On If We Burn

This is a very important book, and especially so for me, because the years it covers were politically formative. I remember when the “protest decade” began, though I was far from any of the action — fifteen years old, in a suburb of Chicago, when the Tunisian Revolution broke out. I knew very little about it then, only that it seemed big, and that it spread quickly to Egypt and the rest of the Middle East; I was part of a small group where we, all teenagers, debated current events. Today I live in Tunis, and I see the aftermath of the Revolution completely differently than I did then. My early understanding was filtered through the ever-present, frankly hegemonic concepts of “democracy” and “freedom” as Washington understands them, and that was never the full story. One of the most widespread slogans was “Bread, Freedom, Dignity, Nation” — it sounds much better in the original Arabic: “Khobz, Hourria, Karama, Watania,” خبز، حرية، كرامة، وطنية. Since then there’s been a worsening of economic conditions, social and political backsliding, and widespread discontent.

How did that happen? It’s almost the exact opposite of what the early revolutionaries intended — and Bevins assures us it’s been a global trend. His book is a solid journalistic account of the worldwide “protest decade,” from the Tunisian Revolution in December 2010 to the outbreak of Covid-19 in early 2020. His coverage is broad — the Arab world, Ukraine, Chile, the US, Western Europe, Turkey, Korea, Indonesia — with the bulk of his attention on Brazil, where he reported for the L.A. Times and took part in the Free Fare Movement. His accounts of specific protests are good, but he’s at his best on the question of technique. He gives considerable attention to the tactics of the 2010s, which can be grouped under “horizontalism”: mostly of the Left, but rejecting strong organizational structures as “Leninist” and insufficiently egalitarian.

The problem, Bevins argues, is that horizontalist movements come with a fatal flaw — they tend to lack a single coherent idea for everyone to unify around. Being open to everyone, they have little capacity for decision-making, so the message gets diluted at best; at worst, the movement is seized by competing, better-organized actors, since there’s really no such thing as a true political vacuum. I think he’s right. In Tunisia the Revolution wasn’t really about one thing, but its most important cause, to my mind, was economic justice. There was significant opposition to the RCD, but the Revolution was rooted in the marginalized interior, where economic prospects were slim — the “bread” of the slogan — and made worse by officials’ habit of humiliating the marginalized, which is where the “dignity” comes in. By the time it reached the capital, more bourgeois groups — lawyers, journalists — pressed their own claims and emphasized the “freedom,” and organized groups, eventually the Troika, seized the Revolution for their own ends while marginalization continued. Crowds, in other words, are excellent at negating an established power structure but fundamentally incapable of generating a positive transformation.

Bevins also dwells on the question of “the day after.” In Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, and Chile, the movements managed the necessary rupture but had no plan for what came next, and in every case the limited gains were rolled back — the reaction proving stronger than the activist forces, so that conditions are now often worse than when the decade began in 2010–11. His view mirrors my own, and although I’ve always been the more aloof, academic type, hesitant to take to the streets, I’ve come to believe that some quasi-Leninist organizational structure is absolutely necessary for real change. Even reform through establishment channels tends to produce better outcomes than horizontalist movements do.

I’m sorry if that comes across as harsh; it’s all too easy to be a critic when you’re not the one doing the work. So I want to use this last paragraph to thank everyone who pushed for change through horizontalist methods, in whatever country. Occupy Wall Street coincided with my own political awakening, and I’ve learned so much from people far braver than I am. Social change requires taking risks, and the activists on the front lines deserve our deepest gratitude.