The Ambiguous Revolts: Precarity and Insurgence in the Twenty-First Century

The paper investigates the revolts of the new precariat: self-employed, platformized, and non-unionized workers who tempestuously and ephemerally react against labor and life conditions. Boosted by social media virality, such populist protests lay claim to freedom and reject left- or right-wing labels, featuring characteristics of both sides. Responding to the difficulty in fitting these movements into one side of political cleavage, public and academic discourse dispute their ideological inclination and question their potentialities, hindering a nuanced understanding of their concrete political experience. Based on ethnographic research, we examine three uprisings in Brazil—the truck drivers’ strike in 2018, the breque dos apps in 2020 (food delivery app workers’ strike), and the app drivers’ strikes in 2023 and 2024—to propose the concept of ambiguous revolts, which designates the inherent radical ambiguity that has constituted current precariat insurgencies, arguing that the revolts do not swing to either pole of the ideological spectrum.