a nice piece in this week’s 
Economist trying to identify a common thread in protest movements in India (Anna Hazare), China (the recent high speed rail debacle), Brazil (a spate of corruption-driven ministerial sackings) and, more tentatively, the initial Arab Spring movements (jobless growth + university education). Its conclusion?
“India and China—and possibly other emerging markets, too—are experiencing the early stirrings of political demands by the growing ranks of their middle classes.”
Some numbers: “The middle classes (which, on their definitions, include many only just out of poverty) accounted for a third of Africa’s population in 2008, three-quarters of Latin America’s and almost 90% of China’s.”
Mind you, the definition of middle class is getting pretty broad these days – anyone on an income between $2 and $20. Not sure Marx would have recognized that.
The Economist argues that public opinion research shows that “as the middle class grows, abstract ideas about governance come to play a bigger role in politics.” In particular, corruption is almost as big a hot button issue for the middle classes as transport and food prices have traditionally been in triggering uprisings of the poor.
Corruption has been boosted by growth, and in particular big infrastructure projects, while the protest movement has benefited from new technologies like twitter (Arab Spring), other microblogs (China) and cable TV (India).
Conclusion? “This focus on corruption suggests that, at the moment, middle-class activism is a protest movement rather than a political force in the broader sense. It is an attempt to reform the government, not replace it. But that could change. In most middle-income countries, corruption is more than just a matter of criminality; it is also the product of an old way of doing politics, one that is unaccountable, untransparent and undemocratic. Ashutosh Varshney, at the Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, also argues that richer Indians resent corruption less because of the money wasted—which they can afford—than because they want clean government for its own sake: “the middle class is asserting its citizenship right to get government services without a bribe.”
In these circumstances, anti-corruption protests could easily morph into something wider. It used to be said that the emerging middle classes would not be politically active. Now they are “just” objecting to corruption. Both arguments underestimate the consequences of the middle- class rise. As Marx said, “historically, [the bourgeoisie] played a most revolutionary part” in Europe. In emerging markets, that revolution now looks closer.”]]>