Review of "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" by Rebecca Solnit

I used to write about technology for a living, and I ended up writing about first technology-enabled transport, and then “smart cities”. There’s quite a lot of overlap between these two domains. One of the things that I encountered was what I ended up calling “zombie projects” – pilots and trials that had come to an end, but continued to be reported as if they were contemporary and ongoing. Unlike the way zombies are usually depicted, though, zombie projects were the subject of relentlessly cheerful narratives. Ideas that had turned out to be dead ends, or moderate failings from which learnings could be drawn, were still success stories in zombie-project-land. 

I was reminded of this when I read Rebecca Solnit’s book. It’s about hopefulness, so it’s inevitably a compilation of success stories. Trouble is, it’s from 2016, so we know how a lot of the stories turned out. Solnit’s a “horizontalist” anarchist, and she wants to believe that spontaneous non-hierarchical organisation works well. Truth is, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. It seems to me that it can sometimes work for short term mutual aid settings, and for organising protests, but that it doesn’t for long term projects about political or social transition. 

For the most part the Arab Spring was a ghastly failure. There was a transition in Tunisia, though I haven’t followed up on how it’s turned out now. But in other countries the decentralised non-hierarchical organisation that is so celebrated didn’t lead to anything good. In Bahrain the pro-democracy protesters were gunned down. In Egypt the non-hierarchical opposition led first to the triumph of the entirely hierarchical and disciplined Muslim Brotherhood, and then to the overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the same militarist forces who had been in control in the first place. 

And the protests and boycotts that the book celebrates? Sometimes they were successful, at least in their own limited terms, but the world is not transformed. Capitalism is more powerful than it was in 2016, economic inequality is worse, the atmosphere is more full of Carbon Dioxide…

There’s no analysis of what worked and what didn’t – even though such analysis is possible...Vincent Bevin’s book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” did this in an honest way, though it’s still short on prescriptions. If we keep learning the wrong lessons from our experiences, and in particular if we fetishise some kinds or organisation (the leaderless, non-hierarchical thing) despite experience, then we will never move forward.

I understand that it’s important to raise our spirits, and to keep believing that things might go our way. But transparent dishonesty about success stories has the opposite effect, at least for me. If we are not prepared to learn anything from both our successes and our failures, then we are engaged in pointless gestures, not actual political transformation.