South Korea’s Great Workers Struggle of 1987 was an explosive period of working-class resistance. Millions of workers joined rank-and-file strikes, which swept through the country like wildfire. The uprising was sparked by a surprise announcement on 29 June from the chairman of South Korea’s ruling Democratic Justice Party that, after decades of military rule, the country would transition to free elections.
A general strike against Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, rocked the country on 24 January, just 45 days into his new government’s term. By mid-morning, the plaza outside the National Congress building in Buenos Aires, the capital, was packed. More than half a million people turned up to protest—striking workers, the unemployed, representatives from neighbourhood assemblies, people mobilised by social justice organisations and left-wing political groups.
“We stand today ... before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.”
As midnight approached on 20 December, people streamed from their homes into streets across Argentina, banging pots and pans. As small, scattered groups marched, they grew and merged, forming cacerolazo demonstrations in neighbourhood after neighbourhood. (Cacerolazo is derived from “casserole dish”, which middle-class people traditionally bang with spoons in Argentinian protests.) Javier Milei, the newly elected far-right president had appeared on television just minutes before to announce a package of sweeping spending cuts and price increases.
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
If you want to see transformative, mass left-wing radicalism in Australia, the time to be active is not when the struggle bursts out. It is now. The longer those who hope in their hearts for a world of equality, justice, beauty and joy hesitate to take the first steps, the more likely it will be that embryonic movements will fail to develop to their full potential.