by Paul Mason
The most important thing about these slogans, images and gestures is not what they said in isolation but what they expressed cumulatively, as they interacted: the woman who walked naked through the riot in Plaza Neptuno, outside the Spanish parliament, holding a sign saying ‘peace’; the video of Loukanikos, the Greek riot dog, which went globally viral in the summer of 2011; the very name of the band Pussy Riot, which newsreaders in some Catholic countries were ordered to avoid saying on air, even as their jail sentences were reported.
What did it all mean? These were first of all signifiers of rejection: scorn not just for the elite world of yachts, diamond watches and bodyguards from which the 99% are excluded, but for the world of corporate conformity. Scorn for the charade played out in the workplace: for discipline, hierarchy, targets achieved, the cheap business suit, the insincere smile, the dead language of corporate communications. Through these signs and symbols, large parts of humanity were signalling their solidarity to one another; their belief that a kinder, more human system is possible; and that it would be born out of the chaotic, ironic, playful qualities of human life—not by pitting one cruel hierarchy against another.
8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy—but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you follow’ somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma, so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early twentieth century, people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders, just to make links like these.
In the Soviet war movie The Commissar (1967), a Jewish blacksmith admits to a female military commissar, as they both prepare to be killed: ‘I’m not spiteful. I am for the International of Kindness. There are so few kind people left in the world.’
She counters: ‘Where did you get those fairy tales from? About the International of Kindness? The International is founded on the blood of workers and peasants. People swallow gunpowder for it and become very spiteful: they endure fighting, marching, lice.’
‘If you take fairy tales away from people,’ he replies, ‘how would you explain to them what they should live for?’
This, the central question for all progressive movements, was unequivocally answered in the twentieth century in favour of the commissar and against the fairy tales: a narrative that preferred ‘dying for’ to ‘living for’ was what prevailed.
The Commissar is one of the masterpieces of Soviet cinema. It goes without saying that it was immediately banned, and the single print was ordered to be destroyed. Director Aleksandr Askoldov was expelled from the Communist Party, accused of ‘social parasitism’ and never allowed to make another movie. Only in 1988, having been secretly preserved by workers in a film archive, was the work revived, to wide acclaim—by which time Askoldov’s career had been destroyed.
Today Askoldov’s phrase ‘The International of Kindness’ seems a strangely apposite label for what the activists have created. Over the past three years a vast, chaotic network of discontented people has has evolved into something close to what the characters in The Commissar describe: an ‘international’ without leaders, formal structures or strategy—and above all without bitterness.
And this is the problem for all those within the radical movements who wish them to take a ‘turn to the workers’, a turn towards ‘everyday life’, to structure, demands and engagement with official politics. Such exhortations miss the point: their unwillingness to engage is precisely what allowed radical activists, up to now, to disrupt the timetable of official politics.
Paradoxically, this very un-Marxist generation of rebels has begun to do what Marx urged during the 1848 revolutions. It has stopped trying to clothe its radicalism in the costumes of past revolutions, and embraced the essence of revolution: ‘revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before’.13
Things ‘kicked off because what Marx called the ‘poetry of the future’ broke through the prose, and the structures of the present. But they did so for quite prosaic reasons, as I outlined in the ninth of the Twenty Reasons.
9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50per cent in higher education will not be enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess—so people are making a rational choice to go into debt in hopes of being better paid later. However, the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.
As an explanation for radicalization, this needs little further comment. However, the long-term economic implications of hollowing out the middle class like this are worth spelling out.
Even before the financial crisis, policymakers were concerned about the impact of ageing populations. In advanced countries the so-called dependency ratio—between the older generation drawing pensions, and a younger generation whose economic activity pays for those pensions—is set to double between now and 2050. In Spain, Italy and Japan—countries with unsustainable debts and low economic dynamism—the ratio is set to reach 60 per cent: that is, for every six pensioners there will be just four citizens of working age. Worse still, in China—the economy we relied on to drive global growth during the recession of the 2010s—the dependency ratio will rise rapidly to around 60 per cent by 2050, two-thirds of which will be dependent elderly people. Meanwhile, already something like one in five graduates in China are having trouble finding permanent, graduate-level jobs: when I visited there in November 2012,1 was struck by the rapid convergence of the Starbucks workforce there with that of other countries. It contains more graduates, many English speakers, and for some their future—indeed their present—looked as uninspiring as it does for the graduate baristas of Europe and the USA.
Globally, even without the financial crisis, the arithmetic of ageing would have made it impossible for the existing financial system—of saving via pensions invested in the equity and debt markets—to go on serving the middle class.
Now however, the realization is dawning that the generation who started work in 2010, and who will retire in 2050, will have been poor through much of their working lives; they will be ‘asset poor’—unless the house-price bubble can be pumped up again—and dependent on a generation being born today to join the ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of wages and lifestyles.
10. This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because—even where you get rapid economic growth—it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.
11. To amplify: I can’t find the quote, but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations—but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freeing and starving, you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.
The historian, of course, was Taine (see Chapter 3) and the comparison has been borne out during the events of 2012.
12. The weakness of organized labour means there’s a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organized workforce. The world looks more like nineteenth-century Paris—heavy predomination of the progressive’ intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the nineteenth century, raves today); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags-to-riches stories celebrated in the media (50 Cent, etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organised labour is still th
ere but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a ‘stage army’ to be marched on and off the scene of history.
Since that was written, there have been massive strikes and demonstrations led by unions and workers’ parties. The million-strong trade union demos in Portugal on 15 September 2012 were forceful enough to achieve, for the first time, the reversal of an EU-mandated austerity measure. In the USA a rolling strike by Walmart employees tipped the psychological balance between unions and employers there.
In Egypt, by late 2011, a strike wave had begun to force the renationalization of enterprises sold off under Mubarak to his regime cronies. In China, repeated walkouts at the iconic Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, which makes the iPhone, are just the most high-profile of the strikes that have continued in the PRC during the economic recovery.
Yet nowhere has organized labour broken out of the patterns imposed on it under neoliberalism.
Unlimited strike action remains rare; sustained workplace occupations—as at the takeover of the general hospital in Kilkis, Greece, in the spring of 2012—have remained isolated and often defeated. The narrative of working-class resistance to austerity is strong in southern Europe. But the narrative of a working-class alternative to capitalism, namely socialism or communism, is extremely weak.
Consequently Europe and the USA are in a period of stasis, in view of the loss of momentum by the horizontalist occupation movements and their collision with the brick wall of official politics, police repression and far-right violence. We must also acknowledge the slow-motion radicalization of organized workers; their consciousness of their own weakness, and their preparedness to subordinate direct action to lobbying the Democrats in Congress or socialists in various European parliaments.
In Egypt, the workers’ movement has grown faster. Early in 2012 the number of struggles—as counted by the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights—hovered around 250 disputes a month. The months of the presidential election witnessed a relative lull. But the first three months of Morsi’s presidency saw around 1,600 strikes and occupations.
This movement is led partly by growing new unions, partly by local rank and file figures. However, it is disunited and not politicized. Apart from the demand for the minimum wage, there are no general demands that unite the movement. And although new unions are springing up, they still represent a small minority of workers and can easily become immersed in debilitating internal disputes.
At present, many of the local leaders of this new union movement are sceptical of politics and politicians, and keen to distance themselves from any kind of political taint.
In the original ‘Twenty Reasons’ I amplified a positive spin-off from this weakness of organized labour as follows:
13. This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can’t retreat from. They can ‘have a day off from protesting, occupying: whereas with the old working-class-based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined, and they couldn ‘t retreat once things started. You couldn’t ‘have a day off from the miners’ strike if you lived in a pit village.
Since then, across the globe those tasked with policing the new protest movements have recognized this ‘loss of fear’ and, through trial and error, evolved an effective response: the aggressive and offensive use of non-lethal force.
The Occupy camp in Zuccotti Park was cleared with maximum theatrical impact on 15 November: when I visited it a few weeks later, with my press pass on display, I was not even allowed to film inside the privately-owned concrete piazza. But the clearance of Zuccotti was only a foretaste of the way in which US police forces would deal with the now mobile and sporadic protests that followed.
On 18 November 2012, when around twenty students at UC Davis sat cross-legged and immobile to block a pathway, police drew batons and shotguns and then pepper-sprayed the entirely peaceful protesters. Video and still images of the protest, which went viral, show one officer forcing open the mouth of a protester and squirting pepper spray down their throat.14 Geoffrey Wildanger, on the receiving end, wrote later:
Pepper spray hurts a lot. Apparently it was military grade pepper spray, which causes a fatality in one out of every 600 uses. One young woman was hospitalized for chemical burns … one of us, sprayed in the mouth, vomited blood for 45 minutes … for two days my eyes burned when I took a shower.15
The demeanour of the police as they then break up a much larger crowd assembled to support the sit-down protest is clear: one missile, blow or act of aggression would have brought even greater force to bear. By now this was part of a global pattern of policing response to non-violent direct action that stood in marked contrast to the way such events had been handled while the economy was booming.
In Greece, police had already crossed a line in the summer of 2011, towards massive and indiscriminate use of tear gas and stun grenades against peaceful crowds. With the election of a New Democracy–led coalition, in June 2012, the stage was set for a radical erosion of democratic rights under the stewardship of the incoming Greek public order minister, Nikolaos Dendias.
Now began a crackdown on free speech. After the Guardian published the allegations that anti-fascists were tortured by pro–Golden Dawn police officers, Dendias threatened to sue the newspaper. Magazine editor Kostas Vaxevanis was arrested (by more than fifty officers) after publishing the infamous ‘Lagarde List’ of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts. Vaxevanis was acquitted within days after an international outcry and a trial at which state prosecutors, having mobilized such heavy policing powers, offered no evidence. Meanwhile two TV journalists were pulled off air in mid-programme and suspended, when they began analysing Dendias’s handling of the crises live on air.
Greece may be the laboratory experiment of curtailed democracy, but it shows what the effect of such repression can be on activists in the social movements and the journalists who cover them: it can force them into various states of retreat, fear and fatalism, and foster a semi-underground lifestyle.
However, the most important effect of the pepper spray, the arrests, the tear gas and rubber bullets has not been on the activists, but on the wider milieu of discontented young people. It has chased them out of the public arena and suffocated the expression of their anger. In this way it has—to use a famous internet meme as metaphor—put one giant Pop Tart of discontent into the microwave, and switched the dial to maximum.
That is where we are. And that is why the final story of the period that opened up with the Arab Spring cannot yet be told.
In February 2011 I wrote:
14. In addition to a day off, you can ‘mix and match’: I have met people who do community organising one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy, then they’re writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week.
This is in part due to the ability of people to adopt multiple and parallel identities, but it is also the result of the following: it is easy to mix and match if you can upload and disseminate the basic knowledge needed to be an activist in different sectors. Because, as I pointed out:
15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news, but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet—and it’s not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects /studied at university, that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true, but the plane of reasoning can be more complex, because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It’s as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, b
ut in every discipline.
I expanded on this in Chapter 7 above. But it is worth considering here what the impact of this instant knowledge—and a wide repository of knowledge—has been on the protest movements themselves.
Castells has described the social movements of 2011–12 as highly ‘self-reflexive’. That is, the activists are prepared to quickly analyse what’s happened, gather evidence, change tactics, adapt slogans. By contrast the old left soldiered on with one fetishized tactic or slogan after another for years: Labour entryism, the rank and file movement, and so on.
So by late 2011 you have the beginnings of a re-evaluation of horizontalism. Activists became aware of the boredom engendered by the perpetual use of the ‘human mic’. They began to understand the limitations of the communal kitchen in actually advancing the communal. They became weary of tent camps, which began to attract the dispossessed and deranged. Their ‘tyranny of consensus’ became, itself, a meme.
At the time of writing, in mid-November 2012, there is a clearly posed question: what next? But no answer. The rest of the conditions I outlined in February 2011 still prevail:
16. There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak—as in all the colour revolutions—the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a meme that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of twelve days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong—only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.
As it turned out, Islamists won the election in Egypt. They dominate the post-revolutionary government of Tunisia, are heavily represented inside the post-Gaddafi Libyan government, and increasingly prominent among the Free Syrian Army. Through it all, at not one moment did concern about Islamism force the USA to pull back from tacit support for liberation movements, or indeed to switch support back to the dictators on whom the world order had previously relied.