by Paul Mason
If you look at this conundrum through the eyes of the old foreign policy elite, it is puzzling: it seems as if the Clinton-led State Department opened up one client state after another to the possibility of an Islamist government—promoting alongside it the interests of a more Westernized, secular, liberal group which was never able to wield power, but accepting the Islamist outcome. The logic is that the State Department has fundamentally rethought its concept of soft power. It believes, after the Arab Spring, that there’s a global marketplace in images and ideas and that its raison d’être is to influence that.
The next three ‘reasons’ are, I think, self-explanatory and stand the test of events.
17. It is—with international pressure and some powerful NGOs—possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerrilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth—both in the West in repressive regimes like Tunisia or Egypt, and above all in China—live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here—more important are the things people exchange by text message, the music they swap with each other, etc.: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art and so on which those in authority fail to spot.
18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt–Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics, but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various ‘revolutions’ in their own lives as part of an ‘exodus ‘from oppression, not—as previous generations did—as a ‘diversion into the personal’. In 1972 Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: ‘We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power.’16 —that’s probably changed.
19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest ‘meme’ that is sweeping the world—if that premise is indeed true—is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don’t seek a total overturn, they seek a moderation of excesses. However, on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for ‘autonomy’ and personal freedom, in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family-based power elites.
With the experience of two more years of protest and instability, however, we have seen the emergence of what Castells calls ‘alternative economic practice’: informal lending between non-family members, sharing of tools, bartering of goods and services. Castells argues that it is out of such makeshift practices that a non-capitalist economics can emerge; at the very least, these tactics of necessity can be the ground on which the radicalized youth meet the dispossessed poor:
Those who dared to live alternative ways of life … built networks of solidarity, support and experimentation … For many others who had accepted an existence sustained by the dream of consumption and the fear of departing from normality, when the crisis disrupted their lives a window of hope appeared through examples that offered glimpses of a different life. Not so much because of a sudden ideological conversion but as a result of the impossibility of living by the rules of the market.17
Certainly, during 2011–12, the impact of Occupy was to push the mainstream discourse to the left. In the UK you now have senior regulators openly discussing the write-off of the country’s debt, and in the case of Andrew Haldane, head of financial stability at the Bank of England, admitting that Occupy had a point:
Occupy has been successful in its efforts to popularize the problems of the global financial system for one very simple reason: they are right … For the hard-headed facts suggest that, at the heart of the global financial crisis, were and are problems of deep and rising inequality.18
Haldane went on to argue that the regulatory reforms to banking begun in the UK would contribute to a more socially responsible and useful banking system, and appealed for the movement’s support. He was not the only figure among the 1 % to conceive of a radically redesigned—and essentially de-financialized—capitalism emerging from this crisis. However, the weakness of Haldane’s argument is obvious: all narratives of change are currently premised on the survival of globalization.
As I argue in Chapter 6 above, the survival of globalization is no longer a given. National routes out of the crisis are entirely possible, and are beginning to present themselves, despite the banishment of economic nationalism from official politics.
20. Technology has—in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera—expanded the space and power of the individual.
If you could only list one reason for what’s happened in the past two years, it would be this: the networked individual colliding with the economic crisis. And yet it is the most contentious, being the hardest to quantify.
As I argue in Chapter 7, something fundamental has happened—a shift in human consciousness and behaviour as momentous as that triggered by the arrival of mass consumption and mass culture in the 1900s.
The sociological tradition tends to emphasize a continuous process of ‘individuation’—from the lifestyle changes of the 1970s through the extreme consumerism of the pre-bust 2000s. By contrast I am drawn to Virginia Woolf s comment: ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed.’19 She was referring to a revolution in social life and art, which made the literary tools and conventions of the Edwardian era ‘dead for us’. Cumulative micro-changes in technology and behaviour interacted with each other, then as now, to produce a tipping point.
Castells documents the tipping points more thoroughly in his 2012 book, Networks of Outrage and Hope.20 For him, the model for real-world networked social movements was the Internet-based movement or community; this ethos then gets projected into space and time—the occupation, the demo, the meeting. The moment of physical projection itself is critical, because it is the point at which what he calls ‘counter- power’—opposition to the status quo—moves from the realm of ideas to action:
From the safety of cyberspace, people from all ages and conditions moved towards occupying urban space, on a blind date with each other and with the destiny they wanted to forge as they claimed their right to make history.21
Castells’s analysis allows us to answer some of the difficult questions posed in this book. If he is right, the networked individual and her behaviour patterns are not just the product of youth, or generational change: there are numerous over-fifties who live the full, untrammelled life of the netizen. The change, Castells argues, is one-off and irreversible, like electrification, and it will condition all politics going forward.
On this basis he offers the following dire news to those—like Malcolm Gladwell during the Arab Spring, and more recently the British writer Mark Fisher—who want the movement to break with autonomy and horizontalism:
Networked social movements, as all social movements in history, bear the mark of their society. They could not exist without the internet. But their significance is much deeper. They are suited for their role as agents of change in the network society, in sharp contrast with the obsolete political institutions inherited from a historically superseded social structure.22
If this is correct, we can expect horizontalism to survive its first winter of discontent, and to resist absorption into the trade unions or the liberal and social-democratic parties. But having exhausted tent camps and general assemblies with their dearth of demands—having begun the move into ‘everyday life’—what happens next?
Where next?
The movements that took to the streets in 2011–12 are at a turning point. They have created a strong counter-culture, which resonates among much wider masses of people than actually turn up to erect tents in squares, defend abortion clinics, attend picket lines.
Yet the revolution remains trapped at the phase of ideology, cultur
e, political debate. The real changes in the world desired by those who protest are still only achievable by those with hierarchical power: be it Mohamed Morsi dictating peace terms to Israel over Gaza, President Obama shielding the women and minorities of the ‘red’ states of America from legal onslaught, Syriza’s leader Alexis Tsipras, waiting nervously in the wings of Greek parliamentary politics.
It is no surprise to the social historian to find this extreme vigour of critical thought alongside seeping powerlessness. Marx himself identified the same problem with German radicalism in the early 1840s. Prevented from staging a revolution in politics, Germans had opted for a revolution of the mind: through the Romantic movement in music and poetry, student radicalism and left-wing philosophy: ‘In politics, the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and presumption of its thought was always in step with the one-sidedness and lowliness of its reality.’23 Marx and his contemporaries proposed that this could not long persist in a revolutionary period, and they were right: by the second month of the 1848 revolutions, Germany was at the centre of the action.
Today, however, the predominance of cultural over physical politics has survived twenty-four months of social upheaval, and the reason is clear. The radical youth do not disdain ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ life, or the uneducated masses; nor do they fear to go up against batons and even bullets. What they disdain and fear are the politics of power. It is this logjam that will have to be broken for the social movements to go from being influencers to a decisive force. In the process, they will have to engage with the things they despise: compromise, parliamentary politics, the art of the possible, political Islam, organized labour. The question then will be, on whose terms and with what politics?
Here, there is a parallel with the 1930s that is worth exploring. The first four years of the crisis, from 1929 to 1933, were not a period of effective mass resistance. That happened later.
The first phase of the 1930s Depression was marked—in most places—by social disorientation, catastrophic policy choices, dysfunctional and autocratic governments and the rapid rise of the far right. Thinking on the left was dominated by the ‘Third Period’ line dictated by Moscow, which said that socialist parties were as bad as fascists and denied any possibility of reforming capitalism; this ensured, by the early 1930s, that most of the Communist Parties would become isolated sects that would have made today’s Occupy protest look positively moderate.
It was Hitler’s rise to power that focused minds, amid the fear that something similar could happen in France, Austria and Spain. At the same time, Roosevelt’s New Deal signalled the possibility of a progressive liberal government after all, capitalism reformed—albeit at the price of a retreat to economic nationalism.
After a huge far-right demonstration in Paris in February 1934, in which sixteen demonstrators and counter-demonstrators were killed, the intellectual climate changed. The socialist and communist masses forced their parties to work together, despite cultural differences and physical antagonism. The Comintern rapidly switched to a strategy of alliances with ‘liberal’ mainstream parties—the so-called Popular Front. The unions went on the offensive, culminating in a workplace occupation movement that stretched from Poland, Spain and France to the USA in 1936–37.24 Beyond the formalities, during this period, the masses took control of opposition politics: dictating new lines to their leaders; softening the rigid doctrines they were presented with.
Up to now, in today’s crisis, protest has been driven by narratives of hope and outrage, not of fear. The horizontalists’ self-isolation, indeed self-obsession, is not the result of a dictated party line, as in the 1930s, but of something equally strong in today’s conditions: the inner zeit-geist. But as Castells points out, it is fear that, neurologically, impels us to take greater risks. As austerity pushes parts of Europe towards social meltdown, as fascism revives there and as democracy is eroded, maybe it is this that drives the workers’ movement beyond the one-day strike and the social movements beyond the temporary occupation of space, as well as goading the existing parties beyond the comfort zone dictated by the global order.
It was the ninety-three-year-old French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel who gave the indignado movement its title, in the iconic October 2010 pamphlet ‘Indignez-vous!’ Hessel identified the rise of Nazism, not the economic depression that produced Nazism, as the key radicalizing factor for his generation:
I wish for you all, each of you, to have your own motive for indignation. It is precious. When something outrages you, as I was outraged by Nazism, then people become militant, strong, and engaged. They join this current of history … and this current goes towards more justice, more freedom.
It took the rise of fascism to force humanity to fight for the progressive world it created after 1945. Flawed as it was, it is this world—of human rights, democracy and affluence in the West—that is now in jeopardy.
And though you can—as the anarchist slogan says—‘live despite capitalism’, you can’t live ‘despite’ fascism, genocidal racism, extreme sexual counter-revolution and war. As the gears of mainstream politics and economic crisis clash and grind above their heads, I would expect this realization to be the guiding factor in where the mass movements turn next.
Notes
Introduction
1.Occupy Everywhere: Reflections on Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, London 2012 (forthcoming).
2.Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, New York 2009, p. 100.
Chapter 1
1.‘Meet Asmaa Mahfouz and the vlog that helped spark the revolution’, youtube.com/watch?v=SgjIgMdsEuk (last accessed 18 October 2011).
2.Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns, Tweets from Tahrir, New York 2011.
3.‘Amazing courage of Egyptian Protesters! Must see!’, youtube.com/ watch?v=6VXP0FnTwZE&feature=related (last accessed 18 October 2011).
4.S. Radwan, ‘Economic and social impact of the financial and economic Crisis on Egypt’, International Labour Organization paper, April 2009.
5.Ibid.
6.Kara N. Tina, ‘We’re Not Leaving Until Mubarak Leaves’, occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=300, 5 February 2011.
7.The Masry Shebin El-Kom workers would force the renationalization of their factory through legal action on 21 September 2011.
Chapter 2
1.‘The World in 2011’, Economist, December 2010.
2.Stephen M. Walt, ‘Why the Tunisian revolution won’t spread’, ForeignPolicy.com, 16 January 2011.
3.Reuters, 25 January 2011, 18:25 GMT.
4.Jonathan Lis, ‘New IDF intelligence chief failed to predict Egypt uprising’, Haaretz, 30 January 2011.
5.Edward Said, ‘Islam through Western eyes’, Nation, 26 April 1980.
6.Tarek Masoud, ‘The road to (and from) Liberation Square’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 22, no. 3, July 2011.
7.Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review 21, May—June 2003.
8.Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, London 1998, p. 59.
9.N. Chomsky and E. Herman, ‘Preface to the 2002 Edition’, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, London 2002, p. xii.
10.Quoted in Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Ropley 2009.
11.Fisher, Capitalist Realism, pp. 3–16.
12.Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush’, New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004.
13.Anthony Giddens, ‘My chat with the colonel’, Guardian, 9 March 2007.
14.Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, London 2010, p. 233.
15.Quoted in Y. Kallianos, ‘December as an event in Greek radical polities’, in Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou, Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come, London 2011.
16.Alan Woods, ‘The crisis of capitalism and the tasks of Marx
ists, Part III’, 29 September 2009, ireland.marxist.com.
17.youtube.com/watch?v=gC2YCgDaL10&feature
18.‘Iran’s Twitter Revolution’, Washington Times editorial, 16 June 2009.
19.youtube.com/watch?v=xlu-qx8ohL8&feature
20.Krista Mahr, ‘Neda Agha-Soltan’, Time, 8 December 2009.
21.The poems and other rooftop videos were collected at mightierthan. com/2009/07/rooftop.
22.‘UCSC Occupation—Friday Night’, indybay.org/newsitems/2009/ 09/25/18623281.php#18623394 (last accessed 18 October 2011).
23.Berkeley student statement, wewanteverything.wordpress.com, 18 November 2009.
24.‘Communique from an Absent Future’, in Claire Solomon and Tania Palmieri (eds), Springtime: The New Student Rebellions, London 2011.
Chapter 3
1.Woollard was sentenced to 32 months jail after giving himself up to the police.
2.Sophie Burge, ‘I was held at a student protest for five hours’, in Dan Hancox, Fight Back!, London 2010.
3.Jonathan Moses, ‘Postmodernism in the streets’, in Hancox, Fight Back!.
4.dan-hancox.blogspot.com
5.BBC Newsnight, 9 December 2010.
6.The Nomadic Hive Manifesto, criticallegalthinking.com, 9 December 2010.
7.Ibid.
8.Rory Rowan, ‘Geographies of the Kettle: Containment, Spectacle & Counter-Strategy’, criticallegalthinking.com.
9.‘The Rise of Street Extremism’, Ideas Space, policyexchange.org.uk, 10 January 2011.
Chapter 4
1.Keith Kahn-Harris, ‘Naming the movement’, openDemocracy.net, 22 June 2011.