[P2P-F] Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason

Sun Feb 6 02:22:11 CET 2011

Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking.html

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 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.