Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere

by Paul Mason

  14

  The Twenty Reasons, Revisited

  It is nearly two years on from Tahrir Square. The president of Egypt is from the Muslim Brotherhood; on the streets of Athens the Golden Dawn party is staging anti-migrant pogroms; the most prominent leaders of Russia’s democracy movement face criminal charges. Around 200 people a week are being killed by Assad’s regime in Syria.

  It’s an easy step from such manifest negativity to the conclusion that 2011, the year it all kicked off, was a flash in the pan. But to conclude that would be totally wrong.

  The Arab Spring and the Occupy movement—with their echoes as far afield as Santiago and Quebec—have unleashed something real and important, and it has not yet gone away. I am confident enough now to call it a revolution. Some of its processes conform to the templates laid down in 1848, but many do not. Above all the relationship between the physical and the mental, the political and the cultural, seem inverted.

  There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible; that a great change in the world’s priorities is within people’s grasp. The essence of it is, as Manuel Castells has written, the collapse of trust in the old regime, combined with the inability to go on living the pre-crisis lifestyle: ‘The perceived incapacity of the political elite to solve their problems destroyed trust in the institutions in charge of managing the crisis.’1

  If anything, the impervious nature of official politics—its inability to swerve even slightly towards the critique of finance capitalism intuitively felt by millions of people—has deepened the sense of alienation and mistrust. But the changes in ideas, behaviour and expectations are running far ahead of changes in the physical world. Here ‘progress’ is hard to find. There is greater space for democratic movements in the Arab world, but it is constantly menaced. ‘The Protester’ may have made it on to the cover of Time as Person of the Year but, to date, not a single anti-austerity protest has achieved its aim.

  If we take 1848–51 as a template, the critical events that would close the period of upheaval lie ahead. Pessimism of the intellect leads you to expect them to be episodes of reaction: a police-led coup in Greece, where democracy is already constrained; a suppression of the secular, liberal and leftist forces in Egypt; an intelligence-led bust up of the Occupy movement in America; and for good measure a war—probably with Iran. But, as I argued in the first edition of this book, there is one powerful factor militating against a return to stability and order: the economy.

  Europe’s great slide backwards, beginning in October 2011, as the G20 summit at Cannes ended in paralysis, has dragged the world economy backwards. In a balance-sheet recession, where recovery is impaired by overhanging debts, all policy can do is to keep the patient alive. Sustained recovery can only begin when the debt mountains are diminished—either by inflation, currency wars or aggressive defaults. In turn, each of these shatters the basis of the old economic order: inflation wipes out the savings of the salaried workforce and the middle class; currency wars trigger the break-up of globalization; default—by states, banks and individuals—reduces parts of the finance system to rubble. As a result we are maybe only halfway through the depressive effects of the 2008 crisis. In countries such as Greece, Spain, or Portugal, a 1930s-style death spiral is a serious danger.

  The title of this book asks ‘why’ social movements erupted as they did from late 2010. It does not and cannot answer the question why they fail; as a work of analysis it was never intended to answer the question ‘what should they do?’

  In general, throughout history, social movements failed because they were not resolute enough, because they were self-deluding, bureaucratized or badly led, or because they were disunited. Often they failed because they were launched at a time when conditions made it impossible for them to succeed. Generally, for those that did succeed, these conditions were overcome. It is impossible to tell at this stage whether the movements described here will fail: but if they do, the conditions of their failure may turn out to involve—as in Greece—a retreat from democracy and from the welfare state, and quite possibly a retreat from globalization.

  With this in mind I want to revisit the ‘Twenty Reasons’ post that originally inspired this book, written as a blog on 5 February 2011.2 Its insights were provisional then, and the conclusions below remain provisional. I will argue that the thrust of the original bullet points—reprinted in italics below—remains valid, but new questions are raised as follows:

  1. At the heart of it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future

  When I wrote those words the indignados had not yet flooded into Madrid’s Puerta del Sol; the Occupy camps had not been thought of; the Quebec student protest was a year away. The ‘graduates with no future’ have been central to the events of 2011–12, although—as we will see, now that we have more case studies—the limits of what they are prepared to do are more obvious.

  Free-market capitalism offered the generations born after 1985 the moon and stars. Now it can offer very little. For the unlucky ones, there is unemployment. In the small Spanish town of San Miguel de Salinas I found jobless youth lounging on the streets, smoking and drinking too early in the day. ‘We have no car,’ one young woman told me, ‘not even a drivers’ licence, because what’s the point of paying for it if you are never going to get a car?’ As one year spills over into the next, there is a quiet migration out of the crisis zone; a chemistry graduate I met in San Miguel is a bartender in Edinburgh. ‘I’ll save some money and then look for something to do with chemistry,’ he said.

  But even for those with jobs, there is a dramatic change of story that makes no version of the future seem palatable. In Athens, I interviewed a female anti-fascist, who’d been strip-searched and abused in the police HQ: what was her job? ‘I wait tables,’ she said, adding with an embarrassed laugh, ‘but I am a qualified civil engineer.’ On the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, late into the night, with the once vibrant bars now closed, you see young adults squatting in groups on the pavement, drinking warm beer out of cans, sold by itinerant migrants. The lifestyle of the small-town poor is forced on the glamorous youth of the most glamorous cities.

  To survive, the young have become a generation of drifters, reliving the plotlines of movies from the 1930s. For those graduating since the crisis began, there is the offer of wages pegged close to the minimum; work contracts stripped of traditional benefits; a collapsed housing market that they cannot enter—even as properties lie crumbling and weed infested, from Las Vegas to Valencia. Rising taxes, massive debts from the day you graduate, a retirement age raised so far you might as well stop thinking about it. And above all stories that no longer make sense: the American dream, the social Europe. And if it’s bad now, the avatars of emerging market capitalism have only scorn for the idea that living in the West, and getting educated, should be a guarantee of decent living standards.

  ‘The minimum wage is a machine to destroy jobs,’ multimillionaire Tidjane Thiam, the Ivorian-born boss of Prudential, told an audience at Davos in 2012. ‘The minimum wage is the enemy of young people entering the labour market.’ Unions too were the enemy of the young, defending the conditions of those with work. The logic is that to get into the labour market at all, this generation—probably the best-educated, healthiest, most emotionally literate generation ever—will have to work for starvation wages and forget about unionization.

  It is a common refrain. At the United World Colleges summit in London, Ruben Vardanyan, the boss of the $1 billion Troika Dialog hedge fund, told me: ‘European people need to work longer, harder and be less paid. Or take a later pension. Otherwise there will be no economy left.’3

  Without some massive and cathartic turnaround, the generation in their twenties, across much of the Western world, will never accumulate savings at the level their parents did; they will never accumulate pension rights at a level that could realistically support them in retirement. What they are accumulating is resentment.

 
; 2. … with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and yfrog, they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyranny

  The state, of course, had other ideas. Facebook pages have been closed down by the US media company, at the request of those in power. And, while states were prepared to ignore social media before they became a venue for opposition, the past two years have seen the imposition of ‘normal’ media law against blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Incitement and libel are now regularly prosecuted on the social media and summary action is common at corporate level. For example, on the eve of planned protests during the UK’s 2011 Royal Wedding, some fifty UK Facebook groups dedicated to organizing protest events were deleted by the company, on the grounds that they were being maintained by people with false names. During the English inner-city riots of 2011, the prime minister floated the idea of banning rioters from using Facebook and Twitter, and two young men who had publicly incited riots in small towns were jailed on the evidence of their Facebook pages (even though in both cases, no riot had ever happened).

  Meanwhile, among the young, poor and disenfranchised demographic who formed the core of rioters, research by the Guardian'/LSE confirmed—as everyone understood at the time—that the secure Blackberry BBM service was the key conduit of riot agitation, not Facebook. RIM, the maker of Blackberry, quickly pledged to do what it could to unsecure the data.

  However, in response to increased surveillance and repression, activists have evolved new uses for social media. Tumblr emerged as the platform of choice of the Occupy movement in America after it hosted the viral ‘We are the 99%’ blog. The blog, and the ‘99%’ meme it created, form a case study in the mass dissemination of ideas possible with social media. The slogan itself originated at a general assembly in New York’s Zuccotti Park in August: a blogger posted an appeal for posed photographs with one-line summaries of their subject’s economic problems. The first, showing a young woman, read: ‘Single mom, grad student, unemployed and I paid more tax last year than GE. I am the 99 per cent.’ Soon the site was getting more than 100 submissions a day. And it was picked up—at first by the niche websites associated with Occupy, then by the mainstream media.

  When protesters took Brooklyn Bridge on 17 November 2011, a guerrilla art group called The Illuminators shone ‘99%’ in the style of a Batman searchlight signal onto the HQ of Verizon. Mark Read, the instigator of the group, told me:

  ‘The bat signal is really simple. It’s big and it reads as a bat signal—it’s culturally legible. It’s a call to arms and a call for aid, but instead of a super-hero millionaire psychopath, like Bruce Wayne, it’s ourselves—it’s the 99% coming to save itself. We are our own superhero.’

  The cat and mouse game between social movements and the authorities over the use of social media has, if anything, made its use more sophisticated. Most of the protests of 2011–12 have involved inchoate groups, overlapping networks, complex demographics. By shutting down one service—as the Iranians did with Facebook in 2009—you tend to push people in the direction of bleeding-edge platforms that are not yet monitored, or back onto the plain, old, pre-social digital comms like email and bulletin boards, and of course word of mouth.

  Underpinning the use of social media, the years of crisis have seen massive combined and synergistic growth in smartphone use, smart-phone technologies and social media applications designed for them. The iPhone grew from scratch in 2007 to 35 million units sold per quarter by 2011. Facebook had 400 million active users in 2010, and has one billion in mid 2012.

  David Karp, the twenty-six-year-old CEO of Tumblr, told me: ‘All of this stuff is gated on the hardware: Apple and Google are pushing the hardware so far, so quickly … and as the creative horsepower moves faster and faster, the software is going to explode.’ Karp is one of the few CEOs you’ll meet whose eyes light up as he describes the momentum behind Occupy Wall Street: ‘The reach you can build out of a network like Tumblr, and the mass communication that’s able to go down in a network like Twitter is incredible: it’s just something that’s never existed before. The other thing is the media itself: it’s easier than ever for you and me to make something that’s really compelling, tells a story, put that out into the world and really move people.’

  It seems, in the near future, highly unlikely—given the overlap of complex and changing networks—that the state, except in outright dictatorships, can do anything more than play catch-up with the social media.

  3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable

  I should have explained this better, because the way this happens involves more than just the social media. It’s clear now—from the examples of Cairo’s ‘Day of Rage’, Wisconsin’s Capitol occupation, the global explosion of the Occupy movement on 15 October 2011—that protesters’ ability to leverage the mainstream media has also been crucial.

  In the first place, it is important for real-time information-spreading. On protests you have started to see geeky men wandering around with a GoPro camera on a bike helmet, linked to a computer and a makeshift aerial, effectively livestreaming the action to niche video blogs. But you also now have mainstream news networks livestreaming the protests, albeit sometimes from the safety of a rooftop or helicopter.

  Two examples spring to mind: first, the notorious clash of 22 October 2011, in Syntagma Square, between anarchist and communist demonstrators. This unfolded in real time on the website of the mainstream Greek TV station Skai, and allowed all segments of the protest movement to react to its full horror (molotovs were thrown). Significantly, those who wanted to follow the news without the constant moralizing of the TV anchormen split-screened with it were forced towards Skai’s unmediated output. The mainstream media was effectively being forced to mimic the output techniques of the guerrilla media.

  The second example was the 26 September 2012 demonstration outside the Spanish parliament, where a broadcast media that usually put a heavy pro-government spin on events, ended up showing the entire, stage-by-stage police attack on a largely peaceful demonstration, including the firing of rubber bullets. For several hours the world could click on a livestream and see protesters repeatedly showing their open hands, trying to calm things down even as the police wound things up.

  What this means is that, wherever the mainstream media has the guts to do it, they can show the unedited truth about protests: who starts them, who escalates them, who behaves stupidly, who not.

  Of course, in the ‘built’ news bulletins you are always going to get ideology and constructed narratives; but in addition to the livestream record of events, and the storm of visual testimony via Twitpic and Instagram, traditional journalists also now have numerous other outlets to triangulate against.

  Russia Today’s coverage of the Greek riots, for example, while descending occasionally into histrionics, provided a very different visual and editorial take to that of Greek TV and the American news channels. Al Jazeera English, HuffPo—in both English and Spanish—and the numerous semi-professional blogs are, effectively, holding a mirror up to the state and corporate media. And what they see sometimes alters the mainstream’s vision of the story.

  At the base layer, of course, remains the social media, which grew more complex during 2011 and 2012. With blogs reducing the price of publishing words, movies and pictures basically to the labour and hosting costs—and Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook providing a massive and unpredictable echo chamber—the whole relationship between mainstream and social media has changed. Slowly, quietly and, for now, unmeasurably, the mainstream media has become, for many involved in activism, politics and journalism itself, a secondary source of information, while social networks have become the primary source. This, in turn, speaks to the emergence of an undeclared dual power between the world of ideas and the world of official politics.

  4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism, etc., in fact, hermetic id
eologies of all forms are rejected

  This sentence does not even begin to capture the scale of detachment from mainstream politics among those protesting—nor its implications. In the event, this disengagement from ideology and structure was to play a major role in the defeat or failure of the progressive movements, from the USA to southern Europe, and above all in Egypt.

  In Egypt, the first year of the revolution had seen spontaneous and popular upsurges in which the youth and the more radical forces played a significant role, demanding—in repeated clashes around Tahrir Square—the transfer of power from the military to civilians. But the secular and leftist youth who had led the revolution had failed to form anything like an effective electoral bloc, or even to design an electoral strategy. Thus the parliamentary election, and the final round of the subsequent presidential race, would be fought essentially between the remnants of militarism and the two forms of political Islam: the Muslim Brotherhood and the more radical Salafist movement.

  On 23 January 2012, parliament convened with a majority for the MB and a stunningly large minority of Salafists. Liberal, secular and leftist parties made up a small minority. However, Egyptians quickly realized that the parliament was effectively neutered, and that real power lay in the hands of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

  Outside parliament two struggles raged: one conducted by the remnants of the Mubarak regime to retain control of the state; the other by the workers’ movement to improve conditions in the factories. But they rarely collided.

  Here the fundamental weakness of Egyptian democratic and secular politics—the so called ‘civil camp’—was exposed. Some of those who had led the masses to Tahrir fought to push the Islamist-led parliament into a clash with the SCAF, and take full power. But many among the liberal and leftist movements rejected the idea of an alliance with the parliament against the SCAF. The liberal Al-Wafd Party even agreed to join an ‘advisory council’ that SCAF had set up to give the impression that it was sharing power. There was, even among NGOs and currents that would be described as social democratic, a preference for an ‘Ataturk-ist’ option: that is benign, secular military rule as a guarantee against Islamism.