Red Pepper » Paul Mason

Tweetin’ ’bout a revolution: Paul Mason interview

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:10:18 +0000

Hilary Wainwright (Red Pepper) You highlight the commonalities of the different revolts of 2011, but how do we understand the differences between revolts against authoritarian regimes and exhausted democracies? Is there a problem with this generality?
Paul Mason I’m looking for what’s common rather than making generalities. First of all, one revolt feeds off another, and you can’t underestimate the physical link: again and again, among people who were involved in March 26 in the UK, J14 in Israel, Wisconsin, you meet people who had been to Tahrir.
Spain isn’t Greece, and Tahrir and Tunis are very different. But there is the archetype of the educated youth whose life chances have been blighted by a combination of economic downturn and a regime they realise is unsustainable.
You can’t underestimate the extent to which those dictatorships had linked themselves to the economic programme of neoliberalism. Many say that the key moment in the Arab Spring was the loss of fear, and in the west it has been the loss of apathy, but the sources have been the same thing: people suddenly realising ‘change is necessary, change is possible’. The more I think about it, the more I trace it back to the collapse of the economic model – it just took a while.
Andrew Bowman (Red Pepper) One of the interesting things linking the revolts is that there isn’t an alternative economic blueprint they’re moving towards.
Paul The lack of a strategic, hierarchical alternative system is what makes this new for those of us who have lived through the late 20th century. But it’s very like the early years of social democracy. The debate in German social democracy in the 1890s was ‘are we trying to overthrow capitalism, or aren’t we?’ The left said ‘Yes, but it will take a long time and we’re doing it through a combination of voting and workers’ struggles.’ The right said ‘No, but in the process of building the movement, we’ll build a better capitalism.’
Eduard Bernstein was the progenitor of modern social democracy, and his key phrase was ‘the movement is everything, the ends are nothing’. Go down to Occupy Wall Street, and that’s what they’re saying. Looking through a 100-year prism, orderly German social democracy, with its libraries and clubs, looks like disorderly anarcho-syndicalism, with its libraries and clubs. It’s people doing what horizontalist theorists would call ‘living despite capitalism’ – creating the areas of civilisation within the jungle.
Andrew Related to this lack of a clear alternative, it looks like 2012 could be defined by a resurgence of economic nationalism, and so conservative forces may well have a good year. How will the movements respond?
Paul The power of the horizontalist movements is, first, their replicability by people who know nothing about theory, and secondly, their success in breaking down the hierarchies that seek to contain them. They are exposed to a montage of ideas, in a way that the structured, difficult-to-conquer knowledge of the 1970s and 1980s did not allow. We’re talking about different human beings; they have different ways of thinking.
And this is very difficult to contain, even by right-wing parties who get 20 per cent of the vote. Whether it’s the True Finns or Jobbik in Hungary, it’s ‘Kinder, Kirche, Kuche’ (family, church, and women in the kitchen) – that’s what they stand for. They do not stand for dance parties, multiple partners or women’s liberation.
But the protest movement isn’t immune from ideological disorientation. In Britain many of these people flip from being Lib Dems to class-struggle anarchists within weeks. In acute crises, you tend to get severe psychological flips in the population. We’ve had a big flip towards horizontalist leftism among the young generation, and its not impossible that it could flip in another direction.
Hilary I want to probe the newness you describe. To what extent is this generation picking up and reconfiguring ideas that were developed in the 1970s, appropriated by the ‘new capitalism’, and are now being rethought?
Paul In the book I say there is a linearity from the New Left to feminism and such movements that attempted to do networks. But they were up against different hierarchies, and those hierarchies corrupted what was liberatory about them. They were also squashed by class, by technology and one other thing that this generation might have to go through again: repression that works.
In the 1960s, the non-violence turned into violence, because non-violence didn’t work. And then the workers acted and a lot of former anarchists just decided they had to be Leninists, or something hierarchical at least.
Andrew There are interesting issues in terms of how technologies fit into these new movements. Social media technology has made horizontalism in revolts more possible, but it has also led to a certain amount of deskilling – as Facebook and Twitter rise as organising tools, groups and protests emerge very quickly, but also disappear very quickly.
Paul These are all the attributes of modern work: a flat hierarchy, weak ties, constant deskilling, the ability to learn a new skill more important than having a skill. Companies that were big 10 years ago don’t exist anymore – that’s modern capitalism.
In the Fordist era, you would have big, hierarchical companies that would persist for a long time on one strategy, and you also had oppositional movements with hierarchies, permanent strategies, strong ties. Here’s the heretical thought: those old movements thought they were movements for overthrowing capitalism. By and large they didn’t, they co-existed with it and mirrored its attributes. What you’re seeing here is probably more honest: movements that don’t like capitalism, which don’t have a strategy for replacing it on a global level, but are highly adapted to living despite it.
Actually the problem they have is that capitalism is in crisis. Social democracy had this problem too. There was a 40-year programme for getting more votes, so that in the 1890s they imagined they would maybe have an electoral majority in the 1920s.
In the middle of the process, bang! World War One; bang! women and unskilled youth flood into the workforce. Suddenly, their world is gone. This is the problem for this movement now – what if the world goes bang?
Andrew What do you see in terms of responses to the precarious, come-and-go features of the current movement? The Camp for Climate Action, for instance, disbanded this year.
Paul The big question for horizontalist movements is that as long as you don’t articulate against power, you’re basically doing what somebody has called ‘reform by a riot’: a guy in a hoodie goes to jail for a year so that a guy in a suit can get his law through parliament.
After a while in the 19th century workers saw there were other ways: form your own party and stand in elections, with all the difficulties that has, or your own newspaper, and basically join the grown-up world of taking responsibility for stuff. I think a lot of people in the horizontalist movement are at the point of considering this, but are hesitant.
Hilary Isn’t there something that is between durability based on hierarchy and structure, and complete chaos? For example memory and also sociality of a meaningful kind.
Paul You identify an important dichotomy between technology-based social networking and face-to-face socialising. The thing I observe is that the progenitors of the big ideas within the protest movement were also strong in the ‘flesh world’. The Tarnac Nine, who wrote The Coming Insurrection, said ‘find each other’, do little things together.
Activists I have spoken to about the book say ‘you’re over-emphasising the technological, you’re neglecting the personal’. But it’s a bit like telling a member of the Levellers in the 17th century that ‘what you do would be impossible without the printing press’. I say, ‘what you’re doing would be impossible without this technology’. Without it, the Tarnac Nine would just be the nine people.
Andrew There are signs of attempts to constrain the liberatory use of the internet. Looking at the history of the printing press, you go from having dozens of radical, mass circulation working class papers, to the press becoming an establishment tool. Is a similar trend possible with the internet?
Paul Ask yourself this question: what businessperson or politician can really be on Twitter – saying ‘I just split up with my girlfriend, I just drank three gins’? The hierarchy wants to own Twitter but it can’t. Even if they did, they would have to live in that world of gin and girlfriends.
A great moment in the Egyptian revolution must have been when Mubarak shut down the internet and people came to him and said ‘general, they are getting round this by a website called hidemyass.com’. So the biggest military in the Middle East was being defeated by hidemyass.com.
During the Reformation and the Renaissance, over a period of generations, the old world was dragged into the new. So eventually the behaviour and ideas of the elite change.
You could say the printing press civilised the reactionaries as well as empowering the agents of change. The possibility exists that today’s tech revolution civilises the old order. But to the extent that elites can’t use this technology, they can’t exist in the modern world.
And the noticeable thing about modern politics is the disconnect between the elite and the masses. The masses are much more homogeneous: the way a young slum dweller in London lives, and the way a student lives, and the way a young professional lives, are not that different. They share a common culture in Twitter and Blackberries.
By contrast the elite are building themselves into a kind of walled turret – that’s dangerous for democracy, and it’s dangerous for them.
Hilary Given your role as an observer, what do you see in terms of new ways of articulating with power? Do you see signs from your global travels that there are other ways?
Paul In Hungary mainstream politics fell apart. The government is right-wing nationalist, the main opposition is far right and anti-Gypsy.
But the NGO-based left suddenly formed quite a successful party – Politics Can Be Different – which now has MPs, power etc. If Hungary is the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the EU, I would expect some of today’s horizontalists in Europe, North Africa and America to start forming parties in the next years.
Andrew How would you sum up the experience of 2011?
Paul To me this movement – weak-tied, mercurial, sporadic – this is completely the product of modern work of a certain kind. This movement is content to live within capitalism, to create its space with capitalism, but the problem is capitalism might be about to go into the level of crisis that doesn’t allow you to do that.
This generation of protesters could easily suffer the fate of social democracy. In 1914 it had to choose between being a recruitment sergeant for mass slaughter, or becoming an underground movement, and there was no middle ground. That could still happen in the world of 2012.
Paul Mason’s new book, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: the new global revolutions, is available now, published by Verso

Paul Mason’s Booktopia

admin — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:54:18 +0000

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman (First published in Switzerland, 1980)

The first chapter left me in a cold sweat: it’s 1942 and an engine driver is shunting a train of empty cattle trucks out of a prison camp – but is it a German camp or a Russian one? It’s not immediately clear. Grossman, the Red Army’s star journalist during Stalingrad, sees the battle from the point of view of those trapped within the Soviet system who just can’t stop fighting for freedom. He died in 1964 with the book unpublished and believing every copy of the manuscript was in the KGB vaults, but photos of the pages were later smuggled to the west.

Red Virgin: the memoirs of Louise Michel

Louise Michel (University of Alabama Press, 1981)

Michel’s memoir of radicalisation, the Paris Commune and transportation to New Caledonia reads like magic realism – except much of the magic is going on inside her head. One transcendental experience after another turns her from slum teacher into revolutionary icon. She gathers shattered cherry blossom under shellfire, rescues a cat from a barricade and heckles her prosecutors: ‘If you are not cowards, kill me.’ A story of human greatness.

Vineland

Thomas Pynchon (Little, Brown, 1990)

If you sat down and free-associated the history of American popular culture, while simultaneously trying to explain the defeat of the 1968 generation and the fatal attraction of the Washington elite, smoking dope and watching a DVD box set of the early Star Trek, you would be in the place where Pynchon begins this book. I am haunted by his satire of idealism and betrayal, kung fu, postmodernism and grief.

My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943

George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, 1968)

‘As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’ Orwell’s collected non-fiction documents his political journey from pacifist to social patriot. Alongside the journalism are his diaries: he wanders through bomb-torn London, sees working-class drinkers switch off vital BBC news bulletins in the pub because the voices are too posh, and flings acid cynicism at the pro-Nazi wing of the British elite as the ‘people’s war’ begins.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck (Viking Press, 1939)

I don’t know why the Salesians of Don Bosco put this on our sixth form reading list: after reading it, a large number of my schoolmates went fruit picking during their summer holidays and promptly went on strike. I, meanwhile, was working in a factory, where the main topics for discussion were socialism and the coming winter of discontent. By the time we put our school blazers on for the upper sixth, life – and Steinbeck – had taught us everything we needed to know. We were uncontrollable.

The Insurrectionist

Jules Vallès (First published in France, 1886)

Vallès was the first gonzo journalist, and here, in razor-sharp first person paragraphs of action and introspection, he tells his barely-fictionalised life story – from abused kid to starving student to hounded newspaper hack in second empire Paris. Elected to the Commune of 1871 as its final fate becomes clear, he writes of ‘a cloak of silence over everything. It lasted long enough for everyone to say goodbye to his life.’

Dispatches

Michael Herr (Knopf, 1977)

When I was about seven years old I saw a Vietnamese man on TV news burning to death with napalm. A few years later I picked up Michael Herr’s account of being a journalist in Vietnam. I won’t say it’s what made me decide to be a journalist, but when I did, it’s the kind of journalist I wanted to be. I don’t mean the adrenaline – I mean the unflinching truthfulness of his gaze, like when he meets the American colonel with a plan to drop piranhas into the rice paddies: ‘He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death.’

Ten Days That Shook The World

John Reed (Boni & Liveright, 1919)

Sometimes, as a mental exercise, I imagine how the modern media would have covered the Russian revolution. Then I read a page from this book at random. It’s always a great cure for complacency.

Paul Mason is BBC Newsnight‘s economics editor. His book Live Working or Die Fighting: how the working class went global is published by Vintage.

His selections can be purchased here.

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