Europe is Fed Up With Capitalism - And You Should Be Too

If you looked at the news these past few weeks, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d travelled back in time to the 60s and its counterculture protests. The protests of today share similarities with the previous ones, but while their generation revolted against the discipline of a stable system that worked a bit too well, today’s youth are revolting against the collapse of stability itself: it’s an insurgency of necessity, not a rebellion of choice. 

The catalysts differ from place to place. In France, hundreds of thousands marched on 17th October over living costs, wages and crumbling public services: over 600,000 took to the streets with nearly 2,400 arrests after violence on the fringes. In Spain, the eviction of an 87-year-old from her home of 70 years turned a housing crisis into a national movement. In Serbia, a student-led campaign against government corruption has run for two years. Different countries, different causes, same frustration with governments that refuse to listen.

I’d argue these aren’t separate stories. Whether the grievance is rent, school funding or corruption, the common thread is capitalism itself: a system that puts profit ahead of people’s stability, and a political class that won’t and can’t control it. An anti-capitalist resistance is occurring in plain sight. Neoliberalism, the free-market doctrine that has governed the West since the late 20th century, is simply the form this has taken in our lifetimes. It turned housing, education and energy into markets, and when the 2008 crash showed who bears the risk, ordinary people paid the bill. These protesters are the generation that inherited it, and I’d argue they’re no longer treating the problem as a bad policy choice. They’re looking at the system underneath - but why now, and are these protests here to stay?

Today’s social and political environment has changed drastically in the past two decades, largely due to the rise of technology. The increased use of AI, algorithms, and social media has created an entirely new playing field that most people don’t know how to combat. Post 2008, capitalism mutated further, into an abstract, decentralised web of algorithms and bureaucracy full of structural weaknesses that keep generating crises. Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, argues that traditional capitalism has been replaced with a newer, more coercive system he calls “technofeudalism”. I would, however, read it as capitalism’s latest form rather than its replacement: the same concentration of wealth and power, just with new tools.

Following the crash, banks authorised trillions of dollars into the global economy and invested them into digital platforms and big techs rather than real-world investment. Power was stripped away from democratic institutions and handed to boardrooms and algorithms, allowing tech oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to “cut a Faustian deal” with users in order to “predict our behaviours, to guide our preferences, to influence our decisions, to change our minds, to thereby reduce us to their unpaid servants, whose job is to provide our information, our attention, our identity and above all the patterns of behaviour that train their algorithms”. We have lost a kind of self-ownership: our desires are manufactured, dictated to us by the algorithms. There’s a reason why the infamous phrase “Eat the Rich” became so popular recently. Unimaginable amounts of wealth are fed into the hands of a select few elite while the ordinary people’s disposable income is wrung out to fill their bottomless pockets. 

It’s hard to escape the sense that a corporatocracy is running things from above: most significant decisions about society and politics seem to be made by those in the big chairs while the rest can’t even manage to get a seat on the floor. France shows the gap between reality and politics: with the Senate and National Assembly unwilling to act on a struggling public sector, the streets have effectively become the only arena where change can manifest itself and be heard. Noam Chomsky, a long-time vocal critic of capitalism, made an argument about American politics, but is still regrettably applicable to Europe: “A considerable majority of the population, those who are lower on the income-wealth scale, are literally disenfranchised. They may cast votes but it doesn’t matter much…The legislators are listening to other voices. The donor class.” Embedded, institutionalised corruption has forced us into serving “the economy, rather than the other way around”. 

The cost of living is where this lands hardest, and housing is the most glaring example. Soaring energy costs, post-pandemic supply chain issues, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, have all contributed to the 60% increase in house prices since 2012, and wages provided to those lucky enough to be employed are unable to bridge the gap between earning and spending. Housing, energy and food are run as markets, so when prices spike, the people with the least pay the most, and those who own the assets walk away unscathed. That’s what I’d call capitalism working as designed, not failing. And the anger doesn’t have only one outlet: the populist right has hit record highs too, feeding on the same insecurity. That’s exactly why the left needs to name the cause rather than leave the space to whoever offers a scapegoat. 

Capitalism’s costs aren’t only material - they’ve infiltrated minds too. A recent study found that debt and income insecurity are consistently linked to depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, across different countries and economic systems, and that people’s subjective sense of financial stress often predicts how they fare better than the debt itself. The mechanism isn’t mysterious: debt and insecurity erode people’s sense of control over their lives and futures. Statistics show the rate of mental disorders has increased by nearly 21% over the past two decades. 

Another review lists financial strain, debt, job loss and housing insecurity as key risk factors for poor mental health in working-age adults. Now picture a generation facing all four at once: unstable work, unaffordable rent, mounting debt, no safety net. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher argued this is no coincidence, that the “mental health plague” in capitalist societies suggests the system is “inherently dysfunctional”. Critics have said that housing policy, social media or the pandemic could explain some of this, and they are partly right. But I’m confident enough to proclaim these pressures as features of how the system is run, not accidents of it, and the protests are what it looks like when people stop treating them as personal failings. 

Modern Europe as we know it is changing by the minute. The Hobbesian social contract the continent followed for the past few decades is fraying before our very eyes, and why shouldn’t it? How are citizens expected to surrender their freedom, to remain civil and obedient when the states that claim to protect them fail to provide the most basic stability and equity? Capitalism has created many of the problems we face daily, and the protests are the first sign that people have noticed.

Still, all hope is not lost. The protests are a reason for optimism: we haven’t yet fallen into passive acceptance. Serbia’s long-running protests against government corruption show breakthroughs can happen. We must, however, actively fuel this momentum and stoke its embers before it can be quietly snuffed out. Europe will be hosting pivotal legislative and presidential elections over the next 12-18 months, which will be critical in deciding the course of our future. Will we let capitalism and its cronies dictate our future as they have our present, or will we strive to fight the good fight? That depends on whether the anger on the streets turn into votes, and into organisation which outlasts the next news cycle.