Why a Decade of Protests Didn’t Lead to Revolution | a new book discusses ten years of democratic anarchist protest movements and how they only served to empower right wing autocrats
Why a Decade of Protests Didn’t Lead to Revolution | a new book discusses ten years of democratic anarchist protest movements and how they only served to empower right wing autocrats
Between 2010 and 2020, a wave of protests erupted around the world. In some cases, these movements strengthened socialist forces. In others, they opened the door to the Right. Vincent Bevins spoke to Jacobin to explain the causes of this divergence.
Why is this solarpunk? Because changing society takes people power. Because protests change nations. Because for the last decade protests inspired by democratic anarchist principles have sprung up in nation after nation, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. And the after action report of the first two decades of the 21st century shows not just how anarchist-inspired protests began but how they fail - and who takes advantage of that failure.
This article is long, complex, and hard to read. Emotionally hard. It holds some truths that are hard for punks and anarchists to hear.
And if your activism is more than just posting online it may be the most important article you read this year.
There is a lot to unpack in this interview, but it is highly ironic that the author doesn't realize that Lenin / the Bolsheviks are the prime historical example of a reactionary group ursurping a popular uprising very similar to the more recent examples that the author has analyzed in more detail.
I think the author / article muddies the concepts of "horizontal" and "organised", and I guess also leaves the obvious question unanswered: Why means? Because we've seen what happens when we pursue ends, over and over again.
Indeed. Also: I am not so familiar with the Brazilian example, but by the description of it in the article it sounds like it already failed and died down months before this reactionary group managed to abuse the legacy of these uprisings. So maybe it was rather a failure to build on this initial popular push rather than a lack of representation that right-wing groups capitalized on by taking over.
I think the underlying issue is that there are different strategic requirements for general collective decision-making, on the one hand, and for outmaneuvering hostile institutions (media, police, etc.) on the other. Horizontalism may work fine for the first, but it’s too predictable and consistent for the second. Because institutions are adaptive, and once they can predict you, they can exploit you. A hierarchical organization with a small leadership can adapt more quickly, but then the bulk of the movement has no agency and the only way to maintain their commitment is through a cult of personality.
I was involved in some of the decade’s horizontalist protest movements, and the events in my city had some parallels to what they describe happening in São Paulo (albeit on a smaller scale): a brutal police response to an initial protest that got widespread media coverage, followed by a much larger protest whose participants weren’t necessarily ideologically aligned with the original one. And while it was ultimately no more successful, they did do one smart thing at first that doesn’t seem to have happened in Brazil: they immediately pulled all the newcomers into a democratic assembly to decide on the next course of action. The newcomers greatly outnumbered the original group, so the original group was giving up control and doubtless compromising some of their original goals. But in return, the newcomers became invested in the process, and that prevented them from getting suborned by external groups as happened in Brazil and elsewhere.
We still had issues of over-predictability, which eventually let hostile groups spin their own narratives and otherwise outmaneuver us; and we gradually fell apart out of frustration with our inability to counter that. But I’m not convinced that centralized leadership would have been the only solution.
As a Brazilian, I can tell this guy is full of shit and doesn't understand what happened here in 2013.
care to elaborate? I'm genuinely interested
Well, for starters, MPL wasn't anarchist-inspired, it's a coalition movement. Saying it's anarchistic would be like saying Pride is anarchistic due to the lack of a single formal leadership.
I've been in anarchist circles for years, and never, ever saw anyone mention the book "Change the World Without Taking Power". Most anarchists here are more inspired by older, classical works. I myself tend to critique them for not reading anything after 1950s.
And he must be referring to anarchists here when he talks about horizontalists, because the other political organizations in MPL are MLs, trotskyists, and maoists. What's insane is that the vast majority of the Brazilian radical left is marxist leninist and pretty much allergic to horizontalism. The reason they build coalitions is because they are in most cases weak and small, not a lack of authority.
Peaceful protests don't lead to revolutions, violent protests do. When things get so bad that people start to violently destroy the infrastructure then you get revolutions.
Revolutionaries start real revolts by terrorizing the powers that be.
They failed because they were attacked by the same people who are supposed to be on our side. At least in the United States, occupy wallstreet got just as much mockery from Democrat voters as it did from Republicans.
Idk what made you think liberals are on the side of democracy when it doesn't make them money.
This was 16 years ago so I hadn't learned that at the time. Frankly it came as a shock to a lot of people in the Occupy movement.