Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason Page B

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    A trend, a direction, an idea-virus, a meme, a source of energy that can be traced through a large number of spaces and projects. It is also a way of thinking and acting: an agility, an adaptability, a refusal to accept the world as it is, a refusal to get stuck into fixed patterns of thought. 1
    Why is it happening now? Ultimately, the explanation lies in three big social changes: in the demographics of revolt, in technology and in human behaviour itself. And without ignoring the specifics of Europe, North Africa or the global south, I will attempt here to summarize (as in the original ‘Twenty Reasons’ blog) what is common to these situations.
    The graduate with no future
    At the centre of all the protest movements is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future.
    In North Africa there is a demographic bulge of young people, including graduates and students, who are unable to get a decent job—or indeed any job. By 2011 there was 20 per cent youth unemployment across the region, where two-thirds of the population is under the age of thirty. In Libya, despite high GDP growth, youth unemployment stood at 30 per cent.
    But youth unemployment is not a factor confined to North Africa. In Spain, in 2011 youth unemployment was running at 46 per cent, a figure partially ameliorated by the tendency for young Spaniards to live off their extended families. In Britain, on the eve of the student riots of 2010, youth unemployment stood at 20 per cent.
    The financial crisis of 2008—which would bankrupt states as well as banks—created a generation of twenty-somethings whose projected life-arc had switched, quite suddenly, from an upward curve to a downward one. The promise was: ‘Get a degree, get a job in the corporate system and eventually you’ll achieve a better living standard than your parents.’ This abruptly turned into: ‘Tough, you’ll be poorer than your parents.’
    All across the developed world, the generation that leaves university in the 2010s will have to work longer because the guarantee of a comfortable income in retirement can no longer be met, either by private investment or the welfare state. Their disposable income will fall, because the financialization of public services demands a clutch of new debt repayments that eat into salaries: student loan repayments will be higher, private health insurance costs will rise, pension top-up payments will be demanded. They will face higher interest rates on home loans for decades, due to the financial crash. They will be burdened with the social costs of looking after the ageing baby boomers, plus the economic costs of energy depletion and climate change.
    For the older generation it’s easy to misunderstand the word ‘student’ or ‘graduate’: to my contemporaries, at college in the 1980s, it meant somebody engaged in a liberal, academic education, often with hours of free time to dream, protest, play in a rock band or do research. Today’s undergraduates have been tested every month of their lives, from kindergarten to high school. They are the measured inputs and outputs of a commercialized global higher education market worth $1.2 trillion a year—excluding the USA. Their free time is minimal: precarious part-time jobs are essential to their existence, so that they are a key part of the modern workforce. Plus they have become a vital asset for the financial system. In 2006, Citigroup alone made $220 million clear profit from its student loan book. 2
    When in 2010 I attended Warwick University’s prestigious Economics Conference, it was populated by young men and women dressed in box-fresh versions of ‘business attire’—hypersexual retakes on the cocktail dress, Mormon-sharp suits, neutral ties—worn amid the routine squalor of a university campus. They were trying to live the dream—but a glance at their Facebook pages told you it was just for show. This