Andrew Friedman: Vincent, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up writing your new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution?
Vincent Bevins: I’m a journalist, and I’ve spent most of my career working in international news, as a foreign correspondent. I got interested in the topic of mass protest when working as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where I was based in São Paulo from 2011 to 2016, The June protests of 2013 exploded in a way that was not only news at the time but that led a lot of us who lived through them to be sort of puzzled by what happened to them. How is it that they ultimately seemed to benefit the Right rather than the Left, when the leftists had been the original organizers?
From 2013 until 2019, I had this project on the back burner. I wanted to develop it somehow into something larger, on the question of the particular style of mass protests that took off in the 2010s and how it was possible, at least for the Brazilian case, to lead to the opposite of what the original organizers were apparently asking for in June 2013. Five years later, I wrote a sort of retrospective for the Atlantic on what had happened—how it was that Brazil seemed to be asking for better public transportation or protesting police brutality but then in 2018 got Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme-right leader that slashed public services and celebrated state violence.
Even before my first book, The Jakarta Method, was published in 2020, I submitted this book proposal, which had as its idea the project of telling the story of the 2010s globally, as if the most important thing to happen in that decade was the mass protest that got so big that it became something else—and to build a work of history around the question of how it’s possible that so many mass protests ended up leading to the opposite of what they asked for. So I’ve really been on this for about eleven years.
AF: If you could distill the main point or the core conclusion of the book, what would it be? And what would you hope that organizers reading the book would take away from it?
VB: What I will say first is that I hope it is the kind of story that speaks to different people in different ways, and hopefully the history itself is rich enough that there are all kinds of different lessons and conclusions that will appear to different readers. But to really get to the nuts-and-bolts question of what is relevant for organizers, I would turn to the set of interviews I did with 250 people in twelve countries that lived through, put together, responded to, and experienced the phenomenon of mass protests that I build my work of history around. We can have another conversation as to what particular dynamics about those protests led to opportunities that were taken advantage of by other people. One of the main questions that I asked all these interviewees is what happened and how. But the second question that I asked all of them is, “What do you wish you would have done differently? What would you tell to younger people, to a new generation that might experience political revolts or mass protests in their lives?”
There are a lot of answers, and they’re not all the same. One very common answer was “We wish that we had been more organized before history came knocking. We wish that we would have built the capacity for meaningful collective action before the unexpected eruption of a mass protest event, before historic opportunity arrived without being announced in advance.” Because, for many of the people I spoke to in the book—even though they had been working hard behind the scenes to put together the beginnings of a protest movement for years—one or two weeks before the thing exploded, they would never have expected it to take on such proportions or to explode in the way that it did. So one of the main lessons, if I’m trying to be incredibly simplistic, is: “We wish we would have organized when it seemed like nothing was happening. It was precisely in the moments that we thought that there was nothing that could have changed in our country that we could have probably built the capacity for acting in the moment of historic opportunity that ended up coming later.”
Another very simplistic summary of the answers to the question of what you wish you did differently—and this is, again, very common across left and right—is that people of all political colors and flavors said, “Our movement, it turned out, was too decentralized. We thought decentralization was a virtue in itself, whereas sometimes it can be good, and sometimes it can be bad. But in the case of the opportunities that this particular mass protest event presented us with, it turned out that we could not fill a power vacuum that appeared in front of us or even elaborate a set of demands to the people in power that would allow them to concede some sort of reforms or to give us a victory in the short term.”
AF: You talk a lot about horizontalism and prefigurative politics in the book, and I think it would be really rich for you to start by defining those things, then say what you learned about them, and then what you see as a result of all these conversations as alternatives to both.
VB: Horizontalism and prefiguration are political concepts, often sort of guiding principles or philosophies that privilege certain types of action that have been especially common on the antiauthoritarian Left and in the anarchist or even libertarian tradition (but not necessarily appearing in those traditions). These were both approaches to political action that played quite a large role in the 2010s. There are reasons that certain actions that seem to be horizontally structured or prefigurative became possible or easier to do in the 2010s than other types of actions or than they would have been in other historical periods.
To define them first, horizontalism is an approach to political organizing or political practice that rejects hierarchy in any form. It is radically anti-hierarchical, to the point of insisting on the rejection of any kind of representation whatsoever. As a concrete example of this, the Brazilian protest movement, MPL (Movimento Passe Livre, or the Free Fare Movement), that I spoke about at the beginning of the interview, which put together these protests back in June 2013, believed in the long-term decommodification of public services in Brazil. But the way that they organized as a group was explicitly horizontal. Now I know some of them would say that they were more dogmatically horizontalist. What this meant in practice is that there was no leadership at all—there was not even any division of labor. So everybody had to do everything. All jobs were rotated within the group. No one could ever become a spokesperson vis-à-vis the media. All decisions would have to be made, should be made, through full consensus. Even the idea that a vote would be taken and that if a majority votes for a particular course of action and everybody agrees to do it—even that was seen as an imposition of an authoritarian position on the willpower of individuals. They were against any kind of division within the group, so the idea of having a management committee was absolutely out of the question. That’s horizontalism, and I think it’s most pronounced for the total rejection of anything that smells even a little bit like hierarchy. It often amounts to a lot of people who are all equally leader of the group.
Prefiguration has more varied philosophical antecedents. In the book, I try to trace where all of the different approaches that became hegemonic in the 2010s came from. The bumper sticker version of prefiguration is “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” The simplest way to explain prefiguration is in the words of one of the book’s protagonists from Brazil. He said, “If you want to build a democracy, your movement must be democratic.” The most pronounced version of this is that you should be acting right now in the way that you want society to be structured after you win.
There are a lot of different ways that prefiguration can work, and I think there are a lot of ways that are quite useful and inspiring. They get people excited about the future and imagining what is possible. But in certain cases—for example, if someone declares war on you, if someone invades your village with a military—you probably don’t want to respond with the peace that you hope to experience after the invasion is defeated, right? Often you’ll have to actually get involved in some kind of a struggle, even if you hope that the shining future is one without struggle.
So those are where those two elements come from. In the mass protest decade, we saw, to various degrees, movements that were self-consciously horizontalist, like the Brazilians were, or protest movements, which we like to say were just more concretely horizontal. For example, in the Egyptian case, many of the people that put together January 25 and January 28 would have loved to have a revolutionary political party or a strong trade union movement with formal organization and the capability of interacting to reform the old state or forming a new state. Those things simply didn’t exist because of the decimation of civil society under North African dictatorships. In other cases, there were some people who really believed in the folk rejection of hierarchy and leaders, but I would say that those were, in most cases, a minority. It was more often the case that the horizontality was simply concretely present, and it was celebrated as proof that these were progressive movements. I think that sometimes a weakness ended up being celebrated as if it were a strength.
People came to me and ended up saying to me, at the end of the decade, not that we should give up on the idea of everybody being equal, not that we should give up on the idea of truly building a better world and being human as we try to build it, but that, at least in the case of the mass protests decade, there were moments of opportunity in which you could only take advantage of them if you acted quickly and collectively as a group, and true effective collective action often means some decision-making mechanism. That means there is a process for deciding what will be done next, and that often needs to be decided quickly. It may not be tenable to wait for every single person to agree. And also, as I described in the other dynamic, if a protest movement starts to succeed, someone might declare war on you, and a war is probably not the best time for prefigurative politics. You can choose not to fight a war, but if you’re going to declare or provoke a war, you need to be prepared for a period in which you are acting differently than the way you hope to act in the shining future.
AF: In the book, one of the things you talk about is the incredible speed with which mass protest movements have exploded around the world, and that, at least in part because of the speed of this rise, they were not ready to fill the vacuums that they created after challenging the old regime.
As you look at the base-building left in the United States, how would you assess our comparative readiness, and how do you see things like political education, and the development of strategic acuity and organizational rigor, and a real and detailed plan or vision for the future, as component parts of creating this readiness?
I would separate that question into two parts, and I think both parts are interesting. On the one hand, part of the point of the book is to ask whether or not, in every case, you want to create a political explosion that leaves a true power vacuum. Now, in the case of the United States, if some kind of a protest movement, no matter its original intent, were to create a true political vacuum tomorrow, a true crisis in the United States, my guess is that who wins is either the US military or right-wing militias.
If there were to be the kind of pronounced case around which I built my book in the United States tomorrow, my guess is that the Left would not do very well. My guess is that the readiness would be poor compared to the outcomes in the book’s episodes that went relatively better.
Part of that answer is to say “not very ready,” but hopefully built into that answer is the recognition, that I think the book points to, that there is no reason to believe that you should, no matter how much you want society to change, bet on the immediate collapse of a particular political system tomorrow—especially if you can game out how that might go for you and your friends versus the most powerful killing machine built in human history. So I would say “not ready,” but luckily, I think that’s not going to happen, and I wouldn’t try to make it happen myself.
You point to something also in your question that I want to answer separately, which does apply quite directly to the United States—and really across the board, no matter what you’re doing or in what context: the idea of political education, or cadre formation in the orthodox twentieth-century Marxist tradition, or just the commonsense idea of passing down lessons from generation to generation or accumulating knowledge as an organization and sharing the knowledge that you’ve built over decades of struggle with other people to help them fight better. That is something that I think we’ve lost the ability to do in the last thirty or forty years. It was something that would have been quite natural for political parties or unions or social movements to be doing in the twentieth century.
No matter who you are or what your goals are, you should not throw away the valuable knowledge that you accumulated through hard work and sacrifice for any reason, because it is simply effective and helpful to share knowledge that is built up. I think a renewed focus on whatever you want to call it—political formation, political education, cadre formation, knowledge sharing, experiential mutual aid—is something that makes most movements stronger, no matter who they are or where they are.
AF: Related to this notion that you talk about in your book, that not every moment is actually the moment to try and create a total power vacuum—of revolutionary retreat as an important thing to be mindful of and a move that we always have—I was thinking about your point that building a strong and more strategic Left is an incremental process. That seems so true to me, and yet I worry, particularly in the US context, that incrementalism can present its own set of dangers and that we can be drawn into a process that is so slow that we end up losing, even as we’re celebrating small, incremental victories.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how we might strike the right balance between preparation and incremental progress and also remain open to the boldness and spontaneity that will enable us to seize moments of opportunity—and that actually you point to as essential to certain people who stepped into vacuums that were created. Seizing power was them actually jumping in when horizontalist formations wouldn’t jump in—sort of punching above their weight, as you said in the book.
VB: I think that your question points to all the right answers already. The way I would put it is: You should do what you can when you can do it. You should do everything you can, when you can do it.
Sometimes all that you can do is to slowly build—slowly, slowly, slowly put together the capacity for collective action that might be useful at some future date. Sometimes all you can do is stop the bleeding. Sometimes all you can do is slow down the decimation of your movement. Sometimes that’s all that’s possible.
Sometimes a moment comes that allows you to scale up very, very, very quickly—some kind of unexpected event, some kind of spectacular change in the dynamics in society that will allow you to add a lot of people to the hopefully stable and democratic structure you’ve created beforehand. Sometimes there are moments that allow you to decide, “Wow, this is an opportunity that we can really take advantage of.”
It sounds stupidly obvious, but one way to think about it is that you should do everything that you can when you can do it, and don’t do what you can’t do when you can’t. If it turns out that it is not a moment when you can effect radical political change, you can think about whether or not to try. There are moments when you can say, “Well, we could try, and if we try and fail, then no harm, no foul; nothing is lost.”
There are other times when you can decide, “No, to try now would be to use up resources that would be wasted.” All of that is about a very careful, constant analysis of everything that is possible at any given moment. And I think more than one thing is possible at any given moment, and at some moments, zero things are possible.
You can be slowly, incrementally building but also looking around for the possibility for rapid growth or, indeed, radical change. None of those things are mutually exclusive. You can be looking around for the possibilities of them all at the same time—there’s no reason to ideologically privilege or exclude, in my worldview, any of the types of things that will actually work and are actually possible.
AF: You spoke about how media incentivizes public protest over other forms of political engagement and power-building work that might happen behind the scenes, like small meetings or leadership development, or cadre formation, as you were just referencing, and that struck me as a valuable insight. I think that dynamic can be accentuated or exaggerated by philanthropy, which then looks to the media for a validation of what’s important.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts about how organizers should respond to both the opportunities and the challenging reordering—or, potentially, distortion—of priorities created by the rise of this media infrastructure that you talk about.
VB: I’m going to try to divide this up into two questions, because I think they’re both important. A particular phenomenon that built the history of the 2010s, the mass protest that goes very, very quickly until it is either generating a revolutionary situation or the possibility for deep reform, the rapid scaling up of a protest movement—and I’m speaking of this particular form only now—is only possible because of a positive feedback loop with media. Protest, as a thing that humans do, only arises with the emergence of mass media in the first place. Protest is always mediated, even if the protesters think they’re not being mediated.
You can only go from one thousand people in the square to three thousand people on the streets because of the reproduction of sounds and images that are then able to reach many, many people that are not there seeing with their own eyes. Unless you’re directly speaking to or observing the original protesters with your own body, the only way that you can decide that you want to join them, too, is because you consume some kind of media about them that portrays them in a positive way. That’s not a weakness of the form. That is the form. In the 2010s, this was often a combination of social media and traditional media.
On the one hand, you can see how that made possible certain revolutionary outcomes, and on the other hand, you can see that this limits what kinds of things are actually going to happen. There’s a limited range of things that are likely to enjoy the combination of social and traditional media approbation. You can imagine certain forms and certain types of ideological positions and certain movements that are not going to get the positive media coverage that is fundamental to the dynamic that I talk about. And I always make very clear that the dynamic I talk about in the book is not the only way that you can do things. That’s kind of the point—that it may be the case that you should think about other moments.
If you are engaged in protest, you are always engaged somehow in a media action. You are always engaged in a communicative action. And just like the answer to the last question, if it seems like that is going to work well for you at a particular time, given the constellation of media apparatuses and the social media environment around where the protest might be, then that’s great. If not, then you can think about other things.
But that’s not true of all types of political action. For example, a strike doesn’t need media coverage. Media coverage can help, but a strike doesn’t need media mediation; it needs mediation between the workers and the boss, but it does not need positive coverage to work. All you need to do is to convince the boss, “If I don’t give X benefit or X wage increase, then I’m not going to be able to restart the factory.” It doesn’t matter, necessarily, what the rest of the country thinks. It often helps to have the rest of the country on your side, but that’s not the key to success.
I wouldn’t say that media incentivizes protest. Media is the target of public protest—or at least the indirect target of public protest, whether or not that is consciously understood by all the participants. And media is going to be more likely to offer positive coverage and create this virtuous feedback loop with certain types of protests and not with others.
The question of philanthropy is interesting, too. In the book, I quote at length the very famous Arundhati Roy essay “The NGO-ization of Resistance.” What she points to, I think correctly, is understanding and recognizing all of the great work that is done by people that work in NGOs or organizations that are funded by philanthropy. At the end of the day, when it’s time for the chips to fall where they may, the NGO that is funded by private donors does not actually answer to the constituents of the service. It is not the people that are being served by the NGO that they must, in the final instance, treat as their constituency.
The donor must continue to offer the money, or else everything falls apart. An NGO might be doing great work helping, say, unhoused people in the center of the city. But it is not them that needs to be convinced of the value of the work; it is the donors, and often the types of people that are likely to give money to NGOs are the types of people that are avid media consumers. They pay attention to positive feedback in the media, and they’re capable of taking the temperature of media coverage, whereas it may be hard for them to actually figure out if the people that are being vaccinated in a particular part of West Africa have had their lives improved as a result. So media is something that ends up mattering quite a lot when the dynamic is one inherent to organizations that actually respond to donors rather than to the people to whom they offer services.
AF: In some ways it’s so obvious, but I really appreciated your focus on the importance of looking at outcomes—impact, or “ends,” as you talk about them—for social change. As an organizer, I have found that we can often get distracted by activity and process, which are both enormously important but are not everything. And we can also be very good, as you describe, at dodging the implications when we come up short, by describing them as the seeds of future victories—the “I loosened it for you” argument.
But as you look at the ends, at the impact of the work of the Left in the United States today, how do you think we’re doing, and what strategic adjustments do you think we should make?
VB: This is a point where there’s a big line. I think there is a fundamental difference between countries that are in the Global North and the Global South, between the First World and what we used to call the Third World. One of the great things about living in a very rich, advanced country that has established a certain level of material and political freedom for a large percentage of the population (not for everybody) is that it gives you space for experimentation and focus on prefiguration or agitation of possible futures. It might not be what you want to spend your time on if you are facing a life-and-death encounter with a particular dictatorship.
I think that it is to be celebrated and taken advantage of that, as US citizens, we have the privilege to focus on process and on imagining different political activities, different political formations. In the case of this book, it turned out that some of the innovations were not suited to the particular phenomena that I analyze. But the flip side, the danger of that—and this is not my insight, and not a new observation, even though it is incredibly common, even in the most individualistic political tradition, even among the most radically anarchist traditions—is the risk of turning it into being about a lifestyle. There’s a risk of concentrating so purely on your own personal morality and your own personal purity that the question of outcomes is set aside entirely.
Maybe in a certain case, where no concrete change is actually possible, or where life is already pretty good for a particular individual subject, just cleansing themselves politically may be all that they want to do. But when you’re talking about a world in which food insecurity is a daily reality for huge amounts of humanity, when we’re facing climate catastrophe, when we are the citizens of a government that has spawned imperialist interventions around the world and has done so for a century now, I prefer that we do not lose sight of ends themselves.
When it comes to effects, “I loosened it for you” may be the best that we can come up with for the millennial left so far. In my generation, in the United States, the very important movements that have come together since Occupy Wall Street and the first Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 have not changed much of those things that I have just outlined as particularly important to me: people starving and dying around the world in the configuration of the US government. But as you pointed out earlier, a lot of times these things are incremental, and we would be quite surprised that a political movement that came together basically in the last five or ten years would have already transformed the most powerful government ever constructed on planet Earth.
For the concrete outcomes of not only the mass political protests that I looked at in my book but also of the active left in the last five, ten years of US history, the balance is not great. But the importance of recognizing setbacks is to learn from them. It is important not to pretend that you won when you lost, but it is also important not to think that just because you lost, you cannot learn from it and win again soon with what you’ve learned.
AF: Excellent—so neither sanguine nor despondent.
VB: Yeah, a pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. A lot of the things that come up in the book are old chestnuts that everybody knew about and used to agree upon but were forgotten in the era of the end of history and technological utopianism. It turns out that a lot of the oldest and best wisdom that arises in politics is still true. You know, to divide and conquer is still a strategy that’ll be used against us, and it’s still bad when you’re divided, and so on. Another quote that I could just pull out from someone else’s mind is, you know, “pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will.”
