Vincent Bevins’ book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution is animated by a pressing question: why did the worldwide uprisings of the 2010s fail to bring about lasting political change? In journalistic style, Bevins weaves together stories of protest movements and their social consequences across national contexts.
Mass protest became a default response to injustice in the 20th century, culminating in the concurrence of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings from 2010 in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria and Libya, the Occupy movements of the US, Spain and Greece, and mass demonstrations in Turkey, Ukraine, Hong Kong, South Korea and Chile. Bevins highlights how these uprisings inspired each other, adopting shared characteristics of horizontalist organisation (leaderless and digitally networked structures), and strategies of prefiguration (‘means’ constitute ‘ends’, as the ideals of a new society are practised through political action today).
The story moves through the decade and between the national case studies, though these are stitched together by regularly returning to Brazil – a case with which Bevins is most intimately acquainted, having worked in São Paulo as a reporter. Of Brazil, he charts a provocative lineage between leftist mass protest and far-right government. He shows how mobilisations against bus fare hikes, and opposition to mega-sporting events like the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics were co-opted by those who led a judicial coup against Dilma Rousseff’s centre-left presidency and supported the subsequent election of Jair Bolsonaro.
Furthermore, we see that in the best-case scenarios the uprisings of the 2010s changed nothing. It is business as usual in the US, Spain and Greece, after the movements of the squares transformed into now-defeated, left-electoral movements (Bernie Sanders for president, Podemos and Syriza). In the worst cases, Tunisia was left with an unstable democracy, Egypt with military dictatorship, Syria with fragmented civil war, Libya with a failed state, and Ukraine with a political stalemate, followed by invasion.
Conspicuous for its absence in Bevins’ history of mass protest is the climate movement. This is less due to a blind spot for the author than it is an indictment of the limitations of an environmentalism that, during the 2010s, failed to incite genuinely mass mobilisation or sustained and scalable organisation towards transformative change. The most that can be said is that it spiked in activity at the very end of the decade with the excitement of Extinction Rebellion, Fridays For Future and Green New Deal campaigns. Unfortunately, less than 18 months passed before this wave was quashed by the demobilising effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
If We Burn contains a series of prescient lessons that environmentalists should heed as the imperative for social transformation becomes increasingly urgent. Most fundamental is that anti-Leninist organisational politics are time and time again a self-defeating dead end. Bevins shows that, despite its purported values, horizontalism cultivates unaccountable leadership determined by personal ties, excludes new members, and inhibits the possibility of scale. The conflation of strategy with tactics, and the failure to plan for revolution beyond spontaneous explosions of action mean that horizontal movements consistently fail to achieve mater-ial victories.
Without such a plan, the inevitable political vacuum is filled by reactionary powers from Bolsonaro to el-Sisi to ISIS. At its heart, If We Burn makes an evidenced argument against the teleological idea that mass protest inevitably drives social progress. However, from the view that things can, and do, get worse, we can uncover a hopeful alternative. With ambitions for mass organisation, movement democracy and representative leadership, we can begin to build a powerful climate movement capable of taking on the crises we face today.
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins. Wildfire, 2023. ISBN: 9781035412273.
