“Social rage” against the oligarchs

This chapter presents an analysis of the main characteristics of recent (pre-war) protests about so-called social issues in Russia and relates them to a wider historical and social constellation, drawing on concepts from both conjunctural analysis and the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. In these protests, participants often speak of their own “social rage” against the elite and particularly against the oligarchs. In the context of these protests, which are motivated by concrete concerns about poverty and corruption, and of debates about their political meanings and implications in Russian publics and political circles, understandings of “the common people” and “ordinary people” (prostoi narod) are being reconfigured, especially in relationship to other, more explicitly political forms of protest. As the example of the spontaneous rage of victims’ relatives and other citizens after the fire tragedy in Kemerovo – and the broader solidarity of workers with the relatives of the victims – show, there are emphatically democratic elements to these social protests, but also strongly regressive ones, in particular anti-Semitism and conspiracy ideologies. The chapter discusses the relation of populism and anti-populism in protest discourse and questions the emancipatory potential of “social rage” protests in their current form, arguing for the necessity of left conceptual work and reflection on utopias of emancipation, rather than dreams of popular unity and an instrumentalist path to a new hegemony.