If We Burn. The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. By Vincent Bevins. Wildfire, 2023. 336pp.
The years 2010 to 2020 saw a possible record number of protest movements over a single decade in different parts of the globe. In many places change of one kind or another was being sought. This book chronicles and seeks to make sense of many of the movements in that ‘mass protest decade’. These include protests that took place in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ countries (Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen), in Latin America (Brazil, Chile), in Hong Kong, South Korea, Ukraine and Turkey, and also, if fleetingly, in Algeria, Bolivia, Syria and Libya as well as via the Occupy Wall Street movement. What is found by the author as a common feature of almost all of them is that they ‘failed’, in the sense that the activists didn’t get what they wanted and in some instances (eg, Egypt, Brazil, Hong Kong) unleashed outcomes that were worse than what existed before. The author’s detailed knowledge of these events arises from his actually being present on the ground in some countries in his role as a foreign journalist for an American newspaper (The Los Angeles Times) but also of multiple personal interviews conducted later in many countries with key protagonists of the happenings in question. This result is a wickedly intricate account that takes us fascinatingly close to the lived experience of those directly involved.
In searching for answers to the failures he catalogues, the factors the author tends to see as most important are faulty methods of organisations and too much ‘horizontalism’ (ie, lack of hierarchical leadership). But, despite the grasp he has of the social and historical background of the territories in question, both through research and personal experience, and his presence on the ground in some of them, this book suffers from a failure on the part of the author to get to the bottom of the underlying nature of and reasons for these protests. He seems determined to frame them as attempts at fundamental social change, even revolution, on the part of those involved, yet if examined closely, a better explanation for the protests and the street demonstrations is a far less radical one. They are largely attempts by people feeling oppressed, disadvantaged or outraged by one aspect or another of how their society is run to try and push those who govern into ways of managing the system they live under more benignly, more ‘fairly’. But key is the reality that they are looking for that system – capitalism – to be reformed, not overthrown.
Throughout the history of capitalism, in different parts of the world, such protests seeking piecemeal changes have come and gone and will continue to do so, sometimes achieving small improvements but, inevitably, failing to change the basic nature of the system we live under. Their precise targets vary, but what unites them is that they involve tinkering at the edges of the ongoing problems and crises that capitalism throws up. Above all, they do not stem from a consciousness that the buying and selling system needs to be replaced by a different one of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – which we would call socialism. So the decade of false dawns the author delves into here is only actually part of a century or more of similar campaigns aimed at trying to make capitalism work in ways that run counter to its needs and its nature.
A further reservation this reviewer would have is the author’s ‘sloppy’ use of the words ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’, employed as a kind of catch-all to mean either some form of state capitalism or any kind of protest or revolt looking to reform certain aspects of capitalism — to make the lives of workers, the majority class, more liveable within it. So we are told, for example that: the Students for a Democratic Society movement in the US in the 1960s ‘advocated for a more socialist economy’; the fall of the Soviet union led to ‘the rapid collapse of allied socialist states’; Tunisia had taken on ‘elements of Nasser’s socialist model’ and was not the same since ‘the end of Arab Socialism’; and in Hong Kong ‘the movement contained elements that … defended aspects of the old socialist system’.
Despite this, there are moments in this book where the author does show a clear understanding of the system we are up against, one whose purpose, in his own words, is ‘to make all the world’s states porous to international capital and open up all the planet’s resources for extraction and commodification’. And he does also come close to glimpsing the kind of world marketless, leaderless society that would transcend the kinds of problems, constantly and inevitably thrown up by capitalism, that the protests examined here focus on. That glimpse can be found, for example, when he talks about ‘constructing a movement that can stand the test of time, in addition to remaining democratic and accountable’ and ‘a world when artificial distinctions and narrowly self-interested activities melt away’ and … ‘our society truly is participatory’.
Howard Moss
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