The Missing Revolutions of The 2010s | Ash Sarkar Meets Vincent Bevins
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- čas přidán 28. 10. 2023
- The 2010s saw a new era of mass protest, from Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, to Occupy Wall Street, EuroMaidan and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. Many of these movements shared a “horizontalist” or leaderless approach and most of them ended in failure.
Vincent Bevins experienced some of these movements up close. In his latest book he tries to explain why the movements of the “New Left” didn’t succeed and what lessons we can learn from them.
You can buy Vincent's book here: www.headline.co.uk/titles/vin...
Novara Live broadcasts every weekday from 6PM on CZcams and Twitch.
Episodes of Downstream are released Sundays at 6PM on CZcams.
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The danger of sentiment over strategy cannot be overstated!
That's not an ideological statement at all.@@DonTavvit
Protest not enough. Activism and civil disobedoence matters. And the mainstream parties are the enemy. Liberalism has failed.
Talking about the need for aligned 'football ultras' and competent fighters in protests, I often think about the Wombles in the early 00s. They were such a good idea, big lads, completely padded with shields. Passive defence that wouldn't attack, but also wouldn't let the cops do violence. Sadly they got repressed, spied on and demolished, but I stillthink there is space for something like that. I reckon getting re-enactors and HEMA folk on board is a good call, most of them are kinda lefty, at least in the UK.
@@queenvagabond8787
The Leties will shut down the West. All good.
@@leonharrison800
People should be protesting their fast approaching technocracy enslavement...
I feel absolutely compelled to commend Vincent for excellent analysis. I am only 24 minutes in but he is always reflective, contextualising, never providing the easiest answer....One of many examples of Novara media choosing excellent guests and perfectly complementary hosts - as I would say about Aaron as well as Ash. Ye are almost certainly the best "new" media source - as an Irishman I find this significantly better than New Left American outlets. Much appreciation for your quantity and quality
❤ love you Novara Media 💚
Protesting those with wealth and power while following the rules they wrote isn't effective, shocking!
They won't let you be loud enough, let alone be effective.
So learn to be *expensive.*
Just create a parallel govt.
@coldpotatoes2556 "Just" 🤣
It's not a bad angle, honestly. We all need something that combines democratic action and is educating, and that is also empowering. It being a "government" isn't itself important and could defeat the entire point. Or not. There's infinite devils down in those details.
One of the things it does to is 1) galvanise support, 2) people on hand to sign petitions.
@silentwitness536 Oh, sure, I'm not saying it's useless, but... all that awareness and support needs to lead to actions that *do* something. Winning elections is an insufficiently low bar, given the rules of politics itself.
It does lead to action. Are you aware that western democracies, by law, must acception petitions? In my country if you get 5000 signatures they must listen.@@3X3NTR1K
Kshama Sawant always makes clear, concrete demands a part of the protests that she organizes. Believe she has also spoken about how we need strong leaders with integrity in protest movements. I’d love to see Novaro Media interview her.
I think concrete demands aren't enough. Direct action is needed, otherwise it's just words with no teeth. People (in the West at least) need to learn to be expensive.
@@challe535 Kshama isn’t just words. She’s the fight in the dog.
We are the world,we are the children! Free❤Palestine❤
Free Europe!
@@aristocraticrebel
Yes free Europe from the hegemony of USA
Yes, USA hegemony is facilitating the Great Replacement. Good we agree. @@KarimAouissi
Can you tell us the examples of Arab countries where people (including women and LGBT) are really “free” ?
If you haven't already you need to read this guy's first book the Jakrata Method. Particularly if you are from the US/Western Europe, it will change your understanding of our history.
Lots to unpack in every sentence spoken, great interview, lots to think about.
Ireland 🇮🇪 stands with Palestine 🇵🇸❤❤❤
🏴
Speak for yourself. I'm with Israel.
@@therealrobertbirchall we have to
Is any of Palestine still standing?
Keith Woods has been doing great work.
A great discussion! Disorganized majorities lose out to organized minorities all the time.
Advocates for communism are the minority - that's why it fails AND the fact that it's tyrannical... People are looking for more rights, not fewer rights. The way that comes about is via freedom of speech and expression, which is being diminished.
because greed does not discriminate between left and right....That is the harsh reality here.
Elites always rise to the top. No matter what system they're in.
thank you for this highly informative and interesting interview 👌🏼🌱💜
"Chaos is a ladder", and those with the resources to climb will step up.
Great interview Ash👍
rather boring and unimaginative, especially for the host to casually dismiss "authoritarian China" as a model without any apparent understanding of their complex administrative system
every year tens of thousands of representatives from a range of organizations participate in the legislative process, with public feedback and pilot process
this means slow deliberation yet durable consensus on topics like climate change, as there are not a handful of old white men that corporations could buy out
democracy is not people ritually pulling on levers, but a system for implementing societal needs and desires, and the so called Left are no better than the MSM if they can't understand systemic issues and systemic solutions
Fascinating interview! Will definitely be aiming to pick up this book!
I'm looking forward to this evening's program.
But first I must apologise for ranting on about some of my personal stuff in a comment to a program last week.
I think its time i took a break for a bit.
I think I'm probably too tired to watch the program live. I'm sure it will be interesting. I'll watch tomorrow. Thanks
Fair play for identifying the need for a break. Keeping up with the news is a 24 hour job and it is not healthy. It definitely has an impact and a break is required for critical thinking 🙂
Great Interview. Thank you
god bless you ❤
How can you be a critical thinker and make reference to a supernatural deity. 🤔
@@beachcomber1able because critical thinking opposes our existence by mere luck. Can a phone be created by itself in a billion years? 10 billion?
The Zhou Enlai quote wasn't apocryphal, but his answer was in response to the 1968 'French Revolution' as that was how he understood the question
Symptoms of concussion
confusion, such as being unaware of your surroundings, a delay in answering questions, or having a blank expression.
headache.
dizziness.
nausea.
loss of balance.
feeling stunned or dazed.
disturbances with vision, such as double vision, blurred vision or “seeing stars” or flashing lights.
Great interview
The last question of the interview on power and leadership is a profound unsolved question at the heart of the split of the past and contemporary left everywhere. (not just on theory) There’s an incapacity to consolidate real alternatives, and transversal alliances and put forward different projects of possible futures because of this very question. It divides social movements and socialists of all strands in Europe, Australia Latin America and everywhere else. Anarchists in Latin America and everywhere are rightly suspicious and against dominant leaderships or single-head movements cos there's a history to draw conclusions. Horizontalism doesn’t mean not having a structure, it means organizing in different ways which would avoid and counteract from the very inception of a revolutionary project the possibility of the creation of yet another Tyrant that could sidetrack the social changes we all want. If we don’t move beyond the reformist social democracy project we are destined to repeat, the same history as Russia, Italy, France, Poland, the US or Latin America. I mean, can we dream together beyond Marxism for once?
and in the meantime, what gives? Vincent sounds like Whickers World, i was on a demo in Brazil, only now I've written a buuk and i hope you like it - kerr - f***kin-ching
No. It's marxisme against capitalism. Democracy against authocracy. Dont you dare to suggest we should take a more scientific approch : Study history and reality in order to see if we can find solutions to our problems.
I don't know how you have this conversation without talking about the zapatistas and rojava
Because most people are protesting for THEMSELVES
The Socialist Challenge Today by Leo Panitch touches on a lot of these themes if people want further reading. Analyses a bunch of movements including what went wrong with Syriza in Greece etc. He's got plenty of talks on CZcams as well.
I wish the US had a media outlet like Novara, bless y’all for real
Great interview, just bought your book.
Superb! Thanks so very much! We need these examples and analysist works. Want the book! Why do I feel Clare Daley & Mick Wallce should be here on this too?! Very interesting.
I think the subtle positioning of "Leninism" as a kind of grown up form of organising to replace anarchism is a bit silly really, or the supressed premise that lifestyleism is limited to parts of anarchism. In reality there are plenty of useless Leninist organisations in the UK (and the world) and the vast majority of people with Left Wing ideas are lifestylists - consuimg Novara Media content is their 'act' for the day.
There is a long history of disciplined, tightly organised anarchism from Makhno onwards. Today platformism and 'espesifismo' are illustrative of this. I recommend people read Black Rose / Rosa Negra's 2023 program, a very coherent and straight to the point analysis and long term strategy for anarchists in USA. Sadly the UK anarchist 'movement' doesn't really exist.
Thanks!
I follow him on Twitter for ever. He sounds completely different than I though. Great jornalist love the Jakarta method
I guess there's an underground for us malcontents
I think that novara definitely needs to interview Roberto Unger on his book The Knowledge Economy.
Mass protests against the Viet Nam war have contributed greatly to ending the war
How? The US didn’t pull out of Vietnam until 1975, the height of the anti war protests was what, 1968? How many anti war protests were happening in 1975?
Much better backdrop and lighting these past few episodes.
Does he mention the role the USA’s covert operations had on the protests?
He gets very close with all these protests all around the world are so similar… must be coincidence
I asked myself the same thing. Indeed, that's the big question. What about Gene Sharp tatics and his connections with conservative think tanks?
No, he does not. But that means Sarkar also missed an opportunity to cast some light on that factor.
See his first book, The Jakarta method, for state tactics against left organizing
That view gives a lot of credit to the CIA. To sell themselves to each other and to their political masters espionage organisations all over the world claim to be able to control events. Even if you’re sympathetic to this view, their effect is extremely limited. It is certainly not the case that you can give a few million dollars to a radical group and foment an insurrection, it is sheer fantasy. They do demonstrate the “politicians art of arriving late and claiming all the credit” though.
Really fascinating discussion, nice work ❤
I was most fascinated by the range of political loyalties within the "ultra" soccer hooligan demo. We don't really have that in the US. Perhaps the Proud Boys phenomenon comes the closest?
The Proud Boys are explicitly Fascist, or neo-Fascist. I'm pretty careful with my use of "fascist" but I'm fairly confident that those guys are as close to Fascism as one gets that we can, for all intents and purposes, just call them Fascists.
With one caveat. Mass politics. 20thC Fascism was predicated on the reality of truly mass politics. We've lost that reality, and the Proud Boys are not a "mass political movement" so, in that sense, they are not Fascists. In that sense only. The content of their beliefs are race-based, Nationalist, aggressively pro-Capitalist. They are "wannabe Fascists".
"I though I could fight" - famous last words of modern anarchists
OMG
Serious question - what happened to the womens demos in Iran?
While movements can learn lessons from previous movements they need to understand that they have to come up with a valid strategy that meets their specific circumstances. The most successful mass movement in my lifetime is, still, the anti-poll tax campaign. That is depressing .
the best protest is everyone stay home do nothing leave an amorphous target for the elites to deal with
The best protest is with your vote and decisive action. Protesting without any strategy for governance is just making noise. Eventually your movement will either get ignored or get highjacked.
Nice bookshelves
“The value of the project, if there’s any.” Well said.
Why do you like this quote in particular?
36:00 - As Zizek stated somewhere - he would like to see "V for Vendetta 2" - what comes after the revolution. It seems nobody seems to know anywhere...
🤠💜
This is a great interview, thank you Ash! I especially enjoyed the last section on strategy, such an important discussion to have. I was there at that event in Liverpool where old-mate called us all c*$*s. Ash did an amazing job at managing that cluster*$* and I think there's something to her point about the lack of democracy and transparency in some parts of the environment/climate movements.
Read
The Jakarta Method by Bevins ✨
Jo Freeman’s Tyranny of Structurelessness remains eternally relevant
not really, it's very dated and even then was completely off-base when published.
Their constructed under safe regulated, coperate circulation that sees it as a filter channel rather then fixing it.
The difference between the protests in 2003 and after 2010, is Social Media.
Protests never end injustice or change things. What they sometimes do is start the process that ends injustice and changes things.
Very interesting conversation. I've got two points I want to make. First, I think Ash and more broadly the socialist left have misunderstood Roger Hallam's position. Hallam rejects any discussion about strategy not because he doesn't want his strategy to be contested or made less effective, but because he sees activism as something which is grounded in morality. You do what you know is right as a loving human being, not what you think might work, and that's why you ultimately win, because you play by different rules altogether. It's activism as testimony of another way of being, and it has strong religious undertones. You may want to criticise it - and I certainly have strong doubts about it - but you have to accept it as what it is, without trying to rein it back into your utilitarian framework as some sort of reverse psychology, which makes it look like some sort of marketing technique.
Secondly, the left has always been obsessed with seizing power rather than contesting it, whereas anarchists are concerned with what power is and how it works. I think that a breezy dismissal of these questions often leads left-wing people to treat anarchists with some degree of paternalism. I don't think that "if you don't do it, someone else will" is a good enough answer to these issues.
What productive thing have anarchists given to society?
@@Iskander448 wrong question.
@@dovic86 Care to elaborate?
@@Iskander448 I don't think that productivity is a helpful yardstick when it comes to the value of political ideas, so I don't accept the framing of your question
Roger Hallam is to environmental policy what Graham Hancock is to archaeology
Please timestamp your videos
38:15 lol 🤘
Regarding football ultras, I dont know why I'm making a 40K analogy but it's like "So you're telling me that in order to beat the Imperium we need.....ORKS!!!???"
Withdraw tax
6:30 The same happened in India. An Anti Corruption Movement around 2011-2012 supported by Mainstream Media ended up paving the ground for an extreme right wing party to wrestle overwhelming power - the same party that now quiet literally does not tolerate protest. And No! Bolsonaro won in 2019, there were plenty of extreme right Prime Ministers elected before him around the world - with Modi being elected in 2014 itself.
Islamist leftist alliance make every leader good so people vote for then
Why would anybody want fascism?
They don't. They want progressive change. Fascism is the establishment's reaction to that.
They get to live in a big mansion with loads of obedient servants. They also get more microphones than a democratically elected leader!
Why wouldn't they?
It means different things to different people. If it's a movement promising dignity to the working class, expect the working class with a sense of national pride to be drawn to that message.
Agreed this host seems to be a little authoritarian and also they fail because they go to far and become insanely violent
2 words: The SWP
Hey Novara media, can you get mosab hassan yousef son of hamas on your show please, it would be a very interesting interview
I would have loved to hear about the chilean protests that exploded in the end of 2019. It's really interesting, because it started as a very moraly-liberal movement, with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets across th country(of 15 million, so actually a lot of people XD), then suddenly the message of the movement was streamed towards the idea of a "new constitution", that started a whole process to write a new one, and ended with a small majority hating the process, the non-political candidates that wrote it being ridiculed and the constitution being voteed against... I think media had a LOT of impact in how people saw the process, feeding fear into the population.
The UK Riots is too often ignored in these discussions
The London riots were the most organic act of working class revolt in recent years and the organised left had nothing to do with it. I feel the left has failed the working class, and this is why the right had gotten such a foothold in England, even in Scotland to an extent.
Hamas is not Left
You summed up why they fail so often at minute 18. "leaderless figureless movement" You are basically leaving a giant vacuum and the right wing loves a good power vacuum.
Money
I'm not part of JSO or XR but I do enjoy listening to Roger Hallam though. If you took offense over him calling you a cunt then I'd just say get over it, he wasn't saying it in a hateful way, he basically called me a cunt and I get where he's coming from haha. Here's his CZcams page. He goes into loads of detail about what a revolution might look like pro's, con's, really interesting stuff.
Ash sarka🐓coys
You're holding onto signs point out the Problems.
we know the problems
How about pointing out the solutions for once.
Lenin addressed these questions a long time in ‘What is to be done?’ And ‘State and Revolution’. Unfortunately, Lenin is taboo for the western left. Probably because of decades of Cold War propaganda. Lenin is not taboo in the Global Majority, which is why successful left-wing revolutionary movements exist in places like India and the Philippines and not in the West, where performative and electoral politics dominate.
Ye he may be taboo to non-communist leftist movements, but we revolutionary communists exist and support is growing again. I'm optimistic.
The reason Leninism is taboo is because two of the three great anthropological disasters of the 20th century happened in self declared Marxist Leninist states (I say this as a Leninist btw)
@@chillwinston8961 Can you elaborate what you mean with "great anthropological disasters"? What are the three that happened which you refer to?
@@challe535 No I’m good
“What is to be done” was contradicted in Lenin’s later work and “state and revolution” was unfinished and demonstrated a severe misunderstanding of Marx’s analysis of the state.
I mean he’s interesting but he’s clearly not an impartial journalist
This talk could be about the SNP and how they don't have the bottle to shred the act of union with England. There's no dout that they, the SNP, have been colonised by the Eglish occupation 🏴🏴🏴
And here I thought it happened because Scotland had bankrupted itself with the idiotic Darien scheme, which led to the Union under the last Stuart monarch.
It was under a Scottish king that the union was formed, ffs. Hell, don't act like Scotland are poor little victims, the Scottish were big fans of colonizing other countries as part of the British empire. There are a bunch of streets in Scotland named after slave traders.
9:52
Very disappointing use of language
*So much happiness and joy❤️,$100k every 2weeks! I now have a house and can now afford anything for my family.*
We don’t have a vanguard party. That’s the problem, so when there is a mass protest there is force to direct to progressive ends.
Leninism bad.
How would you form a vanguard party when the strongest drive for change is anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy?
He talks way too fast for easy comprehension.
Wish NM would pack it in with these lame thumbnail headlines
Nobody is asking you to watch
@@jake751 I'm s supporter and a fan. They don't need to resort to click bait tactics. It's cheap
They kinda do. It's the internet.
Idk maybe if they can 2 tone it so cleaner version for members that are already paid up. It'd be more ideal for you so I see where you're coming from a bit I think.
But if it's not possible it's kinda asking them to harm themselves competitively.
@@grid462I mean, if they’re making videos about the left failure then sure, but Bevins’s book is specifically about how protests fail. He doesn’t really explicitly remark on “the left”.
My deeper issue I think is that NM seem to indulge in this tendency for self-flagellation on the left. It’s kinda stultifying and not useful
@_ack_ It's not fair to suggest that the right fails at protest in the same ways as the left. Look at the example given in the interview of the protests in Brazil, the right wing were successful in taking over the protests for their own benefit. The interview was focused on how left wing protests can work, right wing protests have recent examples of working, so the examination of how protests can work is very much from a left wing perspective.
Because young people DON’T VOTE…
Free El Chapo
A fundamental problem with the communist utopian ideals is that everyone has their own ideas and viewpoints, a product of where they come from and what they have learned and been taught along the way and the overarching system leaves no room for autonomy. We are all individuals after all.
The problem is that it's a fantasy that literally cannot happen.
What?
What are you talking about? No, in fact most communists would agree on what communism is, any disagreements almost exclusively come from how to get there. Communist ideals are not utopian either, they are based in scientific material analysis. I think you need to look into this topic a bit more.
@@challe535 The picture I got from reading a bio on Marx (David McLellan) is that he seemed to think everyone would be happy to be a compliant part of a machine.
@@malectric I think it would be better to read Marx works themselves and form your picture that way. It's quite the opposite really, Marx thought people wouldn't be happy as "just a part of the machine" which is the way the proletariat is treated under capitalism, and therefore the proletariat would seek to break free from capitalism.
Roger, it seems to me, makes two point about strategy. One is that he has studied protest movements and his particular for of non violent getting arrested works and that the situation is so desperate that there is no time to discuss it we just need to get on with it. His second point is that even if it doesn’t work, it’s better than doing nothing and in some ways absolves of the guilt of doing nothing. This second one I find challenging especially in the light of this discussion.
XR strategy is a death-end project. We all get arrested then what?, well, all white people get arrested then what?
Repeat after me: San-oh Paulo. San-oh Paulo. you want me to salt your food or maybe pull salt on your head?!
god sake learn to pronounce the foreign names.
Firstly, this chap is clearly an actor in the events using the cover to journalism. All his comments must be seen in that light as he is not an impartial observer. Furthermore, he lacks an understanding of the origins of the Hong Kong protests, which was more based in sectarianism against mainland Chinese than any other factors. Hence, you saw attacks on anyone speaking Mandarin and the burning of mainland businesses. I’m familiar with the Hong Kong protests, thus this glaring error calls me to question the veracity of his other stuff. In short, I remain to be convinced he’s an honest narrator.
Whilst the country drowns in floods with raw sewage in it this shit is headlining on my algorithm.
THE country? There's more than one you know. But I'm very sorry to hear what you're going through there, wherever you are! Hope it gets better soon. ❤
Sewage didn’t exist before Tories elected in 2010s
@@searchingfortruth4783 didn’t have MPs (Tories) voting to allow it to go unfiltered into rivers. And now into peoples homes.
@@jumperontheline The U.K I meant. I feel for all affected by the floods. Just sorted out our back yard but here there are more worse off.
@@jumperontheline🏴
And what about the role of technology, especially privately owned information technology in this age of Missing Revolutions and global unrest.
The fact that a technological society, which is totally dependent on cheap energy, which is way outside biophysical limits, is bound to explode and collapse over time. How does the writer or host not account for that overarching maxim. That, 8 billion people cannot make sense of a globalized society anymore. And that no one is in control of anything important anymore.
Yep, no plan for unexpected outcomes due to lack of pre experience, and not as good at fighting because they're middle class kids stuck in Marx.
Great interview
9:50
Very disappointing use of language