Twenty reasons why
it’s kicking off everywhere
Paul Mason
We’ve had revolution in Tunisia Egypt’s Mubarak is teetering;
in Yemen Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared.
In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for
a “Second Republic”; in France the youth from banlieues ba led police on
the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking
and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we’ve had
riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.
What’s going on? What’s the wider social dynamic?
My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a
discussion on the programme that then didn’t happen but I am throwing
them into the mix here on the basis of various conversations with academics
who study this and also the participants themselves.
At the heart of it all are young people obviously; students; westernised;
secularised. They use social media – as the mainstream media has
now woken up to – but this obsession with reporting “they use twi er” is
missing the point of what they use it for.
In so far as there are common threads to be found in these diff erent
situation here’s 20 things I have spo ed:
1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no
future
2. …with access to social media such as Facebook Twi er and eg Yfrog
so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary
democracy to tyranny.
3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies and propaganda becomes
fl ammable.
4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism
Islamism Fianna Fail Catholicism etc… in fact hermetic ideologies of all
forms are rejected.
5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. A er twenty
years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the
“archetypal” protest leader organizer facilitator spokesperson now is an
educated young woman.
6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy:
it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously whereas before – and the quintessential
experience of the 20th century – was the killing of dissent within
movements the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.
7. Memes: “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols
or practices which can be transmi ed from one mind to another through
writing speech gestures rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters
of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they
self-replicate mutate and respond to selective pressures.” (Wikipedia) –
so what happens is that ideas arise are very quickly “market tested” and
either take off bubble under insinuate themselves or if they are deemed
no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet
this theory (see Richard Dawkins 1976) seemed an over-statement
but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.
8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful
than the hierarchy – but the ad-hoc network has become easier to
form. So if you “follow” somebody from the UCL occupation on Twi er
as I have done you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt or
a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on
Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early
20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages
across borders just to make links like these.
9. The specifi cs of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-
level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education
will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal
indebtedess – so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt
so they will be be er paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fi scal
retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer
than their parents. And the eff ect has been like throwing a light switch;
the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story even if for individuals
reality will be more complex and not as bad as they expect.
10. This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive
societies and emerging markets because – even where you get rapid economic
growth – it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people
fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.
11. To amplify: I can’t fi nd the quote but one of the historians of the
French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people
but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint
the poor for generations – but if lawyers teachers and doctors are
si ing in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now in
their garrets they have a laptop and broadband connection.
12. The weakness of organised labour means there’s a changed relationship
between the radicalized middle class the poor and the organised
workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris – heavy predomination
of the “progressive” intelligentsia intermixing with the slumdwellers
at numerous social interfaces (cabarets then raves now); huge
social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated
in the media (Fi y Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture
and respectability of organized labour is still there but as in Egypt they
fi nd themselves a “stage army” to be marched on and off the scene of
history.
13. This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement:
they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can’t retreat from.
They can “have a day off ” from protesting occupying: whereas twith he
old working-class based movements their place in the ranks of ba le was
determined and they couldn’t retreat once things started. You couldn’t
“have a day off ” from the miners’ strike if you lived in a pit village.
14. In addition to a day off you can “mix and match”: I have met people
who do community organizing one day and the next are on a fl otilla to
Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy;
then they’re writing a book about something completely diff erent. I was
astonished to fi nd people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation
blogging from Tahrir Square this week.
15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just
on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth.
More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is
available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it’s not predigested
for you by your teachers parents priests imams. For example
there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I
studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s.
Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts or trying
to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be
more complex because people have an instant reference source for the
undisputed premises of arguments. It’s as if physics has been replaced by
quantum physics but in every discipline.
16. There is no Cold War and the War on Terror is not as eff ective as the
Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a
worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of
control post Mubarak – as in all the colour revolutons – the dire warnings
of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a “meme” that has not
taken off . In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme
starts blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I
am not saying they are wrong – only that the fear of an Islamist takeover
in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the
media behind Mubarak.
17. It is – with international pressure and some powerful NGOs – possible
to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years
in the jungle as a guerilla or years in the urban underground: instead the
oppositional youth – both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/
Egypt and above all in China – live in a virtual undergrowth online and
through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here – it is for
example the things people swap by text message the music they swap
with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffi ti street art etc which
those in authority fail to spot.
18. People have a be er understanding of power. The activists have read
their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri but the ideas therein have become
mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics
but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing
how to mess up hierarchies and see the various “revolutions” in their own
lives as part of an “exodus” from oppression not – as previous generations
did – as a “diversion into the personal”. While Foucault could tell Gilles
Deleuze “We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began
to understand the nature of exploitation and to this day we have yet to
fully comprehend the nature of power” that’s probably changed.
19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest “meme”
that is sweeping the world – if that premise is indeed true – is profoundly
less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s
and 1920s; they don’t seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of
excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of
centralized power and the demand for “autonomy” and personal freedom
in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt family based
power-elites.
20. Technology has – in many ways from the contraceptive pill to the
iPod the blog and the CCTV camera – expanded the space and power of
the individual.
SOME COMPLICATIONS…
a) All of the above are generalisations and have to be read as such.
b) Are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point
they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their
values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also
we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever
seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network
off censors the internet cyber-a acks the protesters.
c) China is the laboratory here where the Internet Police are paid to
go online and foment pro-government “memes” to counteract the oppositional
ones. The Egyptian le ist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website
that “in a dictatorship independent journalism by default becomes a form
of activism and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation.”
But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world.
d) What happens to this new fl uff y global zeitgeist when it runs up
against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match where
the la er has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to fi nd out.
e) (and this one is troubling for mainstream politics) Are we creating
a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and
those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example – if you hear the
NDP offi cials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared
to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also
examples in the UK: much of the political discourse – on both sides of the
House of Commons – is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible
“noise” – and this goes wider than just the protesters.
(For example: I’m fi nding it common among non-politicos these
days that whenever you mention the “Big Society” there’s a shrug and a
suppressed laugh – yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around
Westminster it’s treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has
quickly become a “meme” that crosses political tribal boundaries under
the Coalition yet most professional politicians are deaf to “memes” as the
youth are to the contents of Hansard.)
Article originally published at-h p://www.bbc.co.