IF WE BURN - VINCENT BEVINS

An amazing book. Truly one of the best things I’ve read all year. Bevins’ last book, THE JAKARTA METHOD, was one of my favorites from a few years ago and I believe this one tops it. This book is pretty incredible in scope, seeking to cover various protests movements across the world during the 2010’s and provide some insight into why none of them seemed to really work. Why, from Egypt to Brazil to Ukraine to Turkey, the situation after the uprisings become more authoritarian and less free. Bevins does briefly touch on Occupy in the USA but he wisely chooses to focus elsewhere. However, as someone who was very involved in protests in the US during this decade (and who attended protests in Mexico and lived in some pretty unstable places during that decade) the conclusions he draws are incredibly useful and insightful for us here in America as well (full disclosure, I don’t live in the US right now). In many ways the book is a response to David Graeber, a writer for whom my love is well-documented and deep, and ideas about horizontalism and anarchism for which he is the premiere English-language spokesperson. Bevins shows again and again, in different situations around the world, protests and mass-movements spring up, organized without leaders, often using social media tools, which are able to shut things down and attach a ton of attention and create genuine revolutionary moments. However, because there is no leadership or organization a bevy of problems quickly emerges. First, since the movements are focused on size, anyone with any vision of the future can show up and hijack the momentum on the street. Which means that protests that start one way can be co-opted by better organized groups, as happened in Brazil and Egypt. Secondly, since there are no official spokespeople, since that would be a form of hierarchy, the media can talk to whomever the want, which practically means someone who is more middle-class and articulate and/or someone inflammatory and entertaining, and this person can give whatever impression they feel like regarding the movement as a whole. Likewise, when it comes time to negotiate with those in power, in order to get some concessions and get to the next level there is no one who is able to do this. If you don’t have a transparent structure and democratic way to pick spokespeople and leaders, since you oppose these positions on a theoretical level, it’s not as if you won’t have them, they will simply emerge based on things like people’s personal connections and charisma and desire for control, some of the least democratic ways to choose these people. If one is able to create a situation that weakens those in power, you need to realize that even if you have misgivings about power generally and hesitate, someone else who is better organized and doesn’t have these misgivings will not hesitate to take this opportunity. As he says himself towards the end of the book, “I have come to the conclusion that horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest is fundamentally illegible.” I saw every single part of this play out in Seattle in 2020. The inability to pick people to negotiate when we had the upper hand, the hijacking of the movement by people who were more comfortable with being in charge even if they were exactly the sorts of people who should not have been in control. The refusal to build structures which lead to unofficial and opaque means of control. The inability to get on the same page about what was next. It was all there, and there are two full long articles on this website about my experiences and thoughts w/r/t those events. It was amazing to see them connected so clearly to a decade of similar actions across the globe. I wish Graeber was alive to have seen the CHOP, I wish he was alive to debate Bevins and his calls for a revived Leninism. I would say that he shies away or deemphasizes some of the more “deep politics” related issues or US covert meddling in these events. It’s beyond the scope of the book I suppose, nothing in here is deeper than what you would read in the NYT. He does say, “I focused on…things that we already know. But if the past 70 years are any guide, then it is safe to wager that over the next few decades we will begin to learn about secret foreign interventions and provocations that will be shocking, if not in their effectiveness, then in their deviousness.” Which is certainly true. Even since this book came out, we’ve learned, for example, that the sniping in Ukraine’s Maidan protests were carried out by US backed protesters, not Russian backed Ukrainian forces, as we were initially told. All that being said, I wish more journalists and thinkers were this clear-eyed about our current moment. I wish we could all take a look at where we are and change up our tactics since what we (as people globally who wish for a better world) have been doing hasn’t been working and there are much bigger fights on the horizon.