The peasants may not be revolting. The workers may be contenting themselves with mutterings about inflation and social partnership. But the middle classes are up in arms.

Yesterday those archetypal small businessmen, the hauliers, took to the roads with a new variation on an old proletarian weapon, the go-slow. On Wednesday the Bastille of corporate Ireland was stormed at the Eircom a.g.m. in Dublin, not by desperate sans-culottes but by an enraged army of the petite bourgeoisie.

When an old inner-city leftie like Tony Gregory is merely trailing in the wake of the stockbroking senator, Shane Ross, something strange is afoot. And, as the Europewide protests over fuel prices suggest, it's not just a little local disturbance.

The immediate causes of all this anger are obvious and specific. Western consumers had become used to low oil prices and the rising cost of petrol and diesel has put a squeeze on profit margins in the haulage and related industries. Investors in Eircom have seen the value of their investments drop by over a third in the course of a year. Nobody likes losing money, especially in a booming economy where we're all supposed to be on the pig's back.

None of this, however, quite explains the sudden surge of furious protest. Fuel prices are not, by historic standards, all that high. Hauliers may be feeling the pinch but they are hardly facing destitution. People who had money to invest in Eircom shares are very unlikely to be on the breadline. And, after all, it can't be news to anyone that market prices fluctuate and that shares are risky investments.

Anyone who is shocked at the revelation that rich people tend to look after themselves while others take a hit has led a deeply sheltered life. In the long queue of people who have been getting a raw deal in the new economy, small businessmen and small investors ought to be pretty far from the front.

Because the angry mood among what John Bruton used to call "the coping classes" transcends national boundaries, the forces at work must transcend any one local context. The anger, in fact, is rooted in the most obvious and voracious force at work in today's world, free-market capitalism. Today's middle-class rage is shaped by certain political responses to global market forces. Notions that were successfully sold in the era of Thatcherism are turning out to have some disconcerting consequences.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s most of western Europe was hugely influenced by ideas that began with the New Right in the United States and were popularised by Margaret Thatcher in Britain.

One was that the free market was good and state interference in its workings was bad. The other was "popular capitalism" and a "share-owning democracy", Thatcher's vision of a society in which huge numbers of people owned shares and thus had a stake in the working of the market system.

These notions were highly attractive, not just to the rich, but also to many people who would describe themselves as financially comfortable rather than wealthy. The low direct taxes that were part of the freemarket package appealed to those who did not depend on social welfare and could afford to buy healthcare and education.

The idea of a share-owning democracy created a pleasant vision of people with a small amount of capital becoming equal players in the corporate world with the banks and big investors. For the most part, throughout Europe middle-class people bought into the dream.

There were, however, two big problems. The free market and the end of the Nanny State were all very well when "market forces" was shorthand for cutting bureaucracy and income taxes. But when the victims of market forces (low demand for beef, for example, or high demand for oil) are "us" rather than "them", the Nanny State is suddenly back in vogue. Likewise, low income taxes like those in Britain are very welcome, but the corollary - high indirect taxes and the most expensive petrol in Europe - is not.

When fuel is cheap, as it has been for much of the last decade, the market gets the credit. When fuel is dear, governments are to blame.

In the case of the hauliers, the effects of the free market are especially ambivalent. Their line of business, of its nature, benefits from globalisation and the liberalisation of trade. However, free trade also brings free competition. It becomes more difficult simply to pass rising costs on to customers who have many other choices.

And if one government, like the French, effectively subsidises its hauliers, then everyone else is suddenly at a competitive disadvantage. Free markets tend to favour those with most muscle.

So does share-owning democracy. The privatisation of Eircom was a spectacular example of popular capitalism. A huge proportion of the adult population bought shares in the company. This was to be a People's Company rather than a haven for fat cats.

Yet it turned out to be an object lesson in the rules of the game. The first rule is that, whoever loses, those on the inside track do well for themselves. The second, as the thousands of people who turned up to vote at the a.g.m. discovered, is that, in a share-owning democracy, it is the shares and not the shareholders that have the votes.

THERE could have been no more stark illustration of this latter reality. On the key resolutions, observers found it hard to see anyone in the hall who voted in favour of the board. In the crunch vote on the share options deal for top executives, the forces marshalled by Shane Ross and Eamon Dunphy had both the Government and the staff trade unions at their back.

Yet they were overwhelmingly defeated by the proxy votes of the big institutional shareholders. That this came as a shock to many of the people gathered in the RDS suggests that they really had bought the illusion of shareholding democracy.

What we're seeing, then, is a rather confused backlash against some of the most powerful myths of contemporary politics. It's confused because it doesn't really have a natural political home. The old left has made its own ambivalent peace with Thatcherism (witness the embarrassment of Dick Spring on the platform at the Eircom a.g.m.). The new right is still too hung up on the true free-market faith to admit that some of its key dogmas are shibboleths.

In Britain, neither the Tories nor Labour really speak for the revolt against fuel taxes. In Ireland, the strange alliance of Tony Gregory and Shane Ross on Wednesday illustrates the sense in which the Eircom battle pitched all mavericks of whatever political hue against a cosy mainstream.

Yet it is precisely that incoherence that feeds the anger. The resentment can't be funnelled into a party political programme or fobbed off with the kind of official report that governments normally use to defuse mass protest.

At the moment in Ireland it is mixed up with all sorts of other feelings, like disgust at corruption and impunity and impatience at the inability of public services to keep pace with economic expansion. That means most of it will inevitably be aimed at the Government.

And that, for an administration already battered and dazed, is an appalling prospect. For unlike the simmering resentment of the poor, the fury of the solid citizenry will certainly find electoral expression.

The men and women of some property may have gone home from the RDS and may give up blocking the roads, but they're out there somewhere whispering to themselves the chilling last line of the solid citizen Malvolio in Twelfth Night: "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you".

fotoole@irish-times.ie