For a full decade, mobilized by social media and inflamed by the inequities of globalization, the world was on fire with mass protest: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring, Gezi Park in Turkey, Brazil and Chile and Ukraine and Hong Kong. At the time it was almost irresistible to overlook the differences among these movements and see instead an astonishing unforeseen rupture in the global order, and one that just kept ripping — a modern-day 1848 of parallel global uprising. Yet writing about the decade in retrospect, Bevins argues that what is most remarkable is how it ended: with nearly every country back where it started or worse, as reactionary forces and backlash unbent what once looked like an inevitable arc of history.
What explains the pattern? For Bevins, it is primarily a question of political strategy and structure, how contemporary protest has exchanged purpose for scale, and how little trust these recent movements have placed in those traditional forms of radical hierarchy that he calls, in a purposeful provocation, “Leninism.”
Movements need followers, he writes, but they also need leaders. When they choose instead to fetishize shapelessness or what they often call, these days, “horizontality,” the prospects for real change shrink pretty quickly, and the genuinely revolutionary energy of the streets is left somewhat up for grabs. In some cases, it simply dissipates — mass protest as release valve. In others, it is repurposed by more strategic actors with clearer objectives, often political agents friendlier to the establishment and working to enclose the protest energy in a big centrist tent. In still others, the initial protests present the provocation around which outraged others can mobilize a reactionary backlash.
In Brazil, over the last decade, it was all of the above: Anarchist agitators decided to back away from the raucous energy of the street after they helped unleash it, then watched as the middle class and media reinterpreted the protests as generic calls for reform, leading to corruption investigations that eventually toppled the social-democratic party in power, landed its onetime leader Lula in prison and helped usher in the rabid right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro.
The pattern holds not just across the poorer parts of the world, where Bevins concentrates, but in more affluent and outwardly “stable” parts of Europe and North America as well. Here, recent protests have been characterized by the same two distinctive features: their enormous scale and their mercurial shapelessness. Drafting off social media, you can get millions in the streets and awe-inspiring aerial photography, but also risk delivering something more like a symbolic mark on history than a concrete policy legacy. Tick through a list of those movements, for instance, and they may also call to mind narratives of failure and, in some cases, backlash: Occupy, the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter.