Sat, Feb 04, 2012 page9

• Global protests: Where to now?

  The key to effecting change after last year’s Arab Spring and anti-capitalist protests is to turn rebellion into a coherent political vision

  • By Paul Mason / The Guardian, LONDON
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  The first freely elected Egyptian parliament has convened; the first expose of brutality in the jails of liberated Libya has been aired. The Occupy meme that gripped US cities in the autumn is in hibernation; the black bloc, which was declared defiantly to be “just a tactic” a year ago, turns out to have been, for some of the European radicals involved, just a phase.

  If last year felt, at times, like a rerun of 1848 with stereo headphones, this year is already exhibiting some of the features that made 1849 a byword for reaction.

  In Egypt, the secular democratic forces can still lead hundreds of thousands of youth and workers on to the streets, but Salafist Islam can gather 7 million votes in the slums and villages. In Greece, the euphoria one could sense among the protesters camped in Syntagma Square in June last year has given way to an angry silence; to fragmented, anomic acts and the struggle to survive.

  

  Illustration: Tania Chou

  Yet over the past 12 months the technological drivers of the revolts led by young people have powered forward. There are now nearly 1 billion Facebook users: two-fifths of who joined since the start of the Arab Spring. By Feb. 23 this year, based on current trends, the 500-millionth Twitter account will be created — the 400-millionth was created just four months ago, on the day Egyptians clashed with the army in an attempt to retake Tahrir Square.

  However, the fundamental economic problems remain unsolved: Egypt’s growth halved last year; it is hemorrhaging foreign exchange reserves and the regime of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has now gone, military hat in hand, to the IMF for US$3.2 billion. Southern Europe — already the scene of massive protests last year — will see a much more tangible economic crisis this year: The IMF predicts both Italy and Spain will shrink by 2 percent; analysts at Oxford Economics predict the Greek economy will shrink by 6 percent, just as it did last year. Portugal, meanwhile, is spiraling toward the status of a second Greece.

  As a revolutionary wave breaks, historically, it also breaks up. During the Arab Spring and the winter of occupying public spaces, it was impossible to ignore the similarities between the youth across borders: the way they spoke and dressed, the social media they used, the music they listened to. Now, during the scratchy phase we have entered, the specific, national aspects of the social unrest will become more obvious.

  We will notice the fact that the three parties of the Greek left — on a combined 29 percent, neck-and-neck with the main opposition conservative party — are traditionally prone to waging physical violence against each other. We will notice the ability of some of the protesters to, as they themselves put it, “self kettle,” by adopting exclusivist language and activities. We will see the Occupy movement in the US, however reluctantly, plaster their MacBooks with fresh stickers of US President Barack Obama.

  So what remains of the revolution? As the events recede and solidify it becomes clear that last year was, above all, a cultural revolution: a loss of fear in the dictatorships of north Africa; a loss of apathy among educated youth in Europe, Latin America and the US. And the revolution consisted of this: a mass rejection of the values dominant during 20 years of free market capitalism.

  It was free market ideology that painted former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as icons of economic progress. It was also free market norms of regulation that created the banking crisis, and then demanded we should bankrupt states instead of banks. And it was free market patterns of wealth distribution that created the most potent political meme of last year — which was not the Egyptian slogan “Bread, freedom, social justice,” but “We are the 99 percent.”

  Though the Occupy movement has been accused of “lacking demands,” and at times has luxuriated in its own incoherence, in Europe and the US, it is beginning to leave a residue of policy among liberal and social-democratic parties. In the Arab world, demands were never a problem — though many remain to be achieved. In Egypt, for example, government funds are still being poured into food and fuel subsidies; a minimum wage of US$120 a month took effect last month; and four of the factories occupied by workers last year have been renationalized.

  The Occupy movement found itself quoted in Obama’s state of the union speech. Even conservative politicians such as British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are now making verbal critiques of “irresponsible capitalism.” Cameron acknowledged the systemic nature of the discontent in a speech to the co-op movement: “Many people are questioning not just how and when we will recover, but the whole way our economy works ... Uncontrolled globalization can slide into monopolization, sweeping aside the small, the personal and the local.”

  So this year opens with a pause: a political pause, as technocratic governments buy time for the banking system in Europe; as half-democratic regimes from Libya to Egypt find their feet. There is an economic pause — as everybody awaits the outcome of the eurozone crisis and — we should not forget — a military/diplomatic pause as the world waits to see what Iran, under severe internal pressure from its own people, whose protests were suppressed in 2009, does next.

  The biggest pause of all — and it almost sits there like the cadenza mark above a stave of music, begging to be filled by improvisation, if nothing else — is ideological.

  Though the economics point in the direction of competitive exit routes, national economic strategies, protectionism and currency war, only at the edges do you find politicians prepared to combine populism, anti-corporate rhetoric and plebeian nationalism: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen and, rather more genially and in a different context, First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond.

  Given the IMF’s dire warnings about a 1930s-style outcome to the eurozone crisis, it’s not scaremongering to foresee a situation where a second financial catastrophe triggered by Europe finally unleashes economic nationalism into the mainstream. Then, just as with the protesters, the success meme would probably breed imitation.

  In the Arab world, too, it is not hard to see where the new autocrats will come from to replace the old: The arrival of a socially conservative majority in the Egyptian parliament mirrors almost exactly what happened when the radicalized masses of Paris in 1848 found themselves subjects of a new, democratic assembly dominated by representatives of the Catholic peasantry.

  At this point, the questions for the young activists become remarkably similar, whether they are in Oakland, California, or Alexandria, Egypt. What are the social and political alliances necessary to keep the dream alive; what are the compromises “horizontalism” has to make with mainstream politics, hierarchy and power? Anarchism has traditionally answered “none.” Marxism, social democracy and liberalism have a whole history of failed alliances with each other in the mid-20th century for reference points.

  Today, among the activists who made Jan. 25 happen in Egypt — and among those who turned Occupy Wall Street or UK Uncut into global brandnames — you find a common reluctance to engage in the dirty business of power; of the actual, the specific, the non-exhilarating work of community organizing, of elections. For UK Uncut, even recourse to legal action against Goldman Sachs had to be organized under a spin-off entity. For Egyptian youth, it was only the deadline of party registration that forced their coalescence into electoral blocs, which then did very badly.

  There are exceptions: The French Socialist party has been reinvigorated at the bottom by anti-globalist activists, even if at the top it remains its old self, used to champagne and chauffeurs. A grand total of 42 secular liberals and leftists now find themselves, for good or ill, sitting alongside 400-odd Islamists in the Cairo parliament.

  However, the scratchy phase of all revolutions poses — historically — the same question: Who gets what? After 1848 the autocrats got power; the rising industrial class of Europe got wealth — and spectacular growth; the left, liberal and secular young men got to paint naked women in experimental ways and write increasingly outrageous poetry.

  However, a retreat to culture, ideas and alternative lifestyles might not be possible for the radical youth of the 2010s. The regimes installed after the counter-revolutions of 1849 delivered sustained growth, stability and upward mobility for the skilled worker. It is very hard, in Europe and the US, to see what delivers that.

  In short, this may be the year the counter-culture accumulated by young people in the good years, and deployed in what one has called “the senseless beauty of rebellion” last year, finally has to concretize into a program, a coherent vision. If it doesn’t — as is obvious from Budapest to Cairo — there are plenty of other forces with coherence. In times of economic crisis people are far more likely to turn to them.
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