[Debate] Paul Mason, 2011, on the Newest Wave of Social Movements Globally

Wed Apr 11 17:48:47 BST 2012

If "Arab Revolts" show anything, it's that "educated" ≠ "secularized,"
except it's possible to argue that Islamism is one kind of secularization
of Islam.

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 11:38 AM, peter waterman <
peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com> wrote:

> *Peter sez:
>
> *How does this piece, by brilliant BBC journo, Paul Mason, stand up to
> around 12 months of dramatic developments? Note that he sees little role by
> institutionalised labour movements (aka trade unions) in these events. This
> despite him having written a lovely book about worker movements throughout
> history and across the world.
>
> *Now read on...*
>
> [image: BBC BLOGS - Newsnight: Paul Mason]
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> Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere
>
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>   Paul Mason <http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/paul_mason/>
> | 19:07 UK time, Saturday, 5 February 2011
>
> We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen,
> Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young
> techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France
> the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the
> retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have
> become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student
> occupations that changed the political mood.
>
> What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?
>
> My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion
> on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the
> mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study
> this and also the participants themselves.
>
> At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised;
> secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken
> up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the
> point of what they use it for.
>
> In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different
> situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:
>
> 1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no
> future
>
> 2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog
> so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from
> parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.
>
> 3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes
> flammable.
>
> 4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism,
> Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all
> forms are rejected.
>
> 5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of
> modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal"
> protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated
> young woman.
>
> 6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it
> kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the
> quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent
> within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.
>
> 7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or
> practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through
> writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters
> of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they
> self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) -
> so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and
> either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed
> no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the
> internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement
> but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.
>
> 8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful
> than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So
> if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have
> done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer
> in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then
> there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century
> people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across
> borders just to make links like these.
>
> 9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to
> university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher
> education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by
> personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into
> debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years
> of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be
> poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light
> switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for
> individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.
>
> 10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive
> societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic
> growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough
> to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.
>
> 11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the
> French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was *not the product of poor
> people but of poor lawyers*. You can have political/economic setups that
> disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors
> are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now,
> in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.
>
> 12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship
> between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce.
> The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the
> "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at
> numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social
> fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated
> in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and
> respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they
> find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of
> history.
>
> 13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement:
> they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat
> from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith
> he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle
> was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't
> "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village.
>
> 14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people
> who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to
> Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then
> they're writing a book about something completely different. I was
> astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation
> blogging from Tahrir Square this week.
>
> 15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just
> on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth.
> More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is
> available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not
> pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example
> there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I
> studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s.
> Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying
> to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be
> more complex because people have an instant reference source for the
> undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by
> quantum physics, but in every discipline.
>
> 16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the
> Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a
> worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out
> of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire
> warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that
> has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the
> meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be
> clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist
> takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or
> the media behind Mubarak.
>
> 17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible
> to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the
> jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the
> oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like
> Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth
> online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here -
> it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they
> swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc
> which those in authority fail to spot.
>
> 18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read
> their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become
> mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics
> but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how
> to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives
> as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did -
> as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles
> Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to
> understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to
> fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed.
>
> 19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest
> "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is
> profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in
> the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a
> moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the
> dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal
> freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based
> power-elites.
>
> 20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the
> iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the
> individual.
>
> Some complications....
>
> a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such.
>
> b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point
> they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their
> values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we
> have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever
> seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network
> off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.
>
> c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go
> online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional
> ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org <http://www.arabawy.org/>says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by
> default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is
> essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed
> in many parts of the world.
>
> d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up
> against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the
> latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.
>
> e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a
> complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those
> of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP
> officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that
> of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in
> the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of
> Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise"
> - and this goes wider than just the protesters.
>
> (For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that
> whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed
> laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster,
> it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a
> "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet
> most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the
> contents of Hansard.)
>
> That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not
> researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD
> theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments.
> Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you
> may, vent your analog-era spleen below
>
>
> --
> *1.* Invitation: May 1, 2012! Contribute to 'New Worker Movements<http://www.interfacejournal.net/2011/06/call-for-papers-volume-4-issue-2-for-the-global-emancipation-of-labour-new-movements-and-struggles-around-work-workers-and-precarity/>
> '!
> 2.* Blog:* http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman
> *3. EBook 2011, 'Under, Against, Beyond - Essays 1980s-
>                     1990s*'s<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/>
> http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/
> 4. WorkingPaper *2012*: 'Emancipatory Labour Studies'<http://ww.iisg.nl/publications/respap49.pdf>
> :
> *5.* Draft EBook 2012: 'Recovering Internationalism - Essays 2000-10'
> (draft):
>      http://www.scribd.com/doc/82125289/ReCovIntComp-A-2
>      http://www.scribd.com/doc/82129474/ReCovtIntComp-B-2
> *6. *Essay 2012: 'The 2nd Coming of the World Federation of Trade
> Unions': <http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/peter-waterman-the-second-coming-of-the-wftu-updated>
>
>
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-- 
Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://mrzine.org/>
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