Above photo: A fire burns at a gas station on Lake Street on May 29, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Protests have been ongoing in the state and around the country since George Floyd’s death while in police custody on Monday. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images.
The 2010s were a decade of global protest.
Why didn’t the worldwide revolt translate to tangible, lasting change?
The 2010s were a decade of revolt. From Athens to Atlanta, Santiago to Seoul, a global wave of protest brought masses of people into confrontation with the status quo, demanding an end to neoliberalism, racism, climate change, and more. Yet despite this upswell of grassroots political activity, little lasting, positive change followed. What sparked the past decade of mass protest? Why didn’t it result in political transformation? Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a retrospective on the decade that set the world on fire, and how to adapt its lessons for the challenges ahead.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges: There was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 into the global pandemic in 2020. These uprisings shook the foundations of the global order. They denounced corporate domination, austerity cuts, and demanded economic justice and civil rights. The Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the execution of George Floyd in 2020 are cases in point. There were also popular eruptions in Greece, Spain, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Chile, and during South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution. Discredited politicians were driven from office in Greece, Spain, Ukraine, South Korea, Egypt, Chile, and Tunisia.
Reform, or at least the promise of it, dominated public discourse. It seemed to herald a new era. Then the backlash, the aspirations of the popular movements were crushed. State control and social inequality expanded. There was no significant change. In most cases, things got worse. The far-right emerged triumphant. What happened? How did a decade of mass protests that seemed to herald democratic openness, an end to state repression, a weakening of the domination of global corporations and financial institutions, and an era of freedom sputter to an ignominious failure? What went wrong? How did the hated bankers and politicians maintain or regain control?
What are the effective tools to rid ourselves of corporate domination? Joining me to discuss the failure of these popular movements and the resurgence of the right-wing is Vincent Bevins, former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and the author of If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and The Missing Revolution. I have to say, I was far more optimistic. I spent a lot of time in Zuccotti Park, but you’re right, it completely… all of the advances that we thought we had made have been, at best, erased and often rolled back. But let’s go back to, as you do in the book, where we were in that moment in history and what happened.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah, thank you. I do think that there are some victories, some partial victories, but certainly the moments that were experienced as euphoric victory in so many places around the world tended to end up with something far worse than what seemed possible in those moments. I tried to write a history of the world from 2010 to 2020 built around mass protests that got so large that they either overthrew or fundamentally destabilized existing governments. This really starts in Tunisia at the end of 2010, which inspires Egypt early in 2011. Egypt, of course, like every other uprising in the book, in the world, has its own particular reasons for taking off.
But this inspiration that’s coming from a smaller country, North Africa, is part of the story. And then, Tahrir Square really inspires quite a lot of movements across the rest of the decade. I call this the Mass Protest Decade. You could easily call it the Tahrir Square Decade. You see-
Chris Hedges: This is when the Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square, which is this gigantic square in the center of Cairo and camped out there much like the Occupy Movement.
Vincent Bevins: The Occupy Movement did that because they were copying Tahrir Square. There was a protest on January 25th, 2011, aimed at police brutality. Now, the organizers that put together January 25th had not even planned to call for the fall of the government, let alone expected to see the numbers flow into the streets that would make that possible. Yet, a lot more people come to the streets than expected. Then, on January 28th, they really take downtown Cairo. The protest turns into a battle with the police and the police lose. Now, in that moment, they could perhaps have done a lot of different things.
What they do is they take the square, they stay in Tahrir Square for 18 days, and eventually Mubarak is ejected. If you want to look very, very closely at how that ejection happens, it’s, in a narrow sense, perhaps a military coup, but it is a military coup that can be seen as very progressive compared to what was happening previously, especially if elections are really going to go forward. And so, around the world in 2011, you get the… not only are people taking inspiration from Tahrir Square but often copying and pasting that tactic. Occupy Wall Street is Adbusters Magazine saying, we should do Tahrir Square in New York.
You get movements in Spain and Greece that are, to a greater extent in Spain than in Greece, trying to replicate this model. You get this model inspiring not only activists to act a certain way into the 2010s, but inspiring people like me to view other things later as if they’re kind of the same thing, even if national and political circumstances are very different. But I do think the decade, of course, starts with Tunisia, with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, but really this mass protest form and this phenomenon, comes together in the 18 days in Tahrir Square.
Chris Hedges: You mentioned that when the Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square, they didn’t begin with a call for the government. What’s interesting about that self-immolation, he was a fruit seller or just had a cart, and the police had taken away his scales to weigh his fruit. But this was a protest built around a very personal, in particular, injustice, but it, of course, resonated.
Vincent Bevins: Yes.
Chris Hedges: This was the very corrupt Ben Ali regime, resonated throughout Tunisia. That’s an interesting point, that when these protests erupt, they don’t necessarily have a macro goal in mind.
Vincent Bevins: Well, the Tunisia example is really interesting, not only because it sets off so much of what happens elsewhere, but from… even with the advantages of looking back 10 years in the past or with the distance that is given to us, or even some with the distance that was enjoyed or felt to be enjoyed by journalists, looking back on late 2010, just in the middle of 2011, it’s easy to see one thing happening. But if you look back at Tunisia, you can really trace day to day how it is that one man dies, what the circumstances are before he dies, how the people around him start to argue about what that means and what should be done next.
Then, I went back, so this book is built through interviews. I did 200 to 250 interviews in 12 countries, and I did go back to Sidi Bouzid and I talked to members of his family, members of his community, people that worked with him that didn’t have their scales taken away. You had a process where there were people that had already been part of rebellions in the region, labor rebellions, responses to the brutal neoliberalism that had been unleashed on their part of North Africa. There were more formal organizations, that they decide to take this lone act of protest, this cry out against this one very particular injustice, and to turn it into a small-scale protest.
You can see other groups joining and turning that into an even larger protest. And then, you can see now a national movement where a large union organization joins, and then civil society groups join. You can really, by going chronologically, and this is the method that I choose to employ in this book, by really looking at what happens, it seems very simple. On one day and then to the next day, you could see how… it is the people around Mohamed Bouazizi that decide what it means that he has done and would decide what to do with it and ultimately send a dictator, literally fleeing the country.
Chris Hedges: It’s interesting that this contagion, which was certainly true after the French Revolution. The French Revolution inspired much of the consternation of the French planners, the Haitian uprising, but it’s a very similar process where it spreads to, I don’t know, nine or 10 different countries at least.
Vincent Bevins: Yes, and so we see this historically. We do see that uprisings and revolutions come in waves. We see that it’s always really hard to put together what exactly causes these clusters to emerge. But we do see these clusters, and I think media is a big part of how this happens. In 1848, we see a cluster of uprisings. I think what happens in the 2010s is the process of media reproduction accelerates to such an extent that it’s not like a guy on a horse that’s bringing a newspaper from one country to another country in Europe that expand… Oh, my God, look what they’ve done in France. You can see three seconds later how this person responded to a tear gas canister arriving at their feet.
This is something that I experienced. Strangely, this arrived in my life in a weird way when I was working in Sao Paulo in 2013, this constant and immediate back and forth between protesters in Brazil and in Gezi Park in Istanbul. I think that this inspiration has always happened as far as, we have records of clusters of revolutions, but the acceleration of this process really mattered in the 2010s. I think this allowed for people to draw inspiration immediately and it also, in some ways, allowed for people to copy and paste tactics rather than thinking about exactly what is the best thing to do in this case. How can we build upon the energy and the inspiration we’re drawing from this case over here?
They often just thought, well, it’s just the exact same thing. In the case of the Tahrir model, this was one that was reproduced not only in other countries with very different social and economic and political systems, of course. Mubarak is different than Barack Obama. You often still saw the replication of the Tahrir model after the coup that installs Sisi in 2013. You see this copying and pasting continuing after the original case falls apart. I think that a lot of people overstated the importance of social media early in the 2010s. There is this narrative that it’s all about social media, and that’s a good thing.
I think I come down now saying that it’s partially about social media, and to the extent that that’s true, it’s not really a good thing. But that is one change that I think really matters. The acceleration of reproduction of images and texts through mainstream media, through social media that allows for rapid inspiration to be taken for better or for worse.
Chris Hedges: Well, you saw it after the Cuban Revolution.
Vincent Bevins: Absolutely.
Chris Hedges: So, everybody tried to replicate it. And Che is, of course, killed in Bolivia, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because the conditions that made the Cuban Revolution possible are no longer there, largely. Also, they’ve understood how to fight it.
Vincent Bevins: This is something that matters, is that back in the 2010s, some of the more naive commentators about the importance of social media, about how this is going to lead to transparency, forgot that enemies, that bad guys also learn how to use tools. They pay attention.
Chris Hedges: Right. You call them the techno optimists.
Vincent Bevins: Right. This was a real dominant narrative back in the early 2010s. It was Evgeny Morozov that said, “Hey, look, bad guys are also trying to learn how to use the Internet.” In the case of the Cuban Revolution, and this, I think, is relevant for May 68 as well. Some of the participants in May 68, when it didn’t work that time and other people were trying to do it again, they came to the conclusion, well, you can only really surprise the ruling class once. Once they’ve seen a very specific tactic succeed, usually, if possible, they’re going to set up a counterattack for that. They’re going to create defenses for something like the Cuban Revolution. So, there were waves of Guevara’s revolutionary attempts afterwards, but it wasn’t just the leftist that had watched and learned from the Cuban Revolution, it was also the dictatorships around Latin America and the rest of the world.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, and you write about this, the Jakarta Method-
Vincent Bevins: Yes.
Chris Hedges: Your other book, after, what, a million people are killed in Indonesia and that cross-pollination doesn’t only exist among the opposition or the revolutionaries but from the ruling elite as well. You think that the failure of these mass movements is that they didn’t implement hierarchical discipline and coherent organizational structures to defend themselves even when they achieved power, in Greece and Honduras. Talk about that, because, of course, the ethos of these movements was consciously not to be hierarchical, not to create that traditional model.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah, this is something that is explicitly believed in by some participants. In many other cases, this is just the form of rebellion, the form of protest that is possible and easiest to carry out given conditions. So, I’m not sure if I would say that the failure of the protest is that they have this orientation. I would say that they have this orientation for real material and ideological reasons. In some cases, especially in the North African cases, it would be very hard to put together even if you… and many people did really believe in hierarchical revolutionary organizations. Civil society had been decimated, for example, in the Egyptian case.
Regardless of people believed in hierarchy or didn’t, some didn’t, a lot of people did, it was just… this was not something that was really available. It was hard to put together very quickly. In the Brazilian case, for example, which is very different, the one that I know most closely because I lived through the uprising in June 2013, the originators, they would never want to be the leaders, but the originators, the early organizers, they believed deeply in horizontalist principles, absolutely no hierarchy, full consensus decision-making, no division of labor. There would never be any difference between anybody.
Nobody could be told what to do no matter what. What I say is that while some of the participants in these movements were horizontalist, a lot of them were concretely horizontal. Even if some people would’ve liked to put together the kind of organization which would allow for collective decision-making or would allow for mediation with any existing government or would allow for somebody to step into a power vacuum when it was created. Most of them just didn’t have that. And so, this type of protest, this particular approach to injustice, this particular way of responding to elites or governments that are committing abuses comes together in the early 2010s.
There’s a lot of different ingredients in this recipe, and I try to trace where they all come from, but they all come from somewhere. But even the people that put them together largely in the anti-globalization movement or the alter-globalization movement, people on the anti-authoritarian left, didn’t put them together thinking they were going to overthrow dictators. What happens in the 2010s starting, especially in Cairo, but starting more specifically in Tunisia, is that this particular recipe, this apparently leaderless, apparently spontaneous, horizontally structured, social media-driven mass protest is far, far more successful than expected at getting people on the streets.
Far more people come out than anybody had even hoped for. This is, on the one hand, a huge success and this is a strength because given the kind of societies that we’re living in, having an invitation extended to you that says essentially, no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, as long as you’re with us on this one big thing, even in some cases it wasn’t even one big thing, as long as you’re with this movement in the streets, you’re invited. You can participate as an equal with everybody else. You don’t have to be in any kind of an organization. You don’t have to have thought about this until it’s five minutes ago.
This is incredibly effective at allowing people to surge into a public square, sometimes stopping a society from existing or at least stopping the military, in many important cases, from supporting a leader who’s now been discredited. This particular style of protest generates huge opportunities, unexpected opportunities. In that case, I think this concrete horizontality, this lack of hierarchy, whether that’s intentional, whether or not it’s just the state of things, is indeed incredibly successful at creating opportunities. I think those opportunities come in two very broad shapes. Again, I’m trying to tell the history of a whole decade but every case is very different.
Often, people like me made the mistake of thinking they were all the same. But there’s two types of opportunities that are made. Either a government is sent packing and there’s a power vacuum, there’s no one in power. Or, an existing government is so scared of the streets, an existing government is so afraid of losing power that they’re willing to give something. They want to offer some kind of a serious concession or a deep reform to the street movement. Now, at this moment, in the moment of the unexpected opportunity, the movement that is very horizontal, leaderless, that has no means for making a collective decision, easily, at least maybe would take… but not in the short amount of time that is often provided in these moments of opportunity.
A protest, it turned out, more specifically a protest of this type, of the particular type that becomes dominant in the 2010s, turns out to be very poorly constituted to entering a power vacuum, very poorly constituted to taking advantage of an opportunity where there’s really no government. And then often, to the horror of a lot of the organizers, turned out not even to be able to elaborate in a legible way, to the existing elites in these less pronounced cases where the government’s not fled the country, but they want to give the streets something. Brazil is a case like this. Brazil, you have a popular central left president.
Certainly, the original organizers wouldn’t want her to be overthrown. Ultimately, she is, indirectly, perhaps because of the mass protests, but she’s looking to the streets and saying, “Okay, what do you want?” Even in that moment, it seems impossible for the streets to come up with an answer as to what it is they want. This is what a leader really cares about, especially a leader that’s a real bad guy. If there weren’t bad guys, there’d be no reason for protests in the first place. A bad guy wants to know, if I give you A, B, C and D, will I get stability again? And so, often in that moment, what you want, or at least historically what has been the decision made, is to ask for A, B, C, D and E.
Maybe you know that if you don’t get D and E, that’s okay. But if you get A, B and C, you can, as a union, would credibly promise to the bad guy. If we get these things, we’ll go back and we’ll build back stronger. In these moments of opportunity, neither thing seemed possible, entering the power vacuum as a protest or elaborating a set of demands as a very, very horizontally structured protest. In some cases, it doesn’t go so poorly. But in the cases where it does go quite poorly, the very general answer that I have as to how they were not exactly failures but how they experienced defeats that were worse than they ever expected, is that somebody else did take advantage of the opportunity.
Chris Hedges: Well, you are right. The ruling class fills the vacuums, but they do it by rebranding themselves. This is really Obama, really. It comes out of the Chicago political machine, probably the dirtiest political machine in the country wins Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year in 2008. The marketers knew just precisely what he had done. He was a marketer’s dream. I think the lack of a hierarchical structure, the lack of well-defined demands, and perhaps even the lack of any kind of solid ideological foundation made these groups very vulnerable to manipulation, which is what happened.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah. I found them, at least in the cases that I analyze, vulnerable to co-optation, which is the lighter, the nicest form of the three possibilities. Outright hijacking, so not just like, we’re going to take your message and dilute it or water it down. Outright hijacking. Okay, you’re on the left, we’re on the right now.
Chris Hedges: Where was that? Where would that be an example?
Vincent Bevins: Hijacking? Brazil would be one case, I think. This is a case where the original organizers of the protests, they’re a group called the MPL, the Movimento Passe Livre. They’re a group of leftists and anarchists. Within one week you get a new group of protesters on the streets that intentionally copies that acronym. They come up with a new group, this is the MBL, and instead of being leftists and anarchists, they’re a group of libertarians and right-wing students that are funded by… either have trained with the Koch Brothers or have been funded by US think tanks.
They succeed in tricking quite a lot of people into believing that, one, they’re the same thing as the original protesters, that they’re the same people, and then, that they’re now in a leadership position of the next protest wave.
Chris Hedges: I covered the Fall of Ceausescu, and the Securitate managed to do exactly the same thing, hijack the entire movement. They executed Ceausescu and Elena as fast as they could, and they did precisely that.
Vincent Bevins: Then, in other cases, you have imperialist counterattack. In other cases, you have the biggest, baddest guy in the neighborhood or perhaps in the entire global system. Libya, NATO, uses legitimate complaints about the Gaddafi government, legitimate citizen demands upon their own government as an excuse to launch a regime change operation. In Bahrain, one of the clearest cases of a country where the people are not represented by their government. You have a Shia majority and a Sunni minority monarchy. In that case, you simply have Saudi Arabia and other countries from the Gulf marching over the bridge and crushing the uprising.
This mass of millions of individuals, and this is an oversimplification, but at their weakest, they were often millions of individuals with millions, if not, more ideas as to what the thing was all about. It turned out, in many cases, in the 2010s, to be vulnerable to co-optation, hijacking or imperialist counterattack, and in many cases, vulnerable to misrepresentation carried out by people like me. Again, I did lots of interviews with major participants, people in government, people that are experts on these uprisings. A lot of the organizers told me that they found this particular form, by the end of the decade, was particularly vulnerable to misrepresentation.
One Turkish sociologist, [inaudible 00:23:53], in the book, paraphrases Marx’s 18th Brumaire, those who cannot represent themselves will be represented. I think there’s an analogous situation here in the 2010s where movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for. For example, in Egypt, a lot of people told me that they were shocked to see that global media showed up and said that their movement was about the opposite demands of what they thought it was about. They thought that they were, necessarily, a democratic Egypt would necessarily challenge Washington’s partners in their region, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Then, you get global media showing up and saying, this country wants to join the West. They want to be in the minor leagues of America. They want to be junior partners of Washington. People that put together January 25th and January 28th in Egypt often came together through a decade of pro-Palestine solidarity and protest against the invasion of Iraq. Because there is a concrete mass of individuals with no one that can say, actually, we’re doing this in a way that Martin Luther King could do. Again, not everybody that supported Martin Luther King in a march was part of some hierarchical organization, but by virtue of being there, they were often assenting to him to be able to speak in some way for the movement.
Because Egypt often didn’t have that, some of the original organizers were horrified to see leaders selected either by CNN or by social media. Some post goes viral and now that’s the person speaking for the movement. Or, global media walks around the square and looks for the person that’s saying what they want to hear. Now, our movement that we fought to build over the last 10 years is being rendered as its opposite.
Chris Hedges: That was true with every movement I covered. The international media would come in and define it in their terms, which were often… it completely ignored the core of the movement or the orientation of the movement. They recreated the movement. I want to ask about Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle, because this is also a very pernicious force within the movement, the playing to the cameras, the creation of spectacle as opposed to organizing.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah, and I think this is another thing that this strange slippage really matters, this slippage between a protest into something else. Because when you’re at the moment of a protest… Again, my book is only about cases of mass protests that becomes so big that they become something else and then, oh, this is great for this particular moment. Oh, there’s a whole new set of rules for which we’re… there’s a game that we’re not prepared to play. I find that protest itself is always somehow a communicative action. It’s always somehow a media action. That’s not to be dismissive of it, but protest as a human activity, as a phenomenon, historically, emerges alongside mass media.
People didn’t do it before mass media existed, and you could see why they wouldn’t. You wouldn’t go to the square in the center of a nation. Actually, nations didn’t exist before mass media either, but you wouldn’t go to the square in a capitol and demonstrate to just the baker that’s actually working on that corner if no one’s going to reproduce the images. To the extent that a protest is communicative, depending on who you’re trying to reach, it may be the case that you want to somehow perform. It may be the case that you want to at least demonstrate what we believe in. This is who we are, this is what we believe in.
Maybe even to some extent, this is the kind of way that we want to interact in the world that we’re wishing to create. But I think this dominant form of protest in the 2010s became so hegemonic, often even seeming as the only natural way to respond to injustice, that sometimes it was forgotten that there’s a difference between when communication is the right action to take and when you really need to take away someone’s power or put someone else in power. In some cases, you had protests continuing and there wasn’t really anyone to protest to, or the protest was continuing even when the person you were speaking to agreed with you and was saying, okay, well, now what do we do?
You wouldn’t get the mass scaling up of the protest that we saw in the 2010s without some positive reproduction that happens between some vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on how you want to interpret it, between media and the thing on the ground, social media and traditional media, which often work together. If you don’t have some positive representation outside of the actual one part of downtown New York or Central Cairo where people can actually see with their own eyes, you’re not going to get lots of people joining. That is usually part of, at least this package, is some kind of a performance and some kind of a bid to say, we’re a good thing. You could join us.
Now, again, the dark side of this is that if the media doesn’t think that you are a good thing, it’s incredibly easy for them to pick one person, the stupidest person that shows up, or someone that the government has sent in, an agent provocateur, and say, “Oh, look. Look at this stupid thing this one person’s done. That’s what the movement’s really about.” Many protesters told me this, so I don’t want to act as if I’m criticizing smugly from the outside because this is something that a lot of my interviewees told me. “We got caught up in a cycle, and it took us a while to realize this, that we internalized the kind of stuff that Western media wanted to see, and then we did it, and then we saw that it worked, and then we did it again.”
It’s the kind of cycle that I think is familiar to social media users. You figure out what people like to hear and then you do it. Then, many of them came to the conclusion by the end of the decade, well, it turned out that what Western media was going to reproduce was going to give lots of positive coverage, was not the thing that was going to get the concrete results from this or that action that we really needed to help real people in our country.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask about an absence of political theory, which I think characterized many of the movements, I would even argue the Occupy Movement, which I was involved in and very supportive of, and how many times they retreat into popular culture, V for Vendetta, for instance, as reference points.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah. Again, this is something else that many of my interviewees told me. Because V for Vendetta, for those… I remember, you remember, wearing this mask was somehow…
Chris Hedges: Oh, you’d see it in the protests.
Vincent Bevins: All the time. This coded US revolutionary in some way or another. Then, this group, Anonymous, which, again, there was a strange case in Brazil where someone just put on the mask in Brazil and everyone assumed that they were Anonymous, but it turned out it was just a person that was in the mask. At the end of the decade, people told me that they had, to some extent… Well, people told me two things. Three things. I’ll do three things. We wish that we had organized better before the eruption because we never saw it coming. But if we had been a little bit more organized before it arrived, we would’ve done better in this scrum that we hadn’t anticipated.
Two, we wish that we had just simply read more history of revolutions. Every revolution’s new. You don’t want to foreclose the possibilities of the future by reproducing the past, but things tend to happen. You tend to have a counterrevolution. You tend to have a moment that is difficult. You tend to have a moment like this. A lot people told me that, we wish we had spent more time reading history of revolutions.
Chris Hedges: Well, this was the secret of the Bolsheviks. They studied minute by minute, the Paris Commune, which lasted a hundred days. Once Lenin and Trotsky lasted a hundred days, they considered this a huge victory. But I think you’re right, this was the power, in that they were steeped in revolutionary theory.
Vincent Bevins: Again, you brought up Cuba a few moments ago. Che Guevara was waiting for the Bay of Pigs before 1959. He was waiting for the US counterattack before the victory because he’d been in Guatemala in 1954.
Chris Hedges: Arbenz, yeah.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah, he knew how things go. He know there’s going to be a counterattack and he had prepared for it. People told me that they wish they had studied more revolutionary history, and many people told me, and this was quite tragic, that we believed in some sense. Many people made these analogies. We believed in this Hollywood idea of, okay, the bad guy falls and magically, the whole world gets better. One guy uses the end of the Lord of the Rings when Sauron, I don’t even know how to pronounce that, I only watched it because he told me this, that the evil wizard falls, and then across the land, flowers sprout up from the earth.
Or, in the case of V for Vendetta, which I watched, if you look at its actual political content, not the movie, I heard that the graphic novel is much more sophisticated, but I’ll re-watch the movie because that was really dominant. In the decade, you get one guy creating clips, essentially viral clips, that get all of society ready to rise up, and then they just march in a giant mass on the capitol. But there’s no analysis of, well, then what’s going to happen? Because the people in the Capitol, if they’re bad enough, they’ll just kill all those people. They’ll shoot all of them. But if they run away, then what is this? Who are these men? What are they asking for?
Again, I think it’s very easy now to act as if that was a mistake. I think what it is, is that it’s the type of response that was possible and that emerged historically. The reason that people sat down with me for this book is because they believed that this can be the beginning of something bigger and something better, and they wanted to learn from the missed opportunities, the organizational forms that were lacking. Because my starting point for this investigation is that this is the decade, as far as we know, who knows how to count these things, really, is that this was the protest in which… sorry, this was the decade in which more people protested than in any other previous decade surpassing the ’60s.
The desire to change things is there. People are willing to take risks. It seems there is a real and deep will across the global system to change and improve that global system. This became apparent very quickly in ways which weren’t expected and generated opportunities and challenges which weren’t expected. Yeah, some people came to the conclusion that, oh, well, yeah, it turned out to be we got further than we expected, which meant that there were opportunities that we had not planned for.
Chris Hedges: I want to read two quotes from your book. One is from an Egyptian human rights campaigner, Hossam Bahgat, and this is what he tells you. Organize, create an organized movement and don’t be afraid of representation. We thought representation was elitism, but actually it is the essence of democracy. Then, you quote a Ukrainian leftist, Artem Tidva, who says, “I used to be more anarchist. Back then, everyone wanted to do assembly. Whenever there was a protest, always an assembly. But I think any revolution with no organized labor party will just give more power to economic elites who are already very well organized.”
I just want to interject before then, because I was in Zuccotti at the beginning, and when they had the assemblies, they worked when they were small. But by the time they got to 4,000 people, it was paralysis. Kropotkin writes about this actually, caps the number at 150. Once it becomes a mass movement, consensus doesn’t work, and I think that is one of the points of your book.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah. I want to go to Hassam’s quote quickly but, yeah, I think one lesson that had emerged already in the 20th Century and some people had held onto and some people had forgotten, is that whether you like it or not, every group of large individuals has a structure of some kind. Whether you like it or not, if there’s enough individuals, if there’s enough people, especially if there’s power to be grabbed, if there are resources to be claimed, no matter what your inclination is, leaders will emerge. There will be some kind of leadership. In a large enough group of people, there will be leadership.
The question, going back to these discussions in the 20th Century is, not whether or not you can get rid of representation forever, not whether or not you can get rid of leadership forever, because even if you would like to, it seems, at least historically, that’s never been the case. The difference between leaders that you choose, leaders that you can remove when they’re doing a bad job, a structure that you have decided on or a structure that is imposed upon you. What often happened, and Artem is speaking to a phenomenon which was painfully common to a lot of these movements in the 2010s.
Okay, the guy on stage was knocked off the stage, but then the people that were in the wings just entered, right? I don’t know if it was him that put this, we effected, essentially, a game of musical chairs at the elite level.
Chris Hedges: That’s what happened in Egypt.
Vincent Bevins: Yes. Yes. I asked everybody the same question. I like Hassam’s quote because he was very busy. Living in Sisi’s Egypt right now is not an easy thing. The world was crumbling around him as he was giving me this interview. But he put succinctly and elegantly, what, about 200 other people had said. That is the condensed, perfectly polished gem of wisdom that maybe hundreds of people put to me in some other form that… create an organization, do organization now. Representation is actually how you construct a democracy. It’s not something that you can avoid, even if you might.
Philosophically, I’m sympathetic to the urge to reject it, especially when all of the representative structures that we actually have either frayed or disappeared or become a farce in the last 40 years. It turns out you need it. But I absolutely take your point about numbers. This is something that the Brazilian group discovered. Again, this was an opportunity that they had not anticipated. The Brazilian group that set off the mass protests that I lived through, the Movimento Passe Livre, the MPL, this group of leftists and anarchists, they came from the anti or alter-globalization movement.
A lot of them worked for indie media, which I remember is a very important part of my childhood in covering the Seattle protests in ’99 and so on. They formed in 2005 and they were explicitly horizontalists. Some would say now that they were dogmatically horizontalists. But from 2005 to 2013, this worked pretty well. There was 40, 50, 60 people at the meetings and, yeah, the meetings would last forever. It might be annoying to get everybody to come onsite, but it worked. These 50 or 60 people knew each other well enough that they created quite a good plan, really a brilliant plan for igniting a popular revolt in June 2013.
But when they do ignite a popular revolt in 2013, it doesn’t go the way that they expect. Different people show up on the streets than they expected to see. It’s not the working class that they want to help. It’s often center, right, middle class, more privileged Brazilians that come out to the streets. And then, a really strange moment confronts them when Brazilians that are inspired by what they’ve done, want to join the group. They’re inundated with recruits. They weren’t trying to recruit anybody, but there’s all these Brazilians that show up and say, “We want to join the Free Fare Movement. We want to be part of your organization.”
But they don’t know what to do, because if you’re a group of 40 committed activists that know each other and work out everything through consensus, and you let in a thousand people, now the movement is just whatever those thousand people think it is. However, if you create a training program, something that the civil rights organizations of the ’50s and ’60s, [inaudible 00:40:11] Martin Luther King would’ve certainly done, that to them was a betrayal of their horizontalist principles. Somebody said, well, that’s a Leninist deviation. We can’t do that.
We can’t create the original organizers and the new people that we’re training, so they didn’t know what to do. It exploded the movement. They essentially just went away. They stopped organizing protests and eventually were torn apart by not only internal divisions, but by the revolt that they intentionally caused. But, yeah, it was that question of rapid scaling up in numbers that really called the bluff on their horizontalism because it worked when there was just them. But when everybody else wanted to join, actually, they didn’t agree with those people, and they didn’t want to let them overtake the movement.
Chris Hedges: You make, I think, a very important point. You write, the disciplined political organizations are not in… I’m paraphrasing, in and of themselves, sufficient as Greece’s left-wing, the Syriza government proved. If the leadership of an anti-establishment party is not willing to break free from the existing power structure, this was the curse of Greece, they will be co-opted or crushed when their demands are rejected by the reigning centers of power. I thought that was a very important point.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah, I think so. Again, this is a very difficult game. A lot of the lessons that emerged through these conversations in my book are not easy. They’re easier said than done. One thing that I try to avoid in this book is the idea, which was dominant sometimes in the 2010s, that there’s one weird trick for a revolution. There’s one perfect riot that you can carry out, and then that’s it. But even when there are structured organizations, even when there are real movements that can act collectively, they need to be always in dialogue with the less organized masses.
Even in the most structured, disciplined… if you want to accept the narrative of the most clean revolutions of all time, because none of them are clean, they still rely on the support of lots of people that are not in these types of organizations. The organizations, something like Martin Luther King’s organization, or the Cuban revolutionaries, there’s not that many of them, but when they march in Havana, if the people of Havana attacked them, then it wasn’t going to happen. That’s not a revolution, right? You’ve won a battle against the military, and then you’re not going to take over the government.
The organized group needs to always be in close contact with the people that have other things going on in their lives, because normal people are always going to have other things going on in their lives, but also needs to be very aware of the elites, the pre-existing system that they’re going after. What are the interests of these people? How can you act upon them? How can you really seek to transform the society that you’re up against?
Chris Hedges: Well, the tragedy of Syriza, and I think this is the point you make, is that they ended up replicating the programs of the people they were fighting against in order to survive as an entity rather than, essentially, turning on those power structures with full-throttled rejection.
Vincent Bevins: That’s a familiar story, right, throughout politics is, if the dominant system is too strong, then the easy move often is to reproduce what already exists rather than to seek to fundamentally transform it. This is especially true, which I think is very relevant for many cases in the book, Greece included, and which is why I… well, the reason I concentrate on cases outside the United States is because most of the protests that actually get big enough to qualify for my own criteria are outside the United States. But this is something that is easier to forget as a citizen of the US that if you’re not in the United States, there’s always bigger, more powerful countries around that are limiting the range of movement.
For a country like Greece, obviously, it was very famous in constant fights with Germany. But in the cases of North African countries, Egypt, Libya, your range of movement is limited by regional power structures than the global system. Again, it’s a horrible, cruel reality and you can’t just wish it away. But the better you understand the range of movement that is possible, the better you’ll be able to plan for.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask, this is a point in your book that the Iranian-American sociologist, Asef Bayat, makes. He lived through the Iranian Revolution, the 2011 uprising in Egypt, and he distinguishes between what he calls subjective and objective conditions for the Arab Spring uprisings, and argues that the protesters may have opposed neoliberal policies, but they were also shaped by neoliberal subjectivity. Explain.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah. This is a really interesting point that several thinkers in different parts of the world come around to, across. There’s similar trajectories, the Turkish thinkers, Iranian thinkers, thinkers in the Arab world. Rodrigo Nunes, this Brazilian philosopher, that come into conclusion that not only were a lot of these movements aimed at neoliberal economic structures, aimed at a particular set of societal conditions that were opposed on them, often from above, with the help of multinational organizations like the IMF and the World Bank, these were also people that had been living in neoliberal societies for decades.
What this meant at the subjective level is living in a society which exhorts everyone, calls upon all of us to think of ourselves as individuals first, to think of ourselves in the extreme case as one man or one-woman businesses operating in a market rather than part of a real collective struggle. Often, what you get in certain moments is people make the move to brand themselves on social media rather than to take part in some collective struggle. We are so individualized, these various thinkers would affirm, that it became impossible to even imagine what it really takes to act collectively and overthrow a government.
Chris Hedges: I think it’s correct. You say that, essentially, that imbibing that belief system is de-radicalizing the movement. It may speak in radical terms, but the way it responds to power is shaped by the wider society and by neoliberal ideologies.
Vincent Bevins: This is something, as you just quoted, Artem said, the ruling class is always organized. They’re always in concert. This is something that Adam Smith understood back hundreds of years ago. The ruling class is always organized. The more individualized to the society the people below are, the more limited they’re going to be in taking effective collective action. A society in which everybody… and social media both, I think, reflects and incentivizes this type of behavior, to think of myself as a brand, as an individual firm, that is always trying to find my place in the marketplace rather than acting collectively.
Asef Bayat points to the differences between the types of demands that were made in the 2010s versus the types of revolution, the revolutionary horizon that would’ve been obvious to most people in the global south, in the second half of the 20th Century, which was a collective transformation of the economy along more equal lines, if not socialist or communist lines, a collective transformation of society. The demands that tended to be elaborated in the 2010s, alongside other more traditional demands were often more formal. Often the things that rose to the top were things like anti-corruption, things that everyone can agree on, things that are more purely political or even symbolic demands.
I forget who put [inaudible 00:48:13] this to me. If you are making two types of demands on elites and one type of demand is going to take away their money and privileges and the other type of demand is purely symbolic or cultural, you’re going to get the symbolic or cultural one.
Chris Hedges: I want to read, to close, a quote from your book and have you comment. You say the horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass movement is fundamentally illegible. You cannot gaze upon it or ask it questions or come up with a coherent interpretation based on evidence. You can assemble facts, absolutely, millions of them. You are just not going to be able to use them to construct an authoritative reading. This means that the significance of these events will be imposed upon them from the outside. In order to understand what might happen after any given protest explosion, you must not only pay attention to who is waiting in the wings to fill a power vacuum.
You have to pay attention to who has the power to define the uprising itself. I think that’s the heart of your argument and I think you strike at the core of why these movements failed.
Vincent Bevins: Yeah. I was in the strange position of being called upon to do the second thing. I remember, and this was a very strange experience, not only because people like me had no business trying to define this, I think fundamentally illegible explosion on the streets of Brazil. But what we were doing essentially was going out and trying to ask as many people as possible, what are you here for? What are you here for? What are you here for? What I found, because I knew the other foreign correspondents in Brazil, is that we all came back with a narrative that suited our pre-existing ideological biases. I don’t think we did this on purpose.
We saw something that made sense, that fit, that complemented the structures already existing in our brain. The president, at the time, I found out… the story came to me later. She also was trying to figure out what the streets were asking for. And so, she sat in her presidential palace, as Dilma Rousseff in 2013, with the television on watching media coverage of the protest and just reading the signs. She turned off the volume because she didn’t want to be influenced by the journalists that were coming up with their own interpretations. She’s trying to figure out what this really is all about. This is a strange and absurd scenario, right? Because she wants to help the protest.
She was tortured by the US-backed dictatorship. She believes in street action. She believes in dissident pressure on governments, but yet she cannot gaze upon this thing and come up with an answer. She’s limited because she can’t walk the crowds like I can. She’s limited to what the cameras are showing her. The cameras of often oligarch-owned, right-leaning media in Brazil. Now, 10 years later, there are directly contradictory narratives about what June 2013 was that you will hear. The [inaudible 00:51:21] Movement, the defenders of extreme right president, Jair Bolsonaro, will tell you, “Well, that’s where we were born. That’s when our movement came together.
That’s when we realized that we could take the streets and we could take power.” Then, the anti-authoritarian left will say, “June 2013 was about the people standing up for better social services. It was about progressive values and about an opposition to police brutality.” Some members of the Workers’ Party will say, “Well, this was the beginning of a parliamentary coup that had support from outside of Brazil.” These three very contradictory narratives, I think they’re all correct. You cannot look upon June 2013, and no one has, there is no authoritative reading. There’s so many things were happening.
Different things were happening from one day to night, from city to city, it was so entirely different that you were able to construct so many different narratives. Again, in a situation where various narratives can be constructed with existing facts, it is the actors with the biggest microphones that win. The actors with the biggest microphones in the case of Brazil were these oligarch-owned, center to right-wing outlets. Then, when there is a vacuum that cannot be filled, it is the people who are already either organized or have quite a lot of power or the ability to act quickly, because acting quickly is important in these moments of revolutionary opportunity to take advantage of it.
And so, that might be national elites, as it was in the case of Brazil, sometimes with foreign backing, or it might be in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, marching over the bridge and crushing an uprising.
Chris Hedges: Well, this is what makes a figure like Lenin. I’m actually not a fan of Lenin, particularly pretty immoral, but brilliant in terms of being able to read quickly what was happening around, because the Bolsheviks were a tiny minority, actually. But I think it buttresses your point, that without being steeped in revolutionary area and political theory and without having a highly disciplined and structured organization, and I would add a figure like Lenin, who is able to read quickly because the October Revolution would’ve never happened without Lenin.
Even Trotsky dragged his feet, Stalin didn’t want it, et cetera. That combination, I think, we’ve seen throughout history is key in order to make these popular movements successful. Would you agree?
Vincent Bevins: Yeah. Certain things that come out of that, Lenin doesn’t invent, but he crystallizes in some of the works that become famously associated with him, were simply common sense at the time. I think they turned out to be common sense in 2010s. They get called Leninism because there was a state that put forward him as the man that came up with these ideas. But one of those is that there is no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory. One of the things that you can read in What is to Be Done?, and this is something, again, that 50 people told me in the course of my interviews, but they used different words, of course, is that a purely spontaneous uprising will simply reproduce the society that already exists.
Because the ruling class would not be the ruling class if they did not have the means at their disposal to get out their message and to assert their power. If literally everybody comes to the streets, now, you just have the existing society, but everyone’s outside instead of inside. Your question points to the importance of, I think, what would be called in that literature, some kind of a revolutionary theory. Because if you just ask everybody, “Hey, aren’t you mad about things?” The answer is always yes. What are you mad about? Now, you’re going to get more answers. Now, what to do about it? Now you have a real problem.
These are two points that were made very famously by him, but a lot of other people put to me, and these were people that also very often would not… Not all the movements that I look at in the book are even left-wing, some of the movements I think would be more properly characterized as right or center. A lot of people that hate Lenin put to me some version of these two points in contemporary language. There is no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory, and a purely spontaneous uprising will simply reproduce the existing society.
Chris Hedges: But it’s also that deafness, being able to read all power to the Soviets, which resonated, especially in the industrial sector in Russia. But what it really meant was all power to the Bolsheviks.
Vincent Bevins: Ultimately.
Chris Hedges: He destroyed the Soviets. That’s why we don’t have any anarchist history of revolution because he lined them up against the wall and shot them. But I think the points you make are key, and I think that your dissection of the failure of the movements, I think you completely nailed it.
Vincent Bevins: Oh, well, thank you very much.
Chris Hedges: It’s a very important book.
Vincent Bevins: Thank you very much. I tried to, as I said, write a work of history so, looking backward on this, we are limited to the things that have happened so far. Maybe in the future, things can go very, very differently. It’s, I think, one of the driving hopes, but I’m grateful that these people were willing to sit down with me and make it possible to try to tell this global story which-
Chris Hedges: Well, it was important because they were involved and then they went back and were self-critical, and were quite upfront with you about where they had been mistaken and that things had gone wrong.
Vincent Bevins: Some of these people, almost all of them, incredibly smart and brave people, had spent 10 years polishing those perfect gems of wisdom that I’m allowed to just take and present in the book, like Hassam there, as you’ve just quoted. I was very grateful that they allowed me to try to give this global vision to the story, which I think is hopefully part of understanding what happened and what can happen next.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and The Missing Revolution. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.