Yellow Vests stand for and against many contradictory things, but are united in opposition to oligarchy

From a distance, it's hard to understand the nuance of the mass "gilets jaunes" protests that rocked France; with one in five French people identifying as a yellow vest and more vests marching in Basra, Baghdad and Alberta (and with Egypt's autocrats pre-emptive cracking down on the sale of yellow vests ahead of elections), it's clearly a complicated and fast-spreading phenomenon.

The complexity stems in part from the leaderless nature of the group; participants claim they have no formal membership structure and no formal policy-setting mechanism. They're like Anonymous: an "ensemble" (to use anthropologist Gabriella Coleman's very useful frame). You become a yellow vest by putting on a yellow vest. An action is a yellow vest action if people in yellow vests do it.

(This leads to tortured phrasing, as in Caroline Haskins's excellent Motherboard piece, where each yellow vest action is attributed to "certain Yellow Vest protestors" -- this will be familiar to anyone who followed Anonymous.)

So while the original yellow vest protests kicked off over a proposed fuel tax, the actual views of individual yellow vesters are hugely variable. There are factions that want cheap petrol, and factions that want subsidies for a green new deal that will let them get off petrol all together.

But what unites them -- and other yellow jackets around the world -- is rage at oligarchic policies, whether these are aimed at fighting climate change or addressing other problems. French President Emmanuel Macron decided to fight climate change in France by taxing the poor, while transferring masses of wealth to the billionaires who are responsible for the climate crisis, slashing inheritance taxes and weakening labour protections. Read the rest