The decade of love and rage
Love and rage: three words often used as a sign-off to messages by Extinction Rebellion, but perhaps more than that, because it seems to me that this is the mood that might define the 2020s. Predictions are always fraught with risk, but I think we might be entering the decade of the social movement. On an optimistic reading, it could be very exciting.
The broad conditions that might give rise to the decade of love and rage are already here. Age has emerged as a key social cleavage, not only in the UK but globally. Younger people tend to the left and radical, older generations to the right and traditional. The divide is crude, and of course there are young conservatives and older radicals, but we can already see the pattern playing out in British and US elections, and protests from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Chile. In some countries — notably the UK and Hong Kong — the younger generation are effectively locked out of meaningful national power for some considerable time. Their energy has to go somewhere.
We can already see some strong signals of the sort of places it might end up. The extraordinary rise of Extinction Rebellion itself shows that there is a pent-up demand for meaningful action on climate, and those demands aren’t likely to be satisfied any time soon. The community union Acorn, a sort of self-help group for progressive activists, reports a glut of new membership applications since the election. The community enterprise sector — that subculture of co-ops, social enterprise and sustainability that I meet in the pages of Stir Magazine — managed to hold its first festival last year and has more energy about it than I have seen in 20 years. There is a lively debate emerging about how the public sector can hand vastly more power to communities themselves (my contribution is here).
The decade of love and rage even has an intelligentsia-in-waiting in the form of the metamodernists, a slightly ragtag transatlantic alliance of millennial activists and Gen X supporters who are trying to put personal psychological development at the heart of political attempts to address climate change and wider social ills.
We already have good models from abroad about how social movements can exercise real power. Kate Shea-Baird has already proposed Barcelona’s municipalist administration as a model for how to govern alongside active social movements, implementing progressive reform locally while promoting more radical change nationally and globally. Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement has actually been absorbed into government, leading to Audrey Tang’s ‘conservative anarchist’ experiments with crowdsourcing legislation from the people themselves.
The global left has played almost everything wrong since the financial crisis, but perhaps in doing so it has allowed new forces to start emerging from between the cracks in a failing statism. Predictions are for mugs, but here’s mine: the 2020s will see social movements surge globally, providing a petri dish for experiments with a more anarchist-flavoured kind of leftism, and eventually propel a new generation of activists into formal positions of power.
Brace yourselves, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
