Now, I’ve been awake since 6PM Saturday, and it’s 7:47AM Monday, and I’m yelling about tennis on my own blog, so I might just be sleep deprived, but I think a mild amount of skepticism in the face of the protests hitting western Europe is healthy. My Spanish is super rusty and I refuse to use online translators, so I’m slowly making my way through the analysis you linked in your last post, but I don’t think you’re doing anyone a disservice by withholding support for this particular movement when it is–from where I’m sitting–ignoring a significant portion of the population that could actually benefit from having their voices heard.

Well, I am not outright dismissing them, for now. I am, as you rightfully point out, withholding my enthusiasm.

This part of their original manifesto irked me:

“We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us. Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not”.

My first reaction to the above was “Eh, nothing revolutionary there, pals; just the same old middle class sense of entitlement”. But then again, I am highly skeptical because I’ve seen a very similar movement in Argentina in 2001. As soon as the middle classes recovered their “right” to travel to Miami undisturbed, the “revolution” was over. All their initial “working class” enthusiasm quickly disappeared (which proved to be exclusively about co-opting working class language without making working class struggles their own).

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