Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere

by Paul Mason

  Within months, however, class conflict tore the revolutionary alliance apart. In Paris, the newly elected assembly was dominated not by the radicals who’d made the revolution, but by social conservatives. They hired a general to crack down on unrest; that June, he crushed the working class in four days of intense barricade fighting. The first newspaper photograph in history captures the moment: three forlorn barricades, made of cobblestones and carts, stand deserted on the rue Saint-Maur: four thousand people have just been killed. The scene’s eerie modernity is reinforced by an advertisement on the wall for a chocolate factory.2

  Elsewhere in Europe, there was open warfare. Revolutionary armies manoeuvred through Hungary, Poland, Italy, Austria and along the Rhine. Fourteen years later many of the defeated insurgents would turn up on the battlefields of the American Civil War, from Shiloh to Chattanooga, led by the same radical officers and singing the same socialist songs.

  But by 1851 the revolutionary wave in Europe was over, its leaders exiled or dead. A military coup ended the French revolution, the president rebranding himself as Emperor Napoleon III. The Prussian army crushed the German states that had voted for radical democracy. Austria defeated the Hungarian uprising, put down its own and enlisted Napoleon III to suppress the republic that had sprung up in Rome.

  In each case, the survivors observed a similar pattern of events. Once the workers began to fight for social justice, the businessmen and radical journalists who had led the fight for democracy turned against them, rebuilding the old, dictatorial forms of repression to put them down. Conversely, where the working class was weak or non-existent, the radical middle classes would die on the barricades, often committed to a left-wing programme themselves.

  Eighteen forty-eight, then, forms the last complete example of a year when it all kicked off. As with 2011, it was preceded by an economic crisis. As today, there was a level of contagion inexplicable to governments. But in hindsight, it was actually a wave of revolution and reaction, followed pretty swiftly by a wave of war. Even if today’s situation defies parallel, the events of 1848 provide the most extensive case study on which to base our expectations of the present revolts.

  When the next global wave of revolutions broke, in February 1917, the uprisings were led by hardened revolutionary socialists and involved a large, industrial working class. They featured a similar cast of characters to 1848, but the plot was attenuated.

  By contrast, May 1968 looks less like a wave of revolutions and more like a surge of protest: students in the lead, workers and the urban poor taking it to the verge of insurrection only in France, Czechoslovakia and America’s ghettoes. Nineteen eighty-nine was—with the exception of Romania—achieved by demonstrations, passive resistance and a large amount of diplomacy.

  In each of these global spasms, issues of class were crucial. The key questions were always: what do the workers do? Do they lead? What is their ideology? How fast do they move from a democratic to a social agenda? How does the middle class react?

  But these worldwide protests were not only about class. With the rise of social micro-history, we’ve begun to understand that these events were also about ‘the personal’: about relationships, freedom of action, culture, the creation of small islands of autonomy and control. In this respect, the demographics of 2011 resemble those of 1848 more than any other event. There is an expanded layer of ‘graduates with no future’, a working class weakened by the collapse of the organizations and lifestyle that blossomed in the Fordist era, and a large mass of slum-dwelling urban poor.

  As today, 1848 was preceded by a communications revolution: the telegraph, the railway and the steam boat formed part of an emerging transport and communications network clustered around the cities that became centres of the social revolution.

  As today, 1848 was preceded by the rapid formation of networks—in this case, clubs and secret societies. The students, worker-intellectuals and radical lawyers who led them were indeed part of an international network of activists. Marx and Engels had holed up in London’s Soho to write The Communist Manifesto; they were in Brussels by February, Paris by March, and soon after sneaked across the border to join the revolution in Cologne. They were not unique in their globetrotting. Nor was the opening line of their manifesto—‘A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism’—mere rhetoric.

  As today, 1848 was a revolution in social life as well as politics. In a pioneering micro-study of the Languedoc region of France during that year, historian Leo Loubere explored how social-republicanism spread among the workers and farm labourers of the wine-producing district. Café became hubs of political discussion, driven by the newly published radical newspapers; farmhands would gather to hear doctors and lawyers spread the word. At the core of the movement were town-based artisans. Albeit driven by the economic downturn of 1847, the character of the revolution, once unleashed, went beyond economics:

  Most of the active militants were relatively young, in their twenties and thirties … Often their wives and even their children participated in the more festive programs, such as planting liberty trees and crowning them with Phrygian caps, or serenading a local hero, or dancing the farandole in long serpentine columns, or just plain mischief which the police reports refer to as ‘tapage nocturne’.3

  Basically, the radical workers of Languedoc turned the region into one giant festival until the military coup of 1851 ended the revolution.

  We know from newspaper and police reports what their mass meetings advocated: nationalization of the railways, insurance and finance; a publicly funded urban infrastructure; cheap credit for workers’ and farmers’ cooperatives; the breakup of large landholdings; and free, secular education for all.

  They resisted the 1851 coup by force of arms: after their rising was crushed, 5,000 people were arrested, of which 2,000 were deported to Algeria. These had been identified as ‘decurions’—organizers—of something we can recognize all too easily now: a network.

  To anticipate where today’s revolts may lead, we need to avoid two mistakes. The first would be to ignore the classic dynamics of revolution—to imagine that material antagonism between the democratic business class and the workers can remain suppressed forever. The second mistake would be to think there is nothing new, seeing only the parallels with what came before and ignoring the changes in personal identity, knowledge and behaviour described above.

  Today the chaotic, interpersonal and cultural character of the revolution is front and centre. This makes the ‘democratic’ aspect of the uprisings more complex, and the line between politics and economics harder to draw. As it happens there is a glaring historical parallel for this, too, but it’s one of the least recognized.

  The Great Unrest 2.0?

  In 1913 America’s leading business magazine warned the world of a new social movement. Although the name of this movement was not in any dictionary, it threatened ‘to bring the world face to face with the greatest crisis of modern civilization—perhaps of any civilization’.4

  The name of this movement was ‘syndicalism’: a new kind of unskilled trade-unionism that sparked an upsurge of strikes, unionization drives and sit-ins across Europe, the Americas and the Pacific between 1909 and 1913. It had no leaders and no centralized programme, but it inspired a global fight-back by the working poor and a general feeling of defiance aimed at the rich, the media and conservative religions.

  Syndicalism was also a mass cultural movement, creating free social spaces such as secular schools, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires; an Oxbridge college run by workers in the UK; popular community centres in Italy—and, through the ‘Wobblies’, a whole underground network of camps and canteens for America’s itinerant workers.

  Syndicalist methods of struggle went far beyond the strike. They encompassed general strikes, store boycotts, and the boycott of newspapers that took adverts from boycotted stores. Other innovations were industrial sabotage, the ‘union-made’ label on clothing, the school kids’ strike, the rent strike,
the occupation of factories, mutiny and sedition in the army, the dynamiting of non-union mines and the unionization of the most downtrodden people on earth.

  Syndicalism was not the product of a grand plan, but of a new mass culture and new methods of managing work. Its ideas were nurtured in the vaudeville theatres and dancehalls of the early twentieth century. Its organizers travelled in railway box-cars and in the steerage class of migrant ships. The message went viral because it was spread using popular culture. One of syndicalism’s iconic activists and martyrs—Joe Hill, executed in Utah in 1916—became famous for writing radical cover versions of hit songs. If you’ve ever heard ‘You’ll get pie in the sky when you die’, that’s one of Joe’s.

  Above all, the syndicalists showed a determination to live despite capitalism; to achieve something better than reform, but less than a fullblown revolution. Journalists christened their heyday—the strike-torn period before 1914—the Great Unrest.

  If the political aspect of the 2011 revolts shows parallels with 1848, the social aspect has echoes of the original Great Unrest. The move ent is unled; it is the result of changes deep in the organization of work and leisure; it’s inseparable from popular culture and mass technology. And it coincides with a wider cultural embrace of human freedom, just as the era of Joe Hill coincided with the era of Delius and Stefan Zweig. But where does it go next?

  The class issues will surface

  From every previous democratic revolution, we can infer the certainty of an attempt at ‘democratic counter-revolution’ in countries where despots have been overthrown. That is, a moment where the liberal middle classes start to separate from, and oppose, the demands of the workers and urban poor.

  The first stages of it are already clear in Egypt, where evidence of a backroom deal between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood indicates that radical democrats and secularists, let alone the unions, are likely to face tight constraints after the November 2011 elections. The arrest of Asmaa Mahfouz, the Egyptian video blogger, by a military court—after she was accused of calling the regime ‘dogs’ on Facebook—was a straw in the wind.

  The greater the success of an agenda based explicitly on social justice, the more likely will be the retreat from democratic goals by the new Arab governments. Nevertheless, for now, the labour movements in North Africa remain at a basic stage, concentrating on economic goals, sporadically inspired by modern techno-radicalism but not yet imbued with it. They are not, of their own volition, going to provoke a clash with the liberal middle class that led the revolutions.

  More likely, in Egypt at least, is a clash between the secular youth and conservative Islam. The harbingers of this are clear in the repeated attempts by the SCAF regime to stir up Muslim gangs against Coptic Christian churches, leading in October 2011 to the deaths of at least twenty-five Copts at the hands of the army at Maspero.

  In light of the 1848 experience we can further expect the rise of new ‘strongmen’ from within the ranks of the revolutionaries. The events of 1989, meanwhile, taught us to anticipate the rapid rise of the corporate gangster with strong influence inside the fragile new democracies: Ukraine currently offers the best example of how to kill a democratic revolution with corruption.

  The strongman threat is especially significant because, during the Arab Spring, standing national armies proved quite resilient: both in Tunisia and Egypt the army took part, or acquiesced, in the revolution. In Libya, the National Transitional Council’s incorporation of defectors from the Gaddafi regime, together with former Islamist insurgents, provides plenty of candidates should the country need a new dictator. And across the region, while the US State Department will encourage the creation of civil-society counterweights to authoritarianism, it will also search for a new Saif Gaddafi, a younger version of General Tantawi, an Assad with more brain cells, a moderate mullah in Tehran.

  A third development which we cannot rule out is war. ‘Once Syria goes, the next on the list is Iran,’ predicted former Blair aide Jonathan Powell in August 2011. But Iran is the lynchpin of the Middle East balance of power. It contains, alongside the discontented rural poor, a modern urban economy that takes in 71 per cent of the population—with automobile plants, barely suppressed radical trade unions, gay nightclubs and tens of thousands of secular youth whose hearts and minds are still on the rooftops of 2009.

  If the failure of 2009 is explained by the revolution’s lack of social depth, then any successful revolution in Iran would have to be both deep and social. It would involve civil war with the Basij militia and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose status rests not just on its access to military hardware and exotic uniforms, but on an economic empire of Guard-owned factories and energy businesses.

  Long before it would allow itself to be dispossessed, Iran’s power elite would most probably attempt to provoke war with Israel or the Gulf states, or both, fomenting maximum strife in Iraq and Syria.

  The potential for class conflict, authoritarian backlash and war in the Middle East is overlaid by the danger of anomic breakdown and depression in southern Europe. What the diplomats call euphemistically ‘a crisis of democracy’ is still possible in the peripheral arc that stretches from Dublin to Athens.

  Culture wars are colliding with the crisis

  On top of this, a further crack in the world order has appeared, involving the domestic politics of two states at its very core: Israel and the USA. In both of these countries, for different reasons, we are seeing unprecedented culture wars.

  The July 14 or #j14 protest movement in Israel, in the summer of 2011, instantly disproved any idea that the country was immune to the new unrest.

  Those who began the tent-camp protests—modelled more on Syntagma than Tahrir—were mainly young, Westernized and from the Ashkenazi middle class. They had organized, inevitably, through social media. Triggered by the soaring cost of housing in Israel, the protests quickly expanded to embrace a series of grievances: disability rights, freedom for PO W Gilad Shalit, more care for the elderly.

  The first protesters were explicitly hostile to Israel’s anti-Zionist left—and the feeling was mutual. The left-wing blogosphere excoriated them when, almost on cue, they declared their willingess to suspend the protest if called up to fight with the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.

  Despite the fact that #j14 went out of its way to avoid the issue of Palestine, as the protests gained momentum the movement began to tolerate those raising the issue, even drawing in members of Israel’s Arab population. Dimi Reider, a journalist and activist in Tel Aviv, described how on 3 August 2011 the residents of a poverty-stricken, Likud-voting Jewish neighbourhood signed an agreement to campaign jointly with supporters of a pro-Palestinian party, including Arabs:

  They agreed they had more in common with each other than with the middle-class national leadership of the protest, and that while not wishing to break apart from the J14 movement, they thought their unique demands would be better heard if they acted together. At the rally, they marched together, arguing bitterly at times but sticking to each other, eventually even chanting mixed Hebrew and Arabic renditions of slogans from Tahrir.5

  On 3 September 2011 the #j14 movement brought 450,000 Israelis onto the streets, calling for more public housing, public education and an expansion of public spending. Head for head, this had been the biggest demonstration of the year so far.

  Whatever its limitations, #j14 proved the portability of the new kind of protest to Israel, going beyond traditional left–right constraints in the fight for social justice. But even as it flowered, #jl4 exposed a cultural fault line that no social media can overcome.

  Spending on public services in Israel is low because so much public money is spent supporting the ultra-Orthodox settler movement, and on the Israeli military. The ultra-Orthodox right has built itself a role as power-broker in politics which many in the #j14 movement resent. As one protester put it:

  Every few years we vote in the elections, and after the elections we discover that
the interests of the ultra-Orthodox, the settlers and the tycoons are always represented, but we, the middle class, the ones that work, pay the taxes, carry the load, have nobody to speak for us.6

  However briefly, and however hampered by its avoidance of the issue of Palestine, Israel experienced the same kind of protest as those in Madrid or Wall Street, led by the same type of people. Three months before #jl4, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: ‘The world is shaking, but there are no tremors or protests in Israel.’ Not anymore.

  In America, the dynamic of culture war is more advanced. It is paralyzing national political institutions, and in danger of creating two hostile camps which no longer want to exist inside the same polity. The outcome, obviously, will affect the way the whole world exits the crisis.

  The passage of Obama’s healthcare bill in March 2010 proved a turning point for the American right. The Tea Party movement, formed in opposition to the $700 billion ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’ bailout of banks and automakers, found itself in an undeclared formal alliance with healthcare corporations, the Republican right, some libertarian millionaires and Fox News. This laid the basis for a state-level offensive against organized labour, employment conditions, migration and abortion rights.

  The defeat of the right over healthcare was accompanied by a rise in violent imagery in political speech. Sarah Palin’s website famously ‘targeted’ Democrat election candidates, using rifle cross hairs superimposed on a map. When Democrats condemned this as incitement to violence, the right laughed off their response as over-sensitive political correctness.

  The Tea Party movement itself then went through something of an internal split. Sensing its grassroots power, mainstream conservative politicians scrambled to realign themselves, seeking Tea Party endorsement in the 2010 midterm elections. While this would pull the GOP in Congress significantly to the right, its impact on the Tea Party was to force the most committed libertarians to split or form parallel organizations.