The Missing Revolution w/ Vincent Bevins

39 snips

Jan 30, 2024

Vincent Bevins, journalist and author, discusses the lack of improvement in conditions despite mass protests. The left's organizational shortcomings, the shift in tactics, and the importance of leadership are explored. The podcast also delves into the emergence of mass protests and lessons learned, the battles for representation, co-opting of movements, horizontalism, and personal reflections on organizing and activism.

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ANECDOTE

Accidental Journalist

Vincent Bevins became a journalist accidentally while in Venezuela.
He worked for a Chavista-controlled English newspaper.

INSIGHT

Protest Paradox

Bevins's book "If We Burn" examines the 2010s mass protests globally.
It questions why many protests yielded opposite outcomes than intended.

INSIGHT

New Left Inversion

The New Left inverted Leninism, prioritizing means over ends.
This shift impacted protest tactics and strategies.

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The past decade or so was marked by mass protests—in fact, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring to the 2020 George Floyd uprisings and even more recently with millions upon millions pouring into the streets in support of Palestinian liberation. So why, then, have conditions not improved? Why have they, in many cases, only gotten worse?

This is the question that Vincent Bevins set out to answer in his latest book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The search for an answer took Vincent all over the world, from Brazil to Ukraine, Turkey, Chile, Hong Kong, and Middle East. The answer imparts an extremely important lesson to the left: we’re simply not organized. Or, rather, we’re not organized in an effective way. The shift in the left’s tactics and strategies since the 1960s has left us with movements that rely far too heavily on horizontalism, spontaneity, and an extreme form of prefiguration that subordinates ends to means. This New Left ideology abandons the principles of Marxism-Leninism, revolutionary theory, and the importance of leadership. This, Vincent believes, is why the mass protest decade failed to win its demands and bring about real change.

Vincent Bevins is a journalist and writer and, in addition to If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, he’s the author of The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World.

Further Resources:

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
The Tyranny of Structurelessness, by Jo Freeman
On Authority, by Frederick Engels
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series), Adam Curtis
Upstream: What Is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante

Thank you to Menstruação Anarquika for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for this episode's cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond

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