Review of 'This is an uprising' by Mark Engler and Paul Engler

I think this is a dangerous book, and not in a good way - in the way that a manual for a difficult and important task with significant mistakes (a bomb-making manual, maybe?) would be.

It purports to be a ‘playbook’ for non-violent revolt, but it isn’t. It’s a partial survey of some mass outbreaks for civil disobedience in the early 21st century, with some partial analysis and some glaring omissions and failures of analysis. 

It starts with an account of the US Civil Rights movement tactics in Birmingham in the early 1960s, and how much impact that managed to create despite - or rather because of - the movement’s weakness in the face of overwhelming repression and violence from their enemies, both in the State government and in civil society. Then there’s a discussion of the difference between two US schools of radical organizing - the tradition of community organising created by Saul Alinsky, and the ad hoc ‘movement on the fly’ tradition attributed to theorist Francis Fox Piven, and a sensible suggestion that the differences might be more apparent than real.

After this there’s a detailed analysis of the successful unseating of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia by a mass movement called Otpor. Bizarrely, there is absolutely no mention of the links between Otpor and the CIA, though I could find them online within seconds. Later in the book there’s a brief reference to the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in the successor states to the USSR, and why they failed - but no indication that the authors know about the deep involvement of the US government. I later found some reference to ‘external funding’ in the footnotes to the discussion about Otpor, but I couldn’t follow it up - and really, that’s not nearly good enough.

The same applies to the discussion (again!) of the work of Erica Chenoweh and Maria Stephan - which is largely a re-presentation, without any critical engagement, of their conclusions that non-violent protest is more effective than violent protest. Others have criticised some of the deficiencies in their methodology so I will hold off that here. But it’s odd to present these two - who are embedded in the mechanics of the US government’s regime change armoury - as either disinterested scholars or as friends of a movement for transformational social and political change. This stuff has a long history - at least as far back as the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in the early 1950s - and ignoring it undermines the good parts of the book.

This absence is little short of breathtaking. There’s been years of work situating the Civil Rights movement in the political context of the Cold War, and analysis of the relationship between the movement and the transformations taking place within US capitalism at the time. But this is simply ignored, in favour of an account that says the movement was successful because it got the tactics right.

There’s extensive coverage of three pivotal mass movements of non-violent action; the Occupy movement; the mass mobilisations against the Iraq war; and the Arab Spring. My take on all three of these is that they are perfect illustrations of the limitations of mass street protests as a political strategy for transformation. The anti-war mobilisation made those of us who took part in it feel better (the awful slogan ‘Not In My Name’ really sums up what this was about) but did not stop, deflect or limit the invasion of Iraq. Occupy got a lot of people involved in politics for the first time (and I heard some rather good talks at the ‘Occupy University’ next to St Paul’s) but it’s really hard to find much legacy, apart from the hand signals thing. The Arab Spring - especially in Egypt - has left almost nothing behind. The same military crony gangsters are in power as before, and the leaders of both the democracy movement and the electorally-oriented Islamists are in jail. 

I can’t say that the book doesn’t address this, because it does - but in a drive-by analysis from the hip sort of way. Yeah, the democracy movement people didn’t have an organisation, or a political program or a strategy for seizing state power, so they lost....Isn’t this what the book ought to be about? Not how to have good demonstrations, but how these can actually lead to a shift in the balances of forces. There is an entire tradition of revolutionary theory and practice that has an answer to these questions - the Bolshevik tradition. I think that it’s ultimately wrong and leads us to a bad place, and its track record is not great - but it is an answer. Reformist socialists have another answer, that nothing else matters except winning elections and thus “getting in to power”; again, a flawed answer, but a coherent one. I don’t see an answer from the authors’ perspective, just a belief that there ought to be one.

Which points to the biggest shortcoming of all; despite the title, this is not for the most part about uprisings. The Civil Rights movement was not an uprising but an effort to get Black Americans a bigger piece of the pie and a seat at the table of political decision making. In another context, Eric Hobsbawm talked about “collective bargaining by riot”, and I think that’s not a bad way to characterize the Civil Rights movement. That’s why it could attract funding and support from corporate think-tanks and foundations, and why it succeeded as far as it went but no further.

There’s a difference between mass protests with a specific and limited aim, and an uprising. Of course one can turn into the other sometimes, either in a planned or an unplanned way; but for those taking part, it’s important to know the difference and what you are involved in. In that way XR is being disingenuous in calling itself a ‘rebellion’ when, despite the occasional fantasy, it does not have any plans to overthrow the state and seize power. It wants to pressure the government to do the right thing; along the way it proposes some important changes to the political process (notably the idea of a Citizens’ Assembly), but these aren’t really any more revolutionary than the people who think proportional representation will fix a dysfunctional political system.

This is not to say that there’s nothing useful in the book. The Englers are decent sorts, not CIA stooges. There are some good thoughts about tactics (though there is something of a tension between the occasionally contradictory suggestions), and especially on the pragmatic adoption of non-violence as distinct from ideological pacifism. There is a good bibliography and pointers towards other literature. But it’s not a playbook for system change, and those using it as such will get themselves into trouble.