Coll McCail reviews If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins (Hachette, 2023).
“Run, comrade, the old world is behind you,” cried the students of Paris in May 1968. The students built their barricades and stormed towards the heavens just as their forefathers had done during the Commune. “A riot? No sir, it’s an insurrection,” wrote Daniel Singer in his book Prelude To Revolution, imitating the words of Duke La Rochefoucauld in 1789. Singer captured the threat posed to the foundations of French capitalism in 1968.
This May, French students made a fresh dash toward the new world. The young people of the Sorbonne University occupied their campus once again. Joining the global wave of encampments in solidarity with Gaza, students pitched their tents and raised the Palestinian flag only to be evicted and detained by the French police days later. From the Sorbonne to UCLA, Edinburgh University to Columbia, the anti-war movement flourished on campus this spring.
Just as they did in 1968, these developments have spotlit important questions of organisation for the left. While arguments about how best to structure mass movements may feel well-rehearsed by now, such debates should be welcomed as the broader Palestine solidarity movement searches for a strategy to retain momentum more than nine months after Israel’s genocide began. This is an opportune moment to consider the lessons from Vincent Bevins’ new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Surveying the wave of global protest that brought more people to the streets during the 2010s than at any other point in human history, the book explores why success has been so elusive.
Bevins draws on more than two hundred interviews in a dozen countries to analyse the outcomes of the largely ‘leaderless’ movements of 2010–2020. His case studies present a clear pattern: exploiting the conditions presented by widespread apathy and declining political participation, activists sparked horizontalist uprisings only for organised reactionary forces to take advantage – and ownership – of the moment. The mass movements’ rejection of democratic centralism forces a lengthy search for full consensus, inhibiting their progress and creating a political vacuum.
As an LA Times correspondent in São Paulo in 2013, Bevins witnessed the largest protest in Brazilian history. The book follows the anarchist-oriented Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) – Free Fare Movement – in their fight to lower the cost of public transport in the country’s largest city. As he watched the MPL draw hundreds of thousands into the streets, Bevins’ colleague commented, “I don’t think I have ever seen anything more beautiful in my life.” This same sense of euphoria gripped the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel as he climbed atop a barricade in Paris’ Latin Quarter in 1968. “How beautiful it is,” he shouted.
This feeling was however as fleeting in São Paulo as it was in Paris. “We had absolutely no plan for what came after,” a member of the MPL told Bevins. Within days, the MPL’s message was lost andthe protest’s character transformed. The streets were filled not by the left, but by those who would become Brazil’s Bolsonaristas. The spontaneous eruption of popular feeling that the MPL cultivated lacked unifying ideological foundations and was quickly manipulated by the better-organised right. Bevins notes that this is exactly why movements “should not try to effect maximum disruption at any moment that this appears possible.” It would only be rational to create this political vacuum, argues Bevins, if the movement backs the group that will fill it. “The crucial distinction,” he notes, “is not to use the explosion to form the organisation.”
By investigating multiple different countries – from Hong Kong to Ukraine, South Korea to Turkey – Bevins provokes his readers to examine their own context. Applying his lessons to Britain at pres-ent proves instructive. The last nine months have seen some of the largest mobilisations in British history. These have been enabled in part by the permanent organisational structures that Bevins proves are so necessary.
When over a million people marched against the Iraq War in London in 2003, building for the demonstration took months. On the 11th of November 2023, one million protesters flooded the streets of the capital to call for a ceasefire in Gaza with nothing like that level of notice – or mainstream support (The Daily Mirror, for example, backed the 2003 demonstration). A variety of factors enabled this pace of mobilisation. However, the importance of building strong and politically consistent anti-war institutions – such as the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) – during the intervening twenty years should not be understated.
To apply Bevins’ analysis in this instance, StWC existed before the ‘explosion’. When public opinion was on their side and when it was not, the StWC has popularised anti-imperialist arguments for two decades. This provided the necessary organisational legitimacy for Stop the War to take a position of political leadership last October, lending the movement the confidence to march on Armistice Day despite serious threats of state repression.
In October 1968, days after anti-Vietnam War protestors were charged and beaten by police in London’s Grosvenor Square, the playwright David Mercer wrote to The Times to protest its coverage of events. “The truth of the matter is that capitalism is now more seriously embattled than at any time since the thirties,” wrote Mercer. “And the police who cordoned off the American embassy on Sunday faced not exhausted men from Jarrow, nor orthodox communist militants in a re-enactment of Cable Street, but an educated and informed spectrum of opinion which will tolerate dissimulation no longer.” Needless to say, Lord Thompson’s newspaper never published Mercer’s correspondence, but today his words echo down the years. Among the core strengths of the Palestine Solidarity movement in Britain are its breadth, political leadership, and position in the wider anti-capitalist struggle.
By the end of June 1968, French authorities had suppressed the strike wave. The moment that led Paris’ Chief of Police to declare that, in the event of revolution, “it is not clear who defends the government” vanished as quickly as it appeared. While we do not sit on the verge of insurrection, we cannot afford for momentum to evaporate today as it did then.
Recalling Andre Gorz’s reflections on the halcyon days of ‘68, Bevins points out that spontaneous explosions only catch the ruling class off guard once. This is all too visible in Britain, where in recent years the left has switched from one issue to another, building specific, time-limited campaigns.
The institutional strength of Britian’s anti-war movement and Bevins’ case studies demonstrate the importance of political clarity for our movements. This requires a focus, however, which is inhibited by an insistence on switching from one issue to another to keep up with the news cycle. This Spring, as student protests surged on campuses the world over, their coordination relied upon support from pre-existing organisational structures, whose help was used to develop and embed consciousness in an otherwise spontaneous moment.
What ultimately forced De Gaulle to flee Paris in 1968 was the unity of struggle displayed by workers and students. In France today, some observers predict that the political chaos of the Fourth Republic, to which De Gaulle’s return put an end, is set to return. For the moment, the far-right’s ascendency is delayed. However, the unity that enabled the surprise victory of the hastily-assembled New Popular Front in July’s legislative elections has evaporated. “We may not create a paradise from one day to the next. But we will put an end to this hell,” promised Jen-Luc Melenchon in 2022. Two years later, the abolition of hell remains an urgent task for which political principle and organisational unity are as vital as ever.
Coll McCail is a writer and activist based in Glasgow. He is a member of Progressive International’s secretariat, edits Scota, and is a member of the Scottish Left Review editorial board.