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soricelAt this point in my life, I don't really consider myself much of a "political person." I follow current events, I get upset about stuff, I vote, I call my reps, I try to bring some kind of socially/politically-relevant content into my teaching and writing, etc. But I'm not a part of any political organization, I don't do street activism, I don't really engage in political discourse online or elsewhere. If I were still living in the U.S., maybe I would, but I think I would try to be more involved in party politics than the sort of stuff I was doing in the aughts and 2010s. All that is to say that this book, which chronicles and analyzes several mass protest movements around the world in the 2010s, isn't super relevant to me in terms of informing my current or future political activity, but it did give me a different perspective on the activity I *was* involved in for a while.
Because of how and when I developed a "political consciousness" (the early 2000s, via DIY punk/hardcore subculture) I think I've always pretty much believed that political change happens like this, as Bevins sums it up toward the end of the book:
"1. Protests and crackdowns lead to favorable media (social and traditional) coverage
2. Media coverage leads more people to protest
3. Repeat, until almost everyone is protesting
4. ????
5. A better society"
I don't think I ever really spent a lot of time questioning any of these steps, especially the last two. And I guess during the Obama years, and even to some extent the George W. Bush years, I think I just assumed that the U.S. government could and should respond to the demands of large numbers of people in the streets (even when these "demands" were vague, contradictory, and/or incoherent, voiced by all sorts of different people with different visions of what "a better society" would look like). I think in the back of my mind I just sort of believed that making a big enough ruckus, or shifting "the culture" significantly enough, would require the government to "do something," to make some imperfect but pretty okay reforms which could then be reformed even further after more ruckus-making/culture-shifting, and so on. Sure, there were other tactics I used and saw employed during the years when I was most "politically active" (most notably, various forms of "direct action," which mostly meant locking oneself to something), but I don't think I ever really saw/heard anyone question the efficacy of getting lots of people on the street to hold signs, march, chant, etc. This despite the fact that, as Bevins points out again and again in this book, it didn't always, or even usually, work.
As Bevins explains, by the mid-2010s, the occupation/protest camp/mass uprising kind of came to be seen as an end in and of itself, a place to practice prefiguration, direct democracy, consensus-based decision-making, etc. Again, in my "political education," I never really heard/saw these things being questioned or criticized, despite the fact that it wasn't ever entirely clear what made them so great in the first place; fear of the slippery slope to some kind of Stalinism seemed to be enough to make the rightness/goodness of "horizontalism" apparent. But in practice, at least as I saw/experienced it, groups and movements and events based on these values often seemed pretty frustrating and disappointing. Not enough for me to really *question* these values, I guess, but still.
I think one thing that strikes me as I reflect through the lens of this book is that though I vaguely believed in the efficacy and righteousness of these tactics, I had no real idea what "winning" on any of the issues I was engaged with would look like. That seems to be a recurring theme throughout this book. And on this note, there was a passage toward the end that really hit me: "One Egyptian revolutionary put it to me this way: '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.' He was pointing to something that nagged at him, and me, and many others who have taken time to look back at political struggles since the 1960s. Is it perhaps that a lot of these approaches were developed by a New Left, back in the US and Western Europe, that didn't fundamentally care if they won?" And okay, there's a lot to say about that passage, and obviously it's unfair on some level. Obviously there are plenty of people involved in political and social movements in the U.S. and Western Europe that care deeply and sacrifice greatly. But on another level, that passage articulates something I've always felt, which is that if [X issue] *is* the crisis or grave injustice that activist rhetoric claims it is, why does the response to it so often fail to match that level of seriousness? And I don't just mean seriousness in terms of the spectacularness of discrete actions, but in terms of really building infrastructure and a coherent, viable political movement/party that could *actually* effect change on that issue? I guess the short answer is "because it's hard," and the stakes of trying to do that are much higher. But it again makes me think about this idea of the mass protest/occupation as an end in itself; if you believe that some kind of new world will spontaneously emerge from these experiences, then you don't really have to confront the scary prospect of what comes beyond that. And also, you don't have to confront the perhaps scarier prospect of getting your hands dirty, making compromises, and actually "doing politics." On some level, the protest or the occupation *is* the goal.
Anyway, all this might make it sound like this is a cynical book, full of smug, 20/20 hindsight takes, but it's really not. It's sad and frustrating, because you do see people who genuinely *want* to win, to effect specific, concrete changes in their contexts, who experience real transcendent moments of joy and human connection in the streets and occupied squares, and who experience genuine heartbreak and depression when their movements fail or transform into something unrecognizable to them. And even though the scope of this book is really broad and sweeping, I think Bevins does a good job of providing a lot of pretty clear-eyed nuance to each context he covers. There are some movements I knew next to nothing about, despite being pretty politically-engaged when they were happening, and some that I was more familiar with but which I learned were far messier and more complex than I understood them to be. I enjoyed the chapters on Brazil the most, because Bevins was there during the periods he covers in the book, and his emotional investment in the movement and the people he knew from it is pretty palpable. I learned a lot from this book, and even though I don't think I'll apply any of its lessons to my own "political activity" any time soon, I hope it plays a part in informing whatever movements are working on responding to the situation we're in now.
Because of how and when I developed a "political consciousness" (the early 2000s, via DIY punk/hardcore subculture) I think I've always pretty much believed that political change happens like this, as Bevins sums it up toward the end of the book:
"1. Protests and crackdowns lead to favorable media (social and traditional) coverage
2. Media coverage leads more people to protest
3. Repeat, until almost everyone is protesting
4. ????
5. A better society"
I don't think I ever really spent a lot of time questioning any of these steps, especially the last two. And I guess during the Obama years, and even to some extent the George W. Bush years, I think I just assumed that the U.S. government could and should respond to the demands of large numbers of people in the streets (even when these "demands" were vague, contradictory, and/or incoherent, voiced by all sorts of different people with different visions of what "a better society" would look like). I think in the back of my mind I just sort of believed that making a big enough ruckus, or shifting "the culture" significantly enough, would require the government to "do something," to make some imperfect but pretty okay reforms which could then be reformed even further after more ruckus-making/culture-shifting, and so on. Sure, there were other tactics I used and saw employed during the years when I was most "politically active" (most notably, various forms of "direct action," which mostly meant locking oneself to something), but I don't think I ever really saw/heard anyone question the efficacy of getting lots of people on the street to hold signs, march, chant, etc. This despite the fact that, as Bevins points out again and again in this book, it didn't always, or even usually, work.
As Bevins explains, by the mid-2010s, the occupation/protest camp/mass uprising kind of came to be seen as an end in and of itself, a place to practice prefiguration, direct democracy, consensus-based decision-making, etc. Again, in my "political education," I never really heard/saw these things being questioned or criticized, despite the fact that it wasn't ever entirely clear what made them so great in the first place; fear of the slippery slope to some kind of Stalinism seemed to be enough to make the rightness/goodness of "horizontalism" apparent. But in practice, at least as I saw/experienced it, groups and movements and events based on these values often seemed pretty frustrating and disappointing. Not enough for me to really *question* these values, I guess, but still.
I think one thing that strikes me as I reflect through the lens of this book is that though I vaguely believed in the efficacy and righteousness of these tactics, I had no real idea what "winning" on any of the issues I was engaged with would look like. That seems to be a recurring theme throughout this book. And on this note, there was a passage toward the end that really hit me: "One Egyptian revolutionary put it to me this way: '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.' He was pointing to something that nagged at him, and me, and many others who have taken time to look back at political struggles since the 1960s. Is it perhaps that a lot of these approaches were developed by a New Left, back in the US and Western Europe, that didn't fundamentally care if they won?" And okay, there's a lot to say about that passage, and obviously it's unfair on some level. Obviously there are plenty of people involved in political and social movements in the U.S. and Western Europe that care deeply and sacrifice greatly. But on another level, that passage articulates something I've always felt, which is that if [X issue] *is* the crisis or grave injustice that activist rhetoric claims it is, why does the response to it so often fail to match that level of seriousness? And I don't just mean seriousness in terms of the spectacularness of discrete actions, but in terms of really building infrastructure and a coherent, viable political movement/party that could *actually* effect change on that issue? I guess the short answer is "because it's hard," and the stakes of trying to do that are much higher. But it again makes me think about this idea of the mass protest/occupation as an end in itself; if you believe that some kind of new world will spontaneously emerge from these experiences, then you don't really have to confront the scary prospect of what comes beyond that. And also, you don't have to confront the perhaps scarier prospect of getting your hands dirty, making compromises, and actually "doing politics." On some level, the protest or the occupation *is* the goal.
Anyway, all this might make it sound like this is a cynical book, full of smug, 20/20 hindsight takes, but it's really not. It's sad and frustrating, because you do see people who genuinely *want* to win, to effect specific, concrete changes in their contexts, who experience real transcendent moments of joy and human connection in the streets and occupied squares, and who experience genuine heartbreak and depression when their movements fail or transform into something unrecognizable to them. And even though the scope of this book is really broad and sweeping, I think Bevins does a good job of providing a lot of pretty clear-eyed nuance to each context he covers. There are some movements I knew next to nothing about, despite being pretty politically-engaged when they were happening, and some that I was more familiar with but which I learned were far messier and more complex than I understood them to be. I enjoyed the chapters on Brazil the most, because Bevins was there during the periods he covers in the book, and his emotional investment in the movement and the people he knew from it is pretty palpable. I learned a lot from this book, and even though I don't think I'll apply any of its lessons to my own "political activity" any time soon, I hope it plays a part in informing whatever movements are working on responding to the situation we're in now.
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Date: 2025-06-07 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-07 05:10 pm (UTC)