Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (25 page)

While it would be wrong to force an analogy, there are worrying echoes of 1850s America in today's USA.

First is the combination of violent political rhetoric with the prevalence of weapons, something that led one despairing critic to tell me: ‘America is the Weimar Republic with 250 million guns.' Secondly, there is the transformation of TV news and talk radio into a zone of culture war: thanks to Fox and MSNBC, the conservative and liberal halves of America can now live in completely separate media bubbles, never hearing ideas they don't like or seeing news that contradicts them.

Third, all this is building up into an argument about the assertion of ‘states' rights' in the face of Federal government, with individual states attempting to impose, for example, Arizona-style anti-migrant laws or to resist the healthcare legislation. Following Obama's healthcare bill, indeed, seventeen states passed legislation attempting to nullify it; twenty-nine states have mounted a constitutional legal challenge.

Finally, the culture war has spilled over into the fiscal management of the biggest economy on earth. In August 2011 the Republican majority in Congress took the USA to the brink of technical bankruptcy in order to impose on President Obama their desired mixture of tax cuts and lower spending. Though essentially a piece of political theatre, the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011 sent a strategic signal to global markets, to the effect that the USA lacks a solid institutional framework to deal with economic crisis.

If this were just a case of ideological warfare over the same old issues—abortion, gay marriage, race and so on—it would remain pretty much what it's been since the 1970s: something for the political strategists to manoeuvre around as they fight for control of essentially stable institutions.

But America is facing a big new issue—economic decline. This is not a temporary blip. Before 2050, it will have to deal with an energy crisis and numerous resource rivalries, as well as the impacts of an ageing population and climate change. The danger is not that civil conflict breaks out because of one egregious rant by Glenn Beck or Al Sharpton—but that at a certain point the apparatus of government becomes paralyzed, as it was in August 2011, and the mechanisms for resolving conflict break down.

Tahrir comes to America

It is in this context that we have to consider the Madison, Wisconsin revolt, which began on 14 February 2011. Madison was sparked when Republican Governor Scott Walker attacked public sector workers' collective bargaining rights and pensions. As tens of thousands of teachers, firefighters and students protested outside the state capitol, four days after the fall of Mubarak, Lin Weeks (@weeks89) tweeted: ‘Weirdly high number of signs ref'ing egypt. And now chanting: “From Egypt/ to Wisconsin/ power to the people”.'
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The demonstrations continued on successive days, swelling from 30,000 to 75,000 protesters in the first week and becoming a national media spectacle. On 17 February, fourteen Democratic senators left the state in order to prevent Walker's budget vote getting a quorum.

While the hearings were in progress the protesters, who were entitled to sleep on the floor during this time, carried out a mass occupation of the building. By now the #wiunion tag on Twitter was appearing in so many posts that they were scrolling, impossible to read, across the laptops of the activists, huddled in their sleeping bags on the Capitol floor.

Anna Ogden-Nussbaum (@eponymousthing), who describes herself as a theoretical—i.e. unemployed—librarian, went into the Capitol on the second day. ‘We set up a library,' she tells me. ‘Mainly stuff about Madison, because there were people who just didn't know about the city and its history. There was stuff about Egypt everywhere: posters about Mubarak.'

Soon, not only was there ‘stuff about Egypt', there were direct links with the protesters there—one of which came in unexpected fashion.

From the start of the Capitol occupation in Madison, a local pizzeria, Ian's Pizza, had been sending in pizzas to the protesters. Soon, as news of the demonstrations spread, supporters from all fifty states began ordering pizzas on the protesters' behalf. Then, Ian's Pizza started to get orders from Cairo. Finally they got so many paid orders from all over the world, they simply opened the doors of the restaurant and served everybody for free.

The social-media resonance of Wisconsin was amplified by America's radical blogosphere. This has grown to include numerous commercially run blogs with paid correspondents, alongside NGO and trade union blogs who use trained, accredited journalists. Ben Brandzel of
HuffPo
wrote a widely read account that captured the atmosphere:

Everything is donated. The community survives because people from Madison to Cairo have chipped in for Ian's Pizza, endless bagels, or breakfast burritos from an organic café… I saw masseuses drive for hours and haul their chairs up three flights of stairs just to give free massages (before, of course, the chairs were banned). I saw people who had slept on cold marble for weeks gladly share or give away camping mats and pillows … And when the pizza supply was cut off, I saw people who hadn't eaten all day gladly share their only slice.
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If these had been just the usual consumers of organic burritos, the students or the radical left, the occupation could have been easily cleared, or coerced into clearing itself. But trade unions organized 100-strong delegations to sleep in the Capitol in shifts: plumbers, electricians, firefighters. Though it was to be defeated, the #wiunion protest was one of the clearest examples in 2011 of explicit ‘role-allocation' and division of labour between workers and students. The workers understood that their role was to provide the protection of respectability to the youth activists who'd initiated the sleep-in. But there was also crossover. One protester told me:

The way the firefighters reacted was interesting. On the first day they arrived, they spread their sleeping bags out in a solid group as if to say: hey everyone, stand back, we the firefighters are here now to lead the movement. But then, after a couple of days of joining in with the washing up, and talking to people, they just dissolved into the mass. They loosened up.

And they were not the only ones. Brandzel describes how even the police detailed to guard the Capitol were sympathetic: ‘Many of the same officers who guarded us during the day would take their uniforms off at night and join us in protest, often bringing large
Cops for Labor
signs with them.'
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The Wisconsin sit-in exhibited all the symptoms of the new kind of protest, and the new social mix: workers alongside students and community activists; the occupation of physical space for a prolonged period; a determination to be non-ideological; awareness of the power of social media.

Though it was ultimately contained within mainstream, constitutional politics, Wisconsin located the economic policy struggles firmly within the culture wars. The Capitol's occupiers included students, unions, farmers and community groups; their opponents were the local Tea Party, the billionaire libertarians who own Koch Industries, agribusiness and—of course—Glenn Beck. On his televised show, GBTV.com, Beck played a video of an allegedly ‘substance-fuelled rave of anarchists, communists and socialists' in the Wisconsin Capitol. Taunting the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, he said:

These are revolutionaries. If you think, Nancy Pelosi, that you're going to control these people? … Since 2005 I've been talking about the coming insurrection, I called it the perfect storm where all of our enemies say, ‘Now! Go, go, go!' This is it. And you are looking at something that will build stronger and stronger and stronger. If we lose Bahrain, that's our Fifth Fleet, man. Bahrain is on the edge … With Libya melting down, if Gaddafi can't stop it do you think Nancy Pelosi can?
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Within months it would be clear that—though it was well short of insurrection—nobody could stop it. On 17 September the Occupy Wall Street protest began. By 15 October it had spread to tens of American cities. As I write, it is filling my computer screen with livestreamed images of joy, solidarity, and repression.

With America confronting huge, painful economic choices in the next twenty years, it is not ideal for politics to be so polarized along ethnic, demographic, social and cultural lines. Yet in less than a generation US politics has become riven in a way that the mainstream media and academia are still struggling to understand. Its political institutions are coming under severe strain. And there is a feedback loop between institutional crisis, cultural conflict and the economy.

The absence of a coherent left

When the Languedoc workers of 1848 demanded the nationalization of monopolies and the provision of cheap credit, these were not random wishes. The ideology of social-republicanism had been coherently expressed in the works of Louis Blanc, whose book
The Organization of
Labour
had been published eight years previously. If the workers of the Rhineland tended towards the same demands in 1849, it was because a newspaper edited by Karl Marx had sudden freedom to advocate them in dense columns of 9-point Gothic type.

What is striking about the revolutions of 2009–11, however, is the absence of a coherent left. Leninism is looking shrunken and disoriented; horizontalism can stage a great demo, but does not know what it wants. Meanwhile, the mainstream left—Labourism, social democracy, the US Democrats and left-liberalism generally—appears politically confused.

President Obama is the prisoner of a right-wing Congress; Ed Miliband's Labour Party has spent its first year out of office casting around for an ideological alternative to Blairism; French socialism's expected saviour, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, spent his first night out of jail at a $600-a-head dinner in Manhattan. In Portugal, Spain and Greece, the politicians leading the socialist party were the ones who initiated the austerity. In Ireland, fearing it might win the election and find itself presiding over an economically crippled country, Labour was accused of sabotaging its own campaign.

If you were to summarize the problem for the mainstream left in the present crisis, it comes down to three points: free-market capitalism has failed; there's a wave of resistance to wage cuts and austerity; the political leaders of social democracy cannot accept points one and two.

These, then, are the sources of incoherence for the left. But its weakness impacts on the dynamics of unrest in a paradoxical way. By removing the danger of social revolution—or even systematic social reform—it undermines the rationale for a ‘democratic counterrevolution' of the June 1848 type.

The incoherence of the left has emboldened the liberals, the Facebook youth, the urban poor, and so on, to speak of social justice and to fight for it, secure in the knowledge that they cannot be accused of being communists (except on the Glenn Beck show). In this sense, across much of the Arab world but also in parts of Europe, the situation resembles Germany in 1849, not France in 1848. The weakness of the left has allowed the radical middle classes to retain their radicalism—for now.

What is the spectre?

Marx and Engels wrote their
Communist Manifesto
at around the same time as Frédéric Moreau ran into the student demo at the Panthéon. The authors sent their manuscript to London for publication, in German, on 21 February 1848, one day before the uprising in Paris. It therefore had no impact whatsoever in France that year, and no mass circulation in Germany.

By contrast, the modern equivalent of
The Communist Manifesto
has enjoyed widespread circulation—and been widely vilified. It is titled
The Coming Insurrection,
published in French, in 2007, by a collective called ‘The Invisible Committee'. Later, nine French anarchists—the Tarnac Nine—were arrested for allegedly trying to sabotage France's TGV railway network; they were also accused of being the authors of the tract.

The Coming Insurrection
is a remarkable document. Couched in the language of contempt for capitalism, alienation, advertising and the modern city, it seemed to me—on reading it in the middle of the Lehman crisis—designed to remain esoteric, gestural and largely unread.

It captures vividly the frustrations of the youth and urban poor:

We can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin. Sixty years of pacification and containment of historical upheavals, sixty years of democratic anesthesia and the management of events, have dulled our perception of the real, our sense of the war in progress. We need to start by recovering this perception.
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The authors' solution is spelled out in a series of exhortations to act: alone, clandestinely or in small groups, with fluidity, through symbolic gestures. ‘Get going … find each other … start from what's political in friendship'. Expect nothing from established organizations. Above all, ‘form communes'—that is, form autonomous groups to do sporadic things: ‘Becoming autonomous could just as easily mean learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease working, to love each other madly, and to shoplift.'

In 2007, this was indeed the height of activity for most anti-globalization activists: a series of fluid gestures, an alternative lifestyle in close-knit small groups, the occasional ‘day out' outside a conference or nuclear power site.

But the authors of
The Coming Insurrection
were thinking much bigger than the milieu from which they came. Two years in advance of the first networked insurrection, they described how it might come about. The disconnected youth of the urban wasteland, they predicted, would play the role of the new revolutionary subject:

The pioneers of the workers' movement were able to find each other in the workshop, then in the factory. They had the strike to show their numbers and unmask the scabs. They had the wage relation, pitting the party of capital against the party of labor, on which they could draw the lines of solidarity and of battle on a global scale. We have the whole of social space in which to find each other. We have everyday insubordination for showing our numbers and unmasking cowards. We have our hostility to this civilization for drawing lines of solidarity and of battle on a global scale.