Against the Twitter theory of change
Dec. 5th, 2023 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI made the book club read Vincent Bevins’ new book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, even though what I kind of really wanted to do was inflict The Jakarta Method on them, except that I really didn’t want to have to reread The Jakarta Method so soon. Anyway.
If We Burn is a wide-ranging series of interviews getting behind the scenes of major protest movements across the globe, mostly in the Third World, in the 2010s. I followed some of these at the time they were happening via Twitter, others I followed less, so my prior knowledge was very uneven, but even the protests I sort of thought I knew a bit about it turns out I knew a lot less about than I did about protests going on in the US, like Occupy and the first wave of BLM. Anyway, there’s a lot of interesting firsthand accounts of the behind-the-scenes action in uprisings from Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Some of these revolutions were more or less successful–South Korea’s ousting of Park Geun-hye seems to have been followed up in a pretty orderly fashion with somebody else kind of normal being president, although I think the current guy is a bit more right-wing than Moon Jae-in–and some collapsed into military dictatorship, as in Egypt, or worse, like whatever you want to call the current state of things in Libya.
While much of the value in this book is just having a ton of primary sources that were close to the issues at hand, so this information doesn’t get lost in the future, there are a couple of themes that do seem to emerge. One is that the big, digitally coordinated mass protests, however much positive press they got from Western media for being the right and correct and respectable way to make change, had a very uneven record of making any kind of change. Clearly, the theory of change that’s just “Have mass protests until a better society emerges” is missing some key details. Bevins doesn’t lay out a One True Way to Achieve Social Change–his stance even on the age-old “reform or revolution” question isn’t that one is inherently better than the other, just that you should consider doing whichever one you are better positioned to actually pull off–just that there aren’t any shortcuts to thinking strategically and having more than one tool in your “repertoire of resistance.” “Don’t create power vacuums and then leave them open for somebody else to step into, because they will” is a big takeaway, and probably one of the easier ones to start doing something about (Gabriel Boric isn’t having a perfectly flawless term as president of Chile, but he’s still the president, which is a better time than the Egyptian left is having).
Some of the lack of strategic thinking on display in this book is honestly very tragic. The Hong Kong protests were in a tight enough spot given the positive backing they were getting from the U.S., which has been concerned about China’s economic development because we still think it’s against the rules for any country to develop economically except the handful we hand-pick to be allowed to do the same things we coup other countries for trying (called either “democracy” or “communism” depending on whether the US thinks it’s strategically beneficial for the US). Foreign money, especially foreign money from the US, which has lots of it, seems to be capable of overwhelming whatever organic, domestic-policy-oriented protests occur in a nation if the foreign money thinks it could be useful for its own ends. The Hong Kong students thought they could use the US’ sympathy for their own ends, and ended up cosplaying The Hunger Games right into the sea waiting for the US/UK cavalry to come in and deliver them. Also, for Christ’s sake, they were literally cosplaying The Hunger Games. (Made me think of this essay: https://newsocialist.org.uk/outlaw-kings-rebel-chic/.) There’s also some talk with Egyptian leftists who boycotted the four-way election after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and then were shocked Pikachu face that one of the right-wing candidates won, all of whom regretted being all anarcho-vibesist about it and wished they had in some way engaged with the question of who would succeed Mubarak.
Unrelated to issues of theory and strategy, my favorite thing about this book was how personally insulted Bevins is by what the right wing did to Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Bevins is normally fairly good at not making himself part of the story, but he did get caught in some fairly escalated situations during the protests in Brazil, and he got to witness the soft coup impeachment vote that removed Dilma from office, and he was clearly deeply offended by what he saw. He really dislikes the smug little American-funded faux-punk neoliberal group MBL (named deliberately to confuse people by sounding almost like the more popular and sympathetic MPL) with a palpable and visceral dislike, and I am definitely here for it because they sound fucking insufferable. He certainly makes the case convincingly that Dilma was done dirty by just about everybody, but it’s adorable how hurt he seems to be about it.
If We Burn is a wide-ranging series of interviews getting behind the scenes of major protest movements across the globe, mostly in the Third World, in the 2010s. I followed some of these at the time they were happening via Twitter, others I followed less, so my prior knowledge was very uneven, but even the protests I sort of thought I knew a bit about it turns out I knew a lot less about than I did about protests going on in the US, like Occupy and the first wave of BLM. Anyway, there’s a lot of interesting firsthand accounts of the behind-the-scenes action in uprisings from Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Some of these revolutions were more or less successful–South Korea’s ousting of Park Geun-hye seems to have been followed up in a pretty orderly fashion with somebody else kind of normal being president, although I think the current guy is a bit more right-wing than Moon Jae-in–and some collapsed into military dictatorship, as in Egypt, or worse, like whatever you want to call the current state of things in Libya.
While much of the value in this book is just having a ton of primary sources that were close to the issues at hand, so this information doesn’t get lost in the future, there are a couple of themes that do seem to emerge. One is that the big, digitally coordinated mass protests, however much positive press they got from Western media for being the right and correct and respectable way to make change, had a very uneven record of making any kind of change. Clearly, the theory of change that’s just “Have mass protests until a better society emerges” is missing some key details. Bevins doesn’t lay out a One True Way to Achieve Social Change–his stance even on the age-old “reform or revolution” question isn’t that one is inherently better than the other, just that you should consider doing whichever one you are better positioned to actually pull off–just that there aren’t any shortcuts to thinking strategically and having more than one tool in your “repertoire of resistance.” “Don’t create power vacuums and then leave them open for somebody else to step into, because they will” is a big takeaway, and probably one of the easier ones to start doing something about (Gabriel Boric isn’t having a perfectly flawless term as president of Chile, but he’s still the president, which is a better time than the Egyptian left is having).
Some of the lack of strategic thinking on display in this book is honestly very tragic. The Hong Kong protests were in a tight enough spot given the positive backing they were getting from the U.S., which has been concerned about China’s economic development because we still think it’s against the rules for any country to develop economically except the handful we hand-pick to be allowed to do the same things we coup other countries for trying (called either “democracy” or “communism” depending on whether the US thinks it’s strategically beneficial for the US). Foreign money, especially foreign money from the US, which has lots of it, seems to be capable of overwhelming whatever organic, domestic-policy-oriented protests occur in a nation if the foreign money thinks it could be useful for its own ends. The Hong Kong students thought they could use the US’ sympathy for their own ends, and ended up cosplaying The Hunger Games right into the sea waiting for the US/UK cavalry to come in and deliver them. Also, for Christ’s sake, they were literally cosplaying The Hunger Games. (Made me think of this essay: https://newsocialist.org.uk/outlaw-kings-rebel-chic/.) There’s also some talk with Egyptian leftists who boycotted the four-way election after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and then were shocked Pikachu face that one of the right-wing candidates won, all of whom regretted being all anarcho-vibesist about it and wished they had in some way engaged with the question of who would succeed Mubarak.
Unrelated to issues of theory and strategy, my favorite thing about this book was how personally insulted Bevins is by what the right wing did to Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Bevins is normally fairly good at not making himself part of the story, but he did get caught in some fairly escalated situations during the protests in Brazil, and he got to witness the soft coup impeachment vote that removed Dilma from office, and he was clearly deeply offended by what he saw. He really dislikes the smug little American-funded faux-punk neoliberal group MBL (named deliberately to confuse people by sounding almost like the more popular and sympathetic MPL) with a palpable and visceral dislike, and I am definitely here for it because they sound fucking insufferable. He certainly makes the case convincingly that Dilma was done dirty by just about everybody, but it’s adorable how hurt he seems to be about it.