If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
Fortunately, he comes away from his globe-trotting search with critical lessons for activists both here and abroad. Setting the world afire, it turns out, is easier than one might expect. Tending to the flames is harder ... as reliably appalling as police crackdowns against mass demonstrations are, Bevins contends that their role in inspiring further action prevented the movements he surveyed from developing conceptual roots as deep as the problems they hoped to confront—outrage at the state’s violence rarely yielded to coherent shared analyses of the social, economic, and political conditions upholding the state … The causas episode captures well what gradually emerges as Bevins’s central theme. There is both power and peril in leaderless mass action. And the leaderlessness that spontaneous, social media–driven protest lends itself to was adopted as an outright virtue too readily in too many places … the institutions underpinning our politics and our economy have survived the decade mostly unchanged and unscathed; in general, we have about as many reasons to hit the streets now as we did 10 years ago. And when we do, we ought to take more than mere inspiration from movements abroad—it’s their failures that we might learn the most from.”
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Bevins looks to the mass protest movements of the past decade and a half and ponders why matters went so terribly awry ... Bevins posits that the explosion of social media has helped fuel a deepening disdain for traditional political parties in democratic countries, a contempt reflected in the protests as well as everything from the Brexit movement in Britain to the anarcho-punk underground scene in Brazil ... Bevins is comparing apples to oranges when he carries these ideas to autocratic nations.
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Offers both a postmortem of the last decade of mass protest and a blueprint for the inevitable next. In searching for the missing revolution, Bevins may help others find it after all ... Ambitious ... The book balances interviews with the activists and Bevins’s own firsthand reporting ... Much of the book’s protest pedagogy isn’t new. It has been learned, unlearned, and relearned for decades, even centuries. In a certain light, the If We Burn activists’ belated embrace of organization and hierarchy looks an awful lot like a form of Marxist-Leninism.
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