Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (40 page)

Here, there is a parallel with the 1930s that is worth exploring. The first four years of the crisis, from 1929 to 1933, were not a period of effective mass resistance. That happened later.

The first phase of the 1930s Depression was marked—in most places—by social disorientation, catastrophic policy choices, dysfunctional and autocratic governments and the rapid rise of the far right. Thinking on the left was dominated by the ‘Third Period' line dictated by Moscow, which said that socialist parties were as bad as fascists and denied any possibility of reforming capitalism; this ensured, by the early 1930s, that most of the Communist Parties would become isolated sects that would have made today's Occupy protest look positively moderate.

It was Hitler's rise to power that focused minds, amid the fear that something similar could happen in France, Austria and Spain. At the same time, Roosevelt's New Deal signalled the possibility of a progressive liberal government after all, capitalism reformed—albeit at the price of a retreat to economic nationalism.

After a huge far-right demonstration in Paris in February 1934, in which sixteen demonstrators and counter-demonstrators were killed, the intellectual climate changed. The socialist and communist masses forced their parties to work together, despite cultural differences and physical antagonism. The Comintern rapidly switched to a strategy of alliances with ‘liberal' mainstream parties—the so-called Popular Front. The unions went on the offensive, culminating in a workplace occupation movement that stretched from Poland, Spain and France to the USA in 1936–37.
²⁴
Beyond the formalities, during this period, the masses took control of opposition politics: dictating new lines to their leaders; softening the rigid doctrines they were presented with.

Up to now, in today's crisis, protest has been driven by narratives of hope and outrage, not of fear. The horizontalists' self-isolation, indeed self-obsession, is not the result of a dictated party line, as in the 1930s, but of something equally strong in today's conditions: the inner zeit-geist. But as Castells points out, it is fear that, neurologically, impels us to take greater risks. As austerity pushes parts of Europe towards social meltdown, as fascism revives there and as democracy is eroded, maybe it is this that drives the workers' movement beyond the one-day strike and the social movements beyond the temporary occupation of space, as well as goading the existing parties beyond the comfort zone dictated by the global order.

It was the ninety-three-year-old French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel who gave the
indignado
movement its title, in the iconic October 2010 pamphlet
‘Indignez-vous!'
Hessel identified the rise of Nazism, not the economic depression that produced Nazism, as the key radicalizing factor for his generation:

I wish for you all, each of you, to have your own motive for indignation. It is precious. When something outrages you, as I was outraged by Nazism, then people become militant, strong, and engaged. They join this current of history … and this current goes towards more justice, more freedom.

It took the rise of fascism to force humanity to fight for the progressive world it created after 1945. Flawed as it was, it is this world—of human rights, democracy and affluence in the West—that is now in jeopardy.

And though you can—as the anarchist slogan says—‘live despite capitalism', you can't live ‘despite' fascism, genocidal racism, extreme sexual counter-revolution and war. As the gears of mainstream politics and economic crisis clash and grind above their heads, I would expect this realization to be the guiding factor in where the mass movements turn next.

Notes

Introduction

1.
Occupy Everywhere: Reflections on Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere,
London 2012 (forthcoming).

2.Robert Cohen,
Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the
1960s,
New York 2009, p. 100.

Chapter 1

1.‘Meet Asmaa Mahfouz and the vlog that helped spark the revolution', youtube.com/watch?v=SgjIgMdsEuk (last accessed 18 October 2011).

2.Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns,
Tweets from Tahrir,
New York 2011.

3.‘Amazing courage of Egyptian Protesters! Must see!', youtube.com/ watch?v=6VXP0FnTwZE&feature=related (last accessed 18 October 2011).

4.S. Radwan, ‘Economic and social impact of the financial and economic Crisis on Egypt', International Labour Organization paper, April 2009.

5.Ibid.

6.Kara N. Tina, ‘We're Not Leaving Until Mubarak Leaves', occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=300, 5 February 2011.

7.The Masry Shebin El-Kom workers would force the renationalization of their factory through legal action on 21 September 2011.

Chapter 2

1.‘The World in 2011',
Economist,
December 2010.

2.Stephen M. Walt, ‘Why the Tunisian revolution won't spread', ForeignPolicy.com, 16 January 2011.

3.Reuters, 25 January 2011, 18:25 GMT.

4.Jonathan Lis, ‘New IDF intelligence chief failed to predict Egypt uprising',
Haaretz,
30 January 2011.

5.Edward Said, ‘Islam through Western eyes',
Nation,
26 April 1980.

6.Tarek Masoud, ‘The road to (and from) Liberation Square',
Journal of
Democracy,
vol. 22, no. 3, July 2011.

7.Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City',
New Left Review
21, May—June 2003.

8.Fredric Jameson,
The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern,
1983-1998,
London 1998, p. 59.

9.N. Chomsky and E. Herman, ‘Preface to the 2002 Edition',
Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
London 2002, p. xii.

10.Quoted in Mark Fisher,
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?,
Ropley 2009.

11.Fisher,
Capitalist Realism,
pp. 3–16.

12.Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush',
New York Times Magazine,
17 October 2004.

13.Anthony Giddens, ‘My chat with the colonel',
Guardian,
9 March 2007.

14.Paul Mason,
Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed,
London 2010, p. 233.

15.Quoted in Y. Kallianos, ‘December as an event in Greek radical polities', in Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou,
Revolt and Crisis in Greece:
Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come,
London 2011.

16.Alan Woods, ‘The crisis of capitalism and the tasks of Marxists, Part III', 29 September 2009, ireland.marxist.com.

17.youtube.com/watch?v=gC2YCgDaL10&feature

18.‘Iran's Twitter Revolution',
Washington Times
editorial, 16 June 2009.

19.youtube.com/watch?v=xlu-qx8ohL8&feature

20.Krista Mahr, ‘Neda Agha-Soltan',
Time,
8 December 2009.

21.The poems and other rooftop videos were collected at mightierthan. com/2009/07/rooftop.

22.‘UCSC Occupation—Friday Night', indybay.org/newsitems/2009/ 09/25/18623281.php#18623394 (last accessed 18 October 2011).

23.Berkeley student statement, wewanteverything.wordpress.com, 18 November 2009.

24.‘Communique from an Absent Future', in Claire Solomon and Tania Palmieri (eds),
Springtime: The New Student Rebellions,
London 2011.

Chapter 3

1.Woollard was sentenced to 32 months jail after giving himself up to the police.

2.Sophie Burge, ‘I was held at a student protest for five hours', in Dan Hancox,
Fight Back!,
London 2010.

3.Jonathan Moses, ‘Postmodernism in the streets', in Hancox,
Fight Back!.

4.dan-hancox.blogspot.com

5.BBC Newsnight, 9 December 2010.

6.
The Nomadic Hive Manifesto,
criticallegalthinking.com, 9 December 2010.

7.Ibid.

8.Rory Rowan, ‘Geographies of the Kettle: Containment, Spectacle & Counter-Strategy', criticallegalthinking.com.

9.‘The Rise of Street Extremism', Ideas Space, policyexchange.org.uk, 10 January 2011.

Chapter 4

1.Keith Kahn-Harris, ‘Naming the movement', openDemocracy.net, 22 June 2011.

2.Paulo dos Santos, ‘On the Content of Banking in Contemporary Capitalism', Research on Money and Finance Discussion Paper No. 3, February 2009.

3.Richard Sennett,
The Culture of the New Capitalism,
New Haven 2006.

4.‘Live Reporting from Tahrir Sq, Egyptian Revolution', fifthinternational.org, 2 February 2011.

5.P. Altbach et al., ‘Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution', UNESCO.org, 2009.

6.Peter Beaumont, ‘Mohamed Bouazizi: the dutiful son whose death changed Tunisia's fate',
Guardian,
20 January 2011.

7.Ta Paidia Tis Galarias (TPTG), ‘The rebellious passage of a proletarian minority through a brief period of time', in Vradis and Dalakoglou,
Revolt and Crisis in Greece,
p. 116.

8.Hippolyte Taine,
The French Revolution
(1896), vol. 2, trans. J. Durand, Indianapolis 2002, p. 419.

9.Robert Faris et al., ‘Online Security in the Middle East and North Africa: A Survey of Perceptions, Knowledge, and Practice', cyber.law.harvard. edu, Harvard, August 2011.

10.Walter Powell, ‘Neither Market nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization',
Research on Organizational Behavior,
vol. 12, 1990, pp. 295-336.

11.an.kaist.ac.kr

12.Saeid Golkar, ‘Liberation or Suppression Technologies? The Internet, the Green Movement and the Regime in Iran',
International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society,
vol. 9, no. 1, 2011, pp. 50–70.

13.Ibid.

14.André Gorz,
Farewell to the Working Class,
London 1982, p. 64.

15.Sennett,
Culture of the New Capitalism,
p. 2.

16.Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Small change: why the revolution will not be tweeted',
New Yorker,
4 October 2010.

17.Ibid.

18.Sean Naylor, ‘War games rigged?'
Army Times,
16 August 2002.

19.Essam Fadl, ‘Asharq al-Awsat talks to Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement founder', asharq-e.com/news, 10 February 2011.

20.libcom.org/library (undated). First transcribed in Donald Bouchard (ed.),
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,
New York 1980.

Chapter 5

1.Ian Traynor, ‘Greek debt crisis: eurozone ministers delay decision on €12bn lifeline',
Guardian,
20 June 2011.

2.Takis Michas, ‘Athens descends into anarchy',
Wall Street Journal,
13 April 2011.

3.Alexander Trocchi, ‘For the insurrection to succeed we must first destroy ourselves', quoted in Vradis and Dalakoglou,
Revolt and Crisis in Greece,
p. 303.

Chapter 6

1.Rupert Murdoch, ‘Free markets and free minds: the security of opportunity', speech to the Centre of Policy Studies, 21 October 2010.

2.Martin Feldstein and Charles Horioka, ‘Domestic Saving and International Capital Flows',
Economic Journal,
vol. 90, no. 358 (June 1980), pp.314-29.

3.Andrew Haldane, ‘The global imbalances in retrospect and prospect', Bank of England, speech, 3 November 2010.

4.Richard Freeman, ‘The Great Doubling: Labor in the New Global Economy', Usery Lecture in Labor Policy, University of Atlanta, 8 April 2005.

5.Jared Bernstein et al.,
The State of Working America,
Ithaca 2007.

6.
Global Wage Report,
December 2010, International Labour Organisation; Finfacts Ireland, 31 January 2008.

7.‘Real wages in Germany: numerous years of decline', DIW Weekly Report, 23 October 2009.

8.Gordon Brown, Mansion House speech, 20 June 2007.

9.K.-M. Yi, ‘The Collapse of Global Trade: The Role of Vertical Specialisation', in Richard Baldwin and Simon Evenett (eds),
The Collapse of
Global Trade, Murky Protectionism, and the Crisis: Recommendations for
the G20,
London 2009; and Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke, voxeu.org.

10.Costas Lapavitsas et al., ‘Eurozone crisis: beggar thyself and thy neighbour',
Research on Money and Finance Report,
March 2010.

11.Ewald Engelen et al., ‘After the Great Complacence', Oxford 2011, p. 209.

12.Andrew Haldane, speech, November 2010, op cit.

13.Child and Working Tax Credit Statistics, HMRC, hmrc.gov.uk/stats, April 2010.

14.BBC News, ‘Labour attacks Nick Clegg over social mobility plan', 5 April 2011.

15.Stephanie Flanders, ‘Have British jobs gone to British workers?', BBC website, 21 April 2010.

16.See Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, ‘The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan', Council of Economic Advisers, Washington 2009.

17.Andrey Korotayev and Julia Zinkina, ‘Egyptian Revolution: A Demographic Structural Analysis',
Entelequia.
Revista
Interdisciplinary
no. 13, spring 2011.

18.Economist.com, 3 February 2011; GlobalSecurity.org, 28 February 2011.

19.Andrew Lilico, ‘How the Fed triggered the Arab Spring uprisings in two easy graphs', Telegraph.co.uk, 4 May 2011.

20.World Bank Food Price Watch, worldbank.org, April 2011.

21.Toby Nangle, ‘The Sugar Rush and the Jasmine Wave', Barings Asset Management, 20 April 2011.

22.Jonathan Wheatley, ‘Trade War Looming, Warns Brazil',
Financial
Times,
10 January 2011.

23.Ben Bernanke,
Essays on the Great Depression,
New York 2004.

24.Charles Kindleberger,
The World in Depression, 1929-1939,
Harmondsworth 1987, p. 9.

Chapter 7

1.J. M. Keynes, ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace', New York 1920.

2.Stefan Zweig,
The World of Yesterday,
London 2009, p. 219.

3.
Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society,
June 1962.