Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (23 page)

The gas stations are far apart and the Mojave desert is wide, so I've timed my refills rigorously against the distances on the GPS. But the GPS does not agree with the Grand Marquis's fuel gauge, so I glide into the desert truck-stop at Cedar Hills, in neutral gear, having coasted eight miles downhill on empty.

The store in the gas station is full of stuff that's by now emblematic of the Interstate's economy: the stimulant drinks in yellow bottles that keep truck drivers going all night, the Confederate-flag-themed bandannas to wear, defiantly, instead of a helmet as you cruise along on your Harley. Plus those Route 66 stickers, baseball caps and t-shirts. As with so much of today's American culture, the subtext—if you dare admit it—is ‘We were great once'.

I cross the Mojave Desert in the dark and get to Bakersfield, California at midnight: this is the town where the Joads planned to find work in the orange groves. The bar at the hotel is full of oilmen and military guys: the economy of Kern County is no longer dominated by agriculture. The main employers are the Air Force, a naval weaponry base, big oil and private healthcare. Despite that there is still 15 per cent unemployment here—17 per cent at the height of the crisis.

The town is, like so many in the southern USA, a boomtown suburb that's been busted. Its population grew 25 per cent in the 2000s decade, but since the bust, one in seventy homes is in repossession.

But, like I say, the bar is heaving with clean-shaven, loud young guys with lantern jaws: their ladies are kitted out in that regulation designer bling you see wherever easy money flows. This is Obama's fiscal and monetary stimulus in action: it has engorged the military and—by boosting the global price of everything—made the oilman's life sweet too.

But the parking valet, a Mexican who casts a disgusted eye over the Red Bull cans and trail mix strewn all over the car, tells the other side of the story:

‘You can't get work here anymore: $8 an hour for picking fruit. Why bother? A lot of the farmers sold their fields to build homes on. My family, my Mom picked fruit here for thirty years but, well …' He lets his hands drop to his sides and looks shamefacedly at his uniform.

In the morning I go in search of the spot where Steinbeck must have seen this: ‘They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, and the sun came up behind them and then suddenly they saw the great valley below them …'

In the John Ford film there's a great top shot of the San Joaquin valley, but the Interstate highway obliterates the old road now. I drive into a vineyard to find the view that must have greeted the real-life Okies as they crossed the mountains. It's still beautiful. But like the rest of America, hidden from your gaze by the mainstream media, it's a story of poverty for some, work for others; and widespread denial of where much of the work comes from, and what averted the disaster back in 2008: the state.

Steinbeck, who had lived most of his life in California, was among the first to publicize conditions for the Dust Bowl migrants, and to pillory the near-racist attitudes of those who hounded them. Though he faced resistance from the cheap-labour bosses and the police, by the time he wrote the novel Steinbeck was cutting with the grain in terms of Federal policy. For the book is not just about a journey: it is about the search for a new economic model based on state intervention to guarantee full employment, and about a new social model based on solidarity and tolerance.

This was Roosevelt's New Deal, which would, between 1933 and 1937, create twelve million jobs, power America out of double-dip recession and—in the teeth of opposition from corporations—redistribute wealth. Roosevelt would, within days of taking office, abolish speculation in the finance system. Within two years he would pass pro-union legislation, which led to the biggest one-time uplift in wages and conditions in US history. He would raise taxes on the rich and spend Federal money, unashamedly, not just on social programmes but in creating art and theatre for the people: 40,000 actors and directors and scene painters were employed in the first year.

The Joads, then, had Roosevelt. People like Larry Antista and Fernando López have Barack Obama. And on Sunday night, 31 July 2011, those tuning into the radio on Interstate 40 would hear the news: President Obama had agreed to make $2.5 trillion in spending cuts, mostly on infrastructure and welfare payments to the poor. ‘An about-face', as the
New York Times
described it, ‘in the federal government's role from outsize spending in the immediate aftermath of recession to outsize cuts in the future.'

The boss of Pimco, one of America's biggest investment firms, summarized the impact of the debt-ceiling deal: ‘Unemployment will be higher than it would have been otherwise. Growth will be lower than it would be otherwise. And inequality will be worse than it would be otherwise.'
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That summer, key indicators of US economic growth began to flatten off. The Federal Reserve responded with a third tweak to its money-printing operation, and Obama published a job creation plan. But the US recovery was, by now, intertwined with the fate of the global economy, and this—because of the euro crisis—was looking grim.

My trip from Oklahoma to LA was conceived as a snapshot of America struggling with the depths of its jobs and housing drought. If we are very unlucky, the depths may lie ahead of us.

9

1848 Redux: What We Can Learn from the Last Global Wave

Paris, December 1847.
One winter morning Frédéric Moreau, the archetypal ‘graduate with no future', left his student hovel on the Parisian Left Bank, his mind, as always, on his forlorn romance. But history intervened:

Youths in groups of anything from five to twelve were strolling around arm in arm, occasionally going up to larger groups which were standing here and there; at the far end of the square, against the iron railings, men in smocks were holding forth … policemen were walking up and down … Everybody wore a mysterious, anxious expression; clearly there was something in the air, and on each person's lips there was an unspoken question.
¹

This is how Moreau, the hero of Flaubert's novel
Sentimental Education,
collided with the revolution of 1848, and like his romance it did not end well.

On 22 February 1848 the ‘men in smocks'—the Parisian workers—overthrew the monarchy and forced the middle class to declare a republic. It was a shock because, like Saif Gaddafi and Gamal Mubarak long afterwards, King Louis-Philippe had counted himself something of a democrat.

In 1848 a wave of revolutions swept Europe: by March, Austria, Hungary, Poland and many states of the future Germany were facing insurrections, often led by students and the radicalized middle class, with the small, mainly craft-based, working class in support. Elsewhere—as in Jordan and Morocco in 2011—riots and demonstrations forced beleaguered monarchs into constitutional reform.

Within months, however, class conflict tore the revolutionary alliance apart. In Paris, the newly elected assembly was dominated not by the radicals who'd made the revolution, but by social conservatives. They hired a general to crack down on unrest; that June, he crushed the working class in four days of intense barricade fighting. The first newspaper photograph in history captures the moment: three forlorn barricades, made of cobblestones and carts, stand deserted on the rue Saint-Maur: four thousand people have just been killed. The scene's eerie modernity is reinforced by an advertisement on the wall for a chocolate factory.
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Elsewhere in Europe, there was open warfare. Revolutionary armies manoeuvred through Hungary, Poland, Italy, Austria and along the Rhine. Fourteen years later many of the defeated insurgents would turn up on the battlefields of the American Civil War, from Shiloh to Chattanooga, led by the same radical officers and singing the same socialist songs.

But by 1851 the revolutionary wave in Europe was over, its leaders exiled or dead. A military coup ended the French revolution, the president rebranding himself as Emperor Napoleon III. The Prussian army crushed the German states that had voted for radical democracy. Austria defeated the Hungarian uprising, put down its own and enlisted Napoleon III to suppress the republic that had sprung up in Rome.

In each case, the survivors observed a similar pattern of events. Once the workers began to fight for social justice, the businessmen and radical journalists who had led the fight for democracy turned against them, rebuilding the old, dictatorial forms of repression to put them down. Conversely, where the working class was weak or non-existent, the radical middle classes would die on the barricades, often committed to a left-wing programme themselves.

Eighteen forty-eight, then, forms the last complete example of a year when it all kicked off. As with 2011, it was preceded by an economic crisis. As today, there was a level of contagion inexplicable to governments. But in hindsight, it was actually a wave of revolution and reaction, followed pretty swiftly by a wave of war. Even if today's situation defies parallel, the events of 1848 provide the most extensive case study on which to base our expectations of the present revolts.

When the next global wave of revolutions broke, in February 1917, the uprisings were led by hardened revolutionary socialists and involved a large, industrial working class. They featured a similar cast of characters to 1848, but the plot was attenuated.

By contrast, May 1968 looks less like a wave of revolutions and more like a surge of protest: students in the lead, workers and the urban poor taking it to the verge of insurrection only in France, Czechoslovakia and America's ghettoes. Nineteen eighty-nine was—with the exception of Romania—achieved by demonstrations, passive resistance and a large amount of diplomacy.

In each of these global spasms, issues of class were crucial. The key questions were always: what do the workers do? Do they lead? What is their ideology? How fast do they move from a democratic to a social agenda? How does the middle class react?

But these worldwide protests were not only about class. With the rise of social micro-history, we've begun to understand that these events were also about ‘the personal': about relationships, freedom of action, culture, the creation of small islands of autonomy and control. In this respect, the demographics of 2011 resemble those of 1848 more than any other event. There is an expanded layer of ‘graduates with no future', a working class weakened by the collapse of the organizations and lifestyle that blossomed in the Fordist era, and a large mass of slum-dwelling urban poor.

As today, 1848 was preceded by a communications revolution: the telegraph, the railway and the steam boat formed part of an emerging transport and communications network clustered around the cities that became centres of the social revolution.

As today, 1848 was preceded by the rapid formation of networks—in this case, clubs and secret societies. The students, worker-intellectuals and radical lawyers who led them were indeed part of an international network of activists. Marx and Engels had holed up in London's Soho to write
The Communist Manifesto
; they were in Brussels by February, Paris by March, and soon after sneaked across the border to join the revolution in Cologne. They were not unique in their globetrotting. Nor was the opening line of their manifesto—‘A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism'—mere rhetoric.

As today, 1848 was a revolution in social life as well as politics. In a pioneering micro-study of the Languedoc region of France during that year, historian Leo Loubere explored how social-republicanism spread among the workers and farm labourers of the wine-producing district. Café became hubs of political discussion, driven by the newly published radical newspapers; farmhands would gather to hear doctors and lawyers spread the word. At the core of the movement were town-based artisans. Albeit driven by the economic downturn of 1847, the character of the revolution, once unleashed, went beyond economics:

Most of the active militants were relatively young, in their twenties and thirties … Often their wives and even their children participated in the more festive programs, such as planting liberty trees and crowning them with Phrygian caps, or serenading a local hero, or dancing the farandole in long serpentine columns, or just plain mischief which the police reports refer to as ‘tapage nocturne'.
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Basically, the radical workers of Languedoc turned the region into one giant festival until the military coup of 1851 ended the revolution.

We know from newspaper and police reports what their mass meetings advocated: nationalization of the railways, insurance and finance; a publicly funded urban infrastructure; cheap credit for workers' and farmers' cooperatives; the breakup of large landholdings; and free, secular education for all.

They resisted the 1851 coup by force of arms: after their rising was crushed, 5,000 people were arrested, of which 2,000 were deported to Algeria. These had been identified as ‘decurions'—organizers—of something we can recognize all too easily now: a network.

To anticipate where today's revolts may lead, we need to avoid two mistakes. The first would be to ignore the classic dynamics of revolution—to imagine that material antagonism between the democratic business class and the workers can remain suppressed forever. The second mistake would be to think there is nothing new, seeing only the parallels with what came before and ignoring the changes in personal identity, knowledge and behaviour described above.

Today the chaotic, interpersonal and cultural character of the revolution is front and centre. This makes the ‘democratic' aspect of the uprisings more complex, and the line between politics and economics harder to draw. As it happens there is a glaring historical parallel for this, too, but it's one of the least recognized.

The Great Unrest 2.0?

In 1913 America's leading business magazine warned the world of a new social movement. Although the name of this movement was not in any dictionary, it threatened ‘to bring the world face to face with the greatest crisis of modern civilization—perhaps of any civilization'.
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