The following is a lightly edited version of a public talk given to the Tāmaki Makaurau branch in March 2025.
If you are attending a meeting of the International Socialist Organisation then we are going to start with the assumption that you want to change the world for the better: that you are at least interested in socialist politics. We have been studying Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, detailing the Marxist argument that social reform cannot fix the crises of capitalism, and crucially that we cannot replace the end (our goals) with the means (our methods) as was called for by her opponent Bernstein in arguing for reformism. The conclusion from this is that a social and political revolution will be required in order to move beyond capitalism. This talk will take that analysis a little further. This talk is about the importance of organisation. We will do that by analysing some of the movements of the previous decade. This talk is built heavily from the book If We Burn – The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins.
The 2010s saw an upheaval in protests the world over. For some of us, it felt as if positive change was finally possible. At the beginning of that decade we had the Arab Spring. In the West, we had Occupy and Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, and Indigenous protest against drilling and mining. Europe saw rebellions against the ruling class’ demand for austerity. Throughout Africa and Asia, there were rebellions against corruption and international exploitation. Mass movements arose across South America, raging against poverty and imperialism. Every continent was rocked by some of the largest protest movements in history and yet in hindsight when we look around to see what actually changed around the world in this decade, we realise very little has changed. In many cases, rather than a resurgent and powerful Left, the opposite occurred and we had the rise of the far Right.
Vincent Bevins is a journalist from the US who asked the question: why is that the case? In If We Burn, he interviews over 200 activists involved in 26 different countries and details the rebellious actions across many of them including Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Türkiye, Yemen, Spain, Greece, Ukraine, Sudan, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Through these interviews, he weaves together an analysis of movements from the activists themselves, in order to piece out why so many movements failed and why in many cases the call for change developed into a change for the worse. I recommend you read the book in its entirety, but here at least I will discuss some specific struggles.
The title, If We Burn, refers to the theme of self-immolation which appears at the beginning and end of the decade, from the tragic death of Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010 to the adoption of a phrase from The Hunger Games stories during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests: “If we burn, you burn with us.” This is a theme that runs through the decade of mass protest, and also points to some of the difficulties that we have to overcome.
In the second half of this talk, I’m going to expand on Bevins’ conclusions to argue how we can make ourselves more effective in defining and demanding the change we need to make this a better world.
Tunisia
We start out the decade of the 2010s in North Africa: Tunisia. Protests in Tunisia were sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010. The protests soon led to the ousting of Prime Minister Ben Ali on 14 January 2011, when he officially resigned after fleeing to Saudi Arabia, ending his 23 years in power. In just 31 days in 2011 he was ousted by a spontaneous mass movement of people. This would set the theme for the decade. Spontaneous bursts of popular outrage, mass mobilisations, and police brutality – all of it covered and distributed through social media.
And yet today, Tunisia is still not a politically free country. Tunisia’s current president, Kais Saied, assumed dictatorial power in 2021, leading to protests. In April 2023, professional footballer Nizar Issaoui set fire to himself after police accused him of terrorism for arguing about the price of bananas. But, in contrast to the social movements of unionists and Leftists after Bouazazi’s self-immolation, 13 years later there were no mass protests. This theme continues through as well.
The revolts that began in Tunisia at the end of 2010 would not stay there: they spread across North Africa in what began to be called the Arab Spring.
The Arab Spring Spreads to Egypt
In June 2010, people across Egypt were shocked to learn that Khaled Said, a regular guy from Alexandria in Egypt, was dragged from an Internet cafe in June 2010 and beaten to death by the police. He was no Leftist, nor was he an Islamic radical, but his death incensed liberal and conservative Egyptians alike who knew that President Hosni Mubarak’s police were a threat to almost everyone.
Most people had stories of state violence; they had either seen such violence themselves or had a family member suffer a grave injustice. What was new, in 2010, was that images of the repression were available for immediate viewing by tens of millions of people, and they could join a page on Facebook to share their collective outrage.
The “We are all Khaled Said” page grew in numbers and activity throughout the beginning of the Tunisian uprising. This page called for a protest on 25 January, just 11 days after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia. The date coincided with the day for national celebration of the Egyptian police, picked to allow the rally to emphasise the issue of police brutality. The “liberation” of Tahrir Square was called for.
At the planning meetings, activists laid out routes and made preparations. Someone asked, “what will happen once we reach the square?” Everyone burst into laughter. That was not going to happen.
On the afternoon of 25 January in Cairo, far more people showed up to the protest than was expected. Marchers broke through the lines of police, who responded with the repression they had been trained to unleash. But police were unprepared for the number of people that came out that day. As each day passed, more and more joined at Tahrir. Together, now all those in the Square chanted: “Bread, freedom, social justice!” and “The people want the fall of the regime!”. These were radical statements the organisers were dismissing as too difficult just days before. Faced with overwhelming numbers, the police abandoned the city.
Events on 28 January were relatively spontaneous in that things came together very quickly, and the protesting crowd was indeed leaderless, horizontally structured, and ideologically diverse. The movement’s spontaneity had given them success and washed away their opponents, but organisers were stuck. What next? Questions abounded with the organisers, and the different groups and the masses of individuals that joined them in Tahrir.
Should they not charge the halls of power and take control? Should they seize the television and radio stations to stop the regime from broadcasting its propaganda? But then who would speak for the movement? Who would be in charge of what to do with them? The Western media also faced this dilemma. They were there in the Square, but who could they interview to speak on behalf of this movement and on what it wanted to achieve? This mass of people had no official representatives.
In the end, the social pressure increased to the point where the military facilitated the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. Elections were held, which were won by a candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the few well-organised groups participating in the demonstrations. Thus, Mohammed Morsi became president.
Geopolitical interventions were strong, with Türkiye backing Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to build a new regional ally in the Turkish model. Saudi Arabia on the other hand was against this, having no interest in a prosperous Egypt that could pose an ideological threat to the murderous monarchy.
On 29 June 2013, the Tamarod “Rebellion” movement in Egypt announced it had 22 million signatures calling for new elections. The next day, millions of people took to the streets. But to activists that had participated in Tahrir Square, this felt different. This time, police supported the demonstrations, as did the major media. Military aircraft flew overhead. On 3 July, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with the support of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), took power in a military coup. As it turned out, Tamarod was never as much of a grassroots movement as it had first seemed. Rather, it had been funded by Gulf nations, the military of Egypt, and wealthy businessmen. Saudi Arabia immediately threw its support and funding to the SCAF, thus supporting el-Sisi. Morsi had millions of supporters in the country who pointed out that he had won the only legitimate Egyptian election in history and his supporters now gathered not in Tahrir, but in Rabaa just a couple of kilometers away. The army raided and cleared the Square, killing approximately 1,000 people. The Muslim Brotherhood was banned, and dictatorship was re-instituted in Egypt.
Türkiye
In Türkiye, a group of environmentalists organised a protest to save a city park in Istanbul. Opponents of President Tayyip Erdogan packed Gezi Park. More demonstrations erupted in Ankara, Izmir, and a dozen other cities. But in the first days of June 2013, Gezi Park became the national platform for a range of political causes, a site for clashes with the police, and a space for a radically different type of communal experience.
None of this had been planned, and there was no obvious demand for them to make, no obvious target to match their escalated sense of purpose. The causes represented remained as diffuse as the participants. In saying this, Gezi was not as “leaderless” and horizontal as Tahrir, since in Gezi the Taksim Solidarity umbrella organisation quickly formed in an attempt to give some direction to the revolt.
But this umbrella formation didn’t work in practice, as it wasn’t exactly clear who was under that umbrella. Anyone could come to the park, and participation was diverse. The environmentalists had started the movement, and from the beginning there had been representatives from: the People’s Democratic Party – a progressive party that defends Kurdish interests; the organised Left, including the Turkish Communist Party; Kemalists of different stripes; secular social democrats; and ultra-nationalists. Also present were: a few members of the Grey Wolves – far Right nationalists who had been responsible for a wave of terror against the left before the 1980 Military coup; many mostly middle class citizens without political identities or experience; and football hooligans.
After the police failed to squash the protestors with riot squads, thousands of supporters came out to Gezi Park and international media took notice. A few days later, thousands of people gathered in assemblies. The older activists with experience – mostly organised Leftists who were referred to as “big brothers” in the park – wanted to use the leverage they had created to reap immediate benefits (via negotiation and institutional politics) and end the occupation. Young protestors shouted back at them, questioning their authority and yelling that they did not represent them. When it came time for the Turkish government to invite a delegation to negotiate on behalf of the park, it wasn’t clear who was supposed to go.
To paraphrase one of Marx’s most famous lines from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented. The Turkish government selected people to make a deal with and offered them a fait accompli. The people would keep the park if the country voted for it in a national plebiscite, but that was it. Nothing else.
The rise of el-Sisi in Egypt was a huge victory for the Saudi royal family and the version of Gulf-dominated Arab politics that had seemed so threatened by the Arab Spring. With the overthrow of Morsi in 2013, Erdogan lost both his geopolitical ally in Egypt and much of his own secular middle class support. He was now deeply involved in a bloody quagmire in Syria and it looked like Türkiye would no longer be joining the European Union. But his rule itself was not in question. Erdogan’s government gradually became more authoritarian and he is still in power to this day, arresting opposition leaders and banning opponent parties.
Greece and Spain
In May 2011, the Indignados movement began occupying squares across Spain, following the Tahrir model. Over 100 protest camps sprung up – furious at banks and politicians, and at the real life devastation they had wrought in the aftermath of 2008. At the same time, Greek activists set up their own encampments at Syntagma Square in Athens, which remained occupied for the next four months. Assemblies sprang up around the country, committed to horizontalism and radical participatory democracy. Throughout Spain, protestors set up “peoples’ assemblies” that sought to come to decisions through full consensus. Anybody was free to join. A huge number of the population actively participated in these protest movements, and these demonstrations pushed their respective governments to the brink of collapse.
But these demonstrations remained limited to being demonstrations only. After the summer, the assemblies shrank. Only the unemployed and students were able to spend their full time there, and even they found their energy sapped eventually. Political parties developed in the wake of these movements. In Spain, Podemos was set up by activists who started with Indignados. In Greece, the activists from different groups that were involved in the protests formed SYRIZA, which eventually took power in elections. However, unable to break from the capitalist system, they ultimately capitulated to the European Central Bank over onerous debt repayments. This led to their collapse, and now Greece is led by a centre Right party.
Occupy
Then it was the other Western countries’ turn. Occupy Wall Street was tiny compared to the uprisings previously described. Life barely changed for people just going about their day despite the hundreds of encampments dotted around the globe. Setting up in the heart of cities next to international media, OWS engendered a real discursive shift across the Western world, but the occupations nonetheless ended with a whimper.
Within these encampments, there was a fundamental split over the political meaning of the protest camps. For anarchists, the camps were self-governing communities operating autonomously from society – a seed that could grow into a new world of its own; for others, the camps were temporary rallying points, a stage from which to blast out their claims.
OWS organisers insisted that all decisions in encampments be reached through consensus. At its most extreme, this led to situations where a tiny number of people could block the majority, especially when it came to deciding who could speak to or for the movement. Keeping an occupation alive is full time work, and exhaustion set in amongst activists as the mobilisation slowly melted away over a couple of months without any successes.
Hong Kong
Benny Tai, a Law Professor at the University of Hong Kong, published a column with a proposal for a mass protest: If the soon-to-be-announced electoral reforms Beijing planned did not deliver meaningful democracy to the people of Hong Kong, Tai advocated they should take action. Inspired by Occupy Wall Street in the United States, they should occupy “central” the downtown business district of the city, which had been a central administrative region of the People’s Republic of China since 1997.
This was in response to an announcement that stated that whereas there would be universal suffrage for the “Chief Executive” (the top position in Hong Kong’s governance structure), candidates who could run for the position would be preselected by the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Student groups organised protests in response, and occupied Central Square outside the government headquarters. More and more protestors flooded in over the coming days. The police, overwhelmed, fired tear gas on the protestors. Such scenes hadn’t been seen in Hong Kong since the 1960s, and the protestors’ ranks continued to grow in response to the police repression being shown on the news. These protests were dubbed the “Umbrella Movement” by the international press.
This movement had no capacity to impose any significant cost on the Chinese government. An attempt to organise a mass strike fizzled. The Umbrella Movement initially sought to copy Occupy Wall Street (itself a copy of Tahrir Square, which in turn was inspired by the success in Tunisia). There were also other symbols of inspiration, such as a Lennon Wall inspired by a wall of graffiti in Prague which explained why individuals were protesting, and a projector nearby which displayed messages of solidarity from around the world. After police murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US held up both arms and chanted “hands up don’t shoot”, Hong Kong protestors also made the same gesture. Even the three-finger salute from the Hunger Games movies made an appearance.
Within the movement in Hong Kong, splits started to appear. Some “localists” began to mount attacks on the so-called “Left pricks”. Eventually, the localists emerged as the major beneficiaries of the Umbrella Movement, whose politics were originally defined by keeping the old structures of Hong Kong intact but which came to be more defined by outright xenophobia and attacks on working class migrants from mainland China.
Localists forcefully attacked any idea of internal leadership and representation in general. They opposed the use of any flags on the streets or any kind of assembly structure. The Hong Kong government called for a televised debate between student leaders and government officials, which was broadcast in the main square. The lack of structure had dire consequences on the sustainability of the movement. After the debate, there is insufficient action and no open elections. Beijing got what it wanted.
In 2019, the protest movement would ramp up again, this time called the “Water Movement”, based on Bruce Lee’s famous “Be Like Water” teaching. This time, the resistance had a decidedly different air: it was much more spontaneous and slogans were simultaneously more radical and more focused in an “if we burn, you burn” kind of way. The Water Movement’s political strategy appeared to be to cause maximum disruption and hope that this would result in a positive outcome. Mung Siu Tiat, the head of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, began to be alarmed about the tyranny of structurelessness that was found in activist groups in Hong Kong. Tiat stated at the time:
Some people were indeed making decisions, but they had not been authorised to do so. There was a real gap between the idea of spontaneity and the reality of authority. Directives, like ‘no stage’ or ‘you cannot bring a flag’ or ‘you cannot shout a slogan’ are actual rules and perhaps even more authoritarian than any formal structure would have been.
This allowed for more xenophobic elements to become more numerous within the slogans associated with these protests, which provided Beijing with justification to end the “two systems” compromise that had existed since the British withdrawal. Both the “Umbrella” and “Water” uprisings in 2014 and at the end of 2019 undermined the local administration to some extent, but ultimately failed to stop Beijing from taking control.
Themes
From the short overviews provided above of protests from around the world, I want to pick out some of the important points that Bevins sees as uniting the experiences of the activists he interviewed.
Firstly, international solidarity is tangible and real. Revolutionary situations do not respect borders, and successes, even fleeting ones on one side of the world, can sweep through the world and inspire millions. Protests, more generally, are planned based on what we or others we are in contact with have done previously. We are inspired by, and constrained by, this fact. But it does connect us to all the revolutionary currents all around the world.
Next, there was a certain political naivete, a general sense that change is always good. History does not stop, but continues to unfold after the explosion of protest energy. There is always another decision to make – if you can take the square, then where next? For many of the activists looking back, there was a naivete of assuming that if a single big bad thing was removed then evil would just evaporate from the land, much like portrayed in a movie.
History does not possess a supernatural metaphysical quality that pushes progress forward relentlessly. You have to have a way to get from where you are to where you want to be, or at least a road map to somewhere better. You need, if not a plan already prepared in advance, then a strategy elaborated quickly and effectively as events unfold.
When asking activists why they thought many of these protest movements resulted in their country’s going backwards, a clear theme emerged: “There is no such thing as a political vacuum.”
If you blow a hole in the centre of a political system, taking power away from those who have it, then someone else is going to enter the empty space and take it. If it is not going to be you or your movement, then you had better like the people waiting in the wings.
The particular rebellions of this decade – apparently spontaneous, digitally co-ordinated, horizontally organised, leaderless mass protests – did a very good job of blowing holes in social structures and creating political vacuums.
If some new group boldly steps into the vacuum, manages to stay there and transforms society, then that’s a revolution. But if you find your political system broadly acceptable, or you don’t think that you can replace it with something better, then the thing to do is negotiate. That is reform.
All of this requires organisation and democratic structures that allow for decision making and argument. The legacies of this time of protest, of horizontalism, prefiguration, and autonomy were turned into a dogma. The decentralised nature of horizontalism meant that there was no room for discussion about how it should work or how a coherent strategy could be developed, let alone to be carried out.
Often within these movements, the horizontalist or leaderless structure became a principle. In reality, however, the tyranny of structurelessness meant that there was an unelected leadership that faced no accountability for their actions. Any “leaderless” movement will have unofficial leaders, as long as the group gets big enough, whether they admit it or not. The question then becomes how did they arise? How are they held accountable for their actions to the wider movement? These types of structures by definition have a hard time drawing the line between who is in and who is out, and struggle to pivot quickly when circumstances change.
The form of these protests also allowed other causes to enter the streets and contest their meaning, capturing the movements ideologically as Bevins describes with the rise of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the far Right in the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. In order to understand what might happen after a protest explosion, you must not only pay attention to who is waiting in the wings to fill a power vacuum; you also have to pay attention to who has the power to define the uprising itself. Movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for.
In many cases, the act of creating occupations and communities in the spirit of the world they want to build – namely prefiguring their demonstrations – ends up constraining movements. It always means devoting energy to system maintenance and propagation rather than focussing on the task at hand. The means (the methods by which we get to our goal) may inadvertently take precedence over achieving the goal itself.
The consequences of such failures are different under different initial social conditions. The consequences for those at Occupy Wall Street were the potential to get a media or academic career afterward. Conversely, if your uprising fails in many other circumstances, you and your friends may go to jail or be executed by the state.
Lenin said that “spontaneous” uprisings would simply adopt the ideology that is currently dominant. This is an extension of the Marxist idea that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. Ideologically diffuse mass uprisings tend to create opportunities for, or, reinforce larger power structures. Without ideological cohesion, it’s easier for third parties to capture popular movements. This helps explain why sometimes the world’s richest countries welcome selected uprisings. Imperial powers can allow the uprising to become embroiled in a propaganda war, not support it sufficiently to win, but allow the uprising to fail and be repressed very publicly to shame their geopolitical opponent. Historically, successful revolutions have had to defend themselves against ousted elites and their foreign allies who threaten counter revolution and invasion.
What Can We Do?
It is not like you can avoid the arrival of a historical struggle, even if you wanted to. So what should we do to make our interventions in spontaneous uprisings more effective?
Firstly, we need to recognise that organisations are effective and representation is important. As stated earlier: individualisation tends to reinforce power structures. Collectivisation – through a self-consciously democratic organisation that is focused on the most legitimate and transparent ways possible to organise – is one of the few things that can punch above its weight. This shows the important role of a party.
A party can keep a history of protest alive, a consciousness of what has been done before, so we do not have to start from the beginning every time. It allows space for education and debate on strategy and tactics. One must always be very aware of what a protest is doing, and how it will lead to a positive outcome. A tactic might get you through one part of a campaign, but a tactic is not a strategy. If the goal is to put pressure on elites, then strikes and boycotts often work much better than people marching across the city.
If enough leverage is created to make demands – that is to enact reform – then someone must represent the group to negotiate victories. If the existing elites can actually be removed – a revolutionary situation – then some group must be prepared to take their place and do a better job. The question will be whether the people give this minority permission to speak for them.
Winning all at once, and banishing evil from the land – that is the stuff of Hollywood. There is a right way to lose, there is a right way to wait, and there is an effective way to regroup. “Victory is impossible unless one learns to attack and retreat properly,” Lenin said in 1920. Spontaneous uprisings will not get us out of the barbarous path capitalism has laid before us; organisation will.
The Organisation We Need
There is all too frequently a suspicion or hostility to organisation in activist circles. But if you refuse to use the tools that work, you are not really building; you are refusing to take responsibility, and you are ceding your power to other people.
Our understanding of what these organisations are is structured by our history. For most people when we talk about a party they might envision a social democratic party, or a so-called “communist” party in the style of the Soviet Union’s rulers or the Chinese Communist Party. To be clear, we advocate for neither of those – both structures are designed to suit their ends, not ours.
The social democratic conception of a party is a party of the whole class. This flawed viewpoint sees any split within the party as a split within the class itself. The massive apparatus needed to hold together a mass of only half-politicised members in a series of social activities leads to a toning-down of political debate and a lack of political seriousness, which in turn reduces the ability of party members to make independent political evaluations. Without an organisational centralisation aimed at giving clarity and decisiveness to political differences, the independence of the rank and file members is bound to be permanently undermined. Ties of personal affection or of deference to leaders become more important than scientific, political evaluation. We can see that devolution in our New Zealand Labour party – after 109 years we can see what that undermining has resulted in: a party that cannot countenance even discussion of socialism or have any real member-led discussions inside it. Democracy wastes away inside the political machine.
The Stalinist party, on the other hand, had as a basis an adherence to the organisation rather than to the politics of the organisation. Political theory existed to justify the externally determined practice, not vice versa. An example of this is the theory of “Socialism in one country”, derived not politically, but merely to justify the actions of Stalin. Organisational loyalties of the apparatus are responsible for political decisions. It is worth noting that in Russia, a real victory of the apparatus over the party required precisely the bringing into the party of thousands of “sympathisers”. Here it is important to see that for Lenin the party is not the embryo of the workers’ state – the workers’ council is. In Lenin’s major work on the state – State and Revolution – the party is hardly mentioned. The function of the party is not to be the state, but rather to carry out continual agitation and propaganda among more backward elements of the class so as to raise their self consciousness. In places where this style of communist party took power, the party effectively became the state, the party apparatchiks the state capitalists. The apparatus quickly dispels all notion of any real democracy.
We aim for neither of these and so a revolutionary party must have a different structure where democracy is paramount. Chris Harman describes the aim of a revolutionary party as follows:
Parties exist in order to act in this situation to propagate a particular world view and the practical activity corresponding to it. They attempt to unite together into a collectivity all those who share a particular world view and to spread this.
The revolutionary party exists so as to make it possible for the most conscious and militant workers and intellectuals to engage in scientific discussion as a prelude to concerted and cohesive action.
A revolutionary party is constantly trying to make its newest members rise to the level of understanding of its oldest. It is always trying to learn the lessons of the earlier actions of the working class and carry those into the future. It always has to be able to react to the “spontaneous” developments of the class, to attract those elements that are developing a clear consciousness as a result of these. Lenin described our task:
To be a party of the masses not only in name, we must get ever wider masses to share in all Party affairs, steadily elevating them from political indifference to protest and struggle, from a general spirit of protest to the conscious adoption of Social-Democratic views, from the adoption of these views to support of the movement, from support to organised membership in the Party.
The party that fulfils this task will not necessarily be the broadest. It will be an organisation that combines with a constant attempt to involve in its work ever wider circles of workers, and which has a limitation on its membership to those willing to seriously and scientifically appraise their own activity and that of the party generally.
A revolutionary party cannot possibly be created except on a thoroughly democratic basis; unless in its internal life vigorous controversy is the rule and various tendencies and shades of opinion are represented, a socialist party cannot rise above the level of a sect. Leadership in a revolutionary party is fundamentally about convincing members of theoretical and political positions and convincing them to do things, not about organisational rules. The revolutionary party operates as a disciplined party not because of rules or regulations, but because of political conviction.
It is that vigorous democracy, a scientific approach to activism and political activity and commitment to political action that can and has made revolutionary parties not just punch above their own weight, but have the strength and foresight to turn spontaneous outbursts of political upheaval into actual political and social revolutions – or at least to achieve serious reforms. But often, as we have heard about the decade of lost revolutions, the cost of not taking the chance to rebuild the world in the working class’ favour can have dire consequences.
Image: Protesters in Gezi Park, Türkiye, in 2013. Photo credit: Burak Su. Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
