Superlatives are now heard with disorienting regularity: the largest protests in the history of the United States, in the history of Europe, in the history of Latin America; the largest since Black Lives Matter, since the Arab Spring or since the 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq war.
Over the past month, after Hamas swept into Israel and massacred 1,200 people and the Israel Defense Forces began brutally bombing Gaza in response, the streets of the world have become crowded again. For many who participate with enthusiasm and for many who watch from afar with horror, the protests have seemed like a generational turning point.
On November 4, some 300,000 people marched in Washington in support of the Palestinians. Ten days later, there were tens of thousands who supported Israel. On November 11, in London, there were 300 thousand for the Palestinian cause. In Paris, the next day, 180 thousand people marched against anti-Semitism. From country to country, what has surprised is the growing participation.
As unprecedented as the protests may seem, they were also immediately familiar. We were living in a kind of golden age of public protest, writes journalist Vincent Bevins in his remarkable new history, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” More people participated in protests between 2010 and 2020 than at any previous time in human history. And yet, he writes, nothing seems to get better.
For an entire decade, mobilized by social media and inflamed by the inequalities of globalization, the world was ablaze with mass protests: Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square, Gezi Park in Turkey, Brazil and Chile and Ukraine and Hong Kong . It was almost irresistible back then to overlook the differences between these movements and see instead a staggering, unforeseen rupture in the global order, and one that continued to tear itself apart—a current 1848 of parallel global uprising. However, Bevins argues that what is most notable is how it ended: with almost every country back to square one or worse, as reactionary forces and backlash unfolded what once seemed an inevitable arc of history.
What explains the pattern? For Bevins, it is primarily a question of political strategy and structure, of how contemporary protest has traded purpose for scale, and how little trust these recent movements have placed in those traditional forms of radical hierarchy that he calls “Leninism.”
Movements need followers, he writes, but they also need leaders. When they choose instead to fetishize formlessness, the prospects for real change diminish quite quickly and the truly revolutionary energy of the streets is somewhat at stake. In some cases, it simply dissipates—mass protest as an escape valve. In others, it is repurposed by more strategic actors with clearer objectives, often political agents who are more friendly to the establishment and who work to enclose the energy of the protest in a big centrist tent. In still others, the initial protests present the provocation around which outraged others can mobilize a reactionary backlash.
Over the past decade in Brazil it was all of the above, leading to corruption investigations that toppled the ruling social democratic party, sent its former leader Lula to prison and helped give rise to the rabid right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro.
The pattern also holds in more prosperous and seemingly “stable” parts of Europe and North America. Here, recent protests have been characterized by the same two distinctive features: their enormous scale and their mercurial formlessness. By turning to social media you can bring millions to the streets, but you also run the risk of leaving something more akin to a symbolic mark on history than a concrete political legacy.
But with protest it is always difficult to rush to judgment or reduce the question of legacy too clearly to questions of victory or defeat. Although the rhetoric of these mass events may have seemed radical, they were not revolutionary movements, but rather calls for reform.
The strategy might seem naïve or even old-fashioned, given the establishment’s sclerotic reputation for power and the way it can make efforts to disrupt a seemingly indifferent status quo seem more like confirmations of its indifference. It may also appear that large-scale demonstrations risk mobilizing more against the cause than for it.
But while none of these movements can be described as an unequivocal triumph, they did not really fail either. Take, for example, the climate strikes. This fall marks the fifth anniversary of Greta Thunberg’s global fame, Extinction Rebellion’s first mass protest in London, and the Sunrise Movement’s infamous confrontation with Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the US House of Representatives. What has changed?
The story is bigger than the climate protest, but whereas once climate activists could casually denounce the complete indifference of the world’s powerful, today they live in a world that is rapidly rushing to decarbonize. Thunberg is now being disowned by some climate strikers for her stance on Gaza; Extinction Rebellion’s leadership has split in several directions; and Sunrise now appears a much weaker force in American politics, particularly after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its truly aggressive climate provisions. But the US has that law due, at least in part, to its agitation and the sense of obligation it generated.
While not all protests are revolutionary, neither are all aimed at achieving narrow policy victories. They also seismically shape the world—including by paving the way for future upheaval.
By: INTELLIGENCE/David Wallace-Wells
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7008032, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-11-30 21:30:06
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