In If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, published last year, journalist Vincent Bevins attempts to explain how a decade of massive protests led to few changes, and in some cases brought about almost the opposite of what participants in the movements originally wanted. To do so, he takes us around the world between 2010 and 2020 to show how and why a variety of movements failed to achieve sustainable changes for the people of those regions. From the Arab Spring of Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, to Occupy in the United States, to Brazil and Chile, to Turkey and Ukraine, to Indonesia, South Korea and to Hong Kong in 2020, Bevins blends together a story of so-called horizontalist, leaderless, or decentralized movements, the influences of traditional media as well as social-media and the internet, and the powerful forces of capitalists, their nation-states and the right-wing forces within. In doing so, he at least partially explains why none of these massive, potentially revolutionary movements came anywhere close to making the changes their participants really wanted.
This book is useful even if only used as an overview of the explosive movements that took place during the period 2010 to 2020. If the reader only knows about Occupy Wall Street in the U.S., or only a little about the Arab Spring or the Hong Kong protests, this book will help broaden and fill in missing parts of the global picture. The brief descriptions of the many other movements are all informative and thought provoking, particularly if the reader just needs an overview.
He describes how all of these movements attempted, in principled fashion, to be leaderless, to be horizontal, to be structureless, and to be decentralized. None of them built large-scale organization, most of them refused to make many, or even any, specific demands, and all of them relied heavily on social media to develop and spread news of their movements. Many of them relied heavily on occupying a space, at least for some time, and even if only spontaneously at first.
He also shows how various forces of the status quo, some extremely reactionary and right-wing, were able to exert their influence and actually co-opt some of the messages and tactics of the movements, only to use them for their own, anti-democratic ends. In Brazil this led to the rise of Bolsonaro, to the centralization of power under Erdogan in Turkey, to a new military dictatorship in Egypt, and to horrific violence from neo-fascist thugs in Ukraine. Right-wing movements copied from, co-opted, and sometimes forcefully crushed the less organized movements for change.
He also describes the role that social media and the internet can play in reshaping the original messaging of protest organizers, and in shaping how the larger world perceives those messages or the actions of protesters. The role is not different from what traditional (tv, radio, newspaper) media have done in decades past. But the internet allows manipulation and inaccurate translation to occur even more rapidly, often with less depth of understanding, often even more dishonestly, and with far more actors attempting to shape the perceptions of the event.
There are several real weaknesses to the book. Bevins’s short overviews, while good, are in a few cases so brief that they only intrigue the reader, without then going into greater depth that would allow for better understanding. Because he was and is based in Brazil, the movement there gets by far the most pages and more detailed description as well. This leaves the reader with a slightly unbalanced feeling, wondering whether Egypt, or Ukraine, or some other movement deserved a bit more description and detail as well.
He doesn’t fully describe the material, economic forces that have and continue to shape each of the regions he describes. While the specter of capitalism hangs over every part of the book, he does not paint a full picture of the role of capitalism and the capitalist class in any of these regions, or how they shape the vast majority of our globe. This is a major weakness because, without this understanding, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint who or what is shaping the political backlash, and for what purposes.
Perhaps the most significant weakness is in his treatment of what he calls Leninism, and all varieties of Marxist political organizations. Although he doesn’t seem to do so intentionally, his descriptions of Lenin as the leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik organization in Russia, and the many organizations since then that have claimed to follow (and often perverted) Lenin’s practices, give the reader the impression that they are all one and the same: that Leninism is top down, hierarchical, rigidly disciplined, and based on a set of unchanging methods. This impression of Lenin and the Bolsheviks is at best unfair, at worst a misguided caricature. Particularly for the purposes of this book, Bevins needed to spend more time thoroughly and accurately describing Lenin’s practices, the Bolshevik party that he shaped, and how it differed from the unsuccessful movements described throughout this book (not to mention how the practices of many “Marxist-Leninist” groups also diverged from those of Lenin and the Bolsheviks).
Despite these weaknesses, If We Burn does offer a few valuable lessons that Bevins brings to light throughout the story, and that he zeroes in on in his concluding chapters.
For one, he makes clear that once a movement begins pushing for change, it must either take power and see those changes enacted, or the forces of the status quo or reaction will rush in and do what they want instead. Often, this leads to the near opposite of what the movement originally envisioned. Connected with this is the fact that whenever movements for change exist, there will be a reaction. Usually well organized, usually well funded, often forceful and violent, this reaction will come. Those seeking change must be organized enough and prepared enough to stand up to that reaction and persevere.
Although this isn’t his primary focus, he also shows that all of these movements between 2010 and 2020 were based not in the working class, but in the more highly educated, progressive layers of the middle classes. Those middle classes, accustomed completely to capitalism and its modern neoliberal variant, were not out to challenge the global capitalist economic system. They wanted more respect for human rights, legal reforms, less inequality, political accountability and democracy. In other words, reforms of the capitalist political-economy. Without being based in the working class, and without a clear understanding of the power of the organized working class to get rid of capitalism, they were unable to approach an understanding of the root cause of the problems they identified, and were unable to organize to successfully take on those problems at their root. So while they were able to cause temporary disruption, and in a couple cases even bring down authoritarian governments, the ruling classes of those nations were able to regroup, and continued to use their wealth and power to reshape a new government that would continue to meet their needs, as had the old one.
In the most valuable lesson of his book, he emphasizes in his final chapters that so-called horizontal, decentralized, leaderless, or structureless movements simply do not work. They are incapable of building the powerful democratic organizations necessary to make change. They are incapable of formulating democratically arrived at demands that the movement desires. They are incapable of developing larger strategies that can guide growing and energized movements past the initial days or weeks of euphoria, to a sustainable movement that can continue to grow and remain dynamic and achieve its goals. They are also incapable of formulating a response to the reaction that is sure to come. Throughout the book he gives example after example of these phenomena. Well-intentioned, committed people begin a movement without real preparation, and have their movements grow rapidly only to lose control of them soon after, or to have them crushed by the forces of reaction.
Which brings us back to his brief and unsatisfactory descriptions of Lenin and the so-called Leninist practices.
While interviewing a Ukrainian worker who participated in the early stages of the Maidan movement, Bevins mentioned that “Lenin had said that ‘spontaneous’ uprisings would simply adopt the ideology that is dominant in the air around them.” The young worker replied, “Of course, that is exactly what happened.”
Bevins further writes that of all the participants in these movements that he interviewed, “not one told me that they had become more horizontalist, or more anarchist, or more in favor of spontaneity and structurelessness…But everyone that changed their views on the question of organization moved closer to classically ‘Leninist’ ones.” While Bevins uses these examples to demonstrate how horizontal and leaderless movements failed, and to demonstrate that many participants of these movements wished that they had developed better organization, he doesn’t then follow their implications to the logical conclusion.
The logical conclusion is that we – those who see the need for fundamental change in our world – must build the organizations we need to help shape and guide the movement or movements that will one day lead to the destruction of capitalism. We can’t wait until upsurges begin, we can’t wait for some great leader to pronounce the beginning of a movement, we can’t keep occupying spaces until the police clear us out, and we can’t hope that the right meme will come along and make it all happen.
Working people must lead the movements that will challenge capitalism, and to do so we must build an organization in order to effectively carry out that task. In other words, we need to be prepared to dismantle capitalism itself, and to do so we need to have revolutionary organizations. If those organizations are democratic and worker led, then they can have a leadership, they can have some degree of centralization, they can have some degree of organizational hierarchy, and they can then be dynamic, sustainable, and powerful forces for change in the world.
Anyone waiting for crises and uprisings to happen before building their organizations or attempting to operate in a leaderless or horizontalist fashion will have their movements and their goals washed away or crushed, with perhaps worse outcomes than those they started with. Bevins leaves us with no doubt about that. But because he doesn’t have a firm grasp on what Lenin and the Bolsheviks built and accomplished before and during the Russian Revolution, and because he doesn’t spend the time necessary to fully explain what they did, he misses the opportunity to tell us what has worked in past revolutionary situations. If We Burn is well worth reading. It demonstrates clearly that horizontalist, leaderless, decentralized political activism failed to accomplish much at all, and in fact often led to the exact opposite of what the activists were organizing against: a more right-wing, reactionary, and oppressive state. The major problem with Bevins’s otherwise good book is that it only hints at the types of movement and organization that we’ll need to build in order to carry out the revolution we need.
