Chapo Trap House - 777 - Burn Book feat. Vincent Bevins (10/30/23)

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

Author Vincent Bevins returns to the show to discuss his new book “If We Burn” covering the “mass protest decade.” We discuss global protest movements from Brazil to Tunisia to Egypt to Chile, how they’ve affected or failed to affect global politics, and how the last decade of protest and activism relates to the ongoing conflict in Palestine. You can find Vincent’s book here: www.ifweburn.com

I Welcome back friends, it is Monday, October 30th and Chapo Trap House is coming right back at you. We are joined today by the author Vincent Bevin, who has a new book out, If We Burn, that takes a look at basically the decade between 2010 and 2020, and the sort of global protest movements for democracy around the world, and some of the unattended consequences and failures of those movements. Vincent, it's great that this horrific confluence of world events has led you to be the perfect guest for this week's show. So welcome back. Yeah, thank you very much.

It's been, it's been strange to be relevant for this, all of this stuff to be relevant again. Yeah. Well, I mean, before we get into, into the book, you are in London right now and you were just at a, a massive protest demanding a ceasefire in solidarity with Palestine right now in London. I heard there was like, about how many people were at that protest. I mean, I saw the photos on the bridge. How about how many people were there? I mean, I think you have to trust like the people with cameras and like helicopters, these kinds of things. I heard a half a million. I certainly like when I was on that bridge, Westminster bridge, that was a small minority of people,

but I think you can't really take the take the shot And yeah, like we thought we were we thought we were protesting for a ceasefire But then everybody else said we were doing something else which is I think related to the problem with this that I talk about in this book But yeah, it was it was quite a lot of people I think was the biggest one that had so far here in the UK So yeah half a million people in London over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of more in major American cities and European capitals were faced again with a mass protest movement that wants something that wants to change the behavior of the governments, of the citizens

of the country's protesting these terrible things that the government is doing. But we run face again into the reality of the limits's protesting these terrible things that the government is doing, but like, we run face again into the reality of like, the limits of protest, and I guess I'm just like, what was your perspective participating in that March over the weekend, and just like how you see the protest movements turning out to demand a ceasefire, like how does that fit into your narrative,

or like do you see any similarities from the cases that you talk about in your book? Yeah, I think one thing that becomes kind of clear after looking at all this stuff for four years is that protests are fundamentally communicative actions. They really are like demonstrations. They really send a message, usually, to existing elites. And so for the sake of what we were doing this Sunday, I thought there was real value in going out there

and being counted. And like, I don't say this to be just like disparaging, but basically I think I went out there to participate in a photo shoot. Like, we just went there to be like, yes, this many of us are opposed to this thing that is happening. And I think the clearer the demand is,

the more likely that, you know, that it's an effective action, because it really is, I think sort clearer the demand is, the more likely that, you know, that is an effective action because it really is, I think, sort of like a demonstration. Now, the book that I wrote is built around a specific time to a protest, a specific phenomenon that becomes really important for moving history forward in the 2010s. And I write the book as if it is the most important thing moving forward in history in the 2010s. And these are mass protests that become so large that they actually dislodge or fundamentally destabilize existing governments. And so not only what I participated in over the weekend, but what's been happening in the

year of world is very reminiscent of 2011, right? So like what happened in Egypt recently led me to like get on WhatsApp or signal and start texting my Egyptian revolutionary friends and people that I met for this book and be like, do you think that this is like happening again kind of and they're like absolutely? And one thing that was really fascinating and sort of I think important about the what became top of your square, what became the Egyptian revolution in 2011 is a lot of the groups that came together to create that protest movement

and ultimately occupy the square and topple the government, came together through pro-Palestinian solidarity. They understood what they were doing as fundamentally pro-Palestinian and anti-imperialist, which was why it was so strange and shocking to them when CNN represented their movement to the world as something that was pro-Western and pro-American. Because the way that they understood it was, democracy in Egypt will always mean support

for Palestine, like an overwhelming majority of Egyptian supposed normalization with the Israel, a more overwhelming majority support Palestinians. And so the CC government that's been in power since the 2013 coup really must not allow for that particular type of democratic uprising or that sort of particular type of democratic message to be broadcast to the world. And that's exactly happened the other day, right? So he tried to create protests that he could control and they spilled once more into Tucker Square. So this really gets back, all gets to a couple of the fundamental dynamics that mattered in that decade, is that media can sort of misrepresent most protests if they want to, and it's very difficult for these particular

types of protests to respond. And in that region, in the Arab world, the existence of the particular type of Israel that you do have, sort of makes democracy very, very threatening, real democracy in the world, is very, very threatening to the particular power configurations that you have there, basically Saudi and Israeli Germany. I mean, one of the things you lay out in the book is many of the, many of the things that the people, for instance, who occupied to hear a square and overthrew their government

of the things that they wanted, did not come to pass. And this, in a lot of ways, your book is about the thwarted and democratic ambitions that the world felt in the 21st century. And I think whether you're a citizen of an Arab country or a citizen of an EU or America, it seems like the Democratic will, at least as regards to a ceasefire in Palestine, is overwhelmingly on one side, but the governments are completely on the other side. And like, you run into this,

they run into the wall of the limits of protests because they still control all the police and security forces and the governments. Do you write. Is it hard not to communicate a level of despair in covering topics like these? Well, hopefully it's not despair, because the cases that I concentrate on the most in the bug, and there's 13 that I look at, and then I come down to 10 that are really this type of mass protests, are not ones that are kind of ignored by existing elites because we had that before. In 2003, I protested against the Warni Rock. It was very meaningful. I think we did send a message, but ultimately they didn't.

They just didn't listen. What happened in the 2010s very many times is that protests actually got so big to really disrupt and remove governments or to fundamentally destabilize them, put them in a position where they were willing to give up something in order to stay in power. Now, in that moment, in the moment in which these mass protests create a power vacuum and opportunities to either enter that power vacuum or to extract

concessions from the governments, the particular type of protest, which became quite common, quite almost seeming natural in the 2010s, did a very poor job of extracting concessions from states, or did a poor job of entering the power vacuum and often what happened was somebody else went into the power vacuum, whoever was waiting in the wings, often you would get sort of imperialist actors from outside the country. But if indeed, like the problem is just that tactics were slightly mismatched

with the ultimate goals of so many of these movements, what appears to be sort of a pessimistic story becomes an optimistic one quite quickly. Because there's clearly like desire, there's clearly people willing to take risks. There's enough people that have been mobilized to like actually cause real problems for existing elites. And often like, you know, a march sends a message, but often doesn't really cause real problems for existing elites, and often a march sends a message, but often doesn't really cause real problems for existing elites. So if you're just going to, if the issue is just matching tactics to goals, then I don't think despair is the answer, but in the short term, I mean, I don't, I mean, the short term watching what's going on in Gaza is horrible.

I mean, I don't see a way out that is not awful. So in the short term, I'm certainly not feeling great, but I know I'm sure I think that there's a lot of things that can happen. Would you say that, like, when you talk about this specific kind of protest and like the fact that they did dislodge their governments, but then like what they got in exchange for that was perhaps not what they initially intended. When you talk about the that disparity, do you think your book could be called as skeptical of the tactic of horizontalism

in terms of organizing mass movements? Yeah, I mean, at least in when it comes to this particular moment that I just described, right? So the particular type of response to injustice that became really common in the 2010s, especially after Toffer Square. But it was getting momentum even before that Another type of response to injustice that became really common in the 2010s, especially after tougher square, but it was getting momentum even before that, is the apparently spontaneous, leaderless, digitally coordinated, horizontally organized mass protests in

public squares or public spaces. And you can see why either intentional horizontalism, like when movements really believe that there should be absolutely no leaders or any division between who's in and out, or the just sort of concrete horizontality when you just like, actually, that's the situation. You get in a place like Egypt after decades of being able to rule the summation

of civil society. You can see why that is really effective. Dispackage that I just described can get a lot of people in the streets, right? Because you can say to people, you saw this post on the internet yesterday, you're going to come tomorrow. You don't need to exactly know who's behind this,

what we're going to do. You just need to be mad about that thing. And so it really works in that phase in getting people out. But it doesn't do a great job in these opportunities that were generated to either seize power, like in Egypt, they could have, if there were a revolutionary party, they could have seized power in January 2011,

and overseeing the transition to whatever the next government might have been. But a protest, especially one that is configured like this, can't really step into a power vacuum, and it often can't really step into a power vacuum. And it often can't even really sort of elaborate a set of demands like the kind like you can't say to existing elites. If you give us A, B and C, we will stop you know shutting down the country. And then you know after that you know maybe you'll need to get A,

maybe you'll need to get B, maybe C, you leave for another day, but then you can go back and rebuild stronger. But often in that case, there was no one to speak to what could, like, you know, in a way that a union would negotiate, like end a strike. They would say, okay, we really wanted this and the future we want this, but we'll go back to work. If you give us an B, that could often not be elaborated, but it's not because this form is bad at everything. It's because this kind of, like, this particular type of response to injustice ended up being

so much more successful than anyone had really planned for. And in many, many of the cases across the decade, the organizers did not plan for initial success. So yeah, I think a lot of the people that I spoke to, and I did 250 interviews over the last four years, a lot of them say, we wish that our movement had been less horizontal. And I think that was the consensus of a lot of people looking back, but it was about this opportunity, not the sort of a priori theoretical analysis of whether or not it's good to be at the same level.

Just this particular thing could not be done by the particular type of thing that we'd put together. The last time you were on was when your book, The Jakarta Method, came out, and that's very much a book about horrific state repression of people that grew out of your experience living and working in Brazil, and the threats made by the Brazilian right wing, the Jakarta Jakarta is coming here as a way of liquid liquidating their sort of left wing or union or just anyone that doesn't fit in with their vision of power. How did this book come about?

And like, what was the idea that led you to do all this research and to like dive into these movements over like the last decade? Or so? Yeah, I was really, I mean, I started working on this book before the Jakarta method even came out. So then 2019, I was already putting this together. And it has to do with my own experiences in Brazil, basically, in June 2013, I was very, very close

to one of these mass protests explosions that was unexpectedly successful and then generated a set of opportunities that the original organizers could not take advantage of. So this has been a real concern of mine, I guess, personally, and kind of for everyone that I know that lived through the same thing for 10 years. And in that case, who entered the vacuum,

I mean, the original organizers of the protest were left to center kiss and punk, they wanted to lower public transportation called the Movement to Passellee, Read the MPL. And who enters the vacuum movement to pass the library, the MPL, and who enters the vacuum, who enters the streets, who takes advantage of the chaos, and this weird energy that has been unleashed into the centers of the biggest cities in the country, is what is the beginning, I think, now recognizably, of the far right movement in Brazil, like people that come out into the streets and yellow football,

yellow and green football gear, like the National Soccer Jersey, and then become clearly like the beginnings of a far right movement in the country. And then a group of kids who are funded by US libertarian, pre-market organizations, either had studied under the Koch brothers or had been gotten getting a lot of funding from right way organizations in the country, and they step into that vacuum and they pretend to be the MPL. They created an organization called the MBL with the intentional goal of tricking people and they do.

And this is something similar to that happened in Egypt between 2011 and 2013. So for me, it was like personal. I lived through this. I like was one of the foreign journalists that was problematically and foolishly euphoric at the moment when it all exploded and it all looked so great. And I was one of the people living in the country that had to deal with the sort of slow horrors

that unfolded, not necessarily as a result, but in the wake of that strange explosion. There's a good bit in the Brazil part about Brazilian punk groups and Brazilian punk bands. There's some great band names here, including, this is the English translation of Portuguese, brain invaders, and an all-woman punk outfit known as the,

an Narcic menstruation. Yeah, I did. How brain invaders and an Narcic menstruation work into your narrative there. Yeah, a mean, how brain invaders and an arctic administration work into your narrative there. Yeah, makes Thrasso an arquica. Yeah, like punk is a huge part of what, I mean, punk brings anarchism back into the political scene in a lot of countries.

And certainly that's true in Brazil. So a lot of the people that put together this group that I just described to MPL, the movement that Bustal bus delivery had been from like, punk bands, another guy was in a band called Class War. They had all like worked at Indie Media. Like I think, you're like, you remember Indie Media, right? Like that would have been your moment on like,

in the internet, right? Do you remember reading Indie Media? I actually, I don't remember that. I was a big. It wasn't cool enough. It was big, it was big for me. Like it was like 19, I'm just barely old enough to be, to remember, but it was like 1999, 2000, 2001.

And it was a very like anarcho inspired sort of early internet, you like, digital utopian thing that came together to cover the Seattle protest. And yeah, like a lot of the Brazilian activists that put together this set, they were like, they all had like nicknames too. One guy's name is LaGoumi Revechtable. There's like Pedro Punk, he wishes he's like Peter the Punk.

And yeah, they had, they had, they got into each other really, really well over, over eight years, like organizing together. And they all had similar goals and they all had sort of the same ideological assumptions about what they wanted to get done in Brazil and how they wanted to organize. But what they didn't plan for was like millions of people entering the streets as a result of what they had put together. And all those new people had very different ideas about what the protest was about. They had not learned the ethics of a mosh pit over like 10 years of vegan.

What about food not bombs yet? Did you? Yeah, like over like 10 years of like vegan. What about food not bombs yet? Did you, did you, did you, yeah, I know, I know, I know food not bombs. Yeah, they basically had a food not bombs. Also, it was called the Verzo da, which is like, you know, like veggie fest or something. And they all had like ethic. They all like knew how they were supposed to act on the streets. But then these new people came and they just didn't care about these rules.

They just like sort of like bulldozed over their original left anarchist ideals and they like didn't know how to respond to it. And like nobody did because in 2013, the government was the very popular and overwhelmingly elected social democratic president Dilma Rousseff who like came up as a dissident, fighting the dictatorship.

Like she wasn't Mubarak in Egypt. But when this explosion happened, like foreign journalists that were even more clueless than me started saying, like, oh, it's the Brazilian spring. They're doing, they're doing chocolateeers square in Brazil. But like, there was a popularly elected president. This didn't make a lot of sense. So yeah, so the punks and like the fans of Minks

throw a So-and-Archikaaicman menstruation, in this moment, didn't know what to do with what they thought that they had been trying to achieve for so long. I mean, did this all eventually lead to the Lavosjado case and the removal of the, you know, Brazilian government? Yeah, indirectly. So a lot of elements are born on the streets in that weird, like, sort of pressure cooker or ca call during a energy of June 13 that ended up ultimately removing Dilma Rousseff from power and a parliamentary coup in 2016. The Congress, again, Dilma and Congress, like don't know what to do, they're trying to freaking out

trying to give the streets what they want because they don't really know what the streets want. And the streets are asking for all kinds of contradictory things. One thing that does happen is they change the laws regarding jurisprudence in Brazil, which allows a set of guys who were pretending not to be far-right judicial actors, but were far-right judicial actors to start to work behind the scenes,

to put together an anti-corruption case with the ultimate goal of getting will in jail. They did get a little in jail, and it became clear later that they had been working with the US government the whole time. And then this group, MBL, that I told you was like the libertarian youth movement, who had been on like summer camps in the United States, unlike how to do a tea party in Brazil, they led to a position of, you know, quote unquote, leadership because they were, they were like, they were all about leading protest movements.

They were all about conquering power. They let a movement that sort of was pro-Lavagato, pro impeachment, and then they all, many of them were elected in the same election that put Giroboros and Arlen power. You also mentioned that it did not go unnoticed among Brazilian elites when I think in 2008 or 2009, Obama referred to Lula as quote, my man and one of the most popular politicians in the world. Like how is that received income inequality in Brazil. Yeah, the Brazil, let's like, has a very simple way to describe it. It's right. I think it's correct to say that the Brazilian really class is pro-US and the Brazilian media for sure, like really like a lot of Brazil. I mean, I worked in like

Brazil's main, or like one of them, the most respected newspapers. They really looked to like the New York Times, like especially in foreign policy stuff. They really looked to the US as a source of like cultural inspiration. They want to be respected by the US. And then of course, like the Bolsonaro movement is like rabidly pro-US. They like love US.

They want to be more. They like are like more loyal to the US and are Trump like than even most Americans. And this is like not true for the traditional left in Brazil. The traditional left in Brazil used the US as a kind of fearless power. You know, Lula's brother was tortured by the dictatorships so was Dilma.

The US, you know, was responsible for backing the coup in 1964. And so, but yeah, but like in 2008, nobody could really question that Lula had been doing very, very well by the standards that you would judge like a social democratic president like improve ratings were incredibly high. Everyone had gotten better off rich people had gotten better off but poor people have gotten better off too.

So that's a victory for, you know, in the like, for the very low bar of like Brazilian inequality and things sort of deteriorate in Duma's presidency. Like relations with the US get worse in her first office and then especially after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. This is a little bit of talking about Brazil. Like what is going on with Brazil right now? Because we've got Lula, Lula is back in power. He's back.

He's one of like the major world leaders speaking very forcefully about what Israel is doing, Gaza right now, calling it a war crime, I believe. Yeah, he just said, like a few days ago, he just said this is not a war, this is a genocide. So I think he's even more forceful. Yeah. So like, yeah, like how do relationships in the United States and Brazil stand now and how does, how does Lulistan in terms of like Brazilian public opinion currently?

He's doing, I think, quite well considering the very, very different, cold circumstances that under which he took over. So, I spent most of this year in Brazil, either with the landless workers, who was just a radical, radical, led reform group, or I spent the last couple months in Congress, like interviewing the most radical and extreme bolsanadiestas,

who all really love the United States. They all get a lot of their ideological cues from like, right, wing YouTubers, or like all really love the United States, they all get a lot of their ideological cues from like, right, wing YouTubers, or like TikTok stars in the United States. But when, at the end of the Bolsonaro government, at the end of last year, there was kind of a confluence of US and Brazilian, US and Lula's interests,

along like anti-Bolsanades to slash anti-Trump-based aligns, like the Biden administration kind of saw Lula as an acceptable next chapter after Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro was really really aligned in the at least in the eye of like Democrats in the United States with like a kind of like Trumpy and authoritarianism. And like Bolsonaro wanted everyone to think that. He really cultivated that and meant she like really wanted people to call him the Trump of the tropics. And so that democratic transition did happen. The United States did not try to help Oku happen,

which might have happened in other moments of Brazilian history. The Bolsonaroese just tried to carry out many coup d'avis. They did not succeed. Little takes over. But then it becomes quite clear again that this is a guy who believes that he was put in jail by a secret US operation to destroy a Brazilian industry.

He believes the US is an imperial power. And so while he wants good relations with the United States, he made it pretty clear, pretty quickly, and I think there was no purpose, even though in the US media, he was like, who these are gaffes? Whereas I think he was really setting out his position on a set of issues, but he did not want to join the war ever. In Ukraine, there was a lot of fights over that, publicly and privately, over the littleest position

on Ukraine. He did not want to join, like, a chorus of criticism from North America for countries like Venezuela and Iraq, where he's kind of like, no, leave me alone. He's like, I'm not going to participate in this, the United States has been trying to overthrow countries in this region for a very long time. And so relations are not as good as they were at the beginning.

But what he's trying to do domestically is just put the country back together. And it's hard to remember how like, because things are kind of normal again, but things were so bad last year. It was really like you were living in fear at all times, there was people dying everywhere. Like São Paulo was like a post-apocalyptic movie

from most of the pandemic in the years afterwards. So the country is like slowly like realizing that it can like live again, I would say. But also the United States has slowly realized that Louis is like, oh yeah, he's kind of an anti-imperialist. And like his family was tortured by the regime that we support it. So like maybe he's not gonna do with us and everything.

Moving from Brazil to Europe, could you talk about how you're reporting on the Euro-Midon movement in Ukraine and like how that began and just like, just a pretty history of the Euro-Midon for our listeners who maybe aren't aware of it or have forgotten about it by now. Yeah, and this is another one. This was one of the second wave of the protests in the 2010s. There was a lot in 2011, and then in 2013 you had Guessi Park, you had Brazil, and then you had Euro-Midon in Ukraine.

And all three of them had some characteristics in common, which were hard to explain or that were hard for global media to understand. In all three cases, the far right shows up, and it varies how much overall they play in shaping the final outcome. In Brazil, it takes a while, and Ukraine, I think, to play a role in shaping the final outcome. In all three cases, football, who will get matter to the final outcome. In all three cases, you really have to distinguish

what happens at the beginning from what's happening at the middle and what people say they want versus what happens. Because like, imposing a single narrative and what happens in, in my dawn, I think it's just like, doesn't work. Like, you have three distinct movements, I think. Initially, you have a small group of basically western facing liberals, a lot of which that work for NGOs funded by the West. I don't say that in a conspiratorial way. They were like, yeah, we were funded by NGOs from the West. That's how we have to get

the way that we can exist. This first group was coming into the streets in protest of Yanukovic's decision not to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Now, that association agreement did not have popular support in the country. Only 40% of Ukrainians more or less wanted it to be signed. But, and then this is like really, really common across what I call the mass protest decade. You have a police crackdown, which causes way more people to come into the streets. And the people that come into the streets, like, have a much wider set of concerns, and they're very different group of people than the initial sort of liberals in western face saying sort of like quote unquote civil society actors.

And they often want a more just economy in Ukraine, because since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been absolutely decimated. Everybody in Ukraine has a real right to be upset about the oligarchic structure of the economy, the absolute decimation of the country since the fall of the Soviet Union. But then, that just kind of goes on for a while, and I think there's kind of a way in which it's like in Brazil. No one knows exactly what's supposed to be done with this. Like Yanukovych is elected. He was elected. There's a lot of people in the square. And, you know, and then you get a moment in which armed elements often on the far right, establish agemony over, like, kind of self-defense forces in the square. And these have a different

set of views than the people in the second group and from the people in the first group. And while they never, like, become the majority of the people in the second group and from the people in the first group. And while they never become the majority of the people in the square, I think they punch up up their weight because they are armed and they are organized and they have a clear set of ideological goals. And then to some extent, I think shaping the way that the UNO coverage actually does fall, the way that a new government is formed, and a lot of people in the east of the country believe that they are elected president, the person they voted for, that even if they didn't like very much, they liked them more than the other guy. They come to believe that they've had their government taken away from them.

And so, I guess, if my approach in this book has value, I think it's like in putting these elements next to each other, putting everything in chronological order and just showing like what happens. Of course in Ukraine, like the position of the US is very important all time. There's signal to support for monoprotests. And then all of you, of course, Russia's reaction matters as well. And this is like, again, this happens in so many cases across. The decade, either opportunities are created to sort of change geopolitical circumstances

according to the perceived interests of some power, external actor, or people just react very quickly. And yeah, and like that, I think fundamental difficulty in separating out all the different things like has plagued a lot of the understanding of my nonsense because people like, oh, like everyone wanted Europe. And it's like, well, yeah, but their idea of what Europe was was like very different. Like they wanted to be rich.

But the actual like original agreement was not that popular. And then the replacement of young and college with this new government's strange sort of ad hoc administration was very, very popular. In half of the country, like the actual might on protest itself, only had about 50% support at the height of its popularity. But we get told that it was one thing, and I just think across the decade,

it never makes sense to say that these are one things. You have to look actually what happens historically in chronological order. And when you look at these, starting with Tunisia, which kicked off the Arab Spring, if you look at these, like starting with Tunisia, which kicked off the Arab Spring, if you look at these things in chronological order, and like you set up like the characters and like a sequence of events, like what is the pattern that emerges? Like what are you diagnosing here? Like it all, like I mean sort of this book is like structured around one question,

which is how is it that so many mass protests led to the opposite of what they asked for? And they don't all lead to the opposite of what they asked for, but a lot do. And I think the answer, the only way to answer that question is in the story itself, I think like different people will come to the book with different sets of experiences and see a different answer emerge from the events. But certainly putting these things in order allows you to see that the ways in which one thing inspired the next thing.

And I think this could be really good and also quite complicated, quite problematic at some times. So for example, and after the fall of the government in Tunisia, the Egyptian revolutionaries did not think that they were going to get enough people on the streets to even ask for the fall of Mubarak, but it seems pretty clear that looking to Tunisia and what had happened there really mattered for inspiring people to come out of the streets. And then with this very, very inspiring, beautiful scene of T Square that, you know,

the whole world is observing for 18 days. You get a lot of movements around the world which are like explicitly trying to copy this, and that includes in the United States, like Occupy Wall Street was at Buster's magazine saying we need to do a Tucker Square in New York. That includes in Western Europe. And like places where like the political systems

are quite different, different, because ultimately, what happens in Egypt is the military season's power. And that's probably not what you want in the US context in 2011, but Occupy Wall Street works for other reasons that I think are unexpected. It gets a message out. But you see across the decade, the ways in which solidarity is transferred immediately across media,

especially social media, but also through traditional media. People are inspired by each other, but then there's also the strange slippage where there's also like a copying and pasting of tactics, not only from countries where conditions are very, very different, but after a condition, or after it's been proven that it didn't even work

in the original country. So like the talk oftier model continues to inspire movements to copy it after like the CCCO in 2013, after it becomes clear that like this ended quite poorly. Another interesting element to your book is a probably you talk about how like protests marches, people walking in the street carrying signs or chanting slogans, this is relatively a modern invention.

People in the 16th century did not express their dissatisfaction with the local government by turning out marching in the streets. They would just sort of eject the tax collector from town. Is that a tactic that is the result of the creation of modern media? Or you can see images of thousands of people, and now it can be disseminated globally, almost instantaneously? Yeah, absolutely.

I think that's right. I mean, you don't see protests. I mean, you see things that we might call protests, but they weren't the same thing. You would see red riots. You would see the supply of food and demand to be sold at local prices, or you would go or kill some local elite.

But like protesting in the way that we understand it now only emerges with mass media. And it's like, you know, because I think that like a lot of people talked about the impact of technology in 2010s and like social media is the technology they're talking about, but like also photography is quite a new and strange, like piece of technology. I think like I think we're still sort of integrating into human society, how to deal with the ability to see things that aren't in front of your face. Because for the vast mass majority of human history, you could only see things that were in front of your head.

But when you could only see things in front of your face, when it makes sense to go to the square of a major capital and sort of demonstrate to the nation because the nation didn't exist yet. And no one was going to see it except for people that were like literally walking in front of you. And that's why I come down like I said at the beginning that these are fundamentally communicative actions, I think often fundamentally media actions. And that like makes a lot of sense. Like when I said like if I was trying to be on the bridge, Westminster Bridge on Sunday and send the message that like we're against what's happening right now in Gaza, then that makes sense. But when number one, the protest stops really being a protest and creates revolutionary conditions, there was, there's often like this strange like short circuit in this decade where they like kept sending a message to somebody, but there was no one there. Like there was no one else.

There was no one to complain to anymore. Like the thing to do was to like go and become the elites or go and become the people that were in charge of the situation. And then like, and this is a problem that I think that we've all seen like play out like over the last few days. Like I certainly did is that fundamentally, communicative actions, fundamentally media actions rely

upon the reproduction of the images and the messages in media. And like, if in the case of Tucker Square, global media like agrees with you, they like what you're doing. And they want to say that it's good. They'll find a way to say that it's good that is like the jobs with their own ideological assumptions, like, you know, CNN showing up and being like, you know, each of points to be like America whereas really they would have loved to probably be more pro-Palestinian and anti-Neoliberal. Or, and this is what happened with me this weekend, if Dominic Media don't like what you're doing, they'll just find the three worst, like the three people on the streets, whether not they're like actual protesters, they're put there by MI5 or the FBI and be like, oh,

that's what they're doing. That's a pro-terror protest. Oh, like this is, you know, oh, yeah, like those 1,000, oh, that's what they're doing. That's a pro-terror protest. Oh, like this is, oh, yeah, like those 1 million, half a million people on the streets, even though no one that was there, like, experienced this, like it was just all about anti-semitism and support for Israel. Because fundamentally, it's like, it is always in some kind of dialogue with media.

Yeah, it's in that dialogue with media, and it's certainly something we've been talking about over the last couple of weeks. Yeah, that like, you know, for instance, the hundreds of Jewish Americans who are arrested at Grand Central Station this past weekend for demanding a ceasefire and then salad already with Palestine, they're anti-Semites. This is violent, Jew-rated. Right. But like, one of the things we've been talking about is like, obviously like, yeah, the

media doesn't like the message of these protests protests and they will find any way to make it seem like it's something other than it is. But like that only goes so far and one of the things Felix and I've been talking about is just being somewhat I don't know impressed or slightly I don't know. The slightly elated at how badly that this is translating from like the direct media message to public opinion. And it's just like, am I wrong in thinking that the media is running the same script that they always do,

but on this issue, as far as Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza, it just doesn't seem to be working. Well, I think I was also impressed with that action, the one at Grand Central Station, like the Jewish voice for peace one, because I mean, it has nothing to do with what I did, but like if there were lessons sort of offered at the end of my book, like, they seem to have like,

learned the same ones. Like, it was quite clear. Like, they're all like, they all identify like, as Jews, they're all wearing the shirt. They're like, we're here for this reason. We are this group of people. You can't say that we're not, you know, like, we are very, very clearly organized as this group

and with this message. And I think that was quite powerful. And like, yeah, I think you're right. I think that like, because who's the media, right? So the media is a confluence of the traditional sort of mainstream outlets, which still play a huge role. Newer, like, you know, more independent outlets, like you guys are like media, everyone on social media is media.

And like, like recognizing that it's a terrain of battle doesn't necessarily mean that like the old sort of Washington, sort of like White House aligned outlets are gonna win and I don't think that like, I don't know, maybe, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm in, I mean, we're all in sort of different quarters of media, but like, it doesn't mean that they're going to win.

It just means that it is kind of like, will always be a terrain of contention after the action to be like, who was it? And the more, and like certain actions, I think are harder to lie about than others. Yeah, and I guess like, to the point about message discipline, I think, you know, one thing I've been impressed by is like the ceasefire now is the demand. And they're being like a real discipline behind that message and not getting bogged down in debating or litigating which atrocity was done by which side or getting into the whole history of Israel, Palestine.

And again, like that history is important and it's legitimate. But I feel like in this current context, in this current moment, when public opinion is so clearly on the side of, at the very least, ending the killing in Gaza right now, it seems to me like a calculated strategy to get people to debate the minutiae of history and, you know, warfare tactics. Yeah, because that's a gacha, right? Like you can't get a half a million, you can't get a half a million people on the street and London that are all going to have a half a million, you can't get a half a million people on the street and London that are all going to have a

perfect answer for, you know, the evolution of a moss and the relationship between the PL, you know, like, like if you, if you make it about everything, then you'll be able to find someone that slips up or is stupid or says the wrong thing or is like a set like just

put there by MI5 to say the wrong thing. And yeah, I agree, like that, that, the more, like this will happen in person, like, yeah, and that's MI5 to say the wrong thing. And yeah, I agree like that, the more, like this is what happened in person, like, yeah, and that's a good back to like the main thing in the book, but like one thing that made it really, really untenable is it really became about everything. Like everyone was invited to kind of bring

whatever cause they wanted to the streets, like literally whatever. And so the government, like the government, which was even like trying to be sympathetic didn't know how to read the streets. And so the media ended up kind of picking and choosing the things that worked best for them. But like after spending like years on this,

I looked at like the JVP action and a French association, I was like, oh, that's like really well. I was like, not only like good, but it's quite inspiring. You bring up like the kind of like, it's a glib summation of the thesis of the book in the form of a tweet, but it's basically like a five-step process. The first three are get people onto the streets, media covers it,

now basically everyone is in the streets. Four question mark, five better society. And it's that fourth thing that everyone seems to be tripping over. And I'm wondering, do you see a contrast in your mind between these kind of massive and seemingly spontaneous outpourings of popular democratic protests that have not been successful or been like, I don't know, successful in a monkey's paw, weird, erotic, sick kind of right. And for instance, the recent labor actions by, let's say, the WGA or UAW, who did had goals and then they brought, they got concessions out of the people they were organizing against. Like, do you see how do you delineate the difference between those two approaches to like how to fill in that fourth question mark spot that no one knows? Yeah, I mean, I think you answered, like, I think you'd answer it right there.

I think that's, I agree exactly with what you're setting up. I was going to do an op-ed about the strikes, but I wasn't happy, and maybe I took more, I don't know. But one of the things that a lot of people came to me at the end of the book saying was, okay, you know, there's all kinds of different lessons to be learned. And that question mark is like, there's four questions marks.

Those are big, right? Like crack down causes people to come to the streets. Now you're in a position to force the government to do something else, but who's going to do it? And what are they going to force them to do? Or who's going to take over? And what a lot of people tell me, I'm like Egypt or Turkey or Chile to Tunisia,

is organize, build collective action power when it seems like nothing is happening, like build in the off season basically, like create bonds with other human beings that have the same vision for a better world as you when it appears like there's nothing going on because when history comes knocking whether it's in a mass protest or an expected war

or some kind of an opportunity, it's really hard to put together an organization in the moment. And I think the UAW, you labor caucus, like, I don't know, sorry, I think the UAW reform caucus is like a perfect example of that. Like it was like dedicated people that had a vision for changing one of the most important unions in the Western hemisphere. And they did it like in the like seemingly dark days.

I think they started in 2017. I don't know, you know, it took them out of me. I'm wrong. Well, I think they, you know, they think they started when it wasn't about to be timed to put on a huge strike. But that paid off when conditions changed, way down the line. And they were able to use democratic mass organization

to ask for something that was going to help people in a key moment of possibility. And the book is centered around cases which are strangely unsuccessful because that's the strangest thing. But in the cases where there is success, there tends to be a strong working class movement. In the cases that are the most successful compared

to the others, they tend to have autonomous strong unions that play a role at that, like in this key question mark, question mark, question mark moment of being, of saying, oh, this is what we want, and this is like, we're going to pressure you to do it, because like a whole labor union can very quickly make it very difficult for the government of a capitalist economy to operate.

Like, you know, again, not like casting this version on this activity, but like walking back and forth across the city doesn't actually really cause problems for a government unless they feel embarrassed, but they can feel embarrassed. So they can just say that you're a minority, that's no problem.

If you get labor unions saying like, we're shutting down the economy now, unless this happens, that's really powerful. So I think, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the people in like my generation moved from this kind of, like, moved in the same direction towards, no way, from sort of believing that like the perfect riot would lead to the promised land and starting to think, okay, well, how can we build, like, organized power, how can we build structures that would be capable of acting

with flexibly and democratically, how and what may. And it's the given a take of when you're like a protest movement is based around a vague, but like widely held opinion that you have, such as that capitalism and imperialism and racism are wrong and we'd like to see less of it. And this is not even worse. It's like, corruption's bad or crime is bad.

Or like even democracy is like, every, you know, what does that mean? Like some, you know, does that mean like some you know in some some of these cases across the decade I would call them pro-democracy in someone it's like well that's just they just inserted that because it sounded nicer than what they were really all about but no I mean like I mean with what there's different thing like a certain democracy is good and we want more democracy in American society right and they're but they're different in that and like the u.a. w. who is like we would like more democracy in our workplace. Like we would like more control over like the output

of our labor. We would like a like terms that we get that we have power that we can leverage over you. And I guess there's a different thing organizing along like a feeling of real and necessary discontent and like an opinion that people have that's like, you know, not reflected in the media and organizing along things like the workplace, which by definition kind of constrains the argument or the demands that you're making in the message. It's also going to cause problems with people with power. And you have your hands on the choke points of a couple really important areas for capital capitalist production. Yeah, because back in the era of peak 2011, pro-spontaneous horizontal thinking,

people would say, oh, well, these protests have a floating signifier. That was supposed to be very cool and theoretical and post-structuralist, because it was like, it's about what a reach for some brings. But a friend of mine in Brazil put it pretty well. He's like, if you ask the government for a bunch of stuff and some of the stuff is culture war stuff and other stuff requires elites to actually like lose power or lose money, you're going to get the culture war stuff. They're not going to give you the stuff that actually has costs for the ruling class in a given society. They're going to pick and choose the stuff

that they kind of believe. We will get them out of this jam. And you know, Ukraine is an example of this. The people that went to this where in late 2013, for anti-Ologarchical reasons that they believed that they could get economic justice through this, often found themselves really disappointed when basically a new set of oligarchs took power and delivered some like cultural, quote, benefits to some of the society, which alienated much of

the rest of society. So, like, if you're asking for things that really cost dearly to existing elites, whether it's the United States or wherever, they're not going to want to give it to you. And so, you have to be quite clear about that and make it clear what will happen if they don't. And yeah, yeah, that's that's the answer. Well, that goes perfectly into my next question, which is that how how did you process the Black Lives Matter protests that happened in this country during during COVID? And then also like there's also a number of anti like you know, sort of anti-COVID lockdown protests as well.

But in terms of Black Lives Matter in particular, is this not like a fairly good textbook example of getting the cultural wins in exchange for anything that would actually stop the police from killing people or inconvenience anyone in power? I mean, I don't, I mean, certainly I don't think anybody, like I don't think anybody in real positions of power like lost anything, right, in the US. I mean, you know who knows? I mean, like in every case, in every case in this book,

there's the, you know, the hope that somehow, the like legitimate passions or the legitimate concerns behind any one of the uprisings can somehow serve as seeds for something larger to grow up, grow out of them in the future, like that, you know, in the short term, we don't know, but in the long term, maybe this really group builds into something greater. Yeah, like I was in Brazil.

I was in Sao Paulo in 2020, as it all started. And I watched, I think, the same way that a lot of other people in Brazil did thinking, okay, wow, that's quite a bit similar to what happened here. I hope it doesn't go the way that it went here and I didn't exactly didn't exactly but I do think that there was there were moments when I mean because I mean I don't put 2020 in the book because I wasn't there and I've already started working on the book and I don't know it that well But as far as I remember there were moments when like like, quite a lot of the United States was behind

what was happening. There were moments when like, there was serious like, there was a pretty clear message to the government that there was discontent around this issue. And in that moment, who knows, I don't know what could have been possible in that moment, what happened as we all know just kind of kept going, right?

And as it kept going, it became easier for sort of, as you say, easily deliverable quote unquote wins to be offered rather than sort of the kind of things that would have cost elites dearly. And I think you would have to, I don't think that there's any, I think it's silly and productive to think about who could have done something differently in that moment, because you'd have to imagine entirely different set of organizations and structures But I think there was a real moment there when a lot of people were behind the thing.

And I think that a lot of people in power were afraid of losing it, or at least afraid of what was happening on the streets and would have been pretty amenable to doing something as a response. Have you encountered in your book tour or as people process this book, certainly in another moment of mass protest?

Have you got reactions from people who feel disillusioned or are you worried that people might take from the book a message that like, hey, it's all just gonna lead to fuck up in the end anyway. Like what's the point in protesting? I haven't got that from anyone that has read it. I've had people like here, like third hand, what kind of what it might be about. And be like, oh, is that mean that your sense was to do anything?

It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but it is, and like indeed, like, the people that spoke to me, and these are people that lived through often horrifying apparent failures, the, you know, 200, 225 interviews that I did. These are people that sat down to share with me like really difficult stories of things that seem to go well and then really did not. They sat down with me precisely because they had not given up, precisely because they thought it was worth discussing what happened, sort of reconstructing this history and learning from it. And like, again, even as individuals, like most of them are still quite active and just doing doing something. It just might be slightly different. So, yeah, like I said, I think what is

apparently pessimistic starts to look quite optimistic when you're, if it if if if what the book points towards is correct, then it's kind of a mismatch of tactics that were sort of there's a lag in us catching up with well-can-delivered real change in like this new sort of global environment and new media environment then that's not so difficult right I mean if there's the real if there's the obvious desire to improve or change the global system people are taking risks and then it becomes a question of like fine-tuning actions. Then I don't think it's discouraging, I think, hopefully it's the opposite. And out of the various countries and protest movements

that you covered, was there any one of them that was the most surprising to you, researching it, both in terms of like it being dispiriting or perhaps inspiring or like offering the best examples of what people should keep in mind. I mean, like, and the thing is when you say like offering best examples for like current protest movements, it's hard to take examples from protest movements that are about different things and in different countries. Right.

You know, but like, out of these like was it like what are the examples that stick out in your heads or something that was like surprising for you to and that you discovered in your research or something that would perhaps like change your way of thinking? Yeah, and I think like one if there is like lesson, one of the big lessons in the book is like every country is really actually different, and you can't do it with the media. Not that we're doing that now, because I think that question can be answered in an interesting way. But every country really has unique conditions and interesting things popped out of them.

I think I was quite surprised by my time in Tunisia because I kind of had the vague idea of what the so-called Arab Spring was and the issue, the way it was sold to me, was like, oh, you know, just kind of like it just arose from air, like, here's spontaneity. And in the book, there's like, I want to get to like annoyingly theoretical,

but like I think spontaneity doesn't like really exist. Like people are always doing something for a reason, whether or not they're like having a party meeting and then deciding, or they're like texting their friends to decide to do it. Like everyone does things for a reason. But in Tunisia, like when Muhammad Boazizi set himself on fire, nothing had to happen.

Right? Other Tunisians had set themselves on fire, and then nothing did happen. It was a group of real organizations that had, again, really got to know each other beforehand. Really had a plan, had often struggled and learned lessons, already had already been trying and failing and trying again for years. That got the protest to take off, and then got the protest to the capital. There was a left wing party, like a really left wing party actually, a big union organization. There was like networks of unemployed people in Tunisia across the country. There was like a Maoist sector in the middle

ranks of the largest union organization in the country. There was like professional organizations like lawyers and like it's all like real things. It's never just like, oh, like, you know, history, like, sets off an explosion that all the people just rise up. It's always like concrete organizations, concrete people. And I don't know, just like, I don't know if that's like exactly the answer you're looking for, but it was just like cool to get to know all of them them and see what it really was and what they were all trying to do. And then Chile ends up being the most successful. Chile is one where unexpectedly and strangely, the generation of 2011, the student leaders

that had organized Antenio liberal protests back in the year of the Global Explosion ended up becoming the government in 2019 through this weird kind of, yeah, they called the S.I.U.S.S. Social Popping, the Social Explosion. And then you get this formerly left autonomous indie rock kid who's not the president. Camila Vallejo, who was a long time member of the Communist Party in a powerful position in his government. And that I think is, there's a lot of elements there which sort of add up to a initial success, but then you get into government and you have government. Yeah, but they didn't pass that constitutional run.

No, they did not recommend them to change the Chilean constitution to get rid of all the pinochet stuff. No, they did not. And like, yeah, like I said, the best you can do out of this kind of thing is wind power. And then after you wind power, you might screw it up. Like that's baked into the whole thing. Like after you wind power, like the best you can do is get to governing.

And you might really fail. Like a lot of, you know, the Brazilian left does not love the poor-ish government. And I think it's entirely possible that it will fall apart. But if you like, look at at how these things can go well, at least a spontaneous mass explosion where you're at the whole city's shut down, that's one of the best outcomes you got. I guess just like the direct things up here,

I wanna return to the last time we had you on the show, which is the discous, the Jakarta method. And again, back to the protests that you were at on Saturday. These are protests about a horrific campaign of extermination in the Gaza Strip. The Indonesian example is probably one of the most successful genocides of the 20th century. And then they basically totally got away with it.

I mean, I don't know if we have a question here. I'm just like, as someone who studies state violence and has done a lot of really in-depth reporting about the horrors carried out by the Indonesian government on Communists or trade unionists Chinese immigrants How do you see that in the context of what Israel is doing to Gaza right now and like people's reaction against it? And the very real possibility that they'll be also be totally successful with it. Yeah, I mean

That's I mean, I think a couple there there's a couple of ways to answer the question. One is like that book, the Jakarta method, and like, thank you again for having me on three years ago. It was quite like, interesting and like important to like have that conversation with you guys then. It is about like the construction of the global system we have, like the rules based international order that we got after, you know, at the end of the Cold War. And I think like in moments like this,

you see what the rules really are. When the Jakarta came out of Rotor, and off that in the New York Times, I think the headline was, the liberal international order was built with blood. And people like in the Global South, people in the world, they know what the rules are, but it becomes horrifyingly obvious what they really are in a moment like this, that it's different for you if you are allied with the United States. You can get away with things that would often lead to regime change operations happening very quickly in your country if you were not allied with the United States. And then like the other thing that I thought was like quite insightful. Daniel Aldana, go ahead and honor if you know him, you wrote a book about like Green New Deal. He's like a sociologist at Berkeley. But he like posted some like a brief thing online where

he's like, I was born to a Jewish father in a Guatemalan mother. And he talks about what happened in Guatemala in the 1980s, like the genocide that was carried out by the Reagan-backed dictatorship, and he says once the state sets out to eliminate an entire political structure, all boundaries dissolve, anyone can be marked for death. And then he related this back to like,

you know, the experiences of his family and then ultimately to my first book. So like, you know, I think both what's happening now in Gaza and the second book that I wrote happened in the particular type of global order that was constructed by the events of the Jakarta method in the very particular type of world order shaped by imperialist violence. I'm like, yeah, again, this happens throughout so many of the actual protest events is that

this becomes clear. But unfortunately, it becomes clear once more in moments like this. Yeah, I mean, like if the sort of rules-based international order of American-Egemony means we get to decide who can commit genocide and who can't. And who for that is a red line for us. But like, we hear more and more now about the rise of a multipolar world. And if the unipolar world was created through things like the Jakarta method, I mean, does that auger well for the rise of a

multipolar world? They're like, we'll be in United States and its allies continue to reassert the Jakarta method to like hold on to this unipolar model. And as a way to stave off any kind of actual competition or an adversarial, you know, like at any kind of countervailing power in terms of the rise of China and other major countries in the world. Well, historically, historically, empires act very, very poorly in moments like this, right? Like, is that called the deciditity strap? I mean, that might be a slightly different thing.

But, historically, empires react very violently to a perceived loss of power. Like when they start to sense that, oh, time is done on our side, where power is slipping away, they often react very horribly and sort of either start wars or use extraordinary measures to try to hold onto that power, often ultimately failing,

but it's like often a quite bad time. So like I think, yeah, I think to both sides of that equation are really important. Like on the one hand, United States is experiencing a relative decline. So it's not as powerful, it was 10 years ago or 20 or 30 years ago. And it will be probably less powerful in 10 years

from now than it is right now. But it is still by far the richest and militarily most ferocious country to ever exist. And this is like, I know, that scares me. Because if the United States, you know, if the people in the United States realize, okay, well, all these countries are beating us on the economic front, but what terrain do we have the advantage on? Oh, well, we have the most guns.

We have more guns than anyway that's ever existed. Maybe we can shift the terrain to the military confrontation because that's where we might win. And that worries me. That they shift to a more multi-polar world could be marked by like US reaction against the inevitable. But also like in countries like Brazil very, very loudly are like pushing for multiplicity.

Because like again, just like everything, just like a lot of the, you know, when a quote lessons come out of the book, if you just like blow up the existing order and then hope for a new one to emerge from the ashes, just like magically appear as better, you often will be very disappointed by who actually constructs a new order.

So what Lou is trying to do is to try to like actively reconstruct the global system in a way which is going to be as beneficial to South America as possible. Because like, you know, the shift to a multiple world could go a lot of different ways. It could go all kinds of sideways upways. It could go sideways upwards downwards. So I think the thing is, like anything else is to act upon it, analyze it carefully and see how you can make the best of it. Vincent Bevins, I want to thank you for your time. The book is, if we burn, in stores now, we'll have a link to check it out in the show description.

But Vincent, thanks again for joining us. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. All right, cheers. Until next time, bye-bye. All right, thanks. Tudászom, diájt, treszvomi, miseját, ma sztitni, nőrönsját, ma színomi da fél. Boyszíréi nomí, tálibezade, boyszíréi nomí, tálibezade. Tudarmadás, törmadás, törmadás, törmadás, törmadás... I'm going to be a part of this.