Relatively unexpectedly, an intense social mobilization has been unleashed in recent years in much of the world. Nothing new, except the forms and contents of this new social protest.
In cities and countries around the world, massive mobilizations take to the streets in anger and violence many times. But the most striking thing about them is that they are resistant, permanent. They begin but give no sign of when or how they will end. We don’t even know if they will end.
The first hypothesis to understand this social anger is that it is a form of mobilization and protest that is political in itself, but does not address itself to politics.
In other words, it does not have, nor does it intend to have, expectations that traditional and representative politics will account for, administer, manage or satisfy these demands, this discontent. Nothing is asked of institutional political systems, because they are not believed. Furthermore, they are part of the problem, not the solution.
This is the reason for the anger, violence and supposed anarchy. Discontent is directed at the system, not at one of its parts. Therefore, there is no possible solution within the system.
Does that mean it’s revolutionary? Yes and no.
Yes, insofar as it wants to get to the heart of the matter, to a structural change in the political ways of managing life. No, because it does not propose a revolutionary action, at least not in classical terms, and much less constitutes a revolutionary subject.
For vast social sectors, composed of ages, genders, ethnicities, classes, cultures, religions, tastes, sexual perceptions and/or self-perceptions, the political-society relationship typical of the second modernity, as the process in which the individualization of society reaches its maximum expression, has come to an end. Do not question them. Much less dialogue with their imaginations, experiences and life expectations. Of possible ways of life.
The second thesis is, in my opinion, fundamental because it is foundational. On the other hand, social identities do not seem to configure individualities (objectivities plus subjectivities). It is individualities (preferences for ways of life) that shape social collectives. On that same base, unstable, unexpected and uncertain.
Between the first and the second hypothesis is the common thread to understand the social question and, therefore, current politics.
But it is also necessary to define the fuel of this disgust, the expression of discontent. The very essence that makes the manifestation of anger uncontrollable. There is no mobilization without an ultimate reason, a reason that contains in its various forms of expression the discontent of the time.
In this sense, the third hypothesis is that the essential force that drives the expression of contemporary anger is an uncontrollable impulse for freedom.
It is not the philosophical freedom of natural law; it is not the political freedom of the historical development of democracy. It is the violent resurgence of the need for freedom itself to show preferred, non-negotiable and uncontained ways of life.
It is the freedom to need and be able to make visible the metaphorized meanings in forms and expressions of life from which we can continue talking about what we have been talking about for centuries: justice, equality, rights.
A great social discontent emerges. It is disgust, and so it persists and becomes violent. One of its novelties is that it does not address the way politics used to resolve protests, that is, for or against whoever was managing the conflicts.
It seems that this discontent is directed at questioning why someone/something –institutional politics– has to manage and resolve conflicts. It addresses the legitimacy of contemporary institutional policy to speak on behalf of actors and social persons. “Don’t speak for us anymore. They always do this badly.”
Contemporary sociology has a new, broad and necessary field to try to decode the new forms of the social. Contemporary politics have the obligation to look at society, its new expressions, its new forms of organization and collective action, constitution of demands, new subjectivities, perceptions of the duty to be of human life in society.
To say that politics has to look at society and its movements seems obvious.
The point is that a lot of politics is made and developed in itself, without looking at the social or, even worse, thinking that society and the social continue to develop immutably.
Translation of Giulia Gaspar
