In an age of mass protest, why aren’t we winning?
NO GLOBAL MASS REVOLUTIONARY ORG.
Mike Phipps reviews If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins, published by Wildfire.
Based on 200 interviews in a dozen countries, this is an ambitious book which perhaps tries to cover too much. In 2013 Vincent Bevins was a young journalist working in São Paulo in Brazil. He became an eye-witness reporter of the mass movement that sprang up in protest against a rise in the city’s public transport charges – and of the police’s brutal response.
The campaign actually won. Moreover, Brazil’s then President Dilma Rousseff, although condemning a destructive minority, praised on national TV the spirit of the protests, which “proved the energy of our democracy.”
There was just one problem. During those three critical weeks of protest, the President’s poll ratings fell from 57% to 30%. They never recovered.
The movement evaporated. Had it been primarily about advancing the socioeconomic needs of ordinary people, or was the agenda one of institutional change? Its success may have depended on this ambiguity – but it also highlighted the dilemma facing all such successful campaigns. Was the next step to engage with – and risk being coopted by – institutional politics, or to risk irrelevance by maintaining a party-free, consensus-based grassroots movement?
From this first-hand experience, Bevins tries to explore a wider problem. From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other time in human history – the Arab Spring, student direct action in Chile, democracy activism in Hong Kong and Ukraine, to name a few. Why, asks Bevins, has success proved so elusive, in many cases the outcome being the opposite of what the protesters wanted?
Bevins describes the processes whereby the right regained the initiative – in particular, in Brazil, which he knows best. There this was done on the basis of a highly selective anti-corruption drive, backed by state institutions and a pliant media, yet based on deceit and led by law-breaking officials whose main priority was to stop former President Lula from running for a further term. It’s more difficult, however, to explain why this could happen.
Certainly, the structurelessness of mass single issue campaigns organised on a horizontal basis may hobble their effectiveness. Better-funded NGOs and political parties, often with a different agenda, can take control of events. The capacity of social media for distorting reality is also relevant. Victories achieved by the left are unlikely to be permanent. The right is well resourced and endlessly inventive at defending its own interests.
For the left, power is elusive. It includes electoral representation, but is not reducible to that alone. It is tied into a wide and not always obvious network of institutions and processes. When left wing Presidents in Peru and Brazil are elected, they face being impeached out of office, in processes backed by the police and most mainstream media. In Guatemala last year, the newly elected left wing President was nearly prevented by institutional obstruction from taking office at all. But in Argentina, when a right wing extremist is elected with minimal support in Congress, he is allowed to bypass the elected legislature and rule by decree.
Clearly the odds are stacked against progressive change. One response from the left is to reject engagement with the formal power structures. Official politics is a sewer. The abandonment of alternative economic policies by most democratic socialist parties and their capitulation to neoliberalism makes it easier to dismiss all official parties as the same – a ‘caste’, as Podemos characterised the political elite in Spain in its successful insurgent phase.
But this populist grandstanding gets you only so far. In truth, not all political parties are the same and a belief that they are leaves the left ill-prepared when it needs to work with forces to its right, as in Spain and Portugal recently. Then new problems emerge: compromise, corruption, capitulation. This itself feeds an anti-politics populism, which tends to favour a well-funded and resourceful far right.
Events in Chile in 2019 express these contradictions. When the right wing President Piñera declared a state of siege in response to student protests against high public transport fares, neighbourhood assemblies sprang up across the country to discuss their grievances with the government. As protests escalated, Congressional leaders proposed a ‘peace accord’ – a referendum on a new Chilean constitution.
Most of the protest leaders rejected the deal outright. The only radical leftist to sign it was the former student leader Gabriel Boric who was widely denounced for his stance at the time.
Yet in 2021, Boric was elected Chilean President at the age of 35 amid much jubilation on the left. Was this a vindication of his position of two years earlier? That’s more complicated: in 2022, the left’s new constitution was put to a referendum and roundly defeated. Was this the wrong priority, not tied to the immediate economic needs of the Chilean masses? Certainly, the momentum of Boric’s government stalled. But he remains President: the fight goes on.
Bevins’ book doesn’t address all these issues. One lesson he draws from the failed movements of the last decade is that there is no such thing as a political vacuum. If you take away the power from those who have it and don’t seize it yourself, then someone else will. That’s true, as far as it goes.
One activist told the author: “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.”
That’s more helpful. It was echoed elsewhere: “Any revolution with no organized labor party will just give more power to the economic elites.”
One Egyptian activist was blunter: “In New York or Paris, if you do a horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprising, and it doesn’t work out, you just get a media or academic career afterward. Out here in the real world, if a revolution fails, all your friends go to jail or end up dead.”
That sounds bleak, but learning the lessons from these experiences is essential, win or lose. “You can learn more from a failure than from a success – if you recognise it as such,” argued the late Mike Marqusee. This is something that we in the UK, where we have not faced death or been thrown jail in the aftermath of the Corbyn movement’s defeat in 2019, must remember.
This book is well worth reading. It may not have all the answers but it is at least asking the right questions, ones we should all be grappling with.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
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