Attempts to understand the wider context of the Arab Spring in Morocco mainly focus on the dynamic created by the 20 February Movement which originated in the wake of the events of early 2011. A group of young, mostly middle class, urbanites called upon the Moroccan people via social network sites to protest against continuing corruption, the lack of political freedom and socio-economic deprivation. Yet, there has been a long history of increasing socio-economic struggle in Morocco that tends to be underestimated. We have seen a consistent increase of social protest over the past decade, especially in the smaller towns and villages where social misery, despair and inequality among the country’s population are felt much stronger than in the large cities. I argue that the political and democratic protests of the last two years and the history of socio-economic protests cannot be viewed as unrelated phenomena but must be understood as part of the same process, a longer historical process. Attempts to understand a phenomenon such as the Arab Spring and its impact in a particular country cannot be limited to the ‘simple grand rising’ itself, the ‘critical moment’, but have to take into account the history of the numerous and seemingly insignificant cases of local protest in the years leading up to that grand rising. Rosa Luxemburg, in her analysis of the Russian revolution, demonstrated how over a longer period of time, strikes or protests that may have begun over what appear to be small and local socio-economic struggles can rapidly evolve and grow into a challenge on a broader political level. At the same time, she argued that a rise in political struggles – such as in the course of the year 2011 – can feed back into local and dispersed sites of struggle and boost their fighting spirits. Amongst other examples, I focus on the recent disturbances in the phosphate mining region of Khouribga to show the particular dynamic between political and socio-economic struggle.