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Radio War Nerd EP #400 [UNLOCKED] — Mass Protests To Nowhere, feat. Vincent Bevins (Patreon)

Published:
2023-10-04 01:02:49
Edited:
2023-10-04 01:20:27
Imported:
2023-10
Tags:

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Content

Guest: Vincent Bevins, writer 

Recorded: October 1, 2023

We're joined by previous RWN guest Vincent Bevins to discuss his new book, "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade & The Missing Revolution" — about the 2010s, the decade that began in what looked like mass people power, and ended worse than before. We discuss protest movements in MENA, Brazil, Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere, and the catastrophic "horizontalism" that dominated street action thinking.

Listen to our last RWN episode with Vincent, RWN #230, about his book "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World"

Buy Vincent Bevins new book "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution" & check out book tour dates on this page. Follow Vincent on Twitter (formerly known as X because we say so).

Total time: 1:34:54

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

*Buy John Dolan's comic memoir "Pleasant Hell" now available in both audio and ebook format.

Files

Comments

Quinn

the video Bevins is referring to is fred hampton commenting on the weather underground if anyone is curious

Hans Anders

The Jakarta Method is such a great book. It really captures the broad anticommunist policies of murder that the US undertook. I think it may be the single best book to understand what the US fighting the ‘cold war’ meant for the global south.

a clash of purple

Damn, Bevins is really good at coming up with titles... I'm jealous.

Doug Cartel

Wow, nice get for ep 400

Angleton

Great episode! When Mr. Bevins talked about how the Egyptian Protestors(maybe) said they were had when the Military and el-Sisi seized power all I could think about was Marx’s(and best imo) work the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and this passage from it “Last of all, the dregs of bourgeois society form themselves into the holy phalanx of order, and the hero Crapulinski moves into the Tuileries as the ‘saviour of society’.”

Mathieu Duchesne

This interview remembered me the 2012 student uprising in Québec, Le Printemps Érables, and how horizontality and the backstabing of the reformists killed off the uprising once and for all, to a point there was no popular uprising in Québec since, except the few anti-mask weirdos, but they never had a popular support.

Øystein Monsen

This is your best episode possibly ever. Bravo!

Alex

Excellent, excellent stuff.

PostmasterFenian

Waiting for the next string of protests to reinvent democratic centralism.

J P 3

Great discussion. The audiobook is excellent so far (also thought Jakarta Method was outstanding). The past few years have really seemed like a golden age in terms of non-fiction writing. Bevins does an excellent job synthesizing and applying some of the more recent academic work into his journalism. However, the writing is very accessible. An impressive feat.

Welfare state

My Chilean background and the experiences during the arab spring basically leap-frogged me as a teenager towards organised Marxism. All the years of working together with anarchists have made me convinced that our way is better, but it would be nice if Communists in general weren't the most stubborn people on earth, maybe we could even score some wins then

PostmasterFenian

Aren't red guard just some weird gonzoloist psyop that yells at dsa and psl ppl at this point?

James Whale

The first 5 minutes definitely "triggered" me and I noticed that on myself and forced myself to keep listening. I have been apart of simelar movements, with all the best of intentions for almost a decade now . When I kept listening I really resonated with much of the conversation and felt like you all were really discussing the movement in good faith . Since 2020 I am now pretty disillusioned with anarchistic approach.

Martin

As a participant in occupy, this ep really hits home. Funnily enough, I also drew opposite lessons from occupy than many at the time. Nothing like an up close view of horizontal failure and literally being part of a opaque and unaccountable decision making clique to jade you on anarchism.

Totally Tanked

An amazing episode. Really hits home for anyone involved in grass roots politics.

a clash of purple

Are Occupy or any of these other movements really anarchist? I don't think they had an ideology at all.

a clash of purple

Amazing how Occupy is pretty much forgotten in the mainstream. With so many of these movements, as soon as they leave the streets it's like they might as well have never happened. The problem is that as soon as you form anything like an effective organization, the state comes down on you like a pile of bricks. All the activist leadership from the anti-cop revolts in the U.S. were quietly murdered by the police, who said it was suicides and everyone just moved on. A big part of the reason why this horizontalist approach caught on, maybe the main reason, is that state repression has completely destroyed all forms of organized resistance to the imperial project. Like, there were leaders and stuff, they were just all murdered. Turns out if you give infinite resources to the cops, you can keep a lid on popular unrest effectively forever.

Martin

Anarchist ideology suffused occupy. It's structures. It's aims or lack thereof. It's boosters and early adopters. The degree to which it was self consciously anarchist once metastatic growth happened is arguable. It's hostility to representation, demands, religious adherence to prefiguration ad a strategy and practice. Idk seemed anarchist to me, at least anarchist-ish.

Martin

I agree with the thrust of this, with the caveat that nothing lasts forever and if you're on the left it doesn't aid you to assume the omnipotence of your enemies. Because they aren't. However, I feel like people really need to drink in the fact that technology/internet etc is a highly uneven and hostile terrain for activists.

Martin

We were no Spanish Republicans that's for sure.

a clash of purple

Well, yeah. The empire won't always have infinite resources to spare for their oppression apparatus. I just think people shouldn't forget the context that these horizontal movements come out of.

SB

Bevins is great. His Jakarta Method IMO is already seminal. TBH, I'm not as interested to read this one. I'm sure it's great. The discussion was insightful regardless. Completely unrelated, this for some reason reminded me of his totally out of the blue tweet (I followed him after discovering JM, I believe through RWN) back in 2021 about Nazis in Kiev - https://twitter.com/Vinncent/status/1419989288779911173. I think it was a ballsy thing to do then while still in Ukraine.

Dongo

Feel better John!!

John Hieronymus

I’m listening to the new bevins book and I’ve got a fair amount of criticism of his history of the new left, the black freedom movement and the Bolsheviks to start with. Like I’m glad he says he’s not a historian up front because his histories seem very biased, which sucks because I get the core point of “organization is good” is lost on a lot of people but he’s carrying a lot of water for people who doom leninist type parties to be tiny sects that are so marginal they can’t even be called political. Anyone with any familiarity with SNCC would know that it was not a top down hierarchically disciplined organization. They were disciplined but by the grass roots at least according to the histories I’ve read. The SDS was founded by people with direct ties to the so called “old left” and was funded initially by the UAW. By the time of it’s peak it was controlled by marxist Leninists from the weatherman faction and Maoists from the PLP. I’m going to keep slogging through this but as a union steward and tenant organizer but I’m very concerned that this book isn’t actually about taking lessons from the past 10 years (I’ve been on the ground in the left since 1999) and instead is going to provide more of the tired same old worn out templates from a different set of failures by highly disciplined groups focused on taking state power by any means necessary. 2 counter suggestions, Folks should read “dancing with dynamite” about the social movements of South America in the aughts-aught teens, and “neither vertical nor horizontal” by Nunes as a proposed new framework for organizing effectively against capitalism.

floatybirb

This episode was very insightful and i think ill have to read the book. I spend a chunk of each week doing some kind of left wing activism, protesting or organizing, and I always wonder why nothing we try seems to get any tangible result beyond "we got some media people to mention this problem briefly". In the USA we can get broad popular support for a lot of things but we haven't found the right lever to transmute that support into any tangible concession from the ruling class. Maybe we need to find a good middle ground between So-Centralized-That-It-Gets-Hijacked-Into-Stalinism-Mark-II and So-Amorphous-We-Cant-Really-Win-Anything. Or maybe that sort of axis is the wrong way to think about this problem, and/or every possible course of action we could take is equally doomed. Who knows?

floatybirb

thanks for the book recommendations, i might have to check out those two too for comparison.

Dorst Savijeski

Horrible history strange bedfellows the counter revolutionaries have at times. Not a point about who is right about anything, more a perspective on oligarchic retrenchment in IR.