The near-simultaneous 2011 protests revealed a shared deep crisis of neoliberal capitalism

Evidence

That the “movements of the squares” broke out across such a narrow time frame also proved revealing. It showed that contagion across nations and continents was no longer restricted to financial risks—or to viruses—but could also occur in the realm of social mobilization, from which the internet had considerably removed barriers of space and time. Most importantly, it implied that something was going on. It is one thing to witness a social uprising in a specific national context; it is quite another to observe the breaking of a wave of mass protests all around the globe at nearly the same time. Such synchronicity points to deeper factors: the square movements indicated that one type of capitalism in its neoliberal phase was going through a deep and protracted crisis. As we shall see later in this chapter, the specific nature of that crisis—at least in its transatlantic expression, leaving aside the aspects related to authoritarianism in Egypt and Tunisia—was created by the intersection of two major events: the catastrophic management of the 2008 economic crisis, and the decline of democratic institutions. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 88

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that synchronicity across nations signals structural rather than local causes parallels the law-merchant material on how parallel institutional emergence indicates shared systemic drivers. — connects to: The 2010 student protests expressed discontent with capitalist realism itself — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1527; The 2011 square movements broke from older left protest forms in scale and organization — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 87; Global protest movements of 2011 coordinated through shared tactics against the 1 percent (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘The what, the where, the who, and the how’ — how to diagnose whether a wave of protest or mobilization signals deep change or mere contagion, useful for any distributed social phenomenon.

Broader Connections

• Britain’s 2011 riots and Occupy shared a common origin in economic inequality #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 132
• Unbearable inequality fueled the 2011 London riots as social revolutions #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 131
• The 2011 square movements broke from older left protest forms in scale and organization #expands (0.78) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 87
• 2011 uprisings crossed continents through imitation of tactics and solidarity #expands (0.75)
• Global protest movements of 2011 coordinated through shared tactics against the 1 percent #expands (0.72)