It Could Happen Here - A History Built of Uprising

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Mia begins a series on the history of the most recent series of uprisings by examining how history moves.Sources:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-4/endnotes-a-history-of-separation-preface https://archive.org/details/blackjacobinstou0000jameSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Jennifer Arnese, and this is the Black Mother Woon podcast, where we understand. unpack and heal from the very first relationship that shaped us. We rush to accommodate other people when we have been hurt and our hurt has not been healed. Listen to the Black Mother Wound podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, and wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong. for a decade now, I've been seeking the answer to a single question.

How does history move? It is not, as it first appears, an abstract question. In it is the answer to a more immediate query. How did we get here to a decade defined by war, by dictatorship, and by genocide, How did we live to see a world? Where India, China, and the United States, the three largest countries that have ever existed, ruling over three of the world's eight billion people, are rolled by different forms of fascist governments? And is there any way out of the endless nightmare that every summer sets the world on fire, only to leave it the same, but somehow worse? To understand this, to understand how we live to see these days of horror,

we must understand why history moves at all. What is it that drives history forward? Is it great men, and they always seem to be men in such formulations, seizing the stage of history and driving it according to their great will? is it a moral arc of progress forever bending and forever pushing the world however slowly towards a kinder gentler form of liberal democracy

is it the inextrable unfolding of the internal dynamics of capital acting depending on your position and political faction as either the material basis of history or a kind of god impotencia leading inexorably to either communism or something worse, is that the movement of the working class storming onto the historical stage? Are all of these simply a series of irrelevant metanarratives?

My answer is this. The great Marxist historian CLR James, a man as intimately involved in the process of revolution as any of the men he spent his life depicting. once wrote in Black Jacobins, his magisterial account of the Haitian Revolution, that, quote, the rich are only defeated when they are running for their lives. And even in this darkest hour of the working class, with fascism ascendant and a movement to break its power failing to materialize every day,

I have lived to see them run. I have lived to see their shield walls break. Their armies falling back street by liberated street. Seeing those streets turn to cities and those cities turn to whole provinces. I have lived to see ancient and terrible ruling classes, reduced to huddling like rats besieged in their own capitals, to see a commune that outlasted the commune of Paris. I have lived to see the president of the United States

hide in a bunker where protesters fought the secret search. outside the gates of the White House. I have lived to see history come not on horseback, but to the sound of an upturned bucket beaten as a drum, and the thunder of a million voices of a thousand peoples who cannot live to see another moment of a world like this one. And whether you realize it or not, you have lived to see it too. And just as surely I have lived to see what came after. I have lived to see the firebombs, the machine guns,

the all-night courts filling, the prison cells just as surely as the army filled the abattoirs. I have lived to see them build the wall and fill the camps and attempt to wipe whole peoples from existence. And this too is history. But the trick,

the secret, the pattern's so obvious that it cannot be named, is that these are the same history. History moves in and is driven by cycles of uprising and repression, cycles of revolution and counter-revolution. It is an insight so obvious that it does not seem profound. The implications are easy to miss. But if what drives history is cycles of our uprisings

and their repression. It means that history is not driven purely by cyclopean forces outside of even the possibility of our imagination, much less our control. It means that those forces, those impossible abstractions, capitalism and the state and the white supremacist order, the systems and institutions that rule the world, are reacting to us. Capital is forced to maneuver around our advances, just as we are forced to maneuver around its development. The state builds its own capacity against our movements,

not from their own desire, but from their own necessity. The ruling class, for all its power, does not simply rule. It is forced to react to us. The material reality of a world of uprisings is that we are a force of history. This is a dangerous idea to even express, much less to analyze. For if you take the idea seriously that history is not driven by the pure will of great men or the inexorable movement of capital, then, just to start, elites are not, as they would have you believe, the only people who matter.

It means that history is driven by ordinary people who, in an hour of crisis like their mothers before them, pick up a brick and throw it at the nearest symbols or personages of the ruling class. It is of such struggles, from the gates of Versailles to the gates of the White House, that history is made. Regular people, individuals like you and me and your neighbor,

across the street with the cute cat you see sometimes changed the course of human history. It seems almost impossible. And yet, I know it's true because I've met them. The ordinary people thrust into the fulcrum of history. There was David Graber, the late anthropologist, who helped steal a crowd from an otherwise largely pointless protest in a park in New York. there was Vicky Osterweil, a writer who many of you have heard on this show, who facilitated the first meeting of a movement called Occupy Wall Street. These were people, just like you and me, who showed up to a meeting, and after that meeting, the whole world was different.

This is the reality of history. It is driven by ordinary people, who, in retrospect, I remembered, as something greater, as a movement or a class or a world historical force, who at the beginning of the day rolled out of bed as nothing of the sort. And yet, we are historical force, and we belong on the stage of history just as much as the rulers and oppressors. It is, in fact, the great task of the political order, the state, the politician, the social media company, the fashion,

to convince us that we can only be observers to history, that the best we can aspire to is, as Walter Benjamin described, to have a fascist dictator represent and act out our feelings. Thus, the task of counter-revolution is to clear us from the stage of history that we have seized in the streets. And it is here, perhaps, at the kind of revolutionaries who rule the world, have had the greatest success. they have crushed the idea that we can shape history so thoroughly

that the very idea of us changing the world seems like a joke in order to wrestle back that place in history in order to take back our autonomy and our ability to change the horror that is the present world. We must come to understand what it looks like when we take the historical stage, how we have failed and how we succeeded.

We must know at the most basic level that it is even possible at all. The music you love. I heart radio. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts everyone's talking about. All in one place.

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An old man with a beard once said, men make their own history. But they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already. given and transmitted from the past. Marx, of course, was writing of the 18th premier of an earlier set of revolutions and counter-revolutions, different in many ways than our own. Each uprising cycle is shaped by its material conditions,

the social and economic structures of the age. We are to examine the last three cycles of uprisings in an age defined not as Mark spoke of by the triumphant rise of the industrial proletariat, but by the death of that very working class. I have spoken elsewhere

about the death of the old working class at Tiananmen, and I will leave those details to that previous work. We are going to be looking here in the episodes to come at the cycles of uprising that came next, beginning roughly,

with the cycle known as ultra-globalization and the Zapatista uprising. Now, periodization or the task of putting these cycles firmly into lists of dates in which they begin and end

is always a troublesome process. It is never quite historically precise. Movements persist and die in a hundred forms in a hundred places. And the way of global uprising

and global suppression that we are tracking are more complicated than can be fully captured by start date here and date here. But for our purposes roughly,

this initial period of uprisings, the first we will examine, begins roughly with the Zapatista uprising in 1994, but really kicks off with the Battle of Seattle in 1999 through Argentina,

through Argentina, 2001, through the water and gas wars in Bolivia, and travels, I think, to unexpected places, like post-Katrina New Orleans, before eventually ending with the Wahaka commune in 2006. The second wave, the so-called movement of the squares, that starts in 2011 with the Arab Spring, continues with Occupy Wall Street and its myriad success in movements across the world,

and ends, I think, thematically, with Trump coming down the escalator in 2015 with the crushing of Ferguson and the uprising in Baltimore. And finally, we'll turn to the more recent wave of uprisings best remembered for Hong Kong and George Floyd that stretched from Lebanon to Ecuador and roughly from late 2017, early 2018, to probably about 10.

2021. The periodization here is obviously more difficult because unlike with the movements of the previous two cycles, we do not have the luxury of seeing where they led. We are, you know, still living through them in a number of ways. We are still living in the sort of kind of revolution from that cycle in ways that make periodization difficult. It's possible the cycle of uprisings after that has begun already. I simply cannot say we would not be able to periodize it until after the period has sort of ended. Now, these uprisings, save for the special case of Argentina 2001, which we will talk about at length, since it is, I guess, the origin of the conception of Occupy that would become the core,

if an extremely different form of the 2011 uprisings. these uprisings do not look like the uprisings of the past. The working class has stubbornly refused to cohere into its old fighting forms because those forms, the mass party, the workers' council, the mass syndicalist union, were born of structures and conditions of production that no longer exist as they once did. The old identity of the working class, that of a class that was building, the future with his own hands and will one day inherit its own creations is dead. In its wake, workers have tried over and over and over again to forge a new identity. In some cases,

they found limited success. Mostly, they have failed. But in those successes and in those failures, they have defined the modern world. And that is the story we tell in this series. It is the story of Wahaka and Argentina, of Boston and Bosnia, of 30 years of uprisings, and the worlds we built and lost together. It is the story of how the old working class died and how a new class struggles to be born in its wake. It is the story of how conflict with the state came to be the sole force that could put us back into the streets. once we had abandoned the occupation of the factories that had been our domain for almost a century and it is a story

that even though many of us lived through most, or even all of its components, is already being forgotten. So that today, when I speak of the time that workers took a major North American city and held it for several months, people simply don't know that I'm talking about Wohawka.

and that those events happened this century. In 2006, a time almost all of you listening to this were alive. And the economic and social fuels that built these last three cycles of uprisings have not gone away. In fact, the repression has only grown worse, and whether we like it or not, there will be another cycle of uprisings. The question, the question that we're, we all face is this. What are you going to do about it?

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait, Look, they change all of that. Yes. It's real.

This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. The new NFL season is here.

And you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl. It is in the name NFL Daily. You'll have fresh content in your feed every day all season long. That game winning drive. Maybe it's Herbert. Maybe it's Gino. Maybe it's Mahomes. We'll have the highlights.

If Fernando Mendoza or any of the rookies are bawling out, we'll break down the tape. Join me, Greg Rosenthal, and an all-star cast of co-host as we preview and recap every game. Listen to NFL Daily on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Brett Coleman. And I'm Trevor Sikkimam.

If you love football and want to understand what's really happening on the field, check out our show, NFL Pro. Every week we break down the biggest plays, trends, and matchups using exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content you will not find anywhere else. Whether you're new to football, a fantasy football fan or a diehard fan, NFL Pro will help you analyze the game like a pro. Listen to NFL Pro on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Whether you're a seasoned NFL fan or new to the game, there's one place to keep up with all of it, the league's newest podcast, the NFL report, hosted by me, Andrew Siciliano. It is your home for everything football, breaking news, expert analysis, game picks, and hear from your favorite players too.

Join me at an all-star cast of experts for everything you need to know from around the league. Get new episode to the NFL report Monday through Friday all season long. Listen to the NFL report podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle. Every Wednesday on our podcast, lots to say with me, Bobby Bones, and Matt Castle.

You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you, week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day, and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you think you were the only one? Like no matter what you did, it was never good enough for your mother. I'm Jennifer Arnese, and this is the Black Mother Wound podcast, where we unpack and heal

from the very first relationship that shaped us. We rush to accommodate other people when we have been hurt, and our hurt has not been healed. Listen to the Black Mother Wound podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, podcast and wherever you get your podcast.

Hey there, everybody. Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes here from the Amy and T.J. podcast. We're going to cover everything you need to know during this heated political season. Yes, we just saw Lindsey Graham the death of a long time senator. Also, we've got a couple of missing members of Congress. Also, we got a lot of members of Congress behaving badly. We've got accusations, allegations, flying all day long on Capitol Hill. Listen to Amy and T.J. on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.