Vincent Bevins’ compelling investigation of mass protest in the 2010s raises vital questions of organisation and leadership in class struggles, finds Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

To read If We Burn is to revisit a decade of intense global protest. You get to meet leading activists and participants who took part in mobilisations in ten different countries between 2010 and 2020. You compare and contrast the trajectory of many street movements, as well as their impact on the politics of their countries and beyond. And you are repeatedly faced with the question: why did they not succeed?

In his latest book, Vincent Bevins, a progressive American journalist who lived in or visited a number of the countries he writes about in this book, draws the balance of struggles that took shook Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Chile. He does so while relying on personal experiences, library research, and interviews he conducted with over 200 people along the way. An excellent writer, he brings events vividly back to life and allows you to explore them alongside him and his interlocutors.

What is immediately striking about the choice of countries in Bevins’s account is that they are all outside the US and Western Europe. Yet, as many readers in the Global North will find, the book will speak to discussions, debates and dilemmas faced by their own political movements. Because, it would seem, we all fundamentally face common problems, despite extremely uneven and unequal conditions globally. The universality implicit in much of what Bevins brings up is indeed a major strength of his approach. Not that the countries he picks are picked at random.

He focuses on countries in which street protests faced repression, escalated, and disrupted or overthrew governments. In other words, he focuses on situations in which street protests reached the highest levels of intensity, leading them to clash with state power itself. The wave of global protest covered in the book occurred against the background of the 2008 economic crash, the great recession, and the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry in world affairs. Though the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns briefly subdued the high levels of mass unrest seen in the decade up to 2020, we can be sure that the decade’s struggles gave us a glimpse of potential futures as the world hurtled towards deeper and deeper crisis. We’re certainly witnessing the resurgence of global mass politics, as most obviously symbolised by the Palestine solidarity movement in recent months.

Horizontal weaknesses

A major dynamic we see in the struggles of the 2010s is a repertoire of protest tactics legitimised by global (read: Western imperialist) media framings. The protests are presented as initially seemingly spontaneous, and therefore authentic, reactions against galling and very real injustices. They are digitally coordinated and horizontally organised – instances of ‘structureless horizontalism’. Repressed by governments presented as authoritarian, the protests grow and grow, ultimately challenging governmental legitimacy. The dynamic repeatedly plays out against the initial expectations and plans of rank-and-file leaders of movements.

The thing is, though, that these grassroots leaders often lost out and governmental power ended up in the hands of forces alien, and inimical, to the interests of many of those protesting. As the protest movements outgrew the potential of the original organisers to coordinate them, bigger and more powerful forces filled the gap. The latter tended to be pre-existing organisations or institutions, like the army in Egypt in 2013 or the traditional political elites in Brazil in 2016, which turned the clock back on democratic reform and social justice. In only two of the instances which Bevins discusses, namely Chile and South Korea, did the situation end up improving, while only one ends in a ‘draw’ as Bevins sees it, in Ukraine after the Maidan protests. Bevins shows us the human cost of defeat, as progressive forces get repressed, leading activists go into hiding or exile, and depression rules the roost.

To reinforce the message, Bevins quotes two participants in struggles in Brazil. One, Mayara Vivian, was a proponent of horizontalism and direct action from the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), or Free Fare Movement. The other, Fernando Haddad, a minister in the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), or Workers’ Party, who was in government when the MPL started protests against rises in transport fares in 2013. Although both groups had risen against neoliberal globalisation, they had very different responses to it. The former an inveterate opposition movement, the latter committed to governing. Vivian and Haddad had faced off, before the movement against transport fares grew beyond its original bounds, became a nationwide protest movement, and drew in reactionary forces that ultimately toppled the PT government. Both Vivian and Haddad, years later, drew a similar lesson using identical language: ‘There is no such thing as a political vacuum’ (p.263).

Indeed, Bevins is keen to underline that grassroots movements are not really spontaneous, but involve a myriad of conscious actors, organised in different ways, with diverse political views, contrasting capabilities, and diverging strategies and tactics. And, while protests are good at creating revolutionary situations, they are poor at taking advantage of them, leaving it to better organised forces to reap the benefits. The lesson is simple: if ‘you believe that you can forge a better society, if you are willing to run the risk of trying, then you should enter the vacuum yourself’ (p.264).

Types of vanguardism

Bevins does not believe that self-governing structures from below are impossible, but sees them as unlikely in the Global South, an environment riven by powerful foreign interests and actors. His preference is clearly for what he terms vanguardist approaches, where an organised minority steps in to represent the rest of the population. Better a left minority than a right-wing one, he contends. His sympathy throughout the book, in fact, is with a variety of actors in some sense committed to what Bevins sees as a vanguard approach: social-democratic forces, communist parties and Trotskyists. He seems deliberately reluctant to become any more prescriptive, leaving it to readers to debate strategies and tactics in concrete struggles and national conditions.

We should be careful here. The challenge Bevins poses is a real one. That horizontalism has repeatedly failed in the 2010s is well demonstrated throughout the book, posing real dilemmas of strategy and tactics for those committed to fundamental change. The case for more serious consideration of strategy and tactics, embodied in organisation, is well made in the book. Nevertheless, it is also the case that the different forms of vanguardist organisation that Bevins engages with have profoundly different approaches to representation.

On entering government, even with the best of intentions, many left parties have failed. The slogan ‘one foot in the movements, one foot in the institutions’, which in one way or another has been popular in organisations as diverse as the Brazilian PT and the Greek Syriza, led to major disillusionment when the parties did achieve power. As the PT’s most prominent member, and current Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, admitted, after the PT lost power last time, ‘one foot in the movements, one foot in the institutions’ ended up with an emphasis on the foot in the institutions. That in turn led to frictions with the movements supporting left governments, as the left in power engaged in compromises with ruling elites, ultimately resulting in defeat for their programmes of redistributive transformation.

In Bevins’s non-sectarian spirit of inquiry, we may wish to pose a further question to answer his question about the missing revolution: can we build protest movements that give birth to representative institutions that have the capacity to replace the capitalist state? Here, a detour to the situation in Egypt may be a useful one. The mass movement in Tahrir Square posed a challenge to the Egyptian state, but the protest on the square could not possibly have taken power on a permanent basis. What was missing in Egypt was an institutional mechanism that could have provided a more durable form of representation for the popular classes in Egypt.

Perhaps an assembly based on delegates to represent workplaces, popular neighbourhoods and other social groups could have provided that alternative space for debate and discussion more permanently. Surely, to make that work, we would also have required mass political organisations committed to such a novel governance framework. These organisations in turn would have a significantly different understanding of where to place the emphasis when discussing the relationship between the importance of movements and existing institutions. Here, we may understand vanguardism as the commitment to building new institutions based on the working class and popular classes in general that arise through the process of struggle. That would be a very different understanding of vanguardism to the one that emphasises representation by an organisation of the movement as a whole.

Building the alternative

Yet finding a route to building such mass organisations is an art few have mastered in recent years and decades. Where to and how to build unity in struggle, and where to draw lines of division, is not an easy question to answer, especially in a climate where there is no mass consciousness of an alternative way to run society. Think about the discussions about whether to support the building of the New Popular Front in France recently. There was a real discussion on the anti-capitalist left about whether to call for a vote for it against the far right. Some argued that we should be agnostic on the question, because of the weight of centre-left forces that have done deals with the French centre in the past, but to focus on building the extra-parliamentary movement.

That moment, though, was surely an instance of when it was obvious that we could not abstain from existing institutions, lest they be captured by the far right. It was rather better to argue for a mass campaign for the New Popular Front to stop the right, coupled with a campaign to prevent it from collapsing to the centre after the election. This is because the centre had created the conditions in which the far right could prosper, so doing a deal with it in government would only tar the left with the same brush in the minds of a population sick of pro-capitalist policies. Whether or not the New Left Front does collapse in this manner or not in the future is not something the anti-capitalist left can by itself decide, but arguing for local assemblies of the New Left Front and fighting to keep up the pressure in the movements is an important contribution to building a mass consciousness about the possibility of a left alternative.

That brings me back to why we should read If We Burn. The book breathes with the aspirations of the protest movements at their height for an alternative way of running society. It reminded me of how I felt at various moments in the 2010s when so much seemed possible, like when Hosni Mubarak fell in Egypt in February 2011. It is a fidelity to the idea that ordinary people can change the world, embodied in that moment and many moments discussed in If We Burn, that keeps many left activists going at times when nothing seems to change or the right keeps doing the running.

Like any good work of history, Bevins’s book reminds us that the past – and therefore the present – is full of different possibilities. It also does an excellent job of placing debates in the movement at the centre of why these movements ended up in different places over time. We have much to learn from them, and from the discussions they had about how to relate to the media, to political parties, to NGOs, to trade unions, to their armed forces, to imperialist machinations, and to the state as such. The book is well worth reading and discussing with your comrades, as we still have a world to win.