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0:36

Welcome to Deconstructed, I'm Ryan

0:38

Grim. Now the decade from 2010 to 2020

0:41

saw more people surge into the streets to

0:43

engage in mass protests than any decade

0:45

in human history. And I suspect that stat

0:48

remains true even if you adjust it for the

0:50

growing size of the population. There

0:52

were so many, it's hard to remember them all,

0:54

from the Arab Spring in 2011, to mass

0:56

protests in Brazil and Chile, to the Maidan

0:59

in Ukraine, Occupy Wall Street, the Umbrella

1:01

Movement in Hong Kong, the Candlelight Movement

1:03

in Korea, Gezi Park in Turkey,

1:05

the George Floyd protests in the United

1:07

States, and if we want to keep going, the recent

1:10

mass protests in Israel against

1:12

the takeover of the judiciary. But

1:14

if we look back on them with a clear eye, something

1:17

terrifying starts to come into focus.

1:19

In many of those cases, at best, things

1:21

remained basically the same afterwards.

1:24

In others, the result was the precise

1:26

opposite of what protesters originally

1:28

wanted.

1:29

Vincent Bevins, a veteran foreign correspondent,

1:32

has written a new book called If We Burn, The

1:35

Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.

1:38

I thought his last book, The Jakarta Method, published

1:41

in 2020, was a true masterpiece. And so there was no

1:43

chance I was going to miss whatever he wrote next.

1:45

In my opinion, If We Burn is just as good,

1:48

if not even better, but it's a much different

1:50

book and in many ways it's a difficult

1:52

one because it asks uncomfortable questions

1:54

about the movements that have been the real heroes

1:56

of our era. And it asks those questions

1:59

sympathetically to the people who were there.

1:59

those who were most involved in all of those

2:02

mass protest movements. The book

2:04

is also uncomfortable in the way it forces us

2:06

to look closely at the Maidan uprising in Ukraine

2:08

and the ability of the far right to co-opt

2:11

it, the details of which take on a new

2:13

tragic hue amidst this ongoing war. But

2:16

if we don't have these uncomfortable conversations,

2:18

we'll all be stuck in the same doom loop of outrage,

2:21

protest, and reaction. So

2:23

I'm excited to be joined today by the author of

2:25

the new book, If We Burn, Vincent Bevins.

2:28

Vincent, welcome to Deconstructed. Thank

2:30

you so much for having me. And so let's start with the

2:33

free fair movement in Brazil. And first,

2:35

the question of how you actually wound up

2:37

down there in the first place. You say you kind of accidentally

2:40

became a journalist, which is the

2:42

same way it happened to me. So I was intrigued

2:45

to read that line. So how did you stumble

2:47

your way into this terrible profession? Yeah,

2:50

I didn't study journalism. I thought that I was going

2:52

to do something in academia. I was

2:54

in Venezuela in 2007,

2:57

thinking I was going to

2:59

go back to grad school. And I sort of fell into

3:02

local English language journalism in Caracas,

3:04

because it was the only way that I could find to pay for food

3:07

and rent while I was living out there. And I just kind of stuck

3:09

in it. I ended up going back to London or

3:12

moving to London after Venezuela in 2008, and

3:14

then got

3:17

an internship at the Financial Times,

3:19

which was the paper that

3:21

sent me to South Paulo

3:24

in 2010. And when

3:26

I went out to South Paulo in 2010,

3:30

the story was a very different one than the one that

3:32

I ended up covering. It was about the rise of

3:34

a new economic powerhouse in South

3:36

America. It was about shifts in global

3:38

relations. It was about Lula's

3:40

government sort of unquestionably

3:44

having achieved popularity and economic growth.

3:46

And then as I got there, things start to fall apart

3:49

really in 2013 with the eruption of this

3:52

mass protest that becomes the main narrative

3:54

of the book. And you start the book drawing

3:57

a line back to Students for a Democratic

3:59

Society. through Seattle

4:02

and the anti-globalization movement or what they like to

4:04

call the alter globalization movement and then

4:06

through to the way that that

4:09

ethos, that kind of anarchist fueled horizontal

4:12

ethos, fueled the rest of these protests

4:14

throughout the 2010s. Can you set that up a little

4:16

bit for people? Yeah, absolutely. Especially

4:19

as it relates to the Free Fair Movement,

4:22

which was a group in Brazil formed in 2005

4:25

dedicated ultimately to the full

4:27

de-modification of public transportation.

4:30

So their goal in the long term was to ask the

4:32

government to make all transportation free. But

4:35

they were a group of leftists and anarchists that arose

4:37

out of the anti-globalization and alter globalization

4:40

movement. A lot of them had worked for indie media, Brazil.

4:43

They had really their ideological

4:45

and organizational antecedents

4:48

were in the global explosions

4:50

around the Seattle protest in 1999.

4:54

And this group, not only the Free

4:56

Fair Movement, but a lot of the associated organizations

4:59

linked through me, indie media or a

5:01

sympathy for the São Patistas back in the late nineties

5:03

and early two thousands had a particular

5:06

organizational and philosophical

5:09

ethos and an approach to political

5:12

change and to responses

5:15

to perceived political injustice.

5:18

It was very, very different than what we would have seen in the first half of the

5:20

20th century. It was one

5:22

that was based on a rejection

5:25

of the legacy of the Soviet Union, which started really

5:27

in the, as you mentioned,

5:30

with students for democratic society in

5:32

the United States, especially in the 1960s. These

5:37

were a set of philosophical

5:41

and moral approaches to political change, which

5:43

really had Germanic,

5:45

I think, by the 2010s. And they came

5:47

to appear to be the natural,

5:50

if not the only way to respond to

5:52

injustice. And

5:55

this was the natural response. It

5:58

was the mass protest of getting as many people as you can. could

6:00

into the streets in a way which was

6:03

horizontally organized, digitally coordinated,

6:07

apparently leaderless. And these are all

6:09

things that we took for granted as

6:11

not, if not morally

6:14

privileged, then at least the way these things

6:16

were going to go in the 2010s. But I think

6:18

you can only really get to that point

6:21

by looking at the long organizational and intellectual

6:23

history of movements like the Free Fair

6:25

Movement and the transformation

6:28

of ideas, especially in English speaking North

6:30

America from, let's say, 1965 to 1999, and then

6:35

into the 2010s. I saw

6:37

my young self in a lot of these because

6:39

my politics were forged in the 1990s because

6:42

that's when I was basically in college, a young

6:45

man at the time. And there was this

6:47

very robust kind of rejection

6:50

of communism after the fall

6:52

of the Soviet Union and the rise

6:54

of, in some corners, explicit

6:57

anarchism, but elsewhere, like you write,

6:59

is just horizontalism and the hostility

7:02

to hierarchy. And

7:05

I was at those Washington, you talk about A-something

7:07

in 2020 down in Brazil, I was at

7:10

A-16 in Washington, DC, which was

7:12

the follow up to the Seattle protest.

7:14

And like you said, no leaders, nobody

7:17

speaks for anybody, a giant umbrella

7:19

coalition. Nobody is equal.

7:22

And they're just going to mass in the streets and

7:25

take on power and express their outrage. In

7:27

the US, that kind of got shut down by

7:30

9-11 and it

7:32

transformed into an anti-war movement, which was also

7:34

unsuccessful, obviously, because the war

7:36

happened. But you then see that,

7:39

and I hesitate to call it an ideology because it's

7:42

a tactic, but it also is its own

7:44

ideology. It's the means are supposed to be

7:46

the ends. You're building the

7:48

revolution as you go. And

7:51

so you have this free fair movement

7:53

in Brazil. Let's stick with them for a second. So

7:56

by 2013, you've got Dilma Rusco. in

8:00

power. You were kind of in the jungle when

8:03

this breaks out and then you come back to Sao Paulo.

8:06

A very tiny group

8:08

of people is launching a

8:10

campaign against the 20 cent increase in bus

8:13

fare. I mean, I think you're right that there's

8:15

not an ideology necessarily to this

8:17

set of tactics and philosophies,

8:19

but this group does have an ideology. They're

8:22

explicitly and fully committed to horizontalism

8:24

as an organizing principle, and they do

8:26

what they've basically been doing since 2005, which

8:29

is that every time the government is going to raise

8:31

the price of transportation,

8:34

they organize protests, hoping

8:37

that this will cause enough of a mess

8:39

for the government that the government will be forced to back down. And

8:42

this did happen. This had worked a couple

8:44

of times previously in Brazil. They had learned from

8:46

other ways that sparking

8:48

a mass revolt in Brazil, getting

8:51

more people to join in and they, you know, in

8:53

a apparently horizontal leader list in a structuralist

8:56

way had forced the government to back down. So

8:58

I come back to my place in downtown Sao Paulo

9:00

in June 2013 and I attend

9:02

what I think is the fourth of the protests

9:05

that they've organized in that month with

9:07

the attempt to do exactly that. But

9:09

things change and take a quite strange direction,

9:12

not only for the group, but for the media

9:14

and the government, because after

9:16

the first three protests that they have staged,

9:20

inviting punks and anybody who else they can

9:22

to shut down streets and then

9:24

which end in fights with cops by the

9:27

day of the fourth protest, which is on June 13th, 2013,

9:29

the media, no

9:31

respectable mainstream, you

9:33

know, somehow slightly some central left,

9:35

but also central right media are

9:37

have had enough of this. They call upon

9:40

the military police and Brazil's

9:42

police, our military police, which is the legacy of the US

9:44

backed dictatorship. They call on these cops to

9:47

crack down on this movement. We've had enough of this,

9:49

but what happens on June 13th, 2013, and

9:52

you see this happen across the mass decade, is

9:54

that the cops do their job so well. They

9:56

do specifically what they're trained to do, that

9:59

it shocks the sides. The crackdown

10:01

that is asked for by the Brazilian ruling class

10:03

and by major mainstream media hits

10:05

people like me it hits

10:07

journalists that hits regular middle-class white Brazilians

10:10

that are seen as Not

10:12

the type of people that are supposed to be repressed

10:14

in Brazil And this shocks the very media that had

10:17

called for the protest earlier that day and

10:19

over the next few days you get a real shift

10:21

in Coverage of what is supposed

10:23

to be happening? What is happening on the streets and

10:25

this tiny little group of 30 dedicated

10:28

left anarchists who have been you know? Organizing

10:31

and meeting and planning for months on how to do

10:33

this find themselves sort

10:35

of at the front of a movement

10:38

which Consists of millions

10:40

of people pouring into the streets sort of all for

10:42

their own reasons all based on what

10:44

they understand The movement to be based

10:46

on what the media has told them that

10:48

it is and now this is a group that doesn't want

10:51

to Be at the front of anything. They don't believe in leadership They

10:53

don't believe in rising to the occasion

10:56

and sort of negotiating on behalf of the masses

10:58

that's not what they think they think that you cause a map a Popular

11:02

of all and then that is going to get you what you want

11:04

Doesn't go that way and I spent you know Years

11:07

doing interviews for the book and most

11:09

of the interviews that I did were with members of this group and

11:11

also with members of The Brazilian Workers Party

11:13

who were on the other side of this strange Conflagration

11:16

that they both found themselves in and

11:18

yeah, they admitted to me Well, they didn't

11:21

admit they have spent many years thinking about this

11:23

and realizing well causing a huge

11:26

popular revolt Didn't actually

11:28

work out the way that we hoped it would it Turns

11:30

out that when millions of people pour into the streets

11:33

that doesn't necessarily End

11:35

well for the causes that you believe in and

11:38

I just recently interviewed Naomi

11:40

Klein about her book her new book Doppleganger

11:42

And she writes about the right-wing

11:45

mirror world and the right-wing kind of shadow lands

11:47

that have risen up in Contradiction

11:50

but also in some ways in in

11:53

a curious relationship with the

11:55

left and as I was reading Your

11:58

book I was seeing that unfold actually actually

12:00

in Brazil because then you have a right-wing

12:02

organization that pretends to

12:04

be leaderless, takes almost the same

12:07

acronym, but actually does

12:09

have leaders, pretends just like this group

12:11

to be apolitical and a party,

12:14

but is very partisan and has clear

12:16

aims. And spoiler,

12:18

we wind up with Bolsonaro. And those

12:20

guys in power, in office, with

12:23

him. Yeah. Let's leave that hanging for now

12:25

and jump over to the Arab Spring, where

12:28

you had very similar dynamics. And in

12:30

Turkey, as you reported,

12:32

there was even a call and response

12:35

between the protesters in Turkey and the protesters

12:38

in Brazil, all supporting each other. So

12:41

Arab Spring kicks off. Does

12:44

it take on the same kind of leaderless, autonomous

12:47

approach that you saw elsewhere?

12:50

Yes. And I would say that the distinction is

12:52

that in the uprisings

12:54

in North Africa and the

12:56

Arab world, the movements tend

12:58

to be horizontal rather than horizontal-ist.

13:01

And this is a sort of slightly annoyingly

13:03

theoretical distinction. But often what

13:05

you got in places like Egypt was

13:08

de facto horizontality, not because

13:11

the main actors or a huge amount of people on the streets

13:13

believed ideologically in

13:16

the rejection of hierarchy and leadership, like

13:19

the Free Fair Movement did in Brazil, but that civil

13:21

society had been so crushed by decades of dictatorship,

13:23

there was just only inchoate and

13:26

half-formed organizations. The

13:28

organization, which was strongest and

13:31

most real in Egypt,

13:33

for example, was probably the Muslim Brotherhood. But

13:36

that was not who we in

13:38

the international press chose

13:40

to believe was really at the front of what was going on

13:43

in the square. We looked to a lot of,

13:45

in top of your square, we looked to a lot

13:48

of elements which were de facto

13:50

horizontal and told

13:52

ourselves that that was a good thing by necessity,

13:54

because it meant that, of course, they would be pushing history in the

13:56

right direction. Now Tunisia is an interesting

13:58

one, because Tunisia, the first... revolution,

14:01

which really inspires Egypt and the rest of them,

14:03

there are tightly organized

14:06

and disciplined organizations which play

14:08

a big role in actually getting that movement

14:11

over the line and getting the protests

14:14

from the distant city

14:16

of Sidi Bouzid to the capital of Tunis, a

14:18

Marxist-Leninist party that had long

14:20

celebrated Enver Hoxha's Albania was

14:23

important in the very beginning, a very

14:26

large union with radicals

14:28

in the middle, in the mid-levels of the

14:31

organization were really important in getting things over the line, civil

14:33

society organizations were important in getting things

14:35

over the line. But in a case like Egypt,

14:37

you did see horizontality

14:39

rather than horizontalism and I think that did

14:42

really end up

14:44

having a lot to do with the final result. And

14:46

you see over and over in every case

14:48

that you write about organization kind

14:51

of defeating non-organization

14:55

and so after remarkably

14:58

the street protests lead to Mubarak

15:00

being overthrown with the army basically stepping

15:03

in and pushing him aside with millions of

15:05

people in the street, the

15:07

only actual organized force at that point

15:10

is the Muslim Brotherhood. And the army itself. And the

15:12

army itself of course, which will become relevant in a moment.

15:15

So in the coming elections, the leftist

15:17

split between two different

15:20

candidates, both of whom seem like

15:23

pretty good options and because they're

15:26

split, Muslim Brotherhood makes

15:29

it into the runoff with basically an army

15:31

establishment backed candidate with

15:34

the left splitting something like 40 or 50 percent,

15:37

maybe 40 percent of the vote. And

15:39

so they have nobody, the streets outside

15:41

of the Muslim Brotherhood have nobody in the runoff. People

15:44

rally behind the Muslim Brotherhood but

15:47

things quickly go south and again

15:49

you see the mirror world. You

15:52

see the military adopting

15:54

the precise same characteristics

15:57

and same tactics. So talk a little bit about how

15:59

the new protest movement surges

16:01

against the Muslim Brotherhood. Yeah, no,

16:03

so this is one. Yeah, this is I think I think

16:05

that's quite interesting reading

16:08

of it, especially in relationship to the

16:10

name of the client's new book, because these you do

16:13

get in both Egypt

16:16

and at this moment that you're discussing and then in Brazil,

16:18

two years later, the kind

16:20

of like trick mirror appropriation

16:24

of the original revolutionary energies and what everybody

16:26

believes to be popular grassroots,

16:30

youth led digital revolution

16:32

to carry out precisely the opposite

16:35

of what the original organizers

16:37

were aiming for. So what you do is

16:39

after you get more see elected, as you say,

16:42

the two quote unquote progressive to

16:44

you know, the two candidates that could

16:46

have been said to represent the

16:49

dreams of the secular and progressive

16:52

revolutionaries, they get more votes

16:54

than they would have if combined, they would have gotten enough

16:56

votes to get into the second round, but they weren't combined, they had you

16:58

know, they weren't organized enough

17:00

to sort of plan this kind of stuff. This was their first

17:02

this was the first probably legitimate election in trips

17:05

in history that is thrown together very quickly. So

17:07

more season power. And you get

17:09

a new group called

17:12

tomorrow to rebellion, I'm not going to try to pronounce

17:14

the Arabic, which is collecting

17:16

signatures to call for the

17:19

resignation of Morsi. Now

17:21

again, this is presented to

17:23

people and many people believe that it is

17:25

a grassroots youth led

17:27

revolutionary response to a bad government.

17:31

A lot of people sign this petition.

17:33

And many authentic revolutionaries are

17:35

involved. Yeah, like genuinely and earnestly.

17:38

Yep. Some of the people that are at the front of it were

17:40

involved in 2011. And then a lot of the people that were on the streets

17:42

and risk their lives and fought to overthrow Mubarak,

17:45

get involved in what is the new

17:48

protest movement, which is which starts to arise

17:50

in June 2013, like coincidentally

17:52

the same month as the events in Brazil. But

17:55

then these protests rather than

17:57

facing down with the police rather than

18:01

ending in bouts of raucous

18:03

contention with existing elites.

18:06

They're supported by the elites. They take place and it's

18:08

more like a parade. It's more like a big nationalist ritual.

18:11

It's more like everybody's supporting this

18:13

except for the Muslim Brotherhood and President

18:16

Morsi himself. After this

18:19

demonstration, which ends up being larger

18:21

than the ones in 2011, immediately

18:23

there's just a military coup. There's a military coup. CC

18:26

takes over. It turns out that a lot of this

18:28

had been organized behind the scenes and it turns out that

18:31

Gulf monarchies had been

18:33

funding this Tamara

18:35

rebellion petition drive with the goal

18:38

of installing a regime in Egypt that would

18:40

be amenable to Saudi

18:42

led hegemony in

18:45

the Arab world. And this is exactly what happens. And this

18:47

is basically where we are still in Egypt.

18:50

Ten years later, the CC coup takes place,

18:52

cracks down in a much

18:54

more, I don't want to say confident because it seems like

18:57

CC never really understands exactly what the revolution

18:59

was or how to maintain his grip on

19:01

power. But he is unabashed

19:04

and unashamed about simply cracking down and crushing

19:06

any revolutionary contention. There

19:08

is a horrifying massacre of

19:10

supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which happens right after

19:13

he takes power. And then it's like,

19:15

no, no more of that. I've seized power. I'm going

19:17

to be a worse dictator than the last person. And I'm just

19:19

not going to put up with any opposition

19:22

to this regime. And

19:24

as you said, there was this clever trick.

19:26

There was this mirror world version of 2011.

19:29

Because I mean, I think hopefully some young

19:31

people pick up this book, but it's hard to remember now,

19:33

even though I remember it, but it's probably hard to imagine for

19:36

young people that back in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, the idea was that anything

19:38

that the internet caused to happen was necessarily

19:43

a good thing. Like anything, anything that was

19:45

digitally organized, anything that was based on a viral post

19:47

was going to be pushing history towards

19:50

its final glorious conclusion. And

19:52

so yeah, there was this pose, well, yeah, we're doing

19:55

grassroots digital organizing

19:57

against this new bad, you know, because of course, Morsi was

19:59

making all kinds of mistakes. It was in many ways. There

20:02

was all kinds of things to be upset with Morsi about, but

20:05

it was not what it appeared to be. And

20:07

you also, I think, very usefully bring Libya

20:10

into the question and helped

20:12

me to understand

20:13

how

20:14

tyrants and presidents started to

20:16

understand how they needed to respond to

20:19

protest movements and how they needed to think about protest

20:21

movements. All of them being influenced

20:24

by Vladimir Putin, who would, it seems

20:26

like he was calling all of them every time that there were protests,

20:28

you'd call them and say, look, this is the US.

20:31

The US is doing this to you. This is orchestrated.

20:33

They're going to throw you out of the

20:35

pool. And sometimes he was correct.

20:38

And so in Libya, you have kind

20:41

of a sectarian uprising that rolls

20:44

off of the Arab Spring that,

20:46

as you point out in the book, Gaddafi would have been

20:48

easily able to kind of suppress as he had

20:51

for decades. He had just recently

20:54

given up his kind of weapons of mass destruction

20:57

and kind of normalize, started a normalized relationship

21:00

with the West, which, you

21:02

know, side note is another lesson that people

21:04

learned, which is don't give up weapons of mass destruction

21:06

because then within a year you're dying. So

21:10

instead of what would have

21:12

happened, which is just these protests get, you

21:14

know, this uprising, the sectarian uprising

21:16

gets suppressed. The French come

21:18

in, NATO comes in, the US comes in, launches

21:21

a no fly zone. Which means lots of flying. It

21:23

turns out it means, as you point out, it means lots of flying

21:25

and lots of bombing. Yeah. Yeah. How does

21:28

Libya then influence how future

21:30

and current leaders at the time think

21:32

about protest movements? Libya

21:35

is a big lesson, both for the

21:37

original revolutionaries in the so-called

21:39

Arab Spring and for lots of others,

21:42

leaders around the world, especially Vladimir Putin,

21:44

because what happens? And I mean,

21:47

we should be very clear that lots of people in Libya had

21:49

good reasons to be upset with Qaddafi.

21:51

There were legitimate sources

21:54

for the protest that began against him. But

21:56

what essentially you get is a NATO regime change

21:58

operation. What you get is NATO. bombing the country

22:00

until Qaddafi is overthrown or if finally

22:03

murdered on the internet for everyone to see.

22:06

Sotomized with a knife or a bayonet or something

22:08

like that. With the video uploaded to everyone. This is

22:10

one of the moments when we started to see what the internet could really be

22:12

or maybe truly really is, at least if it's

22:14

dominated by the particular tech companies

22:16

that now dominate it. You know, Hillary Clinton

22:19

saying, laughing and saying, you know, we

22:21

came, we saw, he died. For

22:24

those in the progressive

22:27

or revolutionary movements that

22:29

had powered the years of 2010 and 2011, this

22:32

is a lesson that's like, okay, well, larger

22:35

and more powerful forces will take advantage

22:38

of these uprisings in ways that suit their interests.

22:41

This was also especially true in Bahrain when Saudi

22:44

Arabia and the rest of the GCC simply

22:46

invaded to crush a movement

22:48

that had very real reasons to be

22:50

upset with their government. But people like Putin

22:53

say, oh, okay, the

22:55

U.S. is not accepting the

22:59

post-Cold War global

23:01

order that we believed that we could

23:03

exist within. I'm not a Moscow

23:06

expert, but reporting behind the scenes indicates that

23:09

it was the NATO regime change operation

23:11

in Libya that led Vladimir Putin to decide

23:13

to come back to the presidency. He was doing

23:16

this switch off back and forth with Medivh

23:18

at the time and other leaders around the world, other

23:20

authoritarians would be authoritarians, perhaps

23:23

in Syria, come to the conclusion that, you

23:25

know, just don't put up with protests. Like

23:28

you have to either crush them or

23:30

I'm going to end up sodomized on YouTube

23:32

for the whole world to see. And this is a horrifying

23:35

lesson for both those who

23:37

believed in me, apparently spontaneous

23:39

mass uprising, and for those living

23:41

under all of the other leaders around the world that were learning

23:43

their own lessons from it. At the same time, you

23:46

then have Turkey sees the Gezi

23:48

Park uprising, mass

23:50

protests, as you could call it, and it follows

23:52

a similar trajectory, small, kind

23:54

of an obscure, kind of not in

23:57

my backyard issue kicks

23:59

the thing off. they were going to like chop down some

24:01

trees in the park. It was a very small

24:03

park which was never that beloved

24:05

by the people of Istanbul but there was a small group

24:08

of environmentalist activists that

24:10

were trying to defend this park. Yeah. So they

24:12

stood in front of the bulldozers, then

24:15

a bunch of people fell down the steps getting kind

24:17

of pushed. Yeah there's a police crackdown which

24:19

shocks the country, at least the part of

24:21

the country that is watching this unfold on

24:23

social media and you get an explosion

24:26

of sympathy especially from the

24:28

middle class and more secular elements

24:30

of Istanbul society. And

24:33

so then Erdogan eventually capitulates

24:36

and says, all right let's talk. What

24:38

are your demands? Let's negotiate here. And

24:41

you have kind of old lefty folks

24:43

that you call the big brothers of the movement who say, look

24:45

this is this is our moment. Like you

24:47

have to negotiate while you're still in

24:49

the streets. If you agree

24:52

to negotiate and everybody goes home then they're just going to walk

24:54

away from you. We have to seize this opportunity.

24:57

The younger people in the park say, who

24:59

do you think you are? You don't represent

25:01

us. You don't represent us. That's the slogan of the

25:03

decade. Yeah. And so basically

25:06

nobody goes. Talk about how Gezi

25:08

Park kind of unfolds from there. Yeah so then

25:10

of course so then ends up Erdogan chooses

25:12

his own set of representatives. And they were too fake

25:15

right and then he picked a new bunch? Right there was

25:17

some there was actors and he picked a new bunch but

25:19

this was a fundamental problem because I mean in

25:22

many many of these mass

25:24

participants or uprisings it had not been planned

25:27

at all that this was really going to happen. I mean

25:29

they hoped at best to maybe stop this park

25:31

from being destroyed or to make their point that they wanted

25:33

to keep some public spaces in central Istanbul.

25:36

But now and this is I think a real theme of the

25:38

book is you get perhaps not in Turkey because

25:40

I don't think they were in a position to overthrow Erdogan. But

25:43

what you have is a protest which causes

25:45

a situation which offers

25:48

much more opportunities than

25:50

a protest can really take advantage of.

25:53

When you generate these huge uprisings

25:56

you sometimes generate revolutionary situations.

25:59

But approach

29:46

to

30:00

establish right off the bat for people

30:03

outside of the post-Soviet world is

30:05

that after the fall of the USSR

30:07

in 1989 Ukrainians

30:09

got a horrible deal. I mean Ukraine

30:12

Experienced what is it 15

30:15

years or so of horrible political leadership?

30:17

Absolutely atrocious economic decline

30:20

Regular Ukrainians had every reason

30:22

to be upset with Not

30:25

just the particular government that was in power in 2013 Victor

30:29

Yanukovych who was in the executive

30:31

at the time but just in general with the

30:33

state of post-Soviet affairs

30:35

things were very very bad But

30:38

what ends up acting as the spark for

30:40

the Euromaidan? Uprising

30:44

is an association agreement with

30:46

the European Union and This

30:49

makes a lot more sense when put in the context

30:52

of all of the other events in the book But

30:54

that's not really really what it is What it is is the

30:56

crackdown on the protesters

30:58

that leads to an outpouring

31:01

of support in the center of the capital

31:03

of Ukraine So you have an

31:05

explosive combination of a

31:08

lot of people who rightfully believe that their

31:10

system Has been sort of a joke

31:12

for a long time But also

31:14

half of the country have voted for this

31:16

man. He won, you know in the imperfect democracy

31:19

that they had he had won the election and

31:21

then there was the idea sort of dangled in

31:23

front of At least some of

31:25

the parts of Ukraine that we could maybe be

31:27

more integrated into Europe And this is something that really

31:30

inspired a lot of people but not everybody because a lot

31:32

of people believe this deal was not Good.

31:34

I mean notably I think only

31:38

37% about 39% I'm sorry of Ukrainians in November 2013 Actually

31:44

really cared about wanted this association

31:47

agreement with EU, but when there's the crackdown

31:49

on the initial protests there is Widening

31:53

support for whatever it is that's happening in

31:55

the capital and then that question of whatever what

31:57

what is happening in the capital I think from

32:00

week to week until you get into 2014.

32:03

And then you have this moment where the trick

32:05

mirror world presents itself in real time,

32:08

whereas in Brazil and Egypt,

32:10

there was at least some kind of temporal gap. You've

32:13

got the uprising and then the kind

32:16

of

32:17

reverse

32:18

mirror version of the uprising later. In

32:20

the Maidan, you tell this amazing story about

32:23

a group of kind of socialists

32:26

and lefties who decide

32:28

that they are going to put aside

32:30

some of their earlier reservations about this. And

32:33

they're going to participate in this. And they're

32:35

going to form kind of a, what they called it a

32:37

hundreds, which is sort of like a self defense

32:39

group. And so they show up and

32:41

it's the right sector. You

32:44

can argue whether or not all of them are neo Nazis

32:46

or just like white supremacists

32:49

or like, but these are like radical violent

32:51

rights and calling themselves right sector ghosts,

32:53

both because they're on the right part of

32:56

the square, but also that they are as far

32:58

right as you can imagine. And

33:00

so they show up and they ask this guy,

33:02

all right, we want to register our group. And he tells

33:05

them, come back two days later, come

33:07

back unarmed. And so take it from there. Yeah.

33:09

And then they get threatened violently

33:11

and said, there's no leftists, you know, there's not

33:14

going to be any of you leftists,

33:16

gay, anarchist, antifa

33:19

losers, you know, trash in

33:22

our militant self defense groups.

33:25

They are presented with the opportunity of being

33:28

beaten up by C 14, which is a,

33:30

I think it's safe to call, say a neo Nazi group. You

33:33

said a bell and cat story saying it's okay to call

33:35

them neo Nazi. Yeah. 14 stands for

33:37

the 14 racist words,

33:39

whatever they are. Like I live for the defense

33:41

of the white race. Right. And so they

33:43

are presented with either running away from C 14 or

33:46

getting beaten up by them. When they

33:48

had been at least officially trying to

33:50

join the self defense groups in Maidan. And

33:53

so, I mean, from the very beginning, the

33:55

official left, like the capital L old

33:58

school left the KPU. the

34:01

Ukrainian Communist Party was against Maidan.

34:03

The uprising was largely

34:06

the more nationalist

34:08

and more liberal elements of the country.

34:11

Ukraine by 2013 had a polarization which

34:14

would be very familiar to people in the United States. It

34:16

was one half of the country that tended to

34:18

be in the square. The big institutional

34:20

capital L left was against Maidan, but there were some

34:22

elements like the people that I spoke to, the story

34:24

that you're mentioning. On the

34:26

anarchist left, the anti-thoritarian left, the

34:29

more sort of feminist left, people that lived in the capital

34:31

and thought, okay, let's get involved. Maybe

34:33

we don't agree with everything that's happened. Maybe this is a right leaning

34:36

movement. Maybe this is a movement for the

34:38

adoption of a neoliberal trade agreement, which we don't

34:40

even actually love, but we should get involved and try to make

34:42

this as sort of anti-racist and progressive as

34:45

possible. And they are violently

34:47

expelled. Which to go back to your theoretical

34:49

underpinning is,

34:52

again, organization beating

34:54

out lack of organization. You

34:57

describe the right sector and the C-14

34:59

is like neo-Leninist. They would

35:01

have hated Lenin himself, but they

35:04

formed a kind of Leninist vanguard and

35:07

they fought for power. They took it. These

35:09

groups, the radical nationalist groups

35:11

that either assembled on Maidan or

35:14

organized within Maidan were

35:17

absolutely not horizontally

35:21

organized, post-ideological,

35:23

everything goes, we're all in it for whatever

35:26

we want to be in it for. These were tightly

35:29

organized groups that had been planning for quite a long time.

35:32

That violence was necessary, that Ukraine

35:34

needed to be a more pure nation. They

35:37

had been hoping for the moment to

35:39

be properly revolutionary, but

35:41

in the far right sense. And this

35:43

is something that comes up across

35:46

the decade. It is the groups that are already organized,

35:48

disciplined, ideologically

35:51

coherent, and prepared before the explosion

35:53

comes that tend to win out. So,

35:56

Russia and Vladimir Putin in ways

35:58

which are end up being quite catastrophic exaggerate

36:02

the importance of the far right in

36:04

Maidan in 2013. But they are there. Looking

36:08

at the entire decade as I do in this book

36:11

helps to understand what really happens, which is that there's

36:14

a very small group of people, not popular with

36:16

Ukrainians, that punch above

36:18

their weight because they are so tightly

36:20

disciplined and organized before

36:22

the ruckus comes, before history

36:25

with a capital H comes knocking and

36:27

offers opportunity for the

36:29

exact type of violence that they've been waiting

36:31

for. So while the unorganized left is

36:33

punching way below its weight, the organized

36:36

right punching way above its weight, the

36:39

guy who orchestrated

36:41

that threatened to beat down of the left becomes

36:43

what the head of security then in the government

36:46

when they take over. You write about how

36:48

when Zelensky then runs for office,

36:51

he points to her Bolsonaro as

36:54

a model for how he

36:56

intends to govern. So

36:58

let's go back to Brazil. So

37:01

you have this free fair movement, which

37:05

starts the fizzle, yet

37:08

takes a huge chunk out of Dilma Rousseff.

37:11

You write that she never really recovered from

37:13

the protests from months of protests or

37:15

weeks of protests in the streets, even

37:18

though none of the demands

37:20

and none of the complaints actually had anything to do with

37:22

the federal government. This is it. This

37:24

is like a real mystery. These experiences

37:28

really formative for not

37:30

only me as like a journalist covering Brazil at the time, but

37:33

I think almost everybody that lives through it. There

37:35

was just this huge explosion of the

37:38

type that had been planned for very precisely

37:40

and hoped for by the anti-authoritarian

37:44

left for essentially a decade. But

37:46

what it ends up doing is just allowing

37:50

for the right

37:52

to enter the streets. And then Dilma,

37:55

who is a leader that the free

37:57

fair movement did not love, they

37:59

didn't want her out. of power. They preferred her to

38:01

the all of the other existing options

38:04

in the Brazilian political system. They ended up voting for

38:06

her in 2014. She loses 30 percentage points in

38:10

a matter of weeks. Now this is a real puzzle because

38:12

like as you say with

38:15

her actual governance precisely nothing

38:17

happened. The bus

38:19

fare rise was coordinated by

38:21

the mayor of Sao Paulo at the time she actually tried to

38:24

delay it. The police crackdown

38:27

police in Brazil are governed at the

38:29

state level so it was a

38:32

right of center politician in Sao Paulo that would

38:34

have been responsible for that crackdown. Dilma

38:37

herself the executive didn't do anything.

38:39

She tried I mean this is I thought

38:41

like a quite interesting detail

38:43

I got behind the scene. I mean I interviewed her afterwards

38:46

but other things but this was a detail that I got later

38:48

in the reporting for this book is that she

38:50

would spend her days sitting

38:52

in a room by herself watching

38:54

the protests on TV and

38:57

she would turn off the volume because

38:59

she didn't want to be influenced by what the

39:01

journalists were saying was happening on the streets. She

39:04

was just like carefully studying the screen

39:07

trying to figure out okay what are these people asking

39:10

for because I want to give it to them but

39:13

there was no answer like they're asking for everything. They're asking

39:15

for nothing. They were asking for all kinds of things that could not be

39:17

delivered upon because she is somebody

39:20

that came up as a dissident and

39:22

really wanted public transportation

39:25

to be cheaper and more accessible in Brazil. She was

39:27

tortured by the military. She's no fan of the military police.

39:30

She

39:30

like struggles to find a way to respond

39:32

to the streets comes up with some

39:35

stuff a lot of the most important of

39:37

which is respect rejected by the rest of the political

39:39

establishment. Three weeks later the death settles and

39:41

she's lost 30% of her approval rating

39:43

like now why well I don't know a

39:45

theory is that sort of just there was just this big explosion

39:49

of negative media both social and traditional

39:52

coverage of Brazil. Everybody was invited into the streets

39:54

to think about and talk about all the

39:56

things that they didn't like and ask for something better which is I

39:58

think a great thing in general. for

40:01

citizens of a democracy to be engaged

40:03

in, you know, critique and planning

40:05

for improvements. But she just turns around and says,

40:07

well, what happened? And I think sort of to this day,

40:09

she's kind of a lot of people in

40:12

that government and perhaps for herself are kind of

40:14

asking what happened. Yeah, and leaderlessness

40:17

then gets taken to almost

40:20

satirical proportions when

40:22

a guy who says that

40:24

he's part of Anonymous, you know, they've

40:26

faded a little bit, but at the time they were a very big deal,

40:29

as a hacker collective, hacktivist collective.

40:32

He does an anonymous looking video

40:35

and says, here are the five demands. Like if nobody's

40:37

going to articulate demands, these are the five

40:39

things that we want. Some of them

40:41

are obscure, some of them are uncontroversial, none

40:43

of them really, you know, hit at power

40:45

structures and zero of them go

40:48

to anybody's material benefit or economics.

40:51

Because they'd already won, I think, at that point, the 20 cent

40:54

increase had been rolled back. So, they didn't

40:56

want any sense and the free fair movement didn't know

40:58

what to do with that. They didn't want to lead

41:00

something new, so they just kind of went

41:02

away. And so then you found this guy,

41:04

you interviewed him. And

41:07

turns out, you're like, how did you

41:09

guys arrive at these demands? He's like,

41:11

there are no guys, it was just

41:13

me. And found him on Facebook,

41:15

basically. Yeah, I turned on my camera, put

41:17

on a mask and just put it on the internet. It wasn't

41:19

that no one else was stepping up

41:21

to supply with the demands, where everyone was stepping

41:24

up to supply with the demands. And for whatever reason,

41:26

this particular video, you know, maybe it hits the algorithm

41:29

right, maybe he like, you know, it's short and

41:31

punchy. But this one goes viral

41:33

and this is one of the, you know, you see, you know,

41:36

this is you know, this is now is more, I think

41:39

this is now more familiar to us, you know, 10 years

41:42

later. But just one guy

41:44

points the camera at himself. And then within days,

41:47

people are on the streets holding up the single causes,

41:49

the five causes, whatever. That's

41:51

all it is. Just one video that comes

41:53

to stand in for perhaps what the people

41:56

want. And yeah, as you said, I found

41:58

him and he's like, yeah, I just made that up. I don't know. I

42:00

thought it was good. It seemed reasonable. Yeah. It

42:03

seemed fine. It seemed good. Then Dilma

42:05

wins reelection. She ekes out a fourth term. 2014, yeah,

42:07

just barely. And instantly,

42:10

this copycat right-wing group starts

42:13

demanding her impeachment. When did they formulate

42:15

a crime? Was that after the

42:17

demand for the impeachment? No, no, no. They

42:20

were ready to impeach before she even took office.

42:22

But I mean the specific crime. They eventually

42:24

impeached her over this bookkeeping

42:27

issue that does not even appear to be a crime. Did

42:29

they come up with that way down the road?

42:32

They picked that one. That was one that was accepted

42:34

by a very notorious

42:37

and very establishment politician in

42:39

Congress. Who himself was on his way to jail,

42:41

it looks like. He was trying to make a deal.

42:43

That's why he said, he said, I'm going to impeach

42:46

you unless you save my hide. And Dilma said no. A

42:48

lot of other Brazilian presidents probably would have made that deal.

42:51

And then he started impeachment. Lots of groups had

42:53

presented possible ways to impeach. And he grabbed

42:55

this one. It seemed to have just enough of a thin legal

42:58

basis to make it work. And

43:00

then the protest movement, which as you say, was

43:03

born in the streets in June 2013. While

43:05

the Mobimiento Pasilivri,

43:07

the MPL, was becoming

43:09

very popular and being seen as sort of the heroic

43:12

young kids in front of the June 2013 movement, because

43:14

that's what they were. I mean, heroic is a value

43:16

judgment. But they were the organizers. These

43:19

free market libertarian right-wing

43:22

kids who had often either been funded by

43:24

US libertarian groups or worked with the Koch brothers

43:26

in the United States, they found the Mobimiento

43:29

Pasilivri, which is the MPL. So MPL,

43:32

MPL. To this day, like during the time

43:34

that I worked on this book, I would say,

43:36

oh, yeah, I'm doing a lot of interviews with the MPL.

43:38

And then people would just hear MPL because

43:40

that's now the group that became so much more famous. They

43:43

succeeded at stealing the thunder of the

43:45

original group of leftists and anarchists that always

43:48

rejected leadership and participation in

43:50

the political establishment. So

43:53

in Doma Risa's second term, this group becomes

43:56

one of the leading movements to

43:59

organize test for impeachment. Again,

44:01

putting themselves forward as, oh, you know, we're young,

44:03

we're digitally organized, we're a grassroots

44:06

movement of the kids calling for a more

44:08

free Brazil when that the whole time they were very

44:11

well supported by traditional economic

44:13

elites in the US and indeed had formed

44:16

in the specific way that they did because of support from the United

44:18

States. And then they lock up Lula

44:21

on basically trumped up charges. So they

44:23

force one of the main characters of your

44:26

book to be the presidential candidate. And

44:28

he loses by 10 points to a

44:30

guy who'd been on the fringes for

44:32

decades and who you write, he

44:35

dedicated his vote, his impeachment

44:37

vote to the army

44:39

official who tortured Dilma,

44:42

which you described as this rupture in kind

44:44

of Brazilian politics and Brazilian society.

44:48

We've now seen a rollback of that. But

44:50

the original kind of movement then

44:52

ends with Bolsonaro in office. And

44:55

the rainforest being savaged

44:57

and the MPL kind

45:00

of in tatters and in tears and

45:02

getting blamed a lot. You write that a lot of people

45:04

in Congress in the center left, how

45:06

common was it to say this is all those 30

45:09

anarchists fault? The claim is ranged and

45:11

they range from the reasonable to the outlandish.

45:14

You know, this is basically what Adadji says, the

45:16

current minister of finance of Brazil, one of

45:18

the politicians I interviewed in the book that,

45:21

you know, these were good kids, they wanted the

45:23

right thing, but they they unleashed a beast

45:25

that they couldn't control and it got out of in the got

45:28

out of and the beast ended up devouring them,

45:30

which is sort of what many of them

45:33

say. Also, not all of them, they

45:35

to this day remain very, they aren't disciplined

45:38

on messaging, they have their own opinions. But

45:40

then other other parts of the PC would say, well, these

45:42

these people must have been agents of imperialism. These

45:45

people must have been somehow record

45:47

these people or these people were so these

45:50

people started what became the code,

45:52

these people are responsible for the coup and the original

45:55

members, yes, spent years of like, just

45:58

which is something that I compounded all across

46:02

the 12 countries that I visited for this book. There's

46:04

three years of trauma and self-doubt and

46:06

sort of infighting. Like, well, what did we do wrong? What,

46:09

you know, on that particular

46:11

day, what if we turn left instead of right? Like,

46:14

what was wrong with what we did?

46:15

And so, yeah, they were

46:19

destroyed by this piece that they created, but also

46:21

sort of a huge

46:23

part of the Brazilian political establishment

46:26

trying to throw them into the dustbin

46:28

of history. And so to get to one of those uncomfortable

46:31

questions, I want to quote your interview with Fernando

46:33

Haddad, who is the presidential candidate

46:35

who Lula had hoisted and

46:38

then he loses. He says,

46:40

after 1999, the year of those

46:42

Seattle protests, we saw the rise of a

46:45

certain anti-state left with a kind of neo-anarchist

46:48

charm. And that kept its distance from

46:50

governments and any instantiation

46:52

of political representation in general.

46:55

At the end of the day, horizontalism is

46:57

a reflection of individualism. And

46:59

it made me wonder if how enamored

47:01

I was of kind of anarchism

47:03

and horizontalism at the time was

47:06

actually just a mirror world version of the

47:08

neoliberalism that had seeped so

47:11

deeply into society at the time. Was

47:13

I just so kind of marinated in that soup

47:17

that I didn't understand that I was just putting a different

47:19

gloss on this like atomistic

47:21

elevation of the individual over

47:23

the community and over over the

47:25

organization and over kind of a

47:28

person rather than people. As you

47:30

look back at this over the last 15 years,

47:33

what's your takeaway on that? Well,

47:35

I have a similar experience. I mean, well, first of all, just to point

47:37

out, it's not a huge issue, but that

47:39

second sentence, the one that is a horizontalism

47:42

is a reflection of individualism. I don't

47:44

think Fernando Haddad would disagree,

47:46

but that one is actually Paulo Garbaoudo,

47:48

an Italian scholar.

47:51

But, you know, I also I had a very similar... My

47:53

bad, same paragraph. Yeah, same paragraph.

47:55

Well, maybe my bad because I put in the same paragraph. But

47:58

but I don't think Haddad would disagree. I

48:01

mean, I think he also, I mean, he'd

48:03

written about, Haddad had written earlier

48:06

in his career about the sort of deep psychological

48:08

and subjective conditions of neoliberalism

48:12

himself. I mean, I had a very similar

48:14

journey. I mean, I think that I like learned

48:16

how to use the internet watching the Seattle protests

48:19

in 1999, like reading

48:21

No Logo and hanging

48:23

out on indie media were like my coming

48:25

of age political events,

48:28

growing up in California. That's the Naomi Klein

48:30

book for the young people and the very old

48:32

people. Yeah, yeah. The

48:34

thing I put in the book, I found out about it because then Radiohead

48:37

recommended it to me like on their website. And

48:39

you know, this moment of indie media

48:42

and 1999 Seattle protests and the automatic

48:45

assumption that the

48:49

greater individual autonomy within a social

48:51

movement was going to be, that meant

48:53

more freedom and that meant you were more likely

48:55

to get what you wanted and you were more likely to create

48:58

the society that you were hoping for if

49:00

you do get what you wanted. I tried

49:02

to go on this journey sort of chronologically

49:05

through the book and try to explain where it came

49:08

from and why it made sense to

49:10

sort of adopt those particular philosophical

49:13

approaches. Why during, you

49:16

know, in the United States in the era of the

49:18

Cold War, it made sense to perhaps try to

49:20

find a way to do something better or different

49:23

than the Soviet Union. Why it made

49:25

sense to believe in the late

49:28

20th century as David Graber did that

49:31

more anarchist tactics could be more, could

49:33

be effective because we weren't gonna be in an age

49:35

of political warfare. And

49:38

then just to say, well, whether or not this is philosophically,

49:41

ontologically, across space

49:43

and time, a good or a bad approach, it

49:46

proved a very poor match for the particular

49:48

circumstances that arose in the mass protest decade.

49:51

So some people in the book, I mean, a lot of people in the book

49:53

told me that they moved away from horizontalism,

49:55

if not even back towards something closer to Leninism, but

49:58

some people will remain in the same place. And

50:00

it may be the case that this particular set of approaches,

50:02

this particular sort of utopian idea

50:04

of individual centrality, may

50:07

be the right thing for other situations.

50:09

But that's why I insist on sort of, not why I insist,

50:12

that's why I chose to write a history rather

50:14

than just try to say this is what I think happened.

50:17

Because I think in watching the events

50:19

unfold, you can see just how the

50:22

particular repertoire of contention, the particular

50:25

approach to political change that we had assumed was the

50:27

best one in the 20th sense, turned out not

50:29

to be a perfect match. Now that

50:32

is also can be quite inspiring because

50:34

if there is indeed this huge amount

50:37

of desire for change to the global

50:39

system, which I think the mass protest decade demonstrates,

50:42

then all you have to do is sort of jiggle with

50:44

that match and find the right things that are the match

50:47

and find, learn from the story, learn from

50:49

the mistakes, learn from the things that

50:51

didn't quite work out and come up with a set of practices

50:54

that are fit to task. And that sort

50:56

of motivates the entire project.

50:59

It's not about saying, well, here's what I think was wrong and

51:01

saying, okay, well, this is how this came about. This

51:03

is how it didn't work out yet. And this

51:05

is what, you know, 200, 250 people, 200 interviews

51:08

have pointed to as better ways to try

51:11

to improve our world going forward. My own

51:13

accidental journalism career basically

51:15

started in 2005 in Bolivia, covering the uprising that

51:20

led Ava Morales to take power. And

51:23

I found myself thinking of that

51:25

while reading your book because,

51:28

and this is five years before your window, but

51:30

this was, this is a mass demonstration.

51:33

Hundreds of thousands of Bolivians take to the street.

51:36

They overthrow the president and

51:39

they effectively end up installing Ava

51:42

Morales as president. He

51:45

oversaw some of the, you know, the

51:48

most rapid and sustained, you know,

51:50

standard of living increases in the world

51:53

in Bolivia over his terms. And his, one

51:55

of his deputies is still in power there even after

51:58

a coup that house. them

52:00

for a year. Of who they took place after mass protests?

52:02

Yes, exactly. Mass protests appear to

52:04

have been orchestrated in collusion with

52:06

the National Security Council out of the US.

52:10

And so the difference

52:12

there, the reason that I

52:14

think that Maas and Morales

52:17

and the Bolivians were able to succeed, and I'm curious what you

52:19

take on this, they were deeply organized.

52:22

They had mining unions, they had coco-laro

52:25

grower unions, they had leaders, they

52:27

were disciplined, and they had goals, and

52:30

they implemented and executed on them.

52:32

And so there was no vacuum for anybody to fill.

52:35

Exactly. No, I think I agree

52:37

entirely with that assessment. I mean, early

52:40

in the book, I think I kind of cheat a little bit because

52:42

I want to make

52:44

Brazil essential. I said that the Brazil's Workers Party

52:47

may have carried out the most significant social democratic projects

52:49

in the history of the global south. And that only counts

52:51

if you wait for population, right? I think if

52:54

you count Bolivia as, you know, on

52:56

a per capita basis, maybe Bolivia, is it the real

52:59

winner of that contest? It's just

53:01

incredible what happened in Bolivia, Ana

53:03

Morales. That's precisely right, is that, I

53:06

mean, you know, it's used to be axiomatic,

53:08

and it seems really obvious when to think

53:11

about that, you know, okay, when

53:13

you have a situation that you want to take advantage

53:15

of, if you are working collectively, if you're

53:18

working hand in hand with your fellow human beings, you're going to

53:20

be more effective, you know? You know,

53:22

if you have a football game, and everybody

53:25

goes to the football game and sort of decides on their own play

53:27

at the moment of the snap, you're probably not going

53:29

to do as well as a team that has been practicing

53:31

and, you know, forming close bonds over

53:34

years. I think that's precisely right. I think

53:36

unions are a great example. And I mean, I think what's

53:38

going on in the United States right now is an example of sort of

53:40

learning some of the methods lessons of the mass protest decade

53:43

of going back and thinking, okay,

53:45

well, maybe we didn't snatch the presidency

53:48

from of the most powerful nation in human

53:50

history, you know, that was, you know, that would have, you know, might

53:53

have worked. But what we can do is we can build working class

53:55

power. And if you build working class power slowly

53:57

and carefully, you have a set of

53:59

organizations. a set of human beings working hand

54:02

in hand with each other, they can take advantage of whatever comes

54:04

along. It may be the case that right now, there's

54:07

a moment where we can get gains for working people.

54:09

It might be the case that in two years, a

54:12

more organized working class in the United States

54:14

can be fundamental

54:16

to achieving broader

54:18

political demands. What is surprising

54:21

is that we forgot that lesson in the first place.

54:23

And I think sort of the wonderment at the

54:26

internet and sort of digital utopianism, which

54:28

was all wrapped up in a sort of techno-libertarianism,

54:31

which I think has some odd overlapping

54:33

points with the neo-anarchist thought, just sort

54:35

of got us forgetting some basic

54:37

lessons about what works.

54:40

We talked about a lot of this book, but I can assure people

54:42

there's a lot more to it. And I encourage

54:44

people to pick it up. But thank you for

54:47

joining me and congrats on a terrific

54:49

work. Hey, thank you so much for having me and for reading

54:51

it so carefully. It's really, it's been years

54:53

working on it. And I always never know if it's

54:56

actually gonna make sense to anyone. So hearing you recount

54:59

it back to me has been quite fascinating.

55:01

Yeah, thank you for that. That was Vincent

55:03

Bevins. His new book is, If We Burn,

55:06

The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing

55:08

Revolution.

55:11

Deconstructed is a production of the Intercept. Our

55:13

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