Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (39 page)

This is in part due to the ability of people to adopt multiple and parallel identities, but it is also the result of the following: it is easy to mix and match if you can upload and disseminate the basic knowledge needed to be an activist in different sectors. Because, as I pointed out:

15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news, but on the suppression of narratives and
truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the
world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet
—
and
it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams.
For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about
the subjects /studied at university, that were not known when I was
there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent
disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true,
but the plane of reasoning can be more complex, because people have an
instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's
as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every
discipline.

I expanded on this in Chapter 7 above. But it is worth considering here what the impact of this instant knowledge—and a wide repository of knowledge—has been on the protest movements themselves.

Castells has described the social movements of 2011–12 as highly ‘self-reflexive'. That is, the activists are prepared to quickly analyse what's happened, gather evidence, change tactics, adapt slogans. By contrast the old left soldiered on with one fetishized tactic or slogan after another for years: Labour entryism, the rank and file movement, and so on.

So by late 2011 you have the beginnings of a re-evaluation of horizontalism. Activists became aware of the boredom engendered by the perpetual use of the ‘human mic'. They began to understand the limitations of the communal kitchen in actually advancing the communal. They became weary of tent camps, which began to attract the dispossessed and deranged. Their ‘tyranny of consensus' became, itself, a meme.

At the time of writing, in mid-November 2012, there is a clearly posed question: what next? But no answer. The rest of the conditions I outlined in February 2011 still prevail:

16. There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving
to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will
spiral out of control, post Mubarak
—
as in all the colour revolutions
—
the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a
meme that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting
study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of twelve days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong
—
only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to
swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.

As it turned out, Islamists won the election in Egypt. They dominate the post-revolutionary government of Tunisia, are heavily represented inside the post-Gaddafi Libyan government, and increasingly prominent among the Free Syrian Army. Through it all, at not one moment did concern about Islamism force the USA to pull back from tacit support for liberation movements, or indeed to switch support back to the dictators on whom the world order had previously relied.

If you look at this conundrum through the eyes of the old foreign policy elite, it is puzzling: it seems as if the Clinton-led State Department opened up one client state after another to the possibility of an Islamist government—promoting alongside it the interests of a more Westernized, secular, liberal group which was never able to wield power, but accepting the Islamist outcome. The logic is that the State Department has fundamentally rethought its concept of soft power. It believes, after the Arab Spring, that there's a global marketplace in images and ideas and that its raison d'être is to influence that.

The next three ‘reasons' are, I think, self-explanatory and stand the test of events.

17.
It is
—
with international pressure and some powerful NGOs
—
possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend
years in the jungle as a guerrilla, or years in the urban underground:
instead the oppositional youth
—
both in the West in repressive regimes
like Tunisia or Egypt, and above all in China
—
live in a virtual
undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here
—
more important are the things people exchange by text message, the music they swap with each other, etc.: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art and so on which those in authority fail
to spot.

18.
People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt
–Negri, but the ideas therein have
become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and
economics, but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in
knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various ‘revolutions' in
their own lives as part of an ‘exodus ‘from oppression, not
—
as previous
generations did
—
as a ‘diversion into the personal'. In 1972 Foucault
could tell
Gilles Deleuze:
‘We had to wait until the nineteenth century
before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this
day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power.'
¹⁶
—
that's
probably changed.

19.
As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest ‘meme' that is sweeping the world
—
if that premise is indeed true
—
is
profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world
in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn, they seek a
moderation of excesses. However, on politics the common theme is the
dissolution of centralized power and the demand for ‘autonomy' and personal freedom, in addition to formal democracy and an end to
corrupt, family-based power elites.

With the experience of two more years of protest and instability, however, we have seen the emergence of what Castells calls ‘alternative economic practice': informal lending between non-family members, sharing of tools, bartering of goods and services. Castells argues that it is out of such makeshift practices that a non-capitalist economics can emerge; at the very least, these tactics of necessity can be the ground on which the radicalized youth meet the dispossessed poor:

Those who dared to live alternative ways of life … built networks of solidarity, support and experimentation … For many others who had accepted an existence sustained by the dream of consumption and the fear of departing from normality, when the crisis disrupted their lives a window of hope appeared through examples that offered glimpses of a different life. Not so much because of a sudden ideological conversion but as a result of the impossibility of living by the rules of the market.
¹⁷

Certainly, during 2011–12, the impact of Occupy was to push the mainstream discourse to the left. In the UK you now have senior regulators openly discussing the write-off of the country's debt, and in the case of Andrew Haldane, head of financial stability at the Bank of England, admitting that Occupy had a point:

Occupy has been successful in its efforts to popularize the problems of the global financial system for one very simple reason: they are right … For the hard-headed facts suggest that, at the heart of the global financial crisis, were and are problems of deep and rising inequality.
¹⁸

Haldane went on to argue that the regulatory reforms to banking begun in the UK would contribute to a more socially responsible and useful banking system, and appealed for the movement's support. He was not the only figure among the 1 % to conceive of a radically redesigned—and essentially de-financialized—capitalism emerging from this crisis. However, the weakness of Haldane's argument is obvious: all narratives of change are currently premised on the survival of globalization.

As I argue in Chapter 6 above, the survival of globalization is no longer a given. National routes out of the crisis are entirely possible, and are beginning to present themselves, despite the banishment of economic nationalism from official politics.

20. Technology has
—
in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera
—
expanded the space and power of the individual.

If you could only list one reason for what's happened in the past two years, it would be this: the networked individual colliding with the economic crisis. And yet it is the most contentious, being the hardest to quantify.

As I argue in Chapter 7, something fundamental has happened—a shift in human consciousness and behaviour as momentous as that triggered by the arrival of mass consumption and mass culture in the 1900s.

The sociological tradition tends to emphasize a continuous process of ‘individuation'—from the lifestyle changes of the 1970s through the extreme consumerism of the pre-bust 2000s. By contrast I am drawn to Virginia Woolf s comment: ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed.'
¹⁹
She was referring to a revolution in social life and art, which made the literary tools and conventions of the Edwardian era ‘dead for us'. Cumulative micro-changes in technology and behaviour interacted with each other, then as now, to produce a tipping point.

Castells documents the tipping points more thoroughly in his 2012 book,
Networks of Outrage and Hope.
²⁰
For him, the model for real-world networked social movements was the Internet-based movement or community; this ethos then gets projected into space and time—the occupation, the demo, the meeting. The moment of physical projection itself is critical, because it is the point at which what he calls ‘counter- power'—opposition to the status quo—moves from the realm of ideas to action:

From the safety of cyberspace, people from all ages and conditions moved towards occupying urban space, on a blind date with each other and with the destiny they wanted to forge as they claimed their right to make history.
²¹

Castells's analysis allows us to answer some of the difficult questions posed in this book. If he is right, the networked individual and her behaviour patterns are not just the product of youth, or generational change: there are numerous over-fifties who live the full, untrammelled life of the netizen. The change, Castells argues, is one-off and irreversible, like electrification, and it will condition all politics going forward.

On this basis he offers the following dire news to those—like Malcolm Gladwell during the Arab Spring, and more recently the British writer Mark Fisher—who want the movement to break with autonomy and horizontalism:

Networked social movements, as all social movements in history, bear the mark of their society. They could not exist without the internet. But their significance is much deeper. They are suited for their role as agents of change in the network society, in sharp contrast with the obsolete political institutions inherited from a historically superseded social structure.
²²

If this is correct, we can expect horizontalism to survive its first winter of discontent, and to resist absorption into the trade unions or the liberal and social-democratic parties. But having exhausted tent camps and general assemblies with their dearth of demands—having begun the move into ‘everyday life'—what happens next?

Where next?

The movements that took to the streets in 2011–12 are at a turning point. They have created a strong counter-culture, which resonates among much wider masses of people than actually turn up to erect tents in squares, defend abortion clinics, attend picket lines.

Yet the revolution remains trapped at the phase of ideology, culture, political debate. The real changes in the world desired by those who protest are still only achievable by those with hierarchical power: be it Mohamed Morsi dictating peace terms to Israel over Gaza, President Obama shielding the women and minorities of the ‘red' states of America from legal onslaught, Syriza's leader Alexis Tsipras, waiting nervously in the wings of Greek parliamentary politics.

It is no surprise to the social historian to find this extreme vigour of critical thought alongside seeping powerlessness. Marx himself identified the same problem with German radicalism in the early 1840s. Prevented from staging a revolution in politics, Germans had opted for a revolution of the mind: through the Romantic movement in music and poetry, student radicalism and left-wing philosophy: ‘In politics, the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and presumption of its thought was always in step with the one-sidedness and lowliness of its reality.'
²³
Marx and his contemporaries proposed that this could not long persist in a revolutionary period, and they were right: by the second month of the 1848 revolutions, Germany was at the centre of the action.

Today, however, the predominance of cultural over physical politics has survived twenty-four months of social upheaval, and the reason is clear. The radical youth do not disdain ‘ordinary' or ‘everyday' life, or the uneducated masses; nor do they fear to go up against batons and even bullets. What they disdain and fear are the politics of power. It is this logjam that will have to be broken for the social movements to go from being influencers to a decisive force. In the process, they will have to engage with the things they despise: compromise, parliamentary politics, the art of the possible, political Islam, organized labour. The question then will be, on whose terms and with what politics?