I've been around long enough to see the miners strike, the 80s riots, Wapping, the poll tax, the post-communism lull of the mid-90s, the first Reclaim the Streets May Day protests of 99 and 2000, and then the dark days after 9/11. A decade later to feel the thrill of the student and march for alternative protests in 2010-11. Despite everything, I've never felt more optimistic. Its true the movement for change is stratified between educated, more middle class activists and those who are masked up or just surviving. The unions have never been more left, but their power is finite. And yet, there are grounds for unity across a broad range of movements in a way there hasn't been in the past. All the old schisms don't matter anymore.
The most important thing to recognise is that neoliberalism is crumbling, the ideological hegemony is breaking down. After that goes legitimacy. Once legitimacy begins to crack - see the US after Ferguson and Eric Garner, or the UK now with politics in the gutter - change becomes possible, as well as reaction. We must look for ruling class splits, the decline of hegemonic institutions like the Tories, and the fracturing of imedia's hold over people.
The problems are piling up. The danger is like 2008, when the world teetered, the absence of organised anti-capitalist movements meant nothing happened and the elite reorganised.
They've got no answers. The alternatives have already been proposed. All it takes is a Podemos type movement to begin to present an organised alternative. If anyone of these movements can get a taste of power, and then hold on to it, as has happened in Latin America, a new world will open up. Will it come to Britain? It could. There's more up for grabs than at any time since 1979 when neoliberalism triumphed. Some kind of socialism or revolutionary democracy needs to be rehabilitated so people can believe in an alternative. Out of that comes hope.
The Arab spring shows what can happen when a revolution fails to decide on - or achieve - its goals. Reaction. That is the warning. But revolutions are like earthquakes - first the main shock, then the after shock. The after shock of 2008-11 has yet to come.
