Whether in Europe, East Asia or the Americas, this new middle-class rebellion may be seen as what one Marxist publication called “a strike against the rising cost of living.”Īlthough the leftists identify this more with protests against things like subway fare hikes, in the latest uprising the key has been those things, notably energy and housing prices, which threaten to “proletarianize” the living standards of the not long ago decently comfortable. Perhaps the best example today may be Hong Kong, where largely middle-class students and office workers are challenging the world’s most powerful autocracy, one that, by the way sees itself as the tribune of the “workers and peasants.” Although the protests are seen largely as based on issues of personal freedom and democracy, it also reflects a wider, deeper and more pervasive malaise in a city with a per capita income of $60,000, almost four times the national average and three time that of Beijing or Shanghai. But increasingly we are seeing large protests in comparatively wealthy countries that are led not by working class sans-culottes or starving peasants, but what was once the stable middle class. We usually associate rebellions with the rise of the desperate.
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