E94: [TEASER] E94: Radical Reads w/ Jasper Bernes – ‘If We Burn’

preview of our latest episode for our patrons. You can join us, help support our work and listen to the whole thing today at patreon dot com slash working Class History link in the show notes. Hope you enjoy.

content that we're about to start rolling out. This is basically motivated by two things. First, there's a bunch of stuff that we'd really like to talk about, share and discuss with people that doesn't really fit into the standard episode format, so basically this is a way for us to produce that kind of content. And second, we also thought it'd be a great way for us to show our appreciation for all the support that you guys give us.

I know we say it a lot, but it really is true and bears repeating that without your support, we really wouldn't be able to keep this project going, and we're basically insanely grateful that you guys help us to do it. So making this extra Patreon only content is our way of saying thank you well at the same time keeping the majority of our content free for everyone.

We're doing this on a trial basis for now, so please do let us know what you think if you enjoy it, if you don't enjoy it, any changes you think we should make, should we make more. Should we delete this and pretend it never happened, et cetera, et cetera. Our radical read for this episode is Jasper Burns is excellent article from the Brooklyn Rail What Was to Be Done?

Protest and Revolution in the twenty tens. It's a review and critique of the recent and very popular book by Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. And when we read Jasper's article, we felt that it really put into words some of the misgivings that we had about Bevins's book, so we invited Jasper on to talk about his article. It was a

great discussion. We covered not only what we see is some of the issues with Bevins's book, but also broader questions around social movements, revolution, the threat of cooptation, and

what it means to win. And as Jasper says in the discussion, understanding what happened and what we can learn from the protest movements of the twenty tens is one of the most important and vital questions that we can be thinking about right now, and in that sense, If We Burn is a valuable contribution, at least in starting that conversation, even if we have some pretty big disagreements

on its conclusions. We'll put a link in the show notes to get hold of if we burn, as well as Jasper's article and an lecture series that he produced on workers' councils. But before we begin, there are a few acronyms and names that we mentioned that people might not be familiar with. So firstly we mentioned the PT, which is the Workers Party in Brazil. The PT or a left wing social democratic party and currently the party

governing Brazil. Lula de Silva, who we also mention, is a former metal worker and union leader who is now the leader of the PT and the current president CCIDENT of Brazil. At a time of the events that we discussed in this interview and which Bevins discusses in his book, Lula had just completed his first term as president, with massive approval ratings and having lifted many millions out of poverty, but not as we discuss, without criticism from some of

Brazil's social movements. He was also subsequently imprisoned on corruption charges, which were eventually annulled after it was proven that the judge was actually biased against him. Many believed that the corruption charges were an attempt by the Brazilian right to stop Lula from running for reelection and so paved the way for their own victory, which it did with the election of Jaia Bolsonaro in twenty eighteen. We also mentioned

the MST, which is Brazil's landless workers movement. The MST mainly campaigns around land reform, organizing direct actions like land occupations, and is one of the biggest such organizations in Latin America. Anyway, with all that said, I'll stop talking and let you get stuck into the interview itself. Just to start off with, I suppose maybe if you could just introduce yourself.

Bevins book. But I've been thinking about this kind of stuff for a long time.

probably with the pandemic. But he's sort of writing about these movements during that period of the twenty tens, you know, and there is a kind of distinct pattern to these movements. So Vincent Bevins is a journalist by trade, you know, known for writing kind of books informed by journalism and by his position in the world. He lives in Brazil and he participated in some of the events there that

are the form part of the book. But the book is written through I think dozens, you know, probably one hundred or so interviews, and he asked participants to kind of say what happened, and more importantly, what went wrong and what they think should have been done. And so to the ex said that the book has an argument.

The sort of argument is written through a kind of synthesis of these accounts of what went wrong and what should have been done, and the book identifies the problem as originating from this kind of ideology that it describes as horizontalism, which it claims was kind of the dominant, had a force within these protest movements and was a kind of disorganizing and disempowering ideology.

it's engaging, and you can learn a lot. And I and I think it's you know, really asking the right questions, how do we win, what would it mean to win? What was it that these movements wanted? And how could they have achieved it? You know, asking why these movements failed is a good question. And it's also taking a kind of big picture look at things and writing from kind of global and comparative perspective that is pretty rare.

There's not a lot of people who feel they have the kind of authority to kind of write a synthetic book like this, because it's very hard. There were a couple of books that came out, you know, in the twenty tens, but certainly I can't really think of anything like it that's often that's kind of reflective, that's a book. There's a couple, there's a couple of things in other languages, and certainly there's articles written by kind of like very

far left magazines that you know, investigate similar questions. But so, you know, it's it's I think that the peer has to deal with the fact that this is these are really interesting questions and these social movements are vastly important, and understanding them and how they could have succeeded is I think one of the most important things we can

be doing. So, you know, I think that I really, I really admire that, and probably it's because I think those are the right questions that I am very concerned with getting the answers right.

with participants in social movements. So we were very well. I was reading it very interest did to see what these people had to say, and I guess we're going to get but yeah, I think, like you, they are these are really important questions, and I think, like you, I was a little disappointed as well. Something I found really disappointing with the book as a whole, actually that with these interviews with two hundred other people, I was I was reading getting the introbute, I'm really excited to

see these interviews and see what these people say. And then I kind of got about forty five percent of the way through on my kindle and I was like, I'm kind of feeling like, I'm not actually going to see these interviews, you know, because yeah, because I was expecting it to be more the words of the interviewees rather than those kind of used behind the scenes that you don't see, which he then says he's used to construct his narrative, which, yeah, you know, I guess that's

just how the book was put together. But it's hard to see then what the people said to make him then have that opinion, because and how much of that is based on his preconceptions.

looks like for the most part. And then when he does define success, it's quite problematic as I see it, and I'm not sure that these things count as success. And I think that for the movements themselves, they were felt as semi failures, and so it raises a number of questions. But the result of this that he kind of doesn't define failure is that a lot of the problems he identifies as kind of particular to the kind of mass protests decade aren't really particular to that mass

protest decade. And they're problems and kind of failures that you see in pretty much every era of social struggles. They're quite they're quite common, and inasmuch as so in some some things are particular to this era and some things aren't. But because he's not, he's not kind of giving us a comparative approach. He tells us about the twenty tens, but he doesn't tell us about the kind of previous era or the kind of classic period of revolution.

He doesn't define a revolution. He doesn't really have a theory of what a revolution is because he doesn't really periodize this stuff in relationship to what came before. He identifies a lot of problems as particularly this era, that are actually common problems, and as such, the kinds of conclusions he arrives at are commonplaces because they're like common,

they're just very common responses to common problems. And it's not that they're wrong the things he says, it's just that they're kind of banal, actually, and they are the kind of things that pretty much every revolution from every period would tell you so, and that's a lot of what you end up hearing. And it's not that they're wrong, it's just that it's sort of you know, I mean, everybody thinks, hey, I wish we would have been better organized.

I'm not. I'm pretty sure that there's not a single you know, revolutionary who wouldn't tell you some version of that, right.

And you know, in pretty much every period that you look at revolutionary period, if we're talking about capitalism more or less, what we're looking at our various kinds of failures right from the standpoint of the working class, and with a standpoint of communist revolution, you could sort of rate any decade of revolution as an ultimately an era of kind of missing revolution, even the places where it went the furthest in Russia, you know, I mean that

decade was defined as an era of missing revolution precisely in Germany and these other countries where the revolution was supposed to spread. And so I don't know, it's it's so I think that that's the big problem.

So by that point in Chile, following the big protest movement, the government agreed to rewrite the constitution and that was going through the process of being rewritten, and I think his book came out in October twenty twenty three, but then in December they had the referendum on the constitution and it lost, so actually there was there were no concrete results from that, and I think the perspective of the Chileans that I talked to is that it was

a failure. But you know, I guess by his criteria.