Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (35 page)

Russia, on the basis of the events so far, has seen an insurrection pri-marily driven not by economic grievance but by the more complex social, demographic and human changes I describe in Chapter 7: the rise of the networked individual, their desire for enhanced personal and social freedom, and their extreme disenchantment with authoritarian state capitalism.

Putin's main advantage is not his ability to deploy the FSB and the riot squad, nor even his ability to spend tens of billions of roubles on social programmes. It is the sheer scale of social atomization that occurred in the last years of the Soviet Union and the first years of the Yeltsin regime. It is arguable that, even now, the generation that lived through the 1980s and 90s—the Afghan wars, perestroika, the Yeltsin shock—remains so fatally mesmerized by authoritarian nationalism that it would, given the chance, simply replace Putin with a straight Communist or far-right replica. Even if this is not true of the Pussy Riot generation—which has known only cellphones and social media, and which breathes the same radicalism as the youth of Cairo and New York—it creates yet another division within the movement.

All these factors make it unlikely that the democracy movement, on its own, could topple Putin. Expanding the space for social activism and democratic debate might be the most it could hope for, under its own steam. But this, at root, was all that Pussy Riot were trying to do, and in the end the regime could not even tolerate that.

However, there is a strong external dynamic—and the regime is right to fear it. Putin is said to read the annals of Russian despotism not as a history book but as an instruction manual. The centrality of the FSB in his statecraft mirrors that of the Okhrana under Tsarism and the KGB under Brezhnev. The turn to aggressive militarism, nationalism and the muscle of semi-fascist street gangs are, likewise, well-thumbed pages from the Tsarist playbook. But these vital traits of Putinism lead in directions that make his rule decreasingly functional within global capitalism, and tend to alienate even sections of the elite.

And now, the Arab Spring has injected a new, unpredictable element which Putin's statecraft is struggling cope with.

For years, Pentagon strategists have dreamed of a scenario in which Lebanon evicts Hezbollah, Syria goes over to the West, Iran's hardline mullahs get overthrown, and the dominoes of Russian influence topple one by one, in a straight line, from Beirut to the borders of Turkmenistan.

By vetoing sanctions against Assad in Syria, and repeatedly supporting Ahmadinejad against his own people in Iran, Putin has put himself on the opposite side to something more powerful than Hilary Clinton. He has set the Kremlin's face not just against a weak domestic revolution, but against a global revolution that will, in the next few years, arrive on Russia's doorstep.

To lose Syria and Iran would be the diplomatic equivalent of the battle of Tsushima (the 1905 naval battle in which Tsar Nicholas sent Russia's fleet halfway around the world, only to see it instantly sunk by Japan). Revolution in Syria and Iran would leave Russia's power in the world severely curtailed. But with every speech, every veto, every attack helicopter shipped to his failing allies, Putin seems determined to prepare this diplomatic Tsushima.

Thus are the global revolutions and the Russian struggle for democracy linked. The White Ribbon revolution is not just a local reflection of uprisings elsewhere: its fate is intertwined with them.

14

The Twenty Reasons, Revisited

It is nearly two years on from Tahrir Square. The president of Egypt is from the Muslim Brotherhood; on the streets of Athens the Golden Dawn party is staging anti-migrant pogroms; the most prominent leaders of Russia's democracy movement face criminal charges. Around 200 people a week are being killed by Assad's regime in Syria.

It's an easy step from such manifest negativity to the conclusion that 2011, the year it all kicked off, was a flash in the pan. But to conclude that would be totally wrong.

The Arab Spring and the Occupy movement—with their echoes as far afield as Santiago and Quebec—have unleashed something real and important, and it has not yet gone away. I am confident enough now to call it a revolution. Some of its processes conform to the templates laid down in 1848, but many do not. Above all the relationship between the physical and the mental, the political and the cultural, seem inverted.

There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible; that a great change in the world's priorities is within people's grasp. The essence of it is, as Manuel Castells has written, the collapse of trust in the old regime, combined with the inability to go on living the pre-crisis lifestyle: ‘The perceived incapacity of the political elite to solve their problems destroyed trust in the institutions in charge of managing the crisis.'
¹

If anything, the impervious nature of official politics—its inability to swerve even slightly towards the critique of finance capitalism intuitively felt by millions of people—has deepened the sense of alienation and mistrust. But the changes in ideas, behaviour and expectations are running far ahead of changes in the physical world. Here ‘progress' is hard to find. There is greater space for democratic movements in the Arab world, but it is constantly menaced. ‘The Protester' may have made it on to the cover of
Time
as Person of the Year but, to date, not a single anti-austerity protest has achieved its aim.

If we take 1848–51 as a template, the critical events that would close the period of upheaval lie ahead. Pessimism of the intellect leads you to expect them to be episodes of reaction: a police-led coup in Greece, where democracy is already constrained; a suppression of the secular, liberal and leftist forces in Egypt; an intelligence-led bust up of the Occupy movement in America; and for good measure a war—probably with Iran. But, as I argued in the first edition of this book, there is one powerful factor militating against a return to stability and order: the economy.

Europe's great slide backwards, beginning in October 2011, as the G20 summit at Cannes ended in paralysis, has dragged the world economy backwards. In a balance-sheet recession, where recovery is impaired by overhanging debts, all policy can do is to keep the patient alive. Sustained recovery can only begin when the debt mountains are diminished—either by inflation, currency wars or aggressive defaults. In turn, each of these shatters the basis of the old economic order: inflation wipes out the savings of the salaried workforce and the middle class; currency wars trigger the break-up of globalization; default—by states, banks and individuals—reduces parts of the finance system to rubble. As a result we are maybe only halfway through the depressive effects of the 2008 crisis. In countries such as Greece, Spain, or Portugal, a 1930s-style death spiral is a serious danger.

The title of this book asks ‘why' social movements erupted as they did from late 2010. It does not and cannot answer the question why they fail; as a work of analysis it was never intended to answer the question ‘what should they do?'

In general, throughout history, social movements failed because they were not resolute enough, because they were self-deluding, bureaucratized or badly led, or because they were disunited. Often they failed because they were launched at a time when conditions made it impossible for them to succeed. Generally, for those that did succeed, these conditions were overcome. It is impossible to tell at this stage whether the movements described here will fail: but if they do, the conditions of their failure may turn out to involve—as in Greece—a retreat from democracy and from the welfare state, and quite possibly a retreat from globalization.

With this in mind I want to revisit the ‘Twenty Reasons' post that originally inspired this book, written as a blog on 5 February 2011.
²
Its insights were provisional then, and the conclusions below remain provisional. I will argue that the thrust of the original bullet points—reprinted in italics below—remains valid, but new questions are raised as follows:

1. At the heart of it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future

When I wrote those words the
indignados
had not yet flooded into Madrid's Puerta del Sol; the Occupy camps had not been thought of; the Quebec student protest was a year away. The ‘graduates with no future' have been central to the events of 2011–12, although—as we will see, now that we have more case studies—the limits of what they are prepared to do are more obvious.

Free-market capitalism offered the generations born after 1985 the moon and stars. Now it can offer very little. For the unlucky ones, there is unemployment. In the small Spanish town of San Miguel de Salinas I found jobless youth lounging on the streets, smoking and drinking too early in the day. ‘We have no car,' one young woman told me, ‘not even a drivers' licence, because what's the point of paying for it if you are never going to get a car?' As one year spills over into the next, there is a quiet migration out of the crisis zone; a chemistry graduate I met in San Miguel is a bartender in Edinburgh. ‘I'll save some money and then look for something to do with chemistry,' he said.

But even for those with jobs, there is a dramatic change of story that makes no version of the future seem palatable. In Athens, I interviewed a female anti-fascist, who'd been strip-searched and abused in the police HQ: what was her job? ‘I wait tables,' she said, adding with an embarrassed laugh, ‘but I am a qualified civil engineer.' On the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, late into the night, with the once vibrant bars now closed, you see young adults squatting in groups on the pavement, drinking warm beer out of cans, sold by itinerant migrants. The lifestyle of the small-town poor is forced on the glamorous youth of the most glamorous cities.

To survive, the young have become a generation of drifters, reliving the plotlines of movies from the 1930s. For those graduating since the crisis began, there is the offer of wages pegged close to the minimum; work contracts stripped of traditional benefits; a collapsed housing market that they cannot enter—even as properties lie crumbling and weed infested, from Las Vegas to Valencia. Rising taxes, massive debts from the day you graduate, a retirement age raised so far you might as well stop thinking about it. And above all stories that no longer make sense: the American dream, the social Europe. And if it's bad now, the avatars of emerging market capitalism have only scorn for the idea that living in the West, and getting educated, should be a guarantee of decent living standards.

‘The minimum wage is a machine to destroy jobs,' multimillionaire Tidjane Thiam, the Ivorian-born boss of Prudential, told an audience at Davos in 2012. ‘The minimum wage is the enemy of young people entering the labour market.' Unions too were the enemy of the young, defending the conditions of those with work. The logic is that to get into the labour market at all, this generation—probably the best-educated, healthiest, most emotionally literate generation ever—will have to work for starvation wages and forget about unionization.

It is a common refrain. At the United World Colleges summit in London, Ruben Vardanyan, the boss of the $1 billion Troika Dialog hedge fund, told me: ‘European people need to work longer, harder and be less paid. Or take a later pension. Otherwise there will be no economy left.'
³

Without some massive and cathartic turnaround, the generation in their twenties, across much of the Western world, will never accumulate savings at the level their parents did; they will never accumulate pension rights at a level that could realistically support them in retirement. What they are accumulating is resentment.

2. … with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and
y
frog, they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging
from parliamentary democracy to tyranny

The state, of course, had other ideas. Facebook pages have been closed down by the US media company, at the request of those in power. And, while states were prepared to ignore social media before they became a venue for opposition, the past two years have seen the imposition of ‘normal' media law against blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Incitement and libel are now regularly prosecuted on the social media and summary action is common at corporate level. For example, on the eve of planned protests during the UK's 2011 Royal Wedding, some fifty UK Facebook groups dedicated to organizing protest events were deleted by the company, on the grounds that they were being maintained by people with false names. During the English inner-city riots of 2011, the prime minister floated the idea of banning rioters from using Facebook and Twitter, and two young men who had publicly incited riots in small towns were jailed on the evidence of their Facebook pages (even though in both cases, no riot had ever happened).

Meanwhile, among the young, poor and disenfranchised demographic who formed the core of rioters, research by the
Guardian
'/LSE confirmed—as everyone understood at the time—that the secure Blackberry BBM service was the key conduit of riot agitation, not Facebook. RIM, the maker of Blackberry, quickly pledged to do what it could to unsecure the data.

However, in response to increased surveillance and repression, activists have evolved new uses for social media. Tumblr emerged as the platform of choice of the Occupy movement in America after it hosted the viral ‘We are the 99%' blog. The blog, and the ‘99%' meme it created, form a case study in the mass dissemination of ideas possible with social media. The slogan itself originated at a general assembly in New York's Zuccotti Park in August: a blogger posted an appeal for posed photographs with one-line summaries of their subject's economic problems. The first, showing a young woman, read: ‘Single mom, grad student, unemployed and I paid more tax last year than GE. I am the 99 per cent.' Soon the site was getting more than 100 submissions a day. And it was picked up—at first by the niche websites associated with Occupy, then by the mainstream media.