Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, by Paul Mason, Verso, 2012, p237

Anyone who experienced first-hand the student occupations and protests at the back end of 2010 will find themselves – upon reading the chapter on that subject in Paul Mason’s new book, 'Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere' – transported straight back into the strange intensity of that particular moment. The hope that wider opposition to austerity might be galvanised by these actions, the dread of what Britain would become if the government had its way (on tuition fees, EMA and everything else), the energy that swept the NUS leadership aside and drew thousands of hitherto politically inactive young people into the fight against the marketisation of universities. All of this is conveyed, not just by Mason’s account of the basic facts, but by the immediacy of his writing style. This is a book with a global and historic perspective, offering an analysis of commensurate substance and scale.  But it is narrated quite unpretentiously by an observant and informed commentator at your side, taking you on a tour through the various large cracks appearing in the edifice of globalised capitalism, introducing you to the people pushed to the brink by the financial crash and its aftermath, listening to their experiences, their plans for resistance, and trying to bring all this together into a coherent narrative that makes some sense of the upheaval of recent months.

Mason’s thesis, crudely summarised, is essentially this: at the same time as the global crisis placed severe additional pressures on people whose economic situation was precarious even in the boom years, a series of technological advances was bringing forth new tools and techniques capable of empowering those affected to respond in dramatic ways, for which the status quo was unprepared. From the cheap mobile phones used by the Masai in Kenya to the social media available from Western Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, rapid changes were happening to the way in which human beings related to each other, communicated, socialised and organised politically. A greater quantity of information was available, easier to access, and could be transmitted to more people at greater speed. In addition, these new communications channels bypassed hierarchical structures and narratives, widening the possibilities for disobedience of thought and action. From Tehran to Cairo, Athens and London, activists benefitted from increased ability to transmit their message, organise actions, and draw in people from outside their immediate circle who were themselves ready to be radicalised by the worsening of their own material conditions. This adds up to a “perfect storm” where a failing political and economic order meets a new kind of social force, and where the combined effect may prove to be far reaching, even revolutionary.

There are times when Mason seems to stray into over-claiming on behalf of his thesis, for example when he says that:

“The revolts, then, are the result of a technological revolution driven by the deployment of digital communications at work, in social life, and now in forms of protest. It is not necessary to be a techno-determinist to see this”.

Literally, the first of these sentences is techno-deterministic: “the revolts…are the result of a technological revolution”. If the economic system were delivering social justice and the means of individual and collective fulfilment, then there would be no need or desire for revolt, irrespective of the tools available. What is true, and what is strongly supported by the broader evidence and argument presented in the book, is that these revolts may not have happened in way that they did, to the extent that they did, or with the effects that we have seen, were the catalyst of social media and other new technology not in play within the causal mix.

Narrow techno-determinism would not be a reasonable charge. Mason speaks of “the economic causes of discontent”, that context is clear taking the book as a whole, and is dealt with in some detail. The limits of what can be claimed on behalf of technological change are fairly acknowledged: for example, the fact that internet use remains far out of reach for most of humanity. Perhaps it is a reasonable interpretation to say that Mason sees those able to use these technologies, and the effects on their socio-political relations, as a key active agent rather than an overarching cause of broader change.

Still, it is important to emphasise the real limits to this, as may be illustrated by one small example. Mason says that “social media killed” the News of the World by overwhelming it with decentralised attacks on its reputation following the hacking revelations last summer. The “network defeats the hierarchy” of Murdoch’s News Corp. But of course, this isn’t the whole story. It is insufficient to acknowledge the Guardian’s role in bringing the allegations to light, as Mason does. To claim that “social media killed it” relies upon a counter-factual that would be very difficult to prove: namely that the paper would have survived had social media not existed to make use of the allegations. We might easily speculate that other forms and tools of protest could have achieved the same result, given the gravity of what the paper was accused of. The more plausible counter-factual is that the allegations would not have come to light in the first instance without the Guardian operating within its old media structure, with the capacity to employ skilled journalists, provide them with the resources to pursue the story, and with the legal and institutional backing to see the job through in the face of powerful opposition.

This is not to be complacent about the nature of the corporate media, far more a pillar of the establishment than the progressive democratic force it purports to be. Rather, it is to note that, for the time being at least, new media does not quite have the wherewithal to stand up by itself. So when I tweet something that is picked up on and re-tweeted widely, it will usually contain an original remark or observation of my own, plus a link to a story or article from an established media source. I have the autonomy to communicate an idea that is critical of power, and to get that idea transmitted to an amount of people that, ten years ago, I would have had no means to reach on my own. But this is often backed up by a piece of journalism, cited as supporting evidence, that I do not have the means to produce by myself or even with others. At least not in the same way. Until sustainable models are developed for independent media, that landscape will continue to be dominated by corporate structures with their own class commitments and associated political biases. Hence the perverse focus on questions of public spending in today’s political discourse. We are still a long way from undermining the hierarchical agenda-setting power of the ruling class, which has successfully, at least for now, turned a crisis of the free market into a crisis of the public sector, in spite of insurgent activity coming from outside of the mainstream.

For these reasons, it seems a touch unfair of Mason to cast Noam Chomsky as member of a supposedly defeatist pre-2008 left, for expressing doubts about the transformative power of the internet. Anyone familiar with Chomsky’s writing is aware of one constantly recurring theme: the exhortation to recognise that the future is not written, and to engage in organised political activity to challenge power. This is not negated because Chomsky fails to share Mason’s specific view of how change might be brought about. More broadly, the picture Mason presents of a global left that, until the financial crash, had given up the search or the struggle for alternatives to the Washington consensus is a rather surprising one. Every meeting of the global elite for over a decade – be it on trade, aid, climate change or anything else - has been met with major protests against economic injustice, rallied around the common slogan “another world is possible”. This movement comes together annually at the World Social Forum to discuss how an alternative form of globalisation could be brought about, which meetings are regularly attended by heads of state from the various shades of left-wing governments across Latin America. The rise of such governments, in reaction to the failures of the Washington consensus, and with the effect of largely ejecting the United States from its claimed backyard, shows that the development of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism is the business of states in the global south, as well as activists and protest groups worldwide. These are things that Mason is both aware of and has paid serious attention to in the past.  Surely, to the extent that neoliberalism became a hegemonic consensus, it was the capitulation to its key assumptions by the global centre-left – from the New Democrats to New Labour and the German SPD – that really made this possible. 

Again, while Mason rightly focuses on what is new and different in regard to our own historical moment, the novelty can be over-stated. In terms of anti-neoliberal movements, a great deal of what Mason describes is strikingly reminiscent of trends identified by Naomi Klein in Fences & Windows, published in 2002. There we can see non-hierarchical forms of activism taking shape, networked through electronic media, organised in a highly autonomous, consensual way, light on ideology, but tied together by a broad, post-Marxist “common-sense” about the evident injustices of global capitalism.

To return to Chomsky, his increasing appeal at that time was probably due to a certain alignment between his intellectual approach and that of many of the global justice activists. Rather than a grand, abstract, dialectical theory of historical change, what were deployed instead were some basic common principles and a critique. The point of the global economy should be to serve the general population in a sustainable way, with people free to exercise democratic agency and autonomy within the system in order to live fulfilling lives, free from want and insecurity. The reality was that economic change was driven by concentrations of power to serve their own interests in a way that was largely indifferent to the fate of the majority and whose effects were exploitative, undemocratic and unsustainable. Therefore, political action should be aimed at identifying, undermining and eventually dismantling those concentrations of power – through improvised, ad hoc methods that embody the movement’s democratic principles – and to see where that process eventually leads.

Hence, the demands now made by defenders of the unravelling status quo that protestors bring forth their readymade alternative to global capitalism are largely beside the point. It is recognised that the present and its historical context cannot simply be erased and replaced overnight. The point is to identify what is wrong, and then deal with it piece by piece until you end up somewhere radically different.

In many ways, therefore, the Occupy movement and its various incarnations echo the forms of the preceding decade’s global justice movement, albeit upgraded by advances in technology, galvanised by the economic crisis, and expanded in proportion to the increasing amount of people reached both by the system’s iniquities and by the social media available to the activists. This is not to deny that a seminal shift has taken place, but to identify its roots, and to emphasise that what is new remains attached to those roots, and to other social realities.

By rights, this book ought not to work. Over the course of a short 200 pages Mason zooms in on the fine personal details and out to a satellite’s view of how major historic forces and trends are playing out in a variety of contemporary situations, and in comparison to various precedents from the story of capitalism so far. His wide-angle lens takes in an enthralling array of ideas from sociology, culture, economics and more. He reports from Athens, from the Philippines, and from Obama’s America as he traces the footsteps of the sharecroppers depicted in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, now trodden by former members of the US middle-class. He covers events that are all still happening, including some that have barely begun. It should be incoherent, and in the hands of many other writers it probably would have been. In fact, it is synthesised effortlessly both as narrative and as analysis. It works because Mason has clearly given serious, original thought to what he is observing and what it means, because he has the resources of knowledge to place it all in context, and crucially, because he has a natural gift for conveying his ideas in plain language that is enjoyable and stimulating to read. There is much here to reflect upon, to discuss and to debate. Anyone involved or interested in the current upheavals will find this book an essential resource, and eagerly await the next instalment.

David Wearing is researching Britain's response to the Arab uprisings for a PhD in Political Science at the School of Public Policy, University College London. He is a co-editor of New Left Project.