Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Missing Revolution w/ Vincent Bevins

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

The past decade or so was marked by mass protests—in fact, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring to the 2020 George Floyd uprisings and even more recently with millions upon millions pouring into the streets in support of Palestinian liberation. So why, then, have conditions not improved? Why have they, in many cases, only gotten worse? This is the question that Vincent Bevins set out to answer in his latest book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The search for an answer took Vincent all over the world, from Brazil to Ukraine, Turkey, Chile, Hong Kong, and Middle East. The answer imparts an extremely important lesson to the left: we’re simply not organized. Or, rather, we’re not organized in an effective way. The shift in the left’s tactics and strategies since the 1960s has left us with movements that rely far too heavily on horizontalism, spontaneity, and an extreme form of prefiguration that subordinates ends to means. This New Left ideology abandons the principles of Marxism-Leninism, revolutionary theory, and the importance of leadership. This, Vincent believes, is why the mass protest decade failed to win its demands and bring about real change. Vincent Bevins is a journalist and writer and, in addition to If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, he’s the author of The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. Further Resources: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) The Tyranny of Structurelessness, by Jo Freeman On Authority, by Frederick Engels All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series), Adam Curtis Upstream: What Is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Thank you to Menstruação Anarquika for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for this episode's cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Oh You obviously can't actually write the history of the world from 2010 to 2020. That's not possible, but it's also not ever really possible to write any work of history without choosing what to include and what to exclude. So what I wanted to do was to tell the story of this decade as if the most important thing to happen in that decade was the phenomenon of large protests that became so big that they either overthrew governments or fundamentally destabilize them. So protests that became so big that they became something else. And I think it makes sense, makes as much sense to

organize a history of the 20th century around that as it does anything else. A lot of what we're dealing with geopolitically now is a result of some of those explosions. And then the question around which this work is built is how is it that so many of these mass protests led to the opposite of what they apparently asked for in the beginning. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. The past decade or so was marked by mass protests. In fact, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring to the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings, and even more recently with millions upon

millions pouring out into the streets in support of Palestinian liberation. So why then have conditions not improved? Why have they, in many cases, only gotten worse? This is the question that Vincent Bevin set out to answer in his latest book, If We Burn, The Mass Protests Decade and the Missing Revolution. The search for an answer took Vincent all over the world, from Brazil to Ukraine, Turkey, Chile, Hong Kong,

and the Middle East. The answer that he came to imparts an extremely important lesson to us on the left. We're simply not organized, or rather, we're not organized in an effective way. The shift in the left's tactics and strategies since the 1960s has left us with movements that rely far too heavily on horizontalism, spontaneity, and an extreme form of prefiguration that subordinates ends to means. This new left ideology abandons the principles of Marxism-Leninism, revolutionary theory, and the importance of leadership.

This is why the mass protest decade failed to win its demands and bring about real change. Vincent Bevin's is a journalist and writer, and in addition to, if we burn, the mass protest decade and the missing revolution, he's also the author of The Jakarta Method, Washington's anti-communist crusade and the mass murder program that shaped our world. We'll dive into our conversation with Vincent in just a moment, but before we get started we have an exciting update. Our Patreon is set to launch at the beginning of February, so just a few days from now. We're going to record a brief update episode that'll break things down in detail, but for now we just want to let you know that you can look forward to three bonus episodes

that will roll out through the month of February. An episode with Doug Henwood on the problems with modern monetary theory, an episode with Roger Kiran and Joe Jamison on their book Socialism Betrayed Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, and part seven of our ongoing series on Palestine. As a Patreon subscriber, beyond the bonus episodes, you'll also get early access to certain episodes and a variety of thank you gifts at different tiers. And of course,

you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for your crucial support. And if you're already a recurring donor, you have the option of simply keeping your current donation through Flipkaz if for whatever reason, Patreon just isn't for you. Or you can easily cancel your recurring donation and sign up for our Patreon instead.

But again, a recording of an entire update episode will be available at the beginning of February, so stay tuned. And now, here's Robert in have you on the show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, of course. I'm wondering if you can start by introducing yourself for our listeners and maybe telling us a little bit actually about how you came to do the work that you're doing.

Yeah, sure, absolutely. Hi, my name is Vincent Bevins. I'm a journalist and author, I suppose, now from the United States. I've been working as a foreign correspondent of some kind or another since 2007. So I guess that's more than 15 years. I started working as a journalist on accident back in Venezuela in 2007. But most of my professional life has been either working as a correspondent in Sao Paulo Brazil or then afterwards as a correspondent in Southeast Asia. And journalism was an accident. I didn't study journalism in college and undergraduate work.

I had no interest in journalism as a career. I didn't do a major in journalism. I thought I was going to do a PhD in political theory. And I got sort of on the path to doing so. And as part of that, I lived in Berlin for a bit, and then I lived in Venezuela for a bit. And in Venezuela, I was looking for any work to do, any at all. But just what became available was a job at the local English language newspaper, which used to play quite a big role in the expat community of guys that worked for Exxon or whatever back in the days of really good relations between US and Venezuela. I didn't know it at the time,

but it had been secretly taken over by a Chavista official because he basically wanted to keep it alive. The Chavistas didn't wanna be responsible for the death of the daily journal. So I sort of like fell into the possibility of working in journalism and caracas in 2007 and a lot was going on. And this is kind of a normal story for a lot of foreign correspondents. A lot of us, if we didn't like go to Harvard in Yale and have like an uncle that worked at the New York Times to like send us somewhere, we often tended to just be in a part of the world where news was happening and we turned out we could kind of do an okay job of covering it.

So after a few months at that local newspaper in Crocus, I started doing some things for larger outlets. And then after I did a masters, I decided to do more international journalism, eventually being sent to Brazil by the Financial Times. But again, like in either case was I, sure that's what I wanted to do. It just like what became available to me and it turned out that I liked writing. I realized that people were reading the stuff

that I was doing, whereas if I'd done the PhD in political theory, it would have been like nine years to write one paper that no one was gonna read. So I decided to, I just kinda stuck with it. And I've been doing that type of thing ever since. Always for somehow or another, the mainstream corporate media. I mean, I do other stuff as well, but like I was like trained by the Financial Times and then the Los Angeles Times. And I've always worked

in that tradition of like journalism of the like the classic mainstream type. Awesome. Well, I'm very glad you stuck with it. And I'm glad that you took on writing projects too, because I haven't read the Jakarta method. That's definitely next on my list, my long list of books that I'm meaning to read this year. But if we burn, I loved it. And I want to dive into the themes deeply throughout the interview, but maybe just to start, if you could outline your broader thesis in the book and sort of what your intention in writing it was and what the main point was that you were hoping to convey. Yeah, so I definitely had an intention. I'm not sure if I have a thesis. The intention

was to write a global history of the 2010s, organized around one's particular phenomenon and one particular question. So you obviously can't actually write the history of the world from 2010 to 2020. That's not possible. But it's also not ever really possible to write any work of history without choosing what to include and what to exclude. So what I wanted to do was to tell the story of this decade as if the most important thing to happen in that decade was the phenomenon of large protests that became so big that they either overthrew governments

or fundamentally destabilized them. So protests that became so big that they became something else. And I think it makes sense. Makes as much sense to organize a history of the 2010s around that as it does anything else. A lot of what we're dealing with geopolitically now is a result of some of those explosions. And then the question around which

this work is built is how is it that so many of these mass protests led to the opposite of what they apparently asked for in the beginning? Because this was a shocking thing that had happened not only in Brazil where I spent most of the decade, but in many other countries where initial success led to horrifying, not failure necessarily, because failure is determined in the long, over the long term, in the, over the course of generations, if not centuries, but the movements experience reversals, at least in light of what they had initially hoped to achieve after these moments of apparent success. And so I do ask the people that I interviewed to write the book at the end of the decade,

I asked them to reflect back on what they learned, what they would have done differently, what advice they would give to a new generation of protesters or activists or people trying to change the world. And those lessons are summarizable, but really my intention was to tell the story of the decade and explain why what

happened did happen. So it's not a book that is organized analytically with like a thesis and that evidence. People sometimes come to it thinking that it might be, but what I the way that I view it at least is a history. So the intention is to write the story of that decade in a way which of course, like any other work of history is interesting and useful to people that will be reading in the present because they'll be able to draw their own lessons from it. But I think those lessons do vary not only amongst the interviewees that I encountered over four years of research, but among readers based on where you are in the world

or what your own political orientation might be. I think the history in this book offers a diverse set of lessons. Yeah, absolutely. And it was fascinating reading some of those accounts. And you quoted them more at the end of the book when you're really asking your subjects to zoom out and give you sort of the 20,000 foot view on what they thought went wrong.

I definitely came out of the book with a conclusion, whether it was intended or not. That's how it landed for me. And I think in order to begin answering the question of why these protests tended to not achieve what they'd initially hoped to achieve, we need to zoom out a bit. And I'd love it if you could talk a bit about the new left and how they were sort of an inversion of Leninism.

We recently had comrades and friends of the show, Brett O'Shea and Allison Escalante of Red Menace, on to talk about Lenin's landmark book, What is to be Done. And in that book, as I'm sure you're well aware, he presented the case for the Vanguard Party. And so our listeners do have some background on this, but I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the New Left, how it emerged, and also how it contrasts with the principles of the old left. And this is just to sort of get us set up with some historical and ideological context before we get more into some of the specifics and

the protests in the book. Yeah, absolutely. So in order to tell this story of the 2010s, I want to explain where the particular set of tactics that became hegemonic or often even seeming natural as the right way to confront power. I wanted to establish where they came from. So what I do when talking about the 2010s is sketch a brief prehistory of each tactical element sketch a brief prehistory of each tactical element which comes to be part of the recipe, which is really used to cook up these mass protest explosions in the 2010s. And part of the story takes place in the beginning of the 1960s, especially in the United States, where a couple things become cemented or become resuscitated by students and other young people that believe themselves to be working in a new or a different tradition than that of the old left.

So the old left, I mean, like the really simple way, like in, you know, the new left to the extent that it was a term in the English language was employed in the US and the UK in reference to the older Communist Party. So, you know, the old left for somebody in 1961 might have been all of the old unions from the 30s, all of the Communist Parties that were allied with Stalin's Soviet Union that really believed in the centrality of labor and a revolution which will see state power and then oversee a trend, you know, this low or long, depending on the historical experience of particular nations, transitions, transitions, sorry, from socialism to communism. So the importance of this story for me is the emergence

of two of these elements that end up mattering a lot in the 2010s. One is protest in general, and two is prefiguration. So at the beginning of the 1960s, specifically the early members of SDS in the US, and SDS changes throughout the 60s, and the new left is very different. In the second half of the 60s, and very different in other countries, SDS in the first half of the 1960s

comes across the power of mass protest almost accidentally. They had been very inspired by the black civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s that were more hierarchically organized. They often insisted on discipline. They often didn't believe in trying to call every single person to the streets because that, well, I don't know what, I mean, it's, it's, it works the other way around that the, the idea of, of moving to mass protest comes later and kind of organically as it becomes clear How powerful it is and then the other element which is part of this prehistory that I tell in the early 60s is Prefiguration this idea that well actually what it happened in the Soviet I'm paraphrasing sort of parts of the port here on statement

Now well what happened in the Soviet Union is that the hierarchically organized quote unquote Vanguard party just became the state congealed into a set of bureaucratic institutions which stopped actually moving forward towards the supposed intended final goal. And so what we want to do is to try to enact now as much as possible in the means that we employ in our political struggles, the forms that we would like to see in the future. And so these two phenomena that emerge, especially in the early 60s in the United States, can be explained through a combination of anti-communism and McCarthyism on the one side. And on the other side, the emerging power of mass media.

So it's, it is mass media that really drives home too many of the student leaders in the early sixties. Just how many people you can reach with a protest. This again, this is something that we all take for granted, but it was like fascinating for me to relive the way that they realized it, that they watched this happen. And then for reasons which readers may be very sympathetic to or less sympathetic to, they did not want to reproduce what they

saw as the mistakes of the Bolshevik Revolution and then ultimately Stalin's configuration of the doctrine of Marxism, Leninism. And so a lot of other things happen in the 60s, but these two things are the things that I think end up entering the broader mass culture in the second half of the 20th century, especially in the United States, but also globally, and end up mattering quite a lot in the 2010s. And so, yeah, let's fast forward a little bit. You talk about David Graber specifically as an individual who really takes this idea of prefiguration and runs with it. And in a sense, prioritizing means over ends almost to an extreme level.

So I'm going to read a quote from the book here. I'm going to ask you to reflect on it. In a 2002 essay on New Left Review, Graeber explained that for them, the means were the ends. They were not doing something in order to get something else. The point was what they were doing. He wrote, quote, so this is David Graber within this quote, this is a movement about reinventing democracy. It's not opposed to organization.

It is about creating new forms of organization. It's not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It's about creating and enhancing horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states or parties. And then you go in to say, he defended prefigurative politics and celebrated a rich and growing panoply of organizational instruments, all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum effective solidarity without siphoning

dissenting voices, creating leadership positions, or compelling anyone to do anything which they have not freely agreed to do. So I'm wondering, yeah, if you can unpack that quote a little bit, talk about how, you know, and it's not just Gra Graber, but how a lot of the new left and what came to be sort of what we know today as being the dominant mode of, you know, strategy, I guess you could call it on the left, is this idea of prefiguring, this idea of almost subordinating ends to means. Yeah, it's really interesting because like, okay, there's two ways that I want to go about this question. But the first thing that pops into my head is that it's quite interesting to me that

in the 2010s, not that many people actually thought this really. Like, you know, among the people around the world that took to the streets, the full and deep belief in sort of an anarchist or libertarian socialist idea of political practice was only held by a pretty small group of people. What became interesting was this elective affinity that I think emerges between the types of responses to injustice that became easiest. Perhaps in the media, perhaps, you know, the most vocal spokespersons that arise in these movements, David Gray being with someone that becomes quite important in Occupy Wall Street, being sympathetic to these pre-existing ideological currents. Because for me, the surprise is not that the insurrection or the explosion of humanity

on the streets did not lead to the anarchist or libertarian socialist utopia in a couple days. That was always something that people didn't really think, you know, the amount of people that really believed that something like that could happen was always very, very small. And even they didn't really, really think that it could happen right away. What was more interesting for me was the fact that this moved really to the center of the narrative about what was happening because it seemed to be going this way. It's like people really latched on to the apparent lack of ideology in Talk of your Square for example. This was something that was really celebrated. People really latched on to the apparent lack of leaders and the various movements that I traced throughout

the throughout the decade. So that's just a very long way of saying that perhaps for me, it wasn't the dominant mode of strategy. It was the thing that emerged materially and the few pre-existing ideological currents that overlapped or could explain or were compatible with this phenomenon moved to the front of discourse very quickly. So anyways, that's the second answer that I wanted to give to your question.

The first one is that if you go back to the way that prefiguration changes the way that the new left in the early 60s is acting, vis-a-vis not only the old left but also the blacks of rights organizations that had so inspired them. Like many other things in the book, I kind of set up a very, very simple schematic, like a very, very simple spectrum with on the one end, in this spectrum, there's other spectrum that might come up in our conversation, in this spectrum, you have like total bloody-minded focus on ends.

Like you'll do whatever it takes to win state power. And you know, rather symbolistically, I put like the Stalinist interpretation of the Bolster Revolution at one end of the spectrum. So like the Marxist-Leninist practice that was familiar to quite a lot of people in the 20th century. And then in the 60s, you see a lot of people, especially not everyone, because you get very different interpretations of what the new left is outside of the US, but some people saying, no, no, no, no, no. The ends are not everything that matters. The means matter too. We're not willing to win if winning requires compromising on our values when it comes to means. So there's this introduction

of the idea that means matter too. And what Graber puts forward, which is quite radical, is like, nope, there's no ends. It's just means. The means are the ends. There's complete identity between means and ends. Now, David Graber, think, this like ends up not to be too cute, like prefiguring some things that happen in the book later, in ways that like, I think, question the wisdom of this particular approach for what happens in the 2010s, but in his defense, because I really like a lot of the work that he's done, I think he was a really like innovative and clever and sort of like impish critic of capitalism. Back when they put this package together, they didn't plan for the overthrowing of governments with this particular set of practices. This was not something that was seen as a means to, because it wasn't a means to anything,

right? It was not something that was seen as the first step to overthrowing a dictatorship in North Africa and then establishing a better government. So at this moment, yes, you have the full elaboration in New Left Review in an essay called The New Anarchist of the assertion that means and ends are identical. The means are the ends. What we're actually doing is all that matters. And he says, and he admits this in the essay, these kinds of practices, anarchist organizational practices will never be good in war. And again, that's like a little bit of foreshadowing to what happens like after the explosion of the so-called Arab Spring. But he knows that he admits that. But the presupposition of this article back in the early

2000s is that, well, the Cold War is over. So we're not at war now. So we can be more experimental, which I think is to, you know, still in 2024, true in some parts of the world, depending on what you're trying to do, and less true in other parts of the world, as if someone's, you know, at war with you. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thanks for that. And I do want to ask you about the protest movements that you did end up covering. But first, just to stay on this thread with David Graber, who I also really appreciate and I've read a lot of his works. And I think he's a really, really important thinker. Don't want to characterize him as just being that

one quote, which I do agree. Just the guy that organized like clown performances in the streets of the ultra globalization. Like stuff that, you know, was like really a big part of my like, I remember coming up on the internet and watching that stuff online, but people cringe when they remember it now. So yeah, he's much, much more than that. And yes, I learned a lot from his books. And then, you know, it's interesting, you don't talk about Occupy Wall Street very much in the book because you're focusing on sort of, you know, not on the global north or the west. But I'm curious, like, how you think that idea of subordinating ends to means that he

sort of presented an extreme example of in that quote, played out in Occupy Wall Street, for example. So I was in Sao Paulo during Occupy Wall Street. So I kind of missed all of the fights over the organizational questions over, like, well, should we be using microphones? Or, you know, like the debates over what should have been the full horizontalist

or less horizontalist practice of Occupy Wall Street? But my interpretation in the broadest, like really again, 20,000 feet historical sense, is that Occupy Wall Street came as a result of Adbusters magazine trying to reproduce the apparent success of Tahrir Square in New York. I think that Occupy Wall Street was a success for progressives and the left in the United States precisely because it failed

at actually becoming a mass protest event. So what Occupy Wall Street did concretely, and this is again, this matters for the sort of the quote unquote thesis of the book too, because a lot of like even the best revolutions, even the best uprisings in human history, they rarely get exactly what they think they're going to get. If you get something good, even if it's not exactly what you wanted, but it's sort of like one of your broader goals, that's great. And I think what

Occupy Wall Street did is because of, and I'm sure the way that it was configured made this more possible because it was very welcoming that to anybody they wanted to come, there was no sort of like training in the way that there would have been for the, you know, Black civil rights protests back in the 50s. That made it, you know, probably more inviting for a lot of people, but I think what it like, historically concretely produced was a microphone, which is like ironic because it didn't use microphones, for a discourse which inspired quite a lot of people in the United States that had never really heard

about that stuff in the first place. So like the idea of like the people against the financial elites, just broadly speaking, progressive ideas, I think, were reproduced. And again, like this is kind of ironic too, because media was really fundamental to it, even though like a lot of like the more horizontalist theorists like are against mediation at almost a philosophical level. But because they like got their message reproduced out to the larger public, not only through social media,

but through traditional media, quite a lot of people heard about inspiring ideas. And, you know, like, it's kind of similar to what happened with Bernie Sanders in 2015. I'm rarely in the United States. So I often like explain that what happened with Bernie Sanders is that like Hillary Clinton accidentally let a social Democrat on television and then he started saying stuff that led my generation to be like,

oh my god, is that true? You can have healthcare. Like there's countries with healthcare and they're like starting to Google like, is it true? Does Europe have healthcare? Oh my god. Oh my god. Like you could just, there's governments that will give you free healthcare. So I think that Occubi Wall Street was a success for getting out an important message which changed US political culture. But I mean, just the reason it's not included in my book is because it doesn't pass that bar that I set for myself. Like the United States government was not overthrown.

Downtown New York wasn't even like really like brought to a halt. But it changed, it changed political culture in the United States. Absolutely. And I think in a way that was a win for the original, according to the original standards of the early organizers. Can you tell us about some of the protest movements that you did cover and maybe in doing so, if there's any specific parts of each of the protests that stood out to you or that just come, you know, top of the mind right now that might be relevant to, I know you don't have a thesis in the book, but we'll

just keep saying the quote, thesis of the book before I sort of jump into some more specific questions about them. Yeah, absolutely. So I find, and again, if there was one that happened in the first world, that would have included it. There just wasn't. But again, I set that criterion for myself. I look at 13 cases. In three of them, I kind of come to the conclusion that it's not exactly mass protest, which is the main driver of the change that we see. So 10 to 13 cases, depending on how you look at it. Brazil is the most important for me as an individual, because I lived through it. And I think that Egypt is probably the most important for the world. Not only because that was really the like truly inspiring, transformative image that changed

so much of the rest of the decade, especially when it came to protest practice, those 18 days in Takvir Square and the images of them and the stories that came out from the square in central Cairo really changed everything that happened afterwards in my field, you know, the chosen field for this book, which is the the practice of protest in mass uprisings. So, and it's also the case that Egypt is the by far the most populous nation in the Arab world, US support for Israel and Saudi Arabia in the Cold War arose out of an attempt to hold back a very popular Arab socialism led by Egypt under Nasser. Now I still think that Egypt is at the center of the future of the Middle East and of Palestine.

So not only was it like, oh my God, look at what's happening. And I give a talk last night with one of the revolutionaries from Egypt that really helped to make this happen. And we both agreed, even if you know how it turns out, you look at those images again, and you cannot deny that they are incredibly deeply inspiring. People are coming together in ways, which are prefigurative in ways that I think

are truly meaningful. Like, Egyptians showed the world that they could come together across class lines, across gender lines, across religious divisions to take risks and break bread and struggle together. And this really changed quite a lot of what happened in the rest of the decade. I think, obviously, I'm probably gonna get to this, but I think that the prefigurative aspect is not enough. I think it I'm probably gonna get to this, but I think that the prefigured of aspect is not enough I think it's always, you know, there's usually some aspect of it in the

Explosion in a mass protest event in a revolution so Egypt really leads not only people in the United States and Spain and Greece and Turkey and Brazil and Ukraine but all around the world to Believe somehow that they're doing the same thing and this is another dynamic which is very important for the book because also it's a book written by a journalist so I have special insights into the way the media works. Often what happened elsewhere in the mass protest decade was interpreted as if it was the same thing as Talk with Your Square just because it looked the same because journalists are lazy and understaffed and ideologically crippled. So we just kind of would look at the world and be like, oh, look, there's a bunch of crowd. There's a bunch of people

on the street. They're doing top of your square, but in Brazil. And you know, that's a transition that I wasn't planning to make, but I provided it there for myself. And this is one of the things that happens in June 2013 in Brazil that I find so puzzling. So a center left popular democratically elected government is for a couple weeks, kind of ignoring a set of protests put together by leftist anarchists calling for a reversal of the rise in bus fare. And this kind of works for a while. Like no one's really paying too much attention

to these kids except for the fact that they're shutting down major streets in the city where I live. But then there's a police crackdown, which the media asks for. The police crackdown leads the media to change their tune to say it's now a good thing. Millions of people come into the streets and, you know, this is if we could spend hours and hours talking about the Brazilian uprising.

But this does happen. Like an international journalist who's even more clueless than I am calls this the Brazilian Spring as if what's happening in Sao Paulo that year is the same thing as Egypt in 2011. And this, this strange lens is applied also to two other imperfect democracies that had uprisings in that year, Ukraine and Turkey. And I think this really changes the rest of the decade. So Brazil is the one that matters to me. But Egypt, like, talk to your matter so much that you could call this the talk of your decade. If you had a different set of expertise than me, it would make a lot of sense to really center Egypt and its long-term consequences as the most important uprising, I think.

You know, you talked about how people can come together. And I think that definitely feels like that it's not really the problem. I mean, that is in certain areas of the world, I'm sure, and it was for a very long time, but you know, it doesn't seem like that is the issue that we're facing right now. And I'm going to read another quote from the book and then ask you to sort of expand on it and reflect on it. So you write, to sum up the dynamic at work in Egypt, in Turkey, and indeed across the mass protest decade, Tugal, and sorry if I'm pronouncing that incorrectly, but that's one of the sources that you were interviewing. Yeah, I think it's Gion Tuyol, which is wrong but closer.

It's hard to get Tuyol. Yeah, he's great. Yeah. Well, he paraphrased one of Marx's most famous lines in the 18th Brumair of Louis Bonaparte, quote, those who cannot represent themselves will be represented. And so, I think that is, you know, one of the problems that a lot of these protests faced, and you outlined that pretty clearly in the book.

So, I'm wondering if you can sort of explain that quote in the context of the 2013 movements in Brazil and Turkey, specifically that you covered in the book, and, you know, maybe just provide a little bit of context when necessary, right? So to finish one of the things that I was saying earlier is that a particular form I think became Easiest it became easier it became readily available. It was it seemed possible in the 2010s and then yeah These pre-existing ideological currents were identified, or the people that had always been saying that this was the way forward, rose to the top, or the media

reproduced this interpretation. But what was that package? What is that recipe? And I say that it is the apparently spontaneous, leaderless, digitally coordinated, horizontally organized mass protests, usually taking place in public squares or public spaces, and usually being said to prefigure the societies that they wish to create. So what happens in many cases, and you pointed at, we've pointed so far at Brazil and Turkey and Egypt, is that this particular recipe is far, far more successful than expected. Actually, so many people come to the streets that governments are actually toppled, or they are fundamentally destabilized,

they are fundamentally, they believe themselves to be at risk and want to give the streets something. But what happens in these cases, where real opportunities are generated, in the words of a couple of the major characters of the book, political vacuums are generated by popular uprisings. It turns out tragically, terribly, that a protest, specifically a protest of this type,

apparently spontaneous, leaderless, and so on, is not really well suited to take advantage of these power vacuums. And in the case of the more extreme examples, so we'll go back to Egypt when they're like, actually the government like is gone. Like Mubarak is no longer the leader of Egypt It is not the protest itself. It is not the protestors

That form a revolutionary transitional government. They're not even any part of it Who does is initially the military the military says okay? We're taking over we're overseeing a transition to democracy. And like it seemed to many people that that was a real possibility, that was a progressive, you know, maybe this is better representation than we had before because they might actually carry through on this promise

to install a democracy. But it was representation that was imposed. It was not the protest the uprising Representing itself in the new or transitional government, but then in the in the less pronounced cases in Brazil and Turkey are these The government's not overthrown, but in both cases more pronounced in Brazil, but in both cases the government is like, okay What do you want? I want to give you what you want.

I would prefer to have a win-win, even if it kind of like, I would prefer to give you whatever it is you're asking for than to put up with this on the streets. Like I want to be on the side of the people. My image matters to me, like elections matter to me, my approval rating matters to me. What do you want?

And what happens in Brazil is the original organizers are overwhelmed by new arrivals on the streets and they are both unwilling and incapable to lead the explosion of humanity that they have aroused. And so there's a battle over the representation of the streets, like what does it mean? What are we asking for? What's happening? And you know, and I recount one story, which the representation over of this of the streets like what does it mean? What are we asking for what's happening?

And you know when I recount one story which is like the more comic and ridiculous end of the answers to this big and unexpected question Is like a guy makes a video on YouTube and he puts on a V for vendetta mask And he says that he's anonymous and he comes up with five demands and and he says that he's anonymous and he comes up with five demands and that video goes viral amongst a lot of people that think maybe he is anonymous or he's speaking for anonymous but then he told me later in the year that he just made it up himself and as much as anything else those five demands like are now represented on the street they are they are sort of winning this battle to represent what the the streets are asking for and on the other side of this, President Dilmarusav, who used to be a Marxist guerrilla who came up as a dissident, who was tortured by the military dictatorship, she wants to be on the side of the streets always. She believes in the streets, at least in 2013, she does. She can't figure out what to give. She's like, truly hitting her head against the wall and against the television as she sits in the presidential palace, trying to come up with an answer to a question that she cannot

read. The question is not legible to her. So she's trying to come up with an answer. And so there's this insane battle over the representation of the uprising in 2013. And I think everybody agrees whether or not, you know, there's huge disagreements over who should have done what and whose fault it was and when imperialism gets involved in shipping the final outcome and so on. But I think most people agree that the right wins

this battle to impose meaning upon the streets. They win the battle over what will or who will represent the uprising of 2013 in the long term at least. And so yeah, this is something that comes up amongst the serious scholars that look at these uprisings to Yalzuan, Hodorigununis is another, Asif Bayat looks closely at the uprisings in North Africa in the Middle East, this dynamic of the streets being unable to speak for themselves with somebody else speaking for them.

And you know, and like perversely, like you can get away with it, you know, Cece, the dictator that took over in 2013 in Egypt, that a lot of the original protesters would say is worse than the man that they overthrew in 2011. He claims to be the inheritor, the legacy of the 2011 revolution. He just says it. And this happens all the time in the history of revolutions that the counter-revolutionary actor just pretends that he stands in for the revolution.

But what also happens historically is sometimes the revolutionaries withstand the counter-revolutionary attack. In the 2010s, basically no one did. In the 2010s, the counter-revolutionary attack proved far too formidable for, again, I wanna be very fair, it's not their fault, proved far too formidable to people that never saw this coming.

And I understand why they never saw it coming. It was truly strange that they were in a revolutionary situation just two weeks after they had never been able to imagine one. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Vincent Bevinz. We'll be right back. Mas na saudade eles dizem no papel Pra que você não pate de um cabeça de papel, além de explorado como todos nós É também manipulado pra ser outro alienado

Polícia, é cheio de culpa, são atacinos, são animais Quando as armas dominantes fazem logo a pressão Eles vejam todo o ódio que eles têm da natão Políciais, cheios de culpação Todos bastardos, filhos da puta Políciais, cheios de culpação Todos bastardos, filhos da puta, boas-vindiais, cheios de culpação Todos bastados, filhos da puta Atrás dessa fada existe um animal Puge traz esses culturas e existe um ser irracional

Militares, mude verdadeia que sempre existiu Essa poa foi vendada pra fundar esse Brasil Políciais, cheios de culpa são todos bastados Filhos da puta! Políciais, cheios de culpa são todos bastados Filhos da puta, por inscriar Cheios de cubação, todos bastados Filhos da puta O Doriscu! Mais uns batendo de novo, já pra aqui você não pode nunca Vence de batendo lá, vente pra todo mundo O que é isso? O que é isso? O que é isso?

O que é isso? O que é isso? O que é isso? O que é isso? O que é isso? O que é isso? O que é isso? O que é isso?

O que é isso? O que é isso? o que é isso. That was Policiais Shells Jac Jakupa by Menstrual Salanakika. Now back to our conversation with Vincent Bevinz. These kinds of structuralist movements, like you're saying, you know, lend themselves to having meaning imposed upon them from the outside and co-opted. And I think that would also characterize a lot of what happened with the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. I think a lot of that energy was ended up ended up being co-opted, particularly by,

I don't know, I'm thinking of politicians like Stacey Abrams, who had come out and tell people to get off the streets and sort of redirect the energy into the electoral sphere, right? And things like that. So definitely seems like an ongoing theme in a lot of the protests. Who do you think won? Who do you think co-opted or ended up, you know, getting something from that uprising? Because I think about this all the time.

I probably, you know, if I had put George Floyd in the book, I probably would have read 40, 40 books and interviewed a hundred people. But because I didn't, I had put George Floyd in the book, I probably would have read 40 books and interviewed 100 people. But because I didn't, I spent all my time on the other uprights, I was always curious what people think. Who do you think won? Who do you think managed to profit from or co-opt or whatever somehow win from 2020? Yeah, I'm not sure I would characterize it as anyone really winning. Although I guess if you want to take it literally, the Biden team did literally win the election and Kamala Harris, who was literally a cop, you know, as his vice president, they certainly won. So the liberal establishment did come out

of that situation with power. And in terms of the movement being co-opted, like I really do think you'd have to go through and, you know and look city by city. But I do think again, it was the liberal establishment that came out. And like I mentioned, you know, Stacey Abrams, for example, who came out over and over telling people to march on the ballot boxes, that protesting isn't going to get them what they're demanding, which is actually, you know, an interesting thing to think about in the context of what we're talking about today. But, you know, rather she thing to think about in the context of what we're talking about today. But, you know, rather, she said that the solution is voting. And so I do think that redirecting that energy into the voting booth is, you know, certainly form of co-opting the movement.

And we could talk about how some of the orgs like BLM or others benefited in a way from the movement without offering any real solutions. But I think that starts to get pretty messy. I don't know that I have any really solid take away from the whole thing. I don't know. I'm wondering what you think. Yeah, I don't know. I think about what could have happened and I run all these different plays. But in the actual, I mean, I've seen narratives that say that there were sort of, you know, some, there were like some media entrepreneurs that made, you know, a little bit of, you know, they either got a little fame or money out of it. But structurally, I think it's hard to point to, to victories. At least, again, using the standards that I use in the book, which is like trying as much as possible to

look at the original demands or the original spirit of the uprising. Yeah. Well, and you know, I mean, so Derek Chauvin was convicted, right? Right. And stabbed 22 times recently in prison. But then there are three cops in Tacoma, Washington recently who were acquitted of murdering an unarmed black man, not only acquitted, but they're each given

like $500,000 separation agreements by the city. So, you know, who wins in that kind of situation where, you know, you have one conviction, but it doesn't change the structure, it doesn't change the overall way that the system works. And I don't think that's a shock to anybody, but... Well, that translates, I mean, that translates back to... That allows us to... That allows us to build a bridge back to the events in the book is this dynamic is

familiar that the protest starts around a pretty small demand doesn't seem small at the beginning but very quickly so many people come to the streets that it's like oh there's so much more we could do with this massive energy there's so we there is so much desire for change that is larger than just the conviction of one cop or a 20 cent bus fare rise in Sao Paulo or the signing of the one weird economic association agreement with the European Union. This dynamic is, at least that dynamic is familiar, that a small demand is very, very quickly achieved and then the huge mass of energy in the streets has a hard time deciding or figuring out how

to redirect itself or be redirected or end up affecting some kind of larger structural change. There's a really good quote that's sort of related to that from the book. I kind of chuckled when I read this. You write, the crowd kept marching. How long had we been walking? Four hours? Six? Was anything going to happen? That was it. Thousands and thousands of us just walking across the city. And so this was in a relation to a march in Sao Paulo against the bus fare hike after a bloody police crackdown than the previous night that you write about.

And, you know, I don't know if there's exactly the same sentiment that you're trying to convey here. And if it's not, just go ahead and let me know. But, you know, one thing about these protests movements, and this might be a good transition into sort of talking a little bit about Leninism in the near future. But, you know, I've always struggled with this experience,

like the catharsis that you feel and experience in the moment at these protests, like coupled with this feeling of like, okay, but what are we actually doing here? Like what are we materially, what's actually materially happening aside from, you know, voicing a demand or the catharsis, the individual catharsis, and then you leave home and it's all over.

And you have this empty feeling, like what is actually accomplished here? Everyone just goes home and maybe some modest reform has passed, usually not. And I think that's like a really common experience. I've talked to people about this and they experience similar sort of like emptiness after these protests. And this is kind of, I think, it's related to one of the threads that I guess you could call this thread maybe like one of the solutions to this issue that I think is around organization and being prepared before these protests happen so that we can see the protests as one part of a larger organizing strategy. And so you write about in

the book how Lenin talked about how important it is to be prepared before the revolution and like it's extremely difficult to build an organization when the uprisings have already begun and This definitely seems like a pattern throughout the protests of the previous decade that you cover There wasn't really a left organization to guide them, right? And I'm wondering like, you know, would you say that's that's accurate from your perspective? Well, in so yeah So again, there's there's a lot of it it's a good question that I have a bunch of different answers to offer. So in the case of Brazil, which is the, that passage that you just read, the

like big structured left organizations were on the other side, right? They were like saying from the beginning, don't do this. And then they kind of tried to join later and they were not really removed from the streets. But what was really interesting about that moment, and this I think is also symptomatic of a lot of what happened in the 2010s, is that the Free Fair movement in this group in Brazil had both consciously and unconsciously set up direct action that leads to clashes with the police as kind of the be all and end all of political struggle. Like that was, they were really sort of like, they really privileged one tactic. They privileged direct action in the streets and they knew that this would always mean

clashes with the police and often in the 2010s for I think partially for media reasons but also because they are a huge part of the repressive apparatus of advanced capitalist states. Police were often at the center of what set off a movement. Police were the most visible and easiest to target elements of the system that people were taking aim at. But what happened on that night in June, 2013 is the cops just went away, they just withdrew. They're like, well, we're not gonna fight you. Just walk around.

What is that gonna do? You can walk around all day long. Because really, you're asking for a different transportation policy, and we're not in charge of that. We work for actually a right-wing governor. We got yelled at for cracking down on you a few days ago. We're just in charge of that. We work for actually a right-wing governor. We got yelled at for cracking down on you a few days ago.

We're just going to go away and you can walk around for five hours if you want. And it was this really strange moment. It's like, oh, well, the Free Fair movement had set itself up in like mortal combat with the Brazil's military police who are really bad, who commit murder, who routinely engage in acts of police brutality, which would be shocking, I think, to even a lot of Americans. But that was actually not really where the battle was. Strangely, like everyone that really mattered to the decision-making around transportation policy in Brazil was not the cops. So there was this strange thing where

would the police just kind of withdraw from that battle, there's just like, oh, well, what is walking back and forth do? A couple of the more like raucous elements of the protest are smashing a bank here and there or like, you know, there'd be a little bit of property damage, but like, oh, like, maybe the battle with the police isn't the be all in the end all, unless you could actually like destroy or abolish the security services in Brazil. But of course, the street movement would have never had that ability if they went to like actual civil war, right? And so what some interviewees in Brazil and also memorably in Ukraine came to conclude, and I'm trying to get back to the part of your question which is about Lenin, is that what Lenin had said would happen in the case of purely spontaneous uprisings

seem to have happened in the 2010s. Of course, in the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, you have all kinds of stuff. You have all kinds of stuff that is unplanned, which has people involved that are not parts of parties. It's very often the professionalized class of cadres is responding to events, not necessarily starting them. But what he says is going to happen and what what is to be done is that a purely spontaneous uprising will end up simply

reproducing the ideology which is already dominant in a given society that without a revolutionary theory, there will be no actual transformation. Because the powers that be in a given society wouldn't be the powers that be if they didn't have the mechanisms required to get out their message and to reproduce structures that are favorable to them. So when there is nothing but the explosion of people on the streets, who ends up winning that battle for representation? Who ends up winning that battle for

representation? Who ends up moving into the power vacuum? It's in the case of the vacuum of narrative in Brazil. It's dominant media that have a really big role in deciding what this is quote-unquote about. And then in more pronounced cases, when there's really like a government has fled the country, it's groups that are not necessarily, they often did not conceive of themselves as like vanguard groups, but they act in a way, at least in that moment. I think what Hodorigonunus calls this, like acting with a vanguard function, like in that, in just in that moment, these groups that might even if they, whether they were football alters or they're in the military, they might have never planned for this particular type of thing. But it was groups that were already organized with, with some kind of a quote unquote

revolutionary theory, they had some idea of how they wanted society to change, even if it was groups that were already organized with with some kind of a quote-unquote revolutionary theory They had some idea of how they wanted society to change even if it was like we want Ukraine to be racially pure You know even if it was like an insane and horrifying idea of how they wanted society to change It was often these groups that were able to you know Not that I want to make the claim that Ukraine with your mind and revolution ended up being primarily about this But these people punched above their weight because they already knew each other. They were already organized. They were already ready to act.

And then the Egyptian military, clearly, like that's the most organized thing you can ever be is like a standing military in a country. And they have their own ideas and their own traditions of the role that they should play in Egyptian society. So, yeah, that's what often happened. It seemed to many of my interviewees that precisely what Lenin said would happen and what is to be done did happen in the case of their country.

I'm not sure if you've had time to really apply any of the lessons that you learned in sort of researching and writing the book to what's sort of happening, I guess, globally right now, but maybe focusing on the United States since that's where most of our listeners are, or maybe the UK, for example, where I think you're talking to us from right now, to the current protest movements for Palestinian liberation, if you've had time to apply that and if you have any thoughts on that.

No, absolutely. I've been thinking about this all the time, not only because I'm going, but because people are asking me and this is sort of something that you could have seen coming. I mean, at the very end of the book, I hint that like it's, you know, 2010s was the mass protest decade, but it's entirely possible that 2020s will exceed it because this remains the easiest and most natural way for people to respond to some kind of injustice. Sometimes it's very appropriate. Sometimes it's less efficacious, but absolutely I've been thinking about this.

So I think a couple things arise while looking at this new mass protest wave in relationship to my book. The first is that before the 2010s, for example, the invasion of Iraq is very familiar to me because I protested the war in Iraq, it became clear to us back in 2003 that it didn't matter how many people sent the message to George Bush and Tony Blair that we didn't want them to invade Iraq, they just did. They had the capability to ignore that because I think fundamentally, I come to the conclusion that protests are always fundamentally communicative acts. Sometimes the person in power gets the message and decides they don't care. And I think this is kind of what's happening with Netanyahu and Biden.

You could prove to Netanyahu that 98% of the world's population wanted him to stop this. And he might very well just decide he doesn't care. I mean, there's no automatic mechanism where the demonstration of popular will leads to some political actor changing their decisions. Like something that really matters to them has to change. And unfortunately, tragically, what really matters to these two men seems to not have changed so far. I mean things you know this I don't think it's over who knows what happens. You know it seems that now like the next phase is what we're entering a phase where,

you know, what's happening in Yemen and the whole world is starting to have matters just as much as the protests do as well. But you could see the kind of you. It's entirely possible that you would see the type of mass protest event that I describe in my book, but we're not there yet. There hasn't been one that actually overthrows or dislodges the government. And then two relates to what I was saying about Egypt, because despite the way that the media portrayed Taqir Square in 2011, despite the way that it was portrayed as a pro-American, pro-liberal, spontaneous, post-ideological carnival of prefiguration, what had actually happened for 11 years is that Egyptians had

been organizing around support for Palestine, opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, and the rights of workers in Cairo and the Nile Delta region. So all of that gets alighted when 2011 happens and Anderson Cooper shows up, but like the people that actually put together what became Tahrir Square came together through years of organizing around support for Palestinians in opposition to US imperialism.

So they always believed that a movement for democracy in Egypt would necessarily challenge the structures of power in the region that were dominated by US allies, most importantly Israel and Saudi Arabia. This is how they always believed that a pro-democracy movement in Egypt must take shape. So they were shocked and horrified to see people like me show up and say things like, Oh, they want to join America as like a junior

partner in like the free world or whatever. So this contradiction I think is still at the heart of what's happening in and around Palestine, the contradiction between the citizens of various Arab countries overwhelmingly in support of Palestinian liberation. Like the numbers are insane. How high it is. The amount of people in Egypt, for example, that say that there should not be any diplomatic relations with Israel before October 7th. The fundamental contradiction that I see in the region is between the people wanting to support Palestinian liberation and a set of leaders that must somehow play ball with

Israel and the United States to stay in power in order to hold on to their corner of the current geopolitical system, in order to hold on to their little throne in the actually existing global order. So a lot of what's happening, I think, is related to the dynamics that are in the book and to the successes and the challenges faced by protest movements in the 2010s, even as the current wave of protest hasn't actually overthrown a government or toppled, or fundamentally destabilized one in the way that all of the episodes I analyzed in the book. I have one more question before I ask you sort of your closing thoughts and maybe getting into what you think some of the solutions are, even though we've definitely alluded

to them quite a bit already. So there's a powerful quote in the book from an Italian sociologist. The quote is, at the end of the day, horizontalism is a reflection of individualism. When I read that, there were sparks flying from my head because I really, I felt like that made a lot of sense just on the surface of it. And I'm wondering if you can unpack that quote and talk a little bit about horizontalism, you know, and how it's manifested in these protests as an expression of neoliberalism. And if you do feel like it, if you think you can weave in, because I was going to ask you

this earlier, I feel like it might fit in here as well. The idea and also the essay, the tyranny of structuralistness. Yeah, yeah, so absolutely. So that quote from Paulo Gerbaudo is quite interesting because, like, as I researched and write the book, I always thought it was important to demonstrate sympathy for, like, at the very least, the, like, aspirations and the ideals ideals a lot of the movements that I write about. Like I'm not trying to be at all like dunk on or say this doesn't make sense, full stop. But that quote is like in the context of my book

comes across as like a kind of like a shot straight to the gut, I think. But actually a lot of people were like a lot more aggressive about horizontalism. Like I tried not to be, as I say, rude or dunk on particular tendencies that I did I discuss in the book, but there were actually quite a lot of people that came up with quotes that were a lot more aggressive. So you toned it down a bit. Yeah, no, I like there was quite a lot of people that said like

they were just like got really angry at the mention of horizontalism after having lived through what they lived through. But yeah, so if you thought that that made sense to you, it's because he's been working on this for quite a long time. And you know, historically, I mean, you can look at where this emerges historically. So when we can look at historically and theoretically, right? So if you analyze what horizontalism is really, it is a practice of extremely anti-authoritarian organizational principles, right? So no one really gets to tell anybody else what to do no matter whatever. And for better or for worse, throughout human history, like truly collective enterprises, truly collective struggles usually

involve some kind of willingness to say, okay, this may not be the thing that I personally want to do. I wouldn't do this if I were dictator of this movement, but I'm going to do it because the majority agrees with it. Or no one should be the dictator of this movement. There are certain people that are in charge of planning and other people that are in charge of other things in this movement. And that's okay for now.

I'm willing to go sort of be a team player. So on the one hand, you can look at the way that the extreme application of anti-authoritarian principles is a way of saying that every individual gets to do whatever they want at all times. So philosophically, you can see why it has something to do with individualism. But then historically, if you look at the word horizontalism, where it actually emerges, it emerges actually through foreigners studying what Argentines did in the wake of government collapse. But I spoke to some of those original Argentines, and they said, well, yeah, you know, on the one hand, concretely, there was nothing left but the

individual. All of the structures that were supposed to help us, that were supposed to represent us, that were supposed to mediate between us and government power were gone. All there was was individuals. So the practice that we came up with emerged from the concrete decimation of every kind of collective project,

every kind of organization that had existed previously just wasn't there. And then they also told me, well, actually we had been kind of, whether or not we knew it, influenced by discourse being put forward by the neoliberal press at the time. That was really about how the government's always bad, everything needs to be privatized. And this kind of deep suspicion of anything but the centrality of the individual sort of influenced to our discourse at the time. So I think that Gerba Udu's quote, again, hopefully in the broadest sense the book is sympathetic, but I think that his quote stands up both theoretically and historically.

And then the tyranny of structuralistness, which is like, I really can't recommend enough, it's like two pages and it just like hits really home. Because like again, because Joe Freeman, just like so many people that I spoke with for this book, they like spent a decade thinking very hard about the lessons they learn and crystallizing them into a few gems that I could just kind of like take and put onto the page.

Similarly, Joe Freeman like creates this amazing two page essay because she's been through years and years of struggle in what was then called the women's liberation movement. And many people that I spoke to in the book across the world, including people that were used to be horizontalists or still even horizontalists of a type, but of a modified type, told me that they were really inspired by that.

They learned a lot about what happened by reading that essay. And basically what she says is that when you insist on structuralistness, when you insist that there are no leaders, if the group is big enough, some kind of structure emerges, some kind of leaders emerge, but they emerge in a way in which they are not accountable because everyone's pretending that they're not really the leaders. There's no mechanism for putting them there.

There's no mechanism for removing them either. And so often in like, you know, this makes sense if you think about like groups of 40 or 50 people, like, you know, in a university organizing context, it might be the people with the most social capital, like a clique of people that know each other the best end up being really in charge of things. Or, you know, if you get to really, really big movements,

then it might be just the people that are best organized who have like economic or military power that impose their leadership on the apparently structure-less group of individuals. So basically what she says is, if you insist on structure-lessness and you get big enough, you're gonna get structure anyways, but it's gonna be a type of structure

you would have never picked. So she comes to the conclusion that it's better to come up with formal, transparent, democratic mechanisms for structuring an organization rather than pretending that there's not going to be any because someone else will impose it on you. And I mean, it's not, I don't think it's a coincidence that so many people around the world told me, oh, you should look at this. This explains what happened in my country. I know our anarchist listeners are probably grinding their teeth right now,

but I'm gonna recommend a couple more resources if anyone wants to dive a little bit deeper into this idea of structuralistness, horizontalism, anti-authority ideology, that kind of stuff. Of course, there's On Authority by Fredrik Engels, a really great essay that he wrote, I believe, in the 1970s, or the 1870s, rather. And then also interestingly, all watched over by Machines of Loving Grace, a documentary

by Adam Curtis. I don't know if you've seen that, actually, but it's really interesting. He goes through and talks about the hippie communes and how they sort of embody this idea that you were talking about that comes out when there is structuralistness and that Freeman talks about in the tyranny of structuralistness. So just wanted to throw those out there in case anybody wanted to dive deeper. I read about all Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace in Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine because he's talking about this this precise dynamic when it relates to the early internet. But my personal take and again again, everyone can all decide on for themselves, but my

personal take is that anarchists don't need to grind their teeth. Cause like even in the anarchist tradition, especially the, like the long history of the anarchist tradition, the idea that you're not supposed to have any structure whatsoever, that you're not supposed to have any organization. That is not like, I think if you ask me, that is not like a 10th of it. This is again, like it's, it's, it's part of, you know, if you go back to the classical anarchists, a lot of them believed in organizations and unions, of course, democratically organized, but this was something that was a part of the tradition for a long time and still is

for a lot of people and can be for a lot of people. As I said in the beginning of the interview, this extreme insistence on actually no structure whatsoever was never really consciously elaborated or defended by that many people. Like even in the anarchist tradition, even in the anarchist tradition, there was very not a lot of people that actually would say, oh, you should have no, you should just have a bunch of people in the streets and then automatically things will work out. But that is, that was what I think became materially possible and easiest for a lot of people to engage in in the 2010s. And then I said, there was this elective affinity with, with the sort of anarcho-punk traditions or ideologies

that kind of lined up more or less, which what with what seemed to be happening. So I don't, I mean, a lot of the people in the book are still on the anti-authoritarian left after living through the 2010s, but just with like a different idea of what is required to get from moment A to moment B, to get from the uprising to a transformation. So to close out, we can take this in so many different directions. And I'm wondering, I think one of the things that our listeners always ask is sort of how they can apply this, like, what can I do? What can I do? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What, like, you know, what are you, are you recommending anything? Right. Are there any organizations or ways of plugging in that you think are more effective that you would recommend? Do you want to just share maybe about your own journey and how this book impacted the way that you approach organizing and activism if you do those things? So yeah, however you feel like, you know, you want to sort of touch on those questions or if there's another direction that you want to take it in. I was gonna read a fairly long ending quote from the book to close out and ask you to fleck, but I think this other way might be a little bit better

and obviously also want to recommend folks read the book because there's just so much that we didn't get to and it's such an interesting read, but yeah, I'll pass the mic back to you and you can just take it however you want to take it. Yeah, I... The first part of my answer would be to say that I think that I'm not recommending anything.

Some people think that I am, it's interesting. Like I've watched certain people be like, no, he's secretly wants that, he's secretly trying to say this, or he's secretly trying to comment on this battle between left groups in the United States. I think that I'm not, I think that I made an actual decision to not come up with a program or a set of prescriptions

for a couple reasons. One is that I really want this. I hope that this book will be read globally. I mean, it is written by a US author. It came out initially through a New York publisher, but it's not really about a social movement in the United States. It's not about an uprising in the US. So my expectation is that

the answer as to like what is to be done is really going to vary wildly between the various countries in which this book is hopefully read. So I kind of really do, I do, I at least I'm serious about the idea that it will be the story that will allow different readers in different locations to come to different conclusions. But at the same time, I can like, you know, I do ask those people those very, well, to expand on that first question, that first answer even further, like I spent almost all of 2023 doing peer review

and fact checking on this book. And I spent 95% of my time trying to get the story right and 0% of my time trying to write a program for revolution in the US. Like, that's just not something I thought about at all. So like, that is the way that I see the book as a work of history that hopefully speaks to different people in different ways.

At the same time, I do this work at the very end of asking people very, you know, pointed questions about the future, about building the future as the final chapter is called. So I'm happy to summarize that and what like I kind of understood as the possible answers. As you know, quite a lot of people said,

we wish that we had been more organized before the uprising, wish we wish we had engaged in something that Gian Tuyall calls active waiting, which is like, we're not necessarily trying to cause a mass riot right now, but we know that something might happen and we want to be as best positioned as possible to act in a moment of political crisis

or political opportunity. And again, based on where you are, what type of organizations are people talking about? It really depends where you are. But the types that were thrown out are political parties, you know, parliamentary political parties, then there's revolutionary political parties, unions, social

movements. I spent a lot of 2023 with Brazil's MST, which is a large and democratic but hierarchically organized social movement in Brazil. And they, I think, combine in a really And they, I think, combine in a really interesting way a long term revolutionary project with the ability to on a day to day basis actually make the lives of working class Brazilians better. They don't conceive of themselves as like a vanguard party. They don't conceive of themselves in those terms, but they also like read Lenin and they also have practiced some kind of democratic socialism. So like it really, those are the types of things that I think that historically have done well in moments of

political crisis and political opportunity. Social movements, unions, parliamentary parties, revolutionary parties. And then I did a work of history. So I don't I definitely respect and don't want to get in the way of the important work of imagining new types of political struggle, new types of political organizations, new horizons that are only just visible from right now. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Vincent Bevin, author of If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, and The Jakarta Method, Washington's anti-communist crusade and the mass murder program that shaped our world. If you want to continue on with some of the themes discussed in today's episode, check out our conversation with Brett O'Shea and Allison Escalante on What Is To Be Done,

where we explore the principles of Marxism, Leninism in depth, and unpack Lenin's landmark text of the same name. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Menceruao Sawanakeka for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can help us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes

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