Format

• We’re reading 2-3 chapters a week (some are very short). I’m going to be shooting for 50-60 pages a week, give or take. I’m going to be getting page counts from the libgen ebook, so that’s why readings will be done by chapter.
• Hopefully we’ll be done in 7 or 8 weeks
• Feel free to get whatever copy you wish, I’ll also post onto Perusall for your convenience and highlighting.
• I’ll plan to post on Wednesday each week with the readings we’re discussing and our future schedule as I work it out. I’ll also @ mention anyone who posts in this thread in future weeks.

Resources

• Libgen link to an ebook here
• Here’s Bevins’ appearance on Trueanon, which is part of why I wanted to do this book club
• Perusall – if you want to flag passages for discussion, I’ll do my best to check this before I post my weekly post. If people would prefer, I can also make weekly assignments here, but I’ve opened up the book for access in an assignment or whatever.

Previous Posts

Week 1

Chapter 2

• Early 00’s leftism. We have appearances from Klein, Adbusters, and anti WTO protests. While this isn’t going to be the focus of the chapter, perhaps we should reflect on how/why the anti-war movement was so impotent, even in 2003?
• Any thoughts on Mayara’s or Fernandos’s stories?
• The 90’s punk scene in Brazil was informed, reading “Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Bakunin” - and it really sounds like they were doing some cool praxis (“verdurada” sounds cool to me!). Can we imagine a current version of something like this? Is there anything? Also, shoutout to Anarchic Menstruation, that’s a great band name.
• Similarly, Graeber makes an appearance here, showing a serious commitment to “doing” the future anarchist society. I feel like perhaps there was a moment when maybe these emergent anarchist movements could have taken the wheel – what held them back? Was it that the internet wasn’t yet real life (this was the phbb era, after all)? I’m not convinced that “prefiguration politics” is necessarily bad, but did horizontalism contribute as well? Thoughts?
  • Same question a different way: Graeber says there’s a “rich and growing panopoly of organizational instruments… all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum effective solidarity without sifiling dissenting voices.” OK, so what happened then? Any thoughts on how/why these tools were never fully realized in political change?
• Another Graeber moment worth lingering on - “Anarchists could never be very good at war, but they could flourish in peace.” Was the war on terror the end of the brief window? So we see an emergent Anarchism in the 90’s in response to the brief “end of the cold war” and “global peace” that quickly loses any chance at becoming dominant due to the global war on terror?
• Do we generally agree with Fernando’s analysis re: social democracy and the developing world?
• Thoughts about Bevins’s history of the PT’s origins? The ML/Catholic alliance (summoning Jack Chick) is a classic, but I’m just curious - is there any way we could imagine a mass party in the US that aligns religious forces with the left, or is that well impossibly poisoned? My instinct is the latter, but I’d love some thoughts if we want to get into Hell on Earth territory.
• Marx being proven right again: “The end of the dictatorship had changed the political system; but the economic structure of society remained largely the same as before the 1964 coup.” It’s almost as if material conditions matter more than ideological structures.…
• Inside neoliberalism are three wolves, according to Fernando – Authoritarinism, Fascism or Technocracy devoid of politics. This feels broadly right, but do we agree that we should defend democracy to protect “classes without property”? I think there’s a compelling harm reduction argument, but it is an interesting question – is it worth defending democracy even if democracy doesn’t do anything for you?
• “Politics, he lamented, ad become marketing.” This is why the forum podcast is Citations Needed. Is this trend worse? Why or why not? Any interventions we can imagine to break the deadlock if we want to defend democracy?
• The Salvador student movement and bus protests perhaps show an important lesson that we might continue to see going forwards – which demands do you take to avoid fracturing the coalition? Any thoughts on the strategy of the PCdoB?
  • Bloomer notes – how do you keep the momentum so you can “win” the next time the issue comes up if you have compromised?
• Direct action gets the goods, and what can we learn from the MPL? How do we feel about consensus politics here? What about Horizontality (either in the MPL organization or in Argentina in 2001)
• End of history - we know it, love it, and might have listened to the If Books Could Kill episode on it. Any thoughts on Bevins’s analysis of it (and the first world neoliberal turn of the 90’s and early 00’s)? MLK’s analysis of the white liberal appears here as well, and I think Bevins’s double vision in this chapter between the developing world and first world is interesting, especially when we consider the “ideology of progress” and teleology of western liberalism. Thoughts on his comparisons?
  • To return to a question above, was the “End of History” a missed window for Anarchists? If we had 2000’s era internet in 1990, might things have been different?
• Bevins is doing a bit of cheeky political theology here, any critiques? I’m glad he uses Lowith instead of Schmitt, but any further thoughts on the role of religion in these teleologies? Alternatively, the orientalism/Islamophobia of the 90’s neoliberal movement is coming up as well, and we could perhaps reflect on the role of this new “other” before the global war on terror fully organized the post-end-of-history moment.

Chapter 3

• Any thoughts on Bevins’s account of Lula’s government over the 00’s? Also, Bevins’s frank assessment: “This was not the realization of the socialist revolution…” etc.
• Great materialist analysis for how kids moving abroad and becoming correspondents reproduces “neocolonial dynamics.” Too bad there’s no names he calls out though.
• Tiririca – what do we think about the absurdist electoralism? This feels very of the late 00’s moment (think peak Stewart/Colbert). Is this a good strategey?
• However, we’re going to pause on Brazil here – so any last thoughts on the MPL or Brazillian leftism in 2011 before we turn to Tunisia and the Arab Spring?

Chapter 4

• I’ll just say that I really like Bevins’s turn to longer historical roots, especially since while I know the broad strokes of decolonization in Africa, I’ll admit I know jack about Tunisia, so this little primer was helpful.
• Can I just say the phrase “activated their Leninist cadres” sounds really cool? But also, what can we learn of the success in mobilizing here? Compare, perhaps, to protests in 2020 (around, similarly, an outrage and death)?
• I appreciate also Bevins’s accounts of the cost (physical/human) of protest. Something to consider here and going forwards - how do we prepare ourselves (and our comrades) for the potential violence that will be unleashed upon them?
• Any thoughts on the events of the Tunisian revolt? Unionism seems to be a key factor in my read, but any other thoughts here?
• And now we turn to Egypt and Tahir Square. Again, Bevins with a bit of a flashback for us first, anything here we want to draw attention to?
  • Neoliberal “reforms” fail to deliver democracy, who would have thought.…
  • 78 - Bevins notes that the protest group Kefava “flowered into this small space Mubarak opened for legitimate civil society, as well.” While we know civil society doesn’t equal a communist or anarchist one, is it worth fighting for it as anarchists/communists/socialists/leftists on the grounds these spaces allow for organizing? Or are they too easily manipulated?
  • Also, strikes and organizing continue to play a role – is this, perhaps, the real “driver” of change, rather than protest?
  • There is also, again, a victim/martyr, Khaled Said. How important is this, and why is it that (as just one example) George Floyd didn’t translate to any real change? Media apparatus? Shitty first world people? Lack of the strike/organizational infrastructure?
• I can’t help but feel there was a real window here for change in a better direction - the mass movement, the “people and the army are one hand” (82). Any “hinge points” that we can locate going forwards? Any alternative narratives we want to emphasize here too? Bevins is being pretty optimistic about these early days (and to be fair, it was a vibe).
• 82 – I like how Bevins is clear eyed that this was not a nonviolent protest (indeed, there’s a shift from protest to battle here)
• 82/83 - the refusal of the people/protestors/revolutionaries to “take anything” but retreat back to Tahir Sqare. Bungle? Or smart? Thoughts? Is this the legacy of Occupy, perhaps?
• Was it perhaps just that the State Department got caught flat footed and the media took the initiative here? There’s definitely a way to read P.84 and on that way, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the case.… Also, the media’s shoehorning of their own narrative perhaps suggests some consent manufacturing was going on, even if there’s not a coordinated effort.…
• Horizontality and leaderlessness returns here, but how do we feel about “we were anarchists, without knowing we were anarchists” versus our Brazillian punk rockers who are reading Kropotkin and co?
• I will say here on P.86, there’s an important caveat to protest repression/fighting that Bevins recognizes - you need to have someone who’s willing to say “enough” and do a coup/grab the leash – generals have to refuse to fire on protestors, basically.
• Lybia and Syria, time for some big Obama L’s. Bevins suggests there’s a “critical mass” of sorts that Egypt and Tunisia achieved that Lybia and Syria didn’t – let’s attend to this section a bit.
• LOTR comparisons are less cringe than Harry Potter, but oof here
• Bevins being clear-eyed about “no-fly zone”'s meaning and consequences here. Also, the TrueAnon Rule is affirmed “If you have weapons of mass destruction, don’t give them up.” Are the lessons “learned” from Lybia perhaps at play in why protest has become less powerful as well?
• Any thoughts on Syria here? Bevins is pretty short, though perhaps because there was never a true mass movement here, but he’s pretty quick to just move past it (perhaps because it’s “sectarian”?)
• Bahrain and a bit of a “throwback” (indeed, unaccountable monarchy is very old-school) here. The saddest part is it does feel like this would have been the “answer” to sectarian collapse, but the lack of air is clearly a weakness of protest movements here. Anything we should note and watch for in terms of what happens here? Any thoughts on the US foreign policy implications Bevins attends to?

Next Week: Chapters 5-8

@chicory@hexbear.net @Maoo@hexbear.net