The anecdotal tales he provides should remind anyone who participated in any kind of popular resistance in the past decades of the energy and hope one finds and feels at such events.
These are the stuff that makes one join such movements. Worthwhile and provocative. Adapting a rich vein of leftwing revolutionary thought for the wired generation, Mason argues passionately that the old rules have been broken.
We use cookies to enhance your experience. Dismiss this message or find out more. Forgot your password? This ignores another uncomfortable truth for Mason: the spark was lit by the self-immolation of a fruit vendor who was a repressed entrepreneur, and this is why it reverberated so strongly around the region, where so many people's attempts to earn a living were hampered by corrupt officials and governing kleptocracies.
Even in Egypt , which Mason uses as a key example, these are false targets. One analyst told me last month his biggest worry was that market-based reforms just starting to deliver results before the revolution would be choked off now, because of their association with Gamal Mubarak and the corporatist stranglehold of a military dictatorship that still controls perhaps one quarter of the economy.
The seed of this book was planted with an impassioned blog that went viral, which Mason wrote following a discussion about the Paris Commune with 60 students in a Bloomsbury squat.
This sets the tone for the whole book, sprinkled as it is with references to Chomsky and Debord. Mason claims the subsequent Millbank student protests were "one of those unforeseeable events that catalyse everything", while on the "flame-lit" face of protesters "you saw the look of people who had discovered the power of mayhem". There is lots of this sort of stuff.
My guess is that might be a mistake. I am young ish well educated and unemployed with little prospects of finding meaningful and decently paid employment and all of this rings true to me.
I feel like I've been sold a lie. Bring on the revolution! There's a sixties feel to this - despite the gulf between communication technologies then and now. In this country the decade drifted into the disappointments of the seventies and the repressive Thatcherism of the eighties and abroad even worse.
As for government here now, are you saying that the Big Society is a genuine belief in some quarters? Reads like a never ending question in a finals paper and at the end we are invited to 'discuss'. It takes some absorbing but my question is what is the magnitude of the force that these movements represent. The ultimate test is Chinese society.
In Egypt Mubarak will go but what replaces him when the opposition is far from organised. The missing feature in the movements so extensively described and analysed is cohesion. Brilliant general analysis Paul. Also worth a look is the specific nature of the organising strategies of campaigns like Optur and the role of horizontal strategising for taking back power.
Every new generation of young people is convinced that they are 'special' because they understand things in a way the 'old guard' can't. I remember feeling the same way getting my ass kicked in 60s demonstrations. Our music was special, our clothes, drugs, relationships etc etc.
It's a great feeling. But if you really imagine that there aren't forces at work here in the background, with agendas you may not have imagined, you're delusional. Some of us have been trying to get things done about oppression, freedom and all the rest of it for our whole working lives with precious little to show for it. You want to take over because you have facebook? Cool, I'm tired. Brilliant analysis Paul but I think point 5 is what will make the real difference this time round ie the role of young educated women BUT not just young women.
I came to this site via twitter and am well over the new age of retirement. Was working full time and washing nappies by hand in the 60's but am now as free as a As I posted on another BBC blog the other day when David Cameron announced this idea in public I groaned and metaphorically put my head in my hands, and "invoked the name of the Lord". The "Big Society" could turn out to be a barrier between government and the governed, because it is too easy derive incompatible interpretations of what it actually means.
Does it mean that those who protest about the selling off of woodlands will have their views properly considered? Does it mean that those who protest at the possible closure of libraries will have thier views properly considered? I would like to think yes but suspect no. I may be doing him and his cohorts a disservice in saying this but I suspect that DC only wants "Big Society" involvement on subjects of his choosing, not ours. He they would do well to remember the saying "be careful what you wish for".
As someone with basically conservative opinions I think this sort of policy is best described as "naive". Mr Mason: Apologies for hijacking this thread, but I can't find another way to contact this question: can one acquire the slides from your LSE talk of 31 Jan ? I like this. Authoritative positions don't hold the unquestioning respect they used to. We approach the situation as intellectual equals and do not have to believe everything we're told.
Information spreads much faster than is possible for state institutions can get propaganda out because as said we're all connected and communicative, so by the time the propaganda machine hits the airwaves it's already broken down, disseminated and the rhetoric has been deconstructed.
As soon as it comes out it's laughable, and the more entrenched they become hammering it home the more ridiculous they look. Their inability to connect with the populace and realise this is endemic of their detachment from the citizenry. Especially with regards to Big Society where everyone is sitting about saying "what a thoroughly nonsensical idea" yet they're so surrounded by apparatchiks and their blinkers are so tightly on that they'll never know until it's too late.
Age is not it Paul. Otherwise good. Though too much jargon. And ahead of itself on future horrors. As you say yourself for individuals: Things may not be as bad as expected. I'm a bit sceptical of the claims made about modern technology - it does enable people to communicate faster, but at the same time, it can be used by the powerful against new "threats" and there is as much danger of the important stuff being drowned in a pile of banal rubbish.
But there are some important ideas here that are timeless. Mainly, when things become impossible, then anything is possible. And part of what I think you're saying is that what unites students in the UK with the Cairo street is the idea of "no future".
This was last experienced in the punk era here in the UK. Secondly, real movements appear where the downtrodden educated meet the street. Great Article. I might also suggest that the whole notion of cultural hegemony in its loosest sense is, to an extent over. The ruling class or ruling ideology could always consume elements of popular culture and popular dissent and somehow dilute them before feeding them back to the masses in a more palatable form.
Bill with his Sax and Tony with his guitar no longer washes with the public. Technology dictates that cultural mores and forms move so quickly from emergence to transformation or dissolution that the elite ruling classes cannot catch on to the coat-tails of mass movements without seeming too late or too out of step, thereby further exposing the gaping cracks in establishment.
Keep going 'cos I need to discuss all this with my 14 month old grandaughter,and feel that time is accelerating. We now have the technology to govern ourselves.
Ordinary people know more about real life than the politicians so why not use the Internet to Vote For Yourself and do away with the elite. I ran a V4Y campaign during the election and I asked Gordon Brown this very question 2 days before he committed political suicide referring to Gillian Duffy as a bigoted woman , he allowed that this could happen in years. We cannot wait that long - the serious issues are always ducked by careerist politicos whose personal interests are in maintaining a status quo that is seriously weighted towards a small minority of very wealthy people.
We do not have to risk our lives to change things and it would undoubtedly help other countries emerging from years of tyranny created by the vested interests that run our industries if we took a lead in introducing REAL democracy. That we are ruled by a party that attracted If you looked at our current political system as medieval, PR at best is the steam age.
Let's move into the 21st century and allow people to take control of their own lives. Very good article. The only point I take exception to is no. As you say, horizontalism is key. No single group constitutes the backbone.
It's precisely because neither sex is in the driving seat that kicking off on this magnitude has been enabled. That aside, this makes for an incredibly stimulating read. It is true that through education a great many people now understand the nature of power. There are also many who instinctively grasp some element of what is true about life and the way of the world. Thus the tried and tested methods of mass influence and control are less effective. People see through them for what they are.
Nevertheless there are still plenty of people who cam be easily influenced through mass media and the politics of fear. This is more true in 'comfortable' western societies were people falsely believe that they have a fundamental right to a good life, and a secure one. They say that you get the government you deserve. We must snap out of our apathy and take responsibility for our actions. It is not enough simply to understand the nature of power.
We must all learn how to acquire it, how to use it responsibly, and more importantly how to give it up when it is no longer needed. Oh, and finally that crazy bloke Michael Jackson had it correct, I. It is the example that causes lasting change.
Whether it be a mass protest or a life well lived. We are born to be inspired by example, both the good and the bad. I am an old bloke and I agree with most of your analysis. I also applaud much of the action the students are tacking. The serious question is how big is the window of opportunity before we are all defenestrated.? Just loved this analysis - how fabulous to be able to take such a view, which makes so much sense and, interestingly to me anyway! Very interesting and some cogent points but hang on are you really attributing the current revolutionary ferver to middle class activism?
Is it so unthinkable to you that the working classes couldn't organise themselves without the middle classes? That many mebers of the working classes are and have always self educated Is it really possible that in any society the middle classes will ever be hungry enough or cold enough to get up and revolt?
Yes there is an intelligentsia element to all social unrest but not enough to attribute the whole struggle to their energy. The workers still end up being told what to do by those more privileged than they! Look at the people on those streets they are not all lawyers and teachers, they are poor working people, the back bone and the vanguard of any revolutionary uprising!
Intrigued by your mention of the Chinese 'undergrowth' and it's various forms. From photocopiers in Soviet Russia to twitter and facebook - samizdat as means of communicating and organising. Written before Egypt, it interestingly looks at the weaknesses too - as the state also has access to the conversation to bring down networks, track people and propagandize.
It really is a fascinating field of enquiry. Thank you for this concise analysis, can I add my voice to the several others who have commented and are well beyond youth, I too am in my late 40s, and arrived here via twitter.
Social media allow me a connection with society that I've never experienced before, and that I'd be unlikely to find in any other way as a middle aged woman living in a rural area, and working in a very small business. I completely agree with your observation that Westminster is disconnected from most people's reality, and probably always has been, but for the first time since I have been old enough to vote I sense that ordinary people may have the means to bring about real change.
Your article has left me with a feeling of optimism. Thank you. My head is starting to hurt! I didn't benefit from a great education on industrial Tyneside in the sixties and I wonder where all this leaves ordinary working-class folk, from Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, or Londons East End?
The non-Twiterati who don't listen to Radio 4 or watch BBC Four or even Newsnight, let alone get the chance to go to University, even if they could afford it. What does the future hold for them? Looks like Mark Twain's aphorism "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes" has been completely made redundant by the current social media. And a good thing too.
More and more potential parents now work for Mammon, and schooling starts at 2. The effect is cumulative - a negative feedback 'squared'. Inexorably, ability to raise children is departing, hence 'brought up' adults will cease to exist; indeed, they might already have done so, yielding the lack of competence we now experience everywhere.
But Dave, and Dave-ilk, seem to have no inkling of this corrosion at the heart of Britain. Big Society? You can't grow BIG anything this way. Westminster badly needs to swap lawyers and economists for applied philosophers and psychologists. Very interesting, and pertinent, but in such discussions there's a tendency - probably because social-media-savvy young people are in our faces all the time - to forget the rural, uneducated poor worldwide who can't, for one reason or another, get anywhere near the twittersphere, and if they could would find what they saw there largely irrelevant to their lives.
I don't have the stats but I suspect that they are huge in number, and I worry about who's speaking for their interests. It may be that state apparatus and "hermetic ideologies" still have a role to play there. I'm also unimpressed by the over 40s remark. The bankers, the politicians and the elites - i. Buy up copper, buy up oil, buy cocoa, buy cotton, buy, buy, buy!
Buy and drive the prices up. So far they believe they have got away with it - creating the biggest credit bubble in history, profiteering from it and then profiteering again from the crash and the subsequent bail-out of the global financial system. From where they are standing it is a win win situation. What a laugh! If we are lucky we will see a global revolution against them.
Within a year or two the only country on Earth the banksters will be safe in will be in the UK. They won't be threatening to leave, they will be paying to come here. So, the revolution will be led by the young radicalized middle classes? I have to disagree. From what I've seen on the recent student protests, it has been radicalized working class students who have led the way. Furthermore, on the back of those protests, some "middle class" groups have sprung up advocating peaceful demonstrations.
As a peaceful protester, normally, I'd be in support of those groups. However, in various missives, they have attempted to galvanize their position by denigrating the efforts and behaviour of other protesters.
I've felt gutted to read those. If a group wishes to advocate peaceful demonstration, then they must do so, not only in their deeds, but also in their words. My biggest fear at the moment is that the aims and objectives of some will split this movement. We are all fed up with the government's lies! We are all fed up with the hypocrisy!
We are all fed up with the dreadful millionaires' slogan, "We're all in this together! I think your postings under b and c expose the duality of what you have written.
As you confirm what you have written un scientific much of it is purely your commentary and contains little empirical evidence. To single out the Chinese is to deny that the US has had listening posts in place for years with their programs Guardian and Sentinel. Connection to the internet can be switched of anytime. Women have always participated in and taken a leading role all progressive movements so you analysis of history is wrong.
A disorganised mass however well intentioned will not win through. It requires discipline and this does not come from the middle classes though part of a revolutions leadership may. We see today the same action as in Paris the difference is that the students seem to fully embracing ordinary working people in the struggle. From Australia. Posting from Egypt, here. First, I would like to say that this is a very interesting and thoughtful analysis. Points 5, 7, 10, 12, 13 and 18 are quite thought-provoking.
I would, however, like to point out that communications were shut off completely. Today is the first day I was able to send an sms and internet came back fully on February 3.
Currently, though not proven, accounts on both Fb and Twitter have cropped up in record numbers supporting the Mubarak regime and harassing those that post against them. Further, the "cyber-protesters," i. Case in point, Wael Abbas. Finally, much of what is going on here was not fueled by the youth as sad as I am to admit it , or at least not the educated youth that you speak of.
Many of the protesters, starting on January 25, found out about the protests through their mosque or word of mouth. This revolution is not just propagated by the youth of Egypt. This revolution is truly one of the people and people of all ages, classes, religions, beliefs and education level are participating. In light of this information, which I'm not sure if you're aware of or not, we are still in Tahrir and still fighting against the regime.
I might even say that the communications blackout made people fight harder. I'm sure that accounts for some of their organisational ability. I think that you're pretty spot on and I'll be 41 soon. I think the analog age has moved north. There is a factor that I think is missing, perhaps more of a trigger than a factor. In terms of actual currency people may be becoming more wealthy but the purchasing power is in decline. People have been talking about peak oil for years, but we appear to have arrived at peak food.
The availability of all resources is dwindling while the demand, created in part by education and economic prosperity continue to rise. As people globally begin to realize that even if they manage to achieve a greater income their buying power will continue to decline there will be great political upheaval. It's already happening in the West. Think of all those communities still struggling with the poverty brought by Thatcher. Think of all those communities still struggling with the poverty broght by Reagan.
Think of all those who made it rich, very rich. Many of the kids from those communities grew up, tried to make something of their lives, desperately trying to have better lives than their parents.
I remember at the end of the '80s, early '90s there were problems with new graduates finding jobs. Now we are in another wave of economic destruction. Graduates are now up to their eyeballs in debt and will be offered what amounts to slavery - work unpaid as an intern though the slave owner won't house, feed and clothe you, your parents will, so that is an even better deal for the boss.
We have the graduates. We don't have the jos. Remember all those BBC presenters a few years ago scoffing at the almost 30 somethings who were still living with their parents? That was the slope of the very same problem.
Britain, in it's great wisdom, ignored it, laughed at those who were struggling, labelled them as somehow deficient. They weren't failures. They were the first signs of a failing economy and a failing society. And there are still a few people making massive amounts of money. When I look at Tunisia, I see similarities here.
When I look at Egypt, I see similarities here. The actors — Khalid Abdalla, Sirine Saba, Lara Sawalha and Mason , playing a version of himself — are not just performers but activists and eyewitnesses. This is a piece of theatre that could run and run, changing all the time as events unfold and the world shifts on its axis. In some ways this could be seen as the story of a man who read the runes wrong.
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