Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (36 page)

When protesters took Brooklyn Bridge on 17 November 2011, a guerrilla art group called The Illuminators shone ‘99%' in the style of a Batman searchlight signal onto the HQ of Verizon. Mark Read, the instigator of the group, told me:

‘The bat signal is really simple. It's big and it reads as a bat signal—it's culturally legible. It's a call to arms and a call for aid, but instead of a super-hero millionaire psychopath, like Bruce Wayne, it's ourselves—it's the 99% coming to save itself. We are our own superhero.'

The cat and mouse game between social movements and the authorities over the use of social media has, if anything, made its use more sophisticated. Most of the protests of 2011–12 have involved inchoate groups, overlapping networks, complex demographics. By shutting down one service—as the Iranians did with Facebook in 2009—you tend to push people in the direction of bleeding-edge platforms that are not yet monitored, or back onto the plain, old, pre-social digital comms like email and bulletin boards, and of course word of mouth.

Underpinning the use of social media, the years of crisis have seen massive combined and synergistic growth in smartphone use, smart-phone technologies and social media applications designed for them. The iPhone grew from scratch in 2007 to 35 million units sold per quarter by 2011. Facebook had 400 million active users in 2010, and has one billion in mid 2012.

David Karp, the twenty-six-year-old CEO of Tumblr, told me: ‘All of this stuff is gated on the hardware: Apple and Google are pushing the hardware so far, so quickly … and as the creative horsepower moves faster and faster, the software is going to explode.' Karp is one of the few CEOs you'll meet whose eyes light up as he describes the momentum behind Occupy Wall Street: ‘The reach you can build out of a network like Tumblr, and the mass communication that's able to go down in a network like Twitter is incredible: it's just something that's never existed before. The other thing is the media itself: it's easier than ever for you and me to make something that's really compelling, tells a story, put that out into the world and really move people.'

It seems, in the near future, highly unlikely—given the overlap of complex and changing networks—that the state, except in outright dictatorships, can do anything more than play catch-up with the social media.

3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda
becomes flammable

I should have explained this better, because the way this happens involves more than just the social media. It's clear now—from the examples of Cairo's ‘Day of Rage', Wisconsin's Capitol occupation, the global explosion of the Occupy movement on 15 October 2011—that protesters' ability to leverage the mainstream media has also been crucial.

In the first place, it is important for real-time information-spreading. On protests you have started to see geeky men wandering around with a GoPro camera on a bike helmet, linked to a computer and a makeshift aerial, effectively livestreaming the action to niche video blogs. But you also now have mainstream news networks livestreaming the protests, albeit sometimes from the safety of a rooftop or helicopter.

Two examples spring to mind: first, the notorious clash of 22 October 2011, in Syntagma Square, between anarchist and communist demonstrators. This unfolded in real time on the website of the mainstream Greek TV station Skai, and allowed all segments of the protest movement to react to its full horror (molotovs were thrown). Significantly, those who wanted to follow the news without the constant moralizing of the TV anchormen split-screened with it were forced towards Skai's unmediated output. The mainstream media was effectively being forced to mimic the output techniques of the guerrilla media.

The second example was the 26 September 2012 demonstration outside the Spanish parliament, where a broadcast media that usually put a heavy pro-government spin on events, ended up showing the entire, stage-by-stage police attack on a largely peaceful demonstration, including the firing of rubber bullets. For several hours the world could click on a livestream and see protesters repeatedly showing their open hands, trying to calm things down even as the police wound things up.

What this means is that, wherever the mainstream media has the guts to do it, they can show the unedited truth about protests: who starts them, who escalates them, who behaves stupidly, who not.

Of course, in the ‘built' news bulletins you are always going to get ideology and constructed narratives; but in addition to the livestream record of events, and the storm of visual testimony via Twitpic and Instagram, traditional journalists also now have numerous other outlets to triangulate against.

Russia Today's coverage of the Greek riots, for example, while descending occasionally into histrionics, provided a very different visual and editorial take to that of Greek TV and the American news channels. Al Jazeera English, HuffPo—in both English and Spanish—and the numerous semi-professional blogs are, effectively, holding a mirror up to the state and corporate media. And what they see sometimes alters the mainstream's vision of the story.

At the base layer, of course, remains the social media, which grew more complex during 2011 and 2012. With blogs reducing the price of publishing words, movies and pictures basically to the labour and hosting costs—and Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook providing a massive and unpredictable echo chamber—the whole relationship between mainstream and social media has changed. Slowly, quietly and, for now, unmeasurably, the mainstream media has become, for many involved in activism, politics and journalism itself, a
secondary
source of information, while social networks have become the primary source. This, in turn, speaks to the emergence of an undeclared dual power between the world of ideas and the world of official politics.

4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies:
Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism, etc., in fact,
hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected

This sentence does not even begin to capture the scale of detachment from mainstream politics among those protesting—nor its implications. In the event, this disengagement from ideology and structure was to play a major role in the defeat or failure of the progressive movements, from the USA to southern Europe, and above all in Egypt.

In Egypt, the first year of the revolution had seen spontaneous and popular upsurges in which the youth and the more radical forces played a significant role, demanding—in repeated clashes around Tahrir Square—the transfer of power from the military to civilians. But the secular and leftist youth who had led the revolution had failed to form anything like an effective electoral bloc, or even to design an electoral strategy. Thus the parliamentary election, and the final round of the subsequent presidential race, would be fought essentially between the remnants of militarism and the two forms of political Islam: the Muslim Brotherhood and the more radical Salafist movement.

On 23 January 2012, parliament convened with a majority for the MB and a stunningly large minority of Salafists. Liberal, secular and leftist parties made up a small minority. However, Egyptians quickly realized that the parliament was effectively neutered, and that real power lay in the hands of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

Outside parliament two struggles raged: one conducted by the remnants of the Mubarak regime to retain control of the state; the other by the workers' movement to improve conditions in the factories. But they rarely collided.

Here the fundamental weakness of Egyptian democratic and secular politics—the so called ‘civil camp'—was exposed. Some of those who had led the masses to Tahrir fought to push the Islamist-led parliament into a clash with the SCAF, and take full power. But many among the liberal and leftist movements rejected the idea of an alliance with the parliament against the SCAF. The liberal Al-Wafd Party even agreed to join an ‘advisory council' that SCAF had set up to give the impression that it was sharing power. There was, even among NGOs and currents that would be described as social democratic, a preference for an ‘Ataturk-ist' option: that is benign, secular military rule as a guarantee against Islamism.

The underlying problem throughout was that, even as the popularity of the MB and the Salafists began to wane, liberal and leftist forces proved unable to fill the vacuum. And this was not because they lacked support. In the presidential election of May–June 2012, the veteran Nasserite Hamdeen Sabbahi—a secularist—came third in the first round, just 700,000 votes behind the SCAF's candidate Ahmed Shafiq. And the two candidates who were to fight it out—Shafiq and the eventual winner, the MB's Mohamed Morsi—did not even poll half the votes between them in the first round. The election of course was marred by the arbitrary disqualification of other candidates who would have inhabited the secular ground between the MB and the SCAF.

With the MB in power, and consolidating its power in a series of constitutional moves following the presidential poll, the dynamic of the Egyptian revolution changed. It became, for the left, a question of exposing the differences between the social justice rhetoric of the Brotherhood on the streets and its actions in power; a question of organizing the working class in preparation for the moment when political and economic struggles would merge.

As Hossam El-Hamelawy (see Chapter 1) puts it: ‘The leadership is reactionary, reformist, opportunist as with the Labour Party in Britain. But at the same time the base cadres are moving in a different direction. When Morsi speaks about the Islamic Sharia, maybe the Sharia in his head translates into neoliberal norms. But for the Muslim Brotherhood worker it actually means social justice.'
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However, after two years of riots, crises, scandals and crackdowns, Egypt has produced no large force on the left that is simultaneously against Islamism and in favour of a rapid completion of the revolution against the old militarists and businessmen who stand behind the SCAF. The left of all colours remains frustrated by the fact that the revolution has failed to break out of its ‘political' stage.

Egypt, in short, is the clearest example of the revenge of the hierarchy: the revenge of the twentieth-century ideologies that globalist, secularist netizens had convinced themselves would expire of their own accord. The revolution is not over. Its next phase will seem quite familiar to those who studied 1848, or the classic revolutions of the twentieth century—but with this crucial difference: its fate will depend on whether large numbers of the Islamist poor, the lower middle class and workers can be convinced to break with the MB towards a social justice agenda that is not, at the same time, even more radically Islamist. That, in turn, depends on the ability of those who led the masses to Tahrir in January 2010 to break out of the political ghetto described above. (As I read the proofs of this edition, on 6 December 2012, six protesters have died and hundreds have been injured in clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the radical, more secular forces resisting President Morsi's grab for extra-constitutional power.)

And while there are many specifics to the Egyptian situation that are not likely to be replicated elsewhere, the year 2012 closed with a foreboding among the social movements of the world that maybe the old forces—religion, fascism, Stalinist communism, militarism—could revive and conquer elsewhere.

5. Women [Are] very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education
access, the ‘archetypal'protest leader, organiser, facilitator,
spokesperson now is an educated young woman

With more examples to draw on, this pattern is confirmed. But beyond women's demographic and political presence, the noticeable thing is how unprepared feminism has been to deal with what's happened during the struggle.

There's been an obvious and predictable backlash, such as the sexual assaults in Tahrir Square, the crazy debate in the Egyptian parliament over a husband's right to have sex with the corpse of a recently deceased wife; the rapes and sexual assaults in various Occupy camps. Within the developed-world occupation movements there's been the consistent problem of men assuming leadership, and dominating the discussion, even in forums where ‘consensus' and the various speaker stacking systems were supposed to prevent it.

In general, women have been able to organize to combat such instances of outright sexism. But the wider problem remains: if a movement has no demands, then how does it articulate what women's liberation consists of? How does it fit the issues raised by women's long-term and strategic oppression into the immediate social issues of the day?

Such questions perplexed and even tore apart the left-wing movements that emerged after 1968. Once women had won the battle against blatant sexism inside the left, there was still the issue, day to day, of how you advance the self-organization of women in an industrial labour movement that could be simultaneously militant, anti-capitalist and sexist.

In the horizontalist movements, this problem has hardly begun to be addressed. At root it is because feminism has achieved social mobility for some women, and even a symbolically liberated lifestyle, but at the price of a truce over the economic and social subjugation of all women. The journalist Laurie Penny summed up the limitations of what ‘post-left' feminism has achieved:

I wonder if the shiver of impossible yearning I experience when I watch space-battles on the television is what my nanna and women like her felt when they watched us going to university, having boyfriends … dancing all night… For her, my life was, is, science fiction: strange and frightening, enabled by technology … We handle it all casually because we're unable to conceive of an even better world. We've been told that this shaky picture is the best we're ever going to get.
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If you take a long-lens view of this dilemma—personal liberation replacing a struggle for general economic and social liberation—you could say it's simply subset of the overarching problem with the movements of 2011–12. Being a counter-culture—or even a ‘counter-power'—is a viable strategy only as long as the dominant cultures and powers are benign and stable. Here the experience of the early labour movement contains a lesson.