The mass protest decade: From the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter – The Real News Network
The 2010s were a decade of revolt. From Athens to Atlanta, Santiago to Seoul, a global wave of protest brought masses of people into confrontation with the status quo, demanding an end to neoliberalism, racism, climate change, and more. Yet despite this upswell of grassroots political activity, little lasting, positive change followed. What sparked the past decade of mass protest? Why didnt it result in political transformation?Vincent Bevins, author ofIf We Burn, joinsThe Chris Hedges Reportfor a retrospective on the decade that set the world on fire, and how to adapt its lessons for the challenges ahead.
Studio Production: David Hebden Post-Production: Adam Coley
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges:
There was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 into the global pandemic in 2020. These uprisings shook the foundations of the global order. They denounced corporate domination, austerity cuts, and demanded economic justice and civil rights. The Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the execution of George Floyd in 2020 are cases in point. There were also popular eruptions in Greece, Spain, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Chile, and during South Koreas Candlelight Revolution. Discredited politicians were driven from office in Greece, Spain, Ukraine, South Korea, Egypt, Chile, and Tunisia.
Reform, or at least the promise of it, dominated public discourse. It seemed to herald a new era. Then the backlash, the aspirations of the popular movements were crushed. State control and social inequality expanded. There was no significant change. In most cases, things got worse. The far-right emerged triumphant. What happened? How did a decade of mass protests that seemed to herald democratic openness, an end to state repression, a weakening of the domination of global corporations and financial institutions, and an era of freedom sputter to an ignominious failure? What went wrong? How did the hated bankers and politicians maintain or regain control?
What are the effective tools to rid ourselves of corporate domination? Joining me to discuss the failure of these popular movements and the resurgence of the right-wing is Vincent Bevins, former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and the author of If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and The Missing Revolution. I have to say, I was far more optimistic. I spent a lot of time in Zuccotti Park, but youre right, it completely all of the advances that we thought we had made have been, at best, erased and often rolled back. But lets go back to, as you do in the book, where we were in that moment in history and what happened.
Vincent Bevins:
Yeah, thank you. I do think that there are some victories, some partial victories, but certainly the moments that were experienced as euphoric victory in so many places around the world tended to end up with something far worse than what seemed possible in those moments. I tried to write a history of the world from 2010 to 2020 built around mass protests that got so large that they either overthrew or fundamentally destabilized existing governments. This really starts in Tunisia at the end of 2010, which inspires Egypt early in 2011. Egypt, of course, like every other uprising in the book, in the world, has its own particular reasons for taking off.
But this inspiration thats coming from a smaller country, North Africa, is part of the story. And then, Tahrir Square really inspires quite a lot of movements across the rest of the decade. I call this the Mass Protest Decade. You could easily call it the Tahrir Square Decade. You see-
Chris Hedges:
This is when the Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square, which is this gigantic square in the center of Cairo and camped out there much like the Occupy Movement.
Vincent Bevins:
The Occupy Movement did that because they were copying Tahrir Square. There was a protest on January 25th, 2011, aimed at police brutality. Now, the organizers that put together January 25th had not even planned to call for the fall of the government, let alone expected to see the numbers flow into the streets that would make that possible. Yet, a lot more people come to the streets than expected. Then, on January 28th, they really take downtown Cairo. The protest turns into a battle with the police and the police lose. Now, in that moment, they could perhaps have done a lot of different things.
What they do is they take the square, they stay in Tahrir Square for 18 days, and eventually Mubarak is ejected. If you want to look very, very closely at how that ejection happens, its, in a narrow sense, perhaps a military coup, but it is a military coup that can be seen as very progressive compared to what was happening previously, especially if elections are really going to go forward. And so, around the world in 2011, you get the not only are people taking inspiration from Tahrir Square but often copying and pasting that tactic. Occupy Wall Street is Adbusters Magazine saying, we should do Tahrir Square in New York.
You get movements in Spain and Greece that are, to a greater extent in Spain than in Greece, trying to replicate this model. You get this model inspiring not only activists to act a certain way into the 2010s, but inspiring people like me to view other things later as if theyre kind of the same thing, even if national and political circumstances are very different. But I do think the decade, of course, starts with Tunisia, with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, but really this mass protest form and this phenomenon, comes together in the 18 days in Tahrir Square.
Chris Hedges:
You mentioned that when the Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square, they didnt begin with a call for the government. Whats interesting about that self-immolation, he was a fruit seller or just had a cart, and the police had taken away his scales to weigh his fruit. But this was a protest built around a very personal, in particular, injustice, but it, of course, resonated.
Vincent Bevins:
Yes.
Chris Hedges:
This was the very corrupt Ben Ali regime, resonated throughout Tunisia. Thats an interesting point, that when these protests erupt, they dont necessarily have a macro goal in mind.
Vincent Bevins:
Well, the Tunisia example is really interesting, not only because it sets off so much of what happens elsewhere, but from even with the advantages of looking back 10 years in the past or with the distance that is given to us, or even some with the distance that was enjoyed or felt to be enjoyed by journalists, looking back on late 2010, just in the middle of 2011, its easy to see one thing happening. But if you look back at Tunisia, you can really trace day to day how it is that one man dies, what the circumstances are before he dies, how the people around him start to argue about what that means and what should be done next.
Then, I went back, so this book is built through interviews. I did 200 to 250 interviews in 12 countries, and I did go back to Sidi Bouzid and I talked to members of his family, members of his community, people that worked with him that didnt have their scales taken away. You had a process where there were people that had already been part of rebellions in the region, labor rebellions, responses to the brutal neoliberalism that had been unleashed on their part of North Africa. There were more formal organizations, that they decide to take this lone act of protest, this cry out against this one very particular injustice, and to turn it into a small-scale protest.
You can see other groups joining and turning that into an even larger protest. And then, you can see now a national movement where a large union organization joins, and then civil society groups join. You can really, by going chronologically, and this is the method that I choose to employ in this book, by really looking at what happens, it seems very simple. On one day and then to the next day, you could see how it is the people around Mohamed Bouazizi that decide what it means that he has done and would decide what to do with it and ultimately send a dictator, literally fleeing the country.
Chris Hedges:
Its interesting that this contagion, which was certainly true after the French Revolution. The French Revolution inspired much of the consternation of the French planners, the Haitian uprising, but its a very similar process where it spreads to, I dont know, nine or 10 different countries at least.
Vincent Bevins:
Yes, and so we see this historically. We do see that uprisings and revolutions come in waves. We see that its always really hard to put together what exactly causes these clusters to emerge. But we do see these clusters, and I think media is a big part of how this happens. In 1848, we see a cluster of uprisings. I think what happens in the 2010s is the process of media reproduction accelerates to such an extent that its not like a guy on a horse thats bringing a newspaper from one country to another country in Europe that expand Oh, my God, look what theyve done in France. You can see three seconds later how this person responded to a tear gas canister arriving at their feet.
This is something that I experienced. Strangely, this arrived in my life in a weird way when I was working in Sao Paulo in 2013, this constant and immediate back and forth between protesters in Brazil and in Gezi Park in Istanbul. I think that this inspiration has always happened as far as, we have records of clusters of revolutions, but the acceleration of this process really mattered in the 2010s. I think this allowed for people to draw inspiration immediately and it also, in some ways, allowed for people to copy and paste tactics rather than thinking about exactly what is the best thing to do in this case. How can we build upon the energy and the inspiration were drawing from this case over here?
They often just thought, well, its just the exact same thing. In the case of the Tahrir model, this was one that was reproduced not only in other countries with very different social and economic and political systems, of course. Mubarak is different than Barack Obama. You often still saw the replication of the Tahrir model after the coup that installs Sisi in 2013. You see this copying and pasting continuing after the original case falls apart. I think that a lot of people overstated the importance of social media early in the 2010s. There is this narrative that its all about social media, and thats a good thing.
I think I come down now saying that its partially about social media, and to the extent that thats true, its not really a good thing. But that is one change that I think really matters. The acceleration of reproduction of images and texts through mainstream media, through social media that allows for rapid inspiration to be taken for better or for worse.
Chris Hedges:
Well, you saw it after the Cuban Revolution.
Vincent Bevins:
Absolutely.
Chris Hedges:
So, everybody tried to replicate it. And Che is, of course, killed in Bolivia, but it doesnt work. It doesnt work because the conditions that made the Cuban Revolution possible are no longer there, largely. Also, theyve understood how to fight it.
Vincent Bevins:
This is something that matters, is that back in the 2010s, some of the more naive commentators about the importance of social media, about how this is going to lead to transparency, forgot that enemies, that bad guys also learn how to use tools. They pay attention.
Chris Hedges:
Right. You call them the techno optimists.
Vincent Bevins:
Right. This was a real dominant narrative back in the early 2010s. It was Evgeny Morozov that said, Hey, look, bad guys are also trying to learn how to use the Internet. In the case of the Cuban Revolution, and this, I think, is relevant for May 68 as well. Some of the participants in May 68, when it didnt work that time and other people were trying to do it again, they came to the conclusion, well, you can only really surprise the ruling class once. Once theyve seen a very specific tactic succeed, usually, if possible, theyre going to set up a counterattack for that. Theyre going to create defenses for something like the Cuban Revolution. So, there were waves of Guevaras revolutionary attempts afterwards, but it wasnt just the leftist that had watched and learned from the Cuban Revolution, it was also the dictatorships around Latin America and the rest of the world.
Chris Hedges:
Yeah, and you write about this, the Jakarta Method-
Vincent Bevins:
Yes.
Chris Hedges:
Your other book, after, what, a million people are killed in Indonesia and that cross-pollination doesnt only exist among the opposition or the revolutionaries but from the ruling elite as well. You think that the failure of these mass movements is that they didnt implement hierarchical discipline and coherent organizational structures to defend themselves even when they achieved power, in Greece and Honduras. Talk about that, because, of course, the ethos of these movements was consciously not to be hierarchical, not to create that traditional model.
Vincent Bevins:
Yeah, this is something that is explicitly believed in by some participants. In many other cases, this is just the form of rebellion, the form of protest that is possible and easiest to carry out given conditions. So, Im not sure if I would say that the failure of the protest is that they have this orientation. I would say that they have this orientation for real material and ideological reasons. In some cases, especially in the North African cases, it would be very hard to put together even if you and many people did really believe in hierarchical revolutionary organizations. Civil society had been decimated, for example, in the Egyptian case.
Regardless of people believed in hierarchy or didnt, some didnt, a lot of people did, it was just this was not something that was really available. It was hard to put together very quickly. In the Brazilian case, for example, which is very different, the one that I know most closely because I lived through the uprising in June 2013, the originators, they would never want to be the leaders, but the originators, the early organizers, they believed deeply in horizontalist principles, absolutely no hierarchy, full consensus decision-making, no division of labor. There would never be any difference between anybody.
Nobody could be told what to do no matter what. What I say is that while some of the participants in these movements were horizontalist, a lot of them were concretely horizontal. Even if some people wouldve liked to put together the kind of organization which would allow for collective decision-making or would allow for mediation with any existing government or would allow for somebody to step into a power vacuum when it was created. Most of them just didnt have that. And so, this type of protest, this particular approach to injustice, this particular way of responding to elites or governments that are committing abuses comes together in the early 2010s.
Theres a lot of different ingredients in this recipe, and I try to trace where they all come from, but they all come from somewhere. But even the people that put them together largely in the anti-globalization movement or the alter-globalization movement, people on the anti-authoritarian left, didnt put them together thinking they were going to overthrow dictators. What happens in the 2010s starting, especially in Cairo, but starting more specifically in Tunisia, is that this particular recipe, this apparently leaderless, apparently spontaneous, horizontally structured, social media-driven mass protest is far, far more successful than expected at getting people on the streets.
Far more people come out than anybody had even hoped for. This is, on the one hand, a huge success and this is a strength because given the kind of societies that were living in, having an invitation extended to you that says essentially, no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, as long as youre with us on this one big thing, even in some cases it wasnt even one big thing, as long as youre with this movement in the streets, youre invited. You can participate as an equal with everybody else. You dont have to be in any kind of an organization. You dont have to have thought about this until its five minutes ago.
This is incredibly effective at allowing people to surge into a public square, sometimes stopping a society from existing or at least stopping the military, in many important cases, from supporting a leader whos now been discredited. This particular style of protest generates huge opportunities, unexpected opportunities. In that case, I think this concrete horizontality, this lack of hierarchy, whether thats intentional, whether or not its just the state of things, is indeed incredibly successful at creating opportunities. I think those opportunities come in two very broad shapes. Again, Im trying to tell the history of a whole decade but every case is very different.
Often, people like me made the mistake of thinking they were all the same. But theres two types of opportunities that are made. Either a government is sent packing and theres a power vacuum, theres no one in power. Or, an existing government is so scared of the streets, an existing government is so afraid of losing power that theyre willing to give something. They want to offer some kind of a serious concession or a deep reform to the street movement. Now, at this moment, in the moment of the unexpected opportunity, the movement that is very horizontal, leaderless, that has no means for making a collective decision, easily, at least maybe would take but not in the short amount of time that is often provided in these moments of opportunity.
A protest, it turned out, more specifically a protest of this type, of the particular type that becomes dominant in the 2010s, turns out to be very poorly constituted to entering a power vacuum, very poorly constituted to taking advantage of an opportunity where theres really no government. And then often, to the horror of a lot of the organizers, turned out not even to be able to elaborate in a legible way, to the existing elites in these less pronounced cases where the governments not fled the country, but they want to give the streets something. Brazil is a case like this. Brazil, you have a popular central left president.
Certainly, the original organizers wouldnt want her to be overthrown. Ultimately, she is, indirectly, perhaps because of the mass protests, but shes looking to the streets and saying, Okay, what do you want? Even in that moment, it seems impossible for the streets to come up with an answer as to what it is they want. This is what a leader really cares about, especially a leader thats a real bad guy. If there werent bad guys, thered be no reason for protests in the first place. A bad guy wants to know, if I give you A, B, C and D, will I get stability again? And so, often in that moment, what you want, or at least historically what has been the decision made, is to ask for A, B, C, D and E.
Maybe you know that if you dont get D and E, thats okay. But if you get A, B and C, you can, as a union, would credibly promise to the bad guy. If we get these things, well go back and well build back stronger. In these moments of opportunity, neither thing seemed possible, entering the power vacuum as a protest or elaborating a set of demands as a very, very horizontally structured protest. In some cases, it doesnt go so poorly. But in the cases where it does go quite poorly, the very general answer that I have as to how they were not exactly failures but how they experienced defeats that were worse than they ever expected, is that somebody else did take advantage of the opportunity.
Chris Hedges:
Well, you are right. The ruling class fills the vacuums, but they do it by rebranding themselves. This is really Obama, really. It comes out of the Chicago political machine, probably the dirtiest political machine in the country wins Advertising Ages Marketer of the Year in 2008. The marketers knew just precisely what he had done. He was a marketers dream. I think the lack of a hierarchical structure, the lack of well-defined demands, and perhaps even the lack of any kind of solid ideological foundation made these groups very vulnerable to manipulation, which is what happened.
Vincent Bevins:
Yeah. I found them, at least in the cases that I analyze, vulnerable to co-optation, which is the lighter, the nicest form of the three possibilities. Outright hijacking, so not just like, were going to take your message and dilute it or water it down. Outright hijacking. Okay, youre on the left, were on the right now.
Chris Hedges:
Where was that? Where would that be an example?
Vincent Bevins:
Hijacking? Brazil would be one case, I think. This is a case where the original organizers of the protests, theyre a group called the MPL, the Movimento Passe Livre. Theyre a group of leftists and anarchists. Within one week you get a new group of protesters on the streets that intentionally copies that acronym. They come up with a new group, this is the MBL, and instead of being leftists and anarchists, theyre a group of libertarians and right-wing students that are funded by either have trained with the Koch Brothers or have been funded by US think tanks.
They succeed in tricking quite a lot of people into believing that, one, theyre the same thing as the original protesters, that theyre the same people, and then, that theyre now in a leadership position of the next protest wave.
Chris Hedges:
I covered the Fall of Ceausescu, and the Securitate managed to do exactly the same thing, hijack the entire movement. They executed Ceausescu and Elena as fast as they could, and they did precisely that.
Vincent Bevins:
Then, in other cases, you have imperialist counterattack. In other cases, you have the biggest, baddest guy in the neighborhood or perhaps in the entire global system. Libya, NATO, uses legitimate complaints about the Gaddafi government, legitimate citizen demands upon their own government as an excuse to launch a regime change operation. In Bahrain, one of the clearest cases of a country where the people are not represented by their government. You have a Shia majority and a Sunni minority monarchy. In that case, you simply have Saudi Arabia and other countries from the Gulf marching over the bridge and crushing the uprising.
This mass of millions of individuals, and this is an oversimplification, but at their weakest, they were often millions of individuals with millions, if not, more ideas as to what the thing was all about. It turned out, in many cases, in the 2010s, to be vulnerable to co-optation, hijacking or imperialist counterattack, and in many cases, vulnerable to misrepresentation carried out by people like me. Again, I did lots of interviews with major participants, people in government, people that are experts on these uprisings. A lot of the organizers told me that they found this particular form, by the end of the decade, was particularly vulnerable to misrepresentation.
One Turkish sociologist, [inaudible 00:23:53], in the book, paraphrases Marxs 18th Brumaire, those who cannot represent themselves will be represented. I think theres an analogous situation here in the 2010s where movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for. For example, in Egypt, a lot of people told me that they were shocked to see that global media showed up and said that their movement was about the opposite demands of what they thought it was about. They thought that they were, necessarily, a democratic Egypt would necessarily challenge Washingtons partners in their region, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Then, you get global media showing up and saying, this country wants to join the West. They want to be in the minor leagues of America. They want to be junior partners of Washington. People that put together January 25th and January 28th in Egypt often came together through a decade of pro-Palestine solidarity and protest against the invasion of Iraq. Because there is a concrete mass of individuals with no one that can say, actually, were doing this in a way that Martin Luther King could do. Again, not everybody that supported Martin Luther King in a march was part of some hierarchical organization, but by virtue of being there, they were often assenting to him to be able to speak in some way for the movement.
Because Egypt often didnt have that, some of the original organizers were horrified to see leaders selected either by CNN or by social media. Some post goes viral and now thats the person speaking for the movement. Or, global media walks around the square and looks for the person thats saying what they want to hear. Now, our movement that we fought to build over the last 10 years is being rendered as its opposite.
Chris Hedges:
That was true with every movement I covered. The international media would come in and define it in their terms, which were often it completely ignored the core of the movement or the orientation of the movement. They recreated the movement. I want to ask about Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle, because this is also a very pernicious force within the movement, the playing to the cameras, the creation of spectacle as opposed to organizing.
Vincent Bevins:
Yeah, and I think this is another thing that this strange slippage really matters, this slippage between a protest into something else. Because when youre at the moment of a protest Again, my book is only about cases of mass protests that becomes so big that they become something else and then, oh, this is great for this particular moment. Oh, theres a whole new set of rules for which were theres a game that were not prepared to play. I find that protest itself is always somehow a communicative action. Its always somehow a media action. Thats not to be dismissive of it, but protest as a human activity, as a phenomenon, historically, emerges alongside mass media.
People didnt do it before mass media existed, and you could see why they wouldnt. You wouldnt go to the square in the center of a nation. Actually, nations didnt exist before mass media either, but you wouldnt go to the square in a capitol and demonstrate to just the baker thats actually working on that corner if no ones going to reproduce the images. To the extent that a protest is communicative, depending on who youre trying to reach, it may be the case that you want to somehow perform. It may be the case that you want to at least demonstrate what we believe in. This is who we are, this is what we believe in.
Maybe even to some extent, this is the kind of way that we want to interact in the world that were wishing to create. But I think this dominant form of protest in the 2010s became so hegemonic, often even seeming as the only natural way to respond to injustice, that sometimes it was forgotten that theres a difference between when communication is the right action to take and when you really need to take away someones power or put someone else in power. In some cases, you had protests continuing and there wasnt really anyone to protest to, or the protest was continuing even when the person you were speaking to agreed with you and was saying, okay, well, now what do we do?
You wouldnt get the mass scaling up of the protest that we saw in the 2010s without some positive reproduction that happens between some vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on how you want to interpret it, between media and the thing on the ground, social media and traditional media, which often work together. If you dont have some positive representation outside of the actual one part of downtown New York or Central Cairo where people can actually see with their own eyes, youre not going to get lots of people joining. That is usually part of, at least this package, is some kind of a performance and some kind of a bid to say, were a good thing. You could join us.
Now, again, the dark side of this is that if the media doesnt think that you are a good thing, its incredibly easy for them to pick one person, the stupidest person that shows up, or someone that the government has sent in, an agent provocateur, and say, Oh, look. Look at this stupid thing this one persons done. Thats what the movements really about. Many protesters told me this, so I dont want to act as if Im criticizing smugly from the outside because this is something that a lot of my interviewees told me. We got caught up in a cycle, and it took us a while to realize this, that we internalized the kind of stuff that Western media wanted to see, and then we did it, and then we saw that it worked, and then we did it again.
Its the kind of cycle that I think is familiar to social media users. You figure out what people like to hear and then you do it. Then, many of them came to the conclusion by the end of the decade, well, it turned out that what Western media was going to reproduce was going to give lots of positive coverage, was not the thing that was going to get the concrete results from this or that action that we really needed to help real people in our country.
Chris Hedges:
I want to ask about an absence of political theory, which I think characterized many of the movements, I would even argue the Occupy Movement, which I was involved in and very supportive of, and how many times they retreat into popular culture, V for Vendetta, for instance, as reference points.
Vincent Bevins:
Yeah. Again, this is something else that many of my interviewees told me. Because V for Vendetta, for those I remember, you remember, wearing this mask was somehow
Chris Hedges:
Oh, youd see it in the protests.
Vincent Bevins:
All the time. This coded US revolutionary in some way or another. Then, this group, Anonymous, which, again, there was a strange case in Brazil where someone just put on the mask in Brazil and everyone assumed that they were Anonymous, but it turned out it was just a person that was in the mask. At the end of the decade, people told me that they had, to some extent Well, people told me two things. Three things. Ill do three things. We wish that we had organized better before the eruption because we never saw it coming. But if we had been a little bit more organized before it arrived, we wouldve done better in this scrum that we hadnt anticipated.
Two, we wish that we had just simply read more history of revolutions. Every revolutions new. You dont want to foreclose the possibilities of the future by reproducing the past, but things tend to happen. You tend to have a counterrevolution. You tend to have a moment that is difficult. You tend to have a moment like this. A lot people told me that, we wish we had spent more time reading history of revolutions.
Chris Hedges:
Well, this was the secret of the Bolsheviks. They studied minute by minute, the Paris Commune, which lasted a hundred days. Once Lenin and Trotsky lasted a hundred days, they considered this a huge victory. But I think youre right, this was the power, in that they were steeped in revolutionary theory.
Vincent Bevins:
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The mass protest decade: From the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter - The Real News Network