Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere

WHY IT'S STILL KICKING
OFF EVERYWHERE

The New Global Revolutions

Revised and Updated Second Edition

PAUL MASON

Dedication

To my mother

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1.‘Now There Is Freedom': Why Egypt's Revolution Is Not Over

2.Nobody Saw It Coming: How the World's Collective Imagination Failed

3.‘Trust Is Explosive': Britain's Youth Rebel Against Austerity

4.So, Why Did It Kick Off? The Social Roots of the New Unrest

5.Greece: The Anomic State? From Austerity to Social Breakdown

6.‘Error de Sistema': Economic Causes of the Present Unrest

7.‘I Tweet in My Dreams': The Rise of the Networked Individual

8.In the Tracks of Tom Joad: A Journey through Jobless America

9.1848 Redux: What We Can Learn from the Last Global Wave

10.‘We Will Barricade': Slum Dwellers versus the Super-rich

11.Spain Redux: Dispatches from Utopia

12.Developments in Greece: Love or Nothing

13.Russia: ‘Putin Got Scared'—From the Football Riots to Pussy Riot

14.The Twenty Reasons, Revisited

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright

Introduction

It was a cold Friday night in early 2011, sometime between the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and the fall of the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. I got a call: would I do a lecture on the history of the Paris Commune for something called ‘The Really Free School' in Bloomsbury? I turned up to the venue to find it was a squat. They'd formed an ad hoc university, occupied an eighteenth-century townhouse in the heart of London and stuck a sign on the door saying ‘Journalists Fuck Off'.

Here was the hard core of the student protest movement: dedicated eco-warriors, veterans of suicidal sit-downs in front of tanks in Gaza, the demobbed Clown Army and, as my host put it, ‘the Situationist Taliban'.

Did they know this had all been done before? They had a vague idea. I watched their eyes widen—sixty of them, cross-legged on the Jane Austen–era floorboards—as I explained the debates between Proudhon, Blanqui, Marx and Garibaldi in the years before 1871, scarcely needing to draw out the parallels with Climate Camp, the Black Bloc, Naomi Klein and the Zapatistas.

Afterwards, a few of us wedged ourselves into the nearby Museum Tavern, where Marx had been a regular. There was @spitzenprodukte and @benvickers_, both art activists; @dougald—the inventor of the term ‘collapsonomics'; @digitalmaverick, a schoolteacher and ‘moodle evangelist'; and Tim, who'd dedicated his life to fighting for human rights in the Niger Delta.

The discussion buzzed: is it the technology, the economics, the mass psychology or just the zeitgeist that's caused this global explosion of revolt? I inclined to a technological-determinist explanation: ‘Look how your eyes shine when we talk about the network. It's the network!' Glancing at my iPhone, I realized why they seemed occasionally distracted: they were tweeting the entire conversation, live, to their friends.

The next morning I wrote a blog post based on the conversation: ‘Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere' (see page 63). It went viral.

Within a month I met a hacker from Boston, Massachusetts, who told me that ‘there are discussion groups in the USA studying your blog'. Later, I found out that a global collective of protesters were working on a book critiquing the blog
¹
; later still I met some of them, as they tried to avoid having their heads bashed in by Greek riot police. This has created a degree of circularity between the reporter, the reported-on and the events which I am still struggling to get my own head around.

In this book I explore the reasons why numerous protest movements, revolutions, civil wars and internet-based revolts ‘kicked off' in 2009–11. I've travelled from Cairo to Manila to Athens and beyond to write it. It's not a comprehensive history, and of course the events are not over.

The book makes no claim to be a ‘theory of everything', linking LulzSec to global warming and key dates in the Mayan calendar. And don't file it under ‘social science': it's journalism.

Some ideas in the original blog have been expanded, others ditched. Some theatres of the conflict have been ignored, simply because I couldn't get there. The original post—written on 5 February 2011 when Mubarak was still in power and Greece was still scheduled to pay its debts (and with my head throbbing thanks to the Museum Tavern)—was just a snapshot and so is this, albeit with more pixels and depth of field. Though events have moved on fast, the essence of my argument remains unchanged. We're in the middle of a revolution caused by the near collapse of free-market capitalism combined with an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means. An economic crisis is making the powerful look powerless, while the powerless are forced to adopt tactics that were once the preserve of niche protest groups.

If you're skilled at chaining yourself to fighter planes, or know how to launch a ‘denial of service attack', there will be parts of this book that make you think, ‘Yeah, right, of course, I knew all that.' The aim, as with the original blog, is to capture the moments of crisis and revolution, to give them context and to explain what links these apparently disparate, worldwide upheavals.

Many of the activists I've interviewed are hostile to the very idea of a unifying theory, a set of bullet-point demands, a guru or a teleology. I'm not trying to provide any of these. For the youth, increasingly, knowledge is drawn, on demand and free, from online articles and commentaries and—often breathless—tweets. And for many, politics has become gestural: it is about refusing to engage with power on power's own terms; about action, not ideas; about the symbolic control of territory to create islands of utopia.

The format of the book reflects the zeitgeist: it brings together reportage, essay, tweet, anecdote and cyber-psychology; plus some economic insights gathered amid clouds of tear gas.

And the role of ‘the book' itself is changing. Writers of my generation stood in awe of the New Journalism of the 1960s, when the sudden swing to truthful reportage could end presidencies and terminate wars. But the equivalent in this era will not be like the grand reportage of the Sixties at all. Rather, it is the combined input of thousands of people into the freely accessible public record of social media: the thoughts they tweeted, the jokes they cracked as their friends panicked in the crush of crowds, the football shirts they wore as they toted Kalashnikovs through liberated Tripoli. There is a great river of human hope flowing, and all I am trying to do is dip my fingers in it.

The essence of why it's kicking off was put into words by a student protester in the USA. Federal police had tried to arrest somebody on a university campus, so a group of students sat down around the police car. A twenty-one-year-old with curly blond hair took off his shoes and stood on the car's roof, to begin a mass meeting that would last several days. Later, he said:

The act of sitting around the police car, of getting up on the car and starting to speak, of physically structuring the possibility of a community … all of a sudden there is a self-justifying factor to it. In a way, once it's been established, there might be other reasons for sitting around the car than keeping it from moving—namely participating in the community. I have never experienced that anywhere nearly so strongly as around the police car.
²

But that was not in 2011. Those words were spoken in 1964 by Mario Savio, a student leader in Berkeley, California, in a protest that kicked off a decade of campus revolts throughout the USA.

You may have thought such days were gone—such idealism, such eloquence, such creativity and hope. Well, they're back.

London, 26 October 2011

1

‘Now There Is Freedom': Why Egypt's Revolution Is Not Over

Cairo, May 2011

The ground floor of Musa Zekry's house is head-high with garbage and thick with flies. The floor above is home to the widow of his brother, shot dead during the revolution. Musa will live in the top floor, above her, when it is finished—but for now it's a shell, choked with rubble, dust, more garbage and more flies.

A dead brother, several fear-filled days in Tahrir Square, weeks of danger and distrust: that's the balance sheet of Musa Zekry's revolution. All he's got to show for it is a banner slung across the street outside, hailing his brother as a martyr, alongside a portrait of Jesus Christ. Plus freedom.

And it is this freedom, so unexpected and so viscerally felt, that lights his face and energizes his five-foot frame as he steers me through streets filled with
shisha
smoke, donkey crap and a blizzard of flies:

The Central Security forces now are non-existent—because we have freedom! Now everybody has a voice and wants to speak. Before, under Mubarak, if you raised your voice they would kill you in the street. Now there is freedom.

Cairo's Moqattam slum, in the south-east of this vast metropolis, is home to 65,000
zabbaleen
or ‘garbage people'. The young men and children collect the garbage in the twilit streets of downtown Cairo. The women sort it into separate sacks: bone, metal, cloth and plastic in all their subsets: water bottles, oil containers. A whole family just down the street from Musa specializes in smashing plastic knives and forks into a crisp white rubble. The
zabbaleen
's world is one of rank alleyways, face-stinging heat, cheap bread eaten fresh out of grubby fingers.

The
zabbaleen
are mainly Coptic Christians: the face of Jesus gazes down on every workshop and rubbish pile. But in the street, as Musa leads me to a makeshift factory where they are using vats and blowers to turn plastic bottle shreds into translucent snow, two men embrace each other, gesturing at the religious symbols tattooed on their wrists: ‘I Christian, I Muslim,' they chime. ‘We together.'

The Egyptian revolution may have begun on Facebook, but when it reached these alleyways, mobilizing men whose whole lives are stratified by religion, family and caste—well, that was the point that things got serious for Hosni Mubarak.

‘Two men came to us and said, let's go down to Tahrir, to ask for change,' says Musa. He's reluctant to name them even now, but he clasps his palms together above his head to demonstrate what they did. ‘They told us: let's make a demonstration with the people in Tahrir Square. One was Muslim, one Christian. One hand! We went by car: ten or twenty cars. When we got there I realized that our goal was right: to make a revolution and get freedom.'

Some of the bottle shredders did not go: ‘We have our own square here,' laughs one, pointing to a patch of dust and dog-dirt. ‘We waited for Tahrir to come to the
zabbaleen
!'

It did, but not in the way they had expected. On 7 March 2011, less than a month after Mubarak had fallen, and the garbage people had symbolically cleansed Tahrir, thugs from the old regime organized a Muslim mob to attack the slum. These hired gangs are known as the
baltagiya:

My brother ran to tell my Dad—he works in a garage in the place the
baltagiya
were marching to. But my Dad had already run away. Then we got a phone call: your brother is in the hospital, he is dead. He was shot but nobody knows who did it.

Relations between the Copts and the Muslim slums nearby were always fraught, but, despite his brother's death, Musa is not scared to go there. It's the city centre, where law and order has been minimal since the revolution, that frightens him: ‘I can walk through the Muslim slum, no problem. The problem is, now, if I go downtown I am worried somebody's gonna shoot me; somebody is gonna wave a pass—I don't know whether it's fake or real—and tell me to give money, or kill me.'