Occupy Amsterdam, 2011. Flickr/ Peter Visser. Some rights reserved.Even though I am a political scientist, I don't expect that the kind of political change that we need today will come from parliaments, governments or parties. Instead, I look to the streets. This is why when we talk about the future of democracy I put my hopes in the recent cycle of protests and new social movements emerging around the world since 2008.
They are usually interpreted as being motivated by austerity, assuming that people protest worsening standards of living, unemployment, and economic insecurity. I am not saying this is not so, but I would like to draw attention to the fact that many times in history people lived in 'objectively' poor economic conditions, suffered hunger, disease, slavery, all kinds of indignity, but this did not lead to social mobilization of the kind that we have witnessed.
This is because most of the time we accept our conditions of social existence or perhaps even see them as inevitable. We are not aware that our consent is necessary for the active reproduction of the status quo which it is often not in our interest to maintain. In other words, objective circumstances, however unjust, on their own cannot trigger collective social action. For that to happen there needs to be, in Bourdieu’s (1987) terms, a reinterpretation of our conditions as no longer tenable.
