Revolt of the Educated

The young and the educated are out on the streets and revolting everywhere; the streets of Dhaka, Kathmandu, Colombo have witnessed such revolts in recent past. Throwback to 2010-11 and the second decade of this century, we saw the Arab Spring erupts starting from the killing of a young man in Tunisia. The world also witnessed occupy wall street and then ‘occupy movements’ in the centres of global capitalism across the world.

The young and the educated came out on the streets in these movements that let to regime changes in the Arab world, underscored the need for intense social redistribution of wealth in the wealthier economies of the world. At same time, in some instances the outcome of the movements led to the formation of regressive rather than progressive governments.

If we look at the diversity of these protest movements around the globe, some motives appear more frequently – shared outrage over corruption or the abuse of power, for example – but we cannot identify a theme that unifies them all. The sources of the protest movements in each country seem at first glance to be highly diverse. Only the element of mistrust of those in power and of states and institutions seems to be an aspect that appears in the majority of cases. It is thus open to debate whether there is an overall, recurrent theme that connects these divergent currents of anger, protest, and resistance.

In this book the Wolfgang Kraushaar pens a photographic as well as analytical panorama of the protest movements that shook the world in the second decade of this century.

Kraushaar does not reduce the phenomenon of protest to a structural dysfunction between education and labour market. He clearly shows the how the neo-liberal economy is constitutive backdrop for the emergence of these protest movements. This book forcefully reminds us the motives behind protest, namely the disappointment, the anger and the indignation about a wide-spread lack of job prospects. Reading Kraushaar’s book one fills that these movements of new century are in the legacy of Paris, May 1968 and anti-capitalist movement that shook Western Europe and parts of North America in 1968. The young and the educated of today have once again reminded us:

Philosophers have hitherto have explained the world, The point is to change it.