Speaker 1: Hi.
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Speaker 3: As we come. Margin Martin in the Beauty of the Day,
Speaker 3: a million dark in Kitchens, one thousand mil, last grade.
Speaker 2: Hi, Branden by.
Speaker 3: The Beauty is Sun, Sun Discloses, and the people Heresy Bredden, Roses,
Speaker 3: bread and Roses.
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, and welcome to our first installment of Radical Reads,
Speaker 1: a new series where we talk about different political texts
Speaker 1: both old and new, that have even influenced us here
Speaker 1: at wh or texts that we generally think that people
Speaker 1: involved in radical and working class movements should be engaging with,
Speaker 1: discussing and using to inform their activism. We're going to
Speaker 1: be producing occasional Radical Reads episodes as well as other
Speaker 1: discussions as part of a new range of Patreon only
Speaker 1: content that we're about to start rolling out. This is
Speaker 1: basically motivated by two things. First, there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff that we'd really like to talk about, share and
Speaker 1: discuss with people that doesn't really fit into the standard
Speaker 1: episode format, so basically this is a way for us
Speaker 1: to produce that kind of content. And second, we also
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Speaker 1: delete this and pretend it never happened, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Our radical read for this episode is Jasper Burns is
Speaker 1: excellent article from the Brooklyn Rail What Was to Be Done?
Speaker 1: Protest and Revolution in the twenty tens. It's a review
Speaker 1: and critique of the recent and very popular book by
Speaker 1: Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and
Speaker 1: the Missing Revolution. And when we read Jasper's article, we
Speaker 1: felt that it really put into words some of the
Speaker 1: misgivings that we had about Bevins's book, so we invited
Speaker 1: Jasper on to talk about his article. It was a
Speaker 1: great discussion. We covered not only what we see is
Speaker 1: some of the issues with Bevins's book, but also broader
Speaker 1: questions around social movements, revolution, the threat of cooptation, and
Speaker 1: what it means to win. And as Jasper says in
Speaker 1: the discussion, understanding what happened and what we can learn
Speaker 1: from the protest movements of the twenty tens is one
Speaker 1: of the most important and vital questions that we can
Speaker 1: be thinking about right now, and in that sense, If
Speaker 1: We Burn is a valuable contribution, at least in starting
Speaker 1: that conversation, even if we have some pretty big disagreements
Speaker 1: on its conclusions. We'll put a link in the show
Speaker 1: notes to get hold of if we burn, as well
Speaker 1: as Jasper's article and an lecture series that he produced
Speaker 1: on workers' councils. But before we begin, there are a
Speaker 1: few acronyms and names that we mentioned that people might
Speaker 1: not be familiar with. So firstly we mentioned the PT,
Speaker 1: which is the Workers Party in Brazil. The PT or
Speaker 1: a left wing social democratic party and currently the party
Speaker 1: governing Brazil. Lula de Silva, who we also mention, is
Speaker 1: a former metal worker and union leader who is now
Speaker 1: the leader of the PT and the current president CCIDENT
Speaker 1: of Brazil. At a time of the events that we
Speaker 1: discussed in this interview and which Bevins discusses in his book,
Speaker 1: Lula had just completed his first term as president, with
Speaker 1: massive approval ratings and having lifted many millions out of poverty,
Speaker 1: but not as we discuss, without criticism from some of
Speaker 1: Brazil's social movements. He was also subsequently imprisoned on corruption charges,
Speaker 1: which were eventually annulled after it was proven that the
Speaker 1: judge was actually biased against him. Many believed that the
Speaker 1: corruption charges were an attempt by the Brazilian right to
Speaker 1: stop Lula from running for reelection and so paved the
Speaker 1: way for their own victory, which it did with the
Speaker 1: election of Jaia Bolsonaro in twenty eighteen. We also mentioned
Speaker 1: the MST, which is Brazil's landless workers movement. The MST
Speaker 1: mainly campaigns around land reform, organizing direct actions like land occupations,
Speaker 1: and is one of the biggest such organizations in Latin America. Anyway,
Speaker 1: with all that said, I'll stop talking and let you
Speaker 1: get stuck into the interview itself. Just to start off with,
Speaker 1: I suppose maybe if you could just introduce yourself.
Speaker 4: I'm Jasper Burns. I'm a author of various types of books,
Speaker 4: and I just finished a book called The Future of Revolution,
Speaker 4: which first is going to published next year, just about
Speaker 4: communism and revolution. And yeah, I live in Oakland. I
Speaker 4: teach at UC Berkeley.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds like a really interesting and interesting project.
Speaker 1: I suppose is some of the article that you've just
Speaker 1: written that we're going to discuss now, I suppose some
Speaker 1: of those thoughts maybe are going to go into the book.
Speaker 4: Well, not not really, I mean the book is finished.
Speaker 4: Actually it's it's more or less written, so it's it's
Speaker 4: more the other way around that. My thinking about revolution
Speaker 4: and writing this book it formed my criticism of the
Speaker 4: of the Vincent Baben's book. So you know, I've spent
Speaker 4: a lot of time thinking about revolutions and what they are,
Speaker 4: how they happen, how they fail, and what what it
Speaker 4: like for them to succeed and so yeah, so it's
Speaker 4: definitely certain of those thoughts informed my criticism of the
Speaker 4: Bevins book. But I've been thinking about this kind of
Speaker 4: stuff for a long time.
Speaker 1: I mean, part of why I think your article spoke
Speaker 1: to me so much because I think it's since the
Speaker 1: kind of resurgence of kind of social democracy as a
Speaker 1: kind of political force in at least in the anglosphere.
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of a lot of the
Speaker 1: arguments that Bevins makes are kind of crystallizing a general
Speaker 1: kind of attitude. I feel that that was kind of
Speaker 1: about But I guess maybe before we before we get
Speaker 1: into that, maybe could could you kind of introduce Bevin's
Speaker 1: book and kind of what the main argument is.
Speaker 4: So the book is written by Vincent Bevins, and it's
Speaker 4: called If We Burn, I believe. The subtitle is the
Speaker 4: Mass Protest Decade and the miss Revolution by Mass Protest Decade.
Speaker 4: He's referring to what I would call the cycle of
Speaker 4: struggles circa twenty ten, which kind of began with the
Speaker 4: Arab Spring. It's unclear when it ended in some ways,
Speaker 4: probably with the pandemic. But he's sort of writing about
Speaker 4: these movements during that period of the twenty tens, you know,
Speaker 4: and there is a kind of distinct pattern to these movements.
Speaker 4: So Vincent Bevins is a journalist by trade, you know,
Speaker 4: known for writing kind of books informed by journalism and
Speaker 4: by his position in the world. He lives in Brazil
Speaker 4: and he participated in some of the events there that
Speaker 4: are the form part of the book. But the book
Speaker 4: is written through I think dozens, you know, probably one
Speaker 4: hundred or so interviews, and he asked participants to kind
Speaker 4: of say what happened, and more importantly, what went wrong
Speaker 4: and what they think should have been done. And so
Speaker 4: to the ex said that the book has an argument.
Speaker 4: The sort of argument is written through a kind of
Speaker 4: synthesis of these accounts of what went wrong and what
Speaker 4: should have been done, and the book identifies the problem
Speaker 4: as originating from this kind of ideology that it describes
Speaker 4: as horizontalism, which it claims was kind of the dominant,
Speaker 4: had a force within these protest movements and was a
Speaker 4: kind of disorganizing and disempowering ideology.
Speaker 1: What are some of the positives that you see in
Speaker 1: the book.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I was very excited about this book,
Speaker 4: and I should note that it's a very popular book,
Speaker 4: and you know, and I think that that indicates something.
Speaker 4: People really love it, including many many people I know,
Speaker 4: get a lot out of the book and are quite
Speaker 4: excited by it. And that's in some ways what kind
Speaker 4: of motivated me to identify what I think thought were
Speaker 4: the problems with it. It's appealing, it's really well written,
Speaker 4: it's engaging, and you can learn a lot. And I
Speaker 4: and I think it's you know, really asking the right questions,
Speaker 4: how do we win, what would it mean to win?
Speaker 4: What was it that these movements wanted? And how could
Speaker 4: they have achieved it? You know, asking why these movements
Speaker 4: failed is a good question. And it's also taking a
Speaker 4: kind of big picture look at things and writing from
Speaker 4: kind of global and comparative perspective that is pretty rare.
Speaker 4: There's not a lot of people who feel they have
Speaker 4: the kind of authority to kind of write a synthetic
Speaker 4: book like this, because it's very hard. There were a
Speaker 4: couple of books that came out, you know, in the
Speaker 4: twenty tens, but certainly I can't really think of anything
Speaker 4: like it that's often that's kind of reflective, that's a book.
Speaker 4: There's a couple, there's a couple of things in other languages,
Speaker 4: and certainly there's articles written by kind of like very
Speaker 4: far left magazines that you know, investigate similar questions. But so,
Speaker 4: you know, it's it's I think that the peer has
Speaker 4: to deal with the fact that this is these are
Speaker 4: really interesting questions and these social movements are vastly important,
Speaker 4: and understanding them and how they could have succeeded is
Speaker 4: I think one of the most important things we can
Speaker 4: be doing. So, you know, I think that I really,
Speaker 4: I really admire that, and probably it's because I think
Speaker 4: those are the right questions that I am very concerned
Speaker 4: with getting the answers right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, I think for listeners that haven't read the book,
Speaker 2: because I was also really excited to read it as well,
Speaker 2: because he interviewed I think two hundred and twenty five
Speaker 2: people in I can't remember how many countries, like ten
Speaker 2: or eleven, and it covers a selection of big struggles
Speaker 2: from the twenty tens. And the questions that he said
Speaker 2: he was putting to people are very similar to the
Speaker 2: questions that we ask when we're doing a podcast episode
Speaker 2: with participants in social movements. So we were very well.
Speaker 2: I was reading it very interest did to see what
Speaker 2: these people had to say, and I guess we're going
Speaker 2: to get but yeah, I think, like you, they are
Speaker 2: these are really important questions, and I think, like you,
Speaker 2: I was a little disappointed as well. Something I found
Speaker 2: really disappointing with the book as a whole, actually that
Speaker 2: with these interviews with two hundred other people, I was
Speaker 2: I was reading getting the introbute, I'm really excited to
Speaker 2: see these interviews and see what these people say. And
Speaker 2: then I kind of got about forty five percent of
Speaker 2: the way through on my kindle and I was like,
Speaker 2: I'm kind of feeling like, I'm not actually going to
Speaker 2: see these interviews, you know, because yeah, because I was
Speaker 2: expecting it to be more the words of the interviewees
Speaker 2: rather than those kind of used behind the scenes that
Speaker 2: you don't see, which he then says he's used to
Speaker 2: construct his narrative, which, yeah, you know, I guess that's
Speaker 2: just how the book was put together. But it's hard
Speaker 2: to see then what the people said to make him
Speaker 2: then have that opinion, because and how much of that
Speaker 2: is based on his preconceptions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, Jesspa if you wanted to, if
Speaker 1: you wanted to go into maybe what some of the
Speaker 1: main problems you saw with the book, and it's kind
Speaker 1: of main arguments I think.
Speaker 4: I guess the main problem is that Bevins rates all
Speaker 4: of these movements as failures, but he doesn't really define success.
Speaker 4: He describes the present era as you know, one of
Speaker 4: kind of unwritten ing failure for protest movements, but he
Speaker 4: doesn't do so in relationship to you know, he doesn't
Speaker 4: give us an example of some era where things weren't
Speaker 4: just failure, and he doesn't tell us what success really
Speaker 4: looks like for the most part. And then when he
Speaker 4: does define success, it's quite problematic as I see it,
Speaker 4: and I'm not sure that these things count as success.
Speaker 4: And I think that for the movements themselves, they were
Speaker 4: felt as semi failures, and so it raises a number
Speaker 4: of questions. But the result of this that he kind
Speaker 4: of doesn't define failure is that a lot of the
Speaker 4: problems he identifies as kind of particular to the kind
Speaker 4: of mass protests decade aren't really particular to that mass
Speaker 4: protest decade. And they're problems and kind of failures that
Speaker 4: you see in pretty much every era of social struggles.
Speaker 4: They're quite they're quite common, and inasmuch as so in
Speaker 4: some some things are particular to this era and some
Speaker 4: things aren't. But because he's not, he's not kind of
Speaker 4: giving us a comparative approach. He tells us about the
Speaker 4: twenty tens, but he doesn't tell us about the kind
Speaker 4: of previous era or the kind of classic period of revolution.
Speaker 4: He doesn't define a revolution. He doesn't really have a
Speaker 4: theory of what a revolution is because he doesn't really
Speaker 4: periodize this stuff in relationship to what came before. He
Speaker 4: identifies a lot of problems as particularly this era, that
Speaker 4: are actually common problems, and as such, the kinds of
Speaker 4: conclusions he arrives at are commonplaces because they're like common,
Speaker 4: they're just very common responses to common problems. And it's
Speaker 4: not that they're wrong the things he says, it's just
Speaker 4: that they're kind of banal, actually, and they are the
Speaker 4: kind of things that pretty much every revolution from every
Speaker 4: period would tell you so, and that's a lot of
Speaker 4: what you end up hearing. And it's not that they're wrong,
Speaker 4: it's just that it's sort of you know, I mean,
Speaker 4: everybody thinks, hey, I wish we would have been better organized.
Speaker 4: I'm not. I'm pretty sure that there's not a single
Speaker 4: you know, revolutionary who wouldn't tell you some version of that, right.
Speaker 4: And you know, in pretty much every period that you
Speaker 4: look at revolutionary period, if we're talking about capitalism more
Speaker 4: or less, what we're looking at our various kinds of
Speaker 4: failures right from the standpoint of the working class, and
Speaker 4: with a standpoint of communist revolution, you could sort of
Speaker 4: rate any decade of revolution as an ultimately an era
Speaker 4: of kind of missing revolution, even the places where it
Speaker 4: went the furthest in Russia, you know, I mean that
Speaker 4: decade was defined as an era of missing revolution precisely
Speaker 4: in Germany and these other countries where the revolution was
Speaker 4: supposed to spread. And so I don't know, it's it's
Speaker 4: so I think that that's the big problem.
Speaker 1: That I have.
Speaker 2: I would agree with that as well, because the one
Speaker 2: ex he does pick out as a success is in Chile,
Speaker 2: whereas I think partly the issue is when the book
Speaker 2: was published, which I think was late twenty twenty three October.
Speaker 2: So by that point in Chile, following the big protest movement,
Speaker 2: the government agreed to rewrite the constitution and that was
Speaker 2: going through the process of being rewritten, and I think
Speaker 2: his book came out in October twenty twenty three, but
Speaker 2: then in December they had the referendum on the constitution
Speaker 2: and it lost, so actually there was there were no
Speaker 2: concrete results from that, and I think the perspective of
Speaker 2: the Chileans that I talked to is that it was
Speaker 2: a failure. But you know, I guess by his criteria.
Speaker 4: And they even tell him that they even his own
Speaker 4: his own his own interviewees tell him that they feel
Speaker 4: disappointed in Borich.
Speaker 2: Borich is the current president of Chile. He was a
Speaker 2: leader of protest movements in Chile in the early two thousands,
Speaker 2: and he he subsequently became president at the end of
Speaker 2: the decade.
Speaker 4: And then he's at the end, he's like, yeah, they
Speaker 4: seem to have kind of come around, and then he
Speaker 4: tells and then he basically talked back to them, and
Speaker 4: there's like, well, you guys are lucky that you know,
Speaker 4: Borges came along and recuperated your movement, because the alternative is,
Speaker 4: you know, Brazil where it's you know, the kind of
Speaker 4: bolson Aristas that take over.
Speaker 2: That brings us to the end of this episode. Preview
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Speaker 2: notes