Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

delivered in the style of an art-house movie narration: Wim Wenders in Farsi, with Tehran instead of West Berlin. But it is real— just as Neda’s death, the karate-kicking woman, the surging crowds and baton charges are all real. The reality of protest, self-sacrifice and solidarity surged through the songlines of the Internet. Not everybody saw them: only the netizens sitting up late at night in Santa Cruz, in Marrakech, in Beijing, in Cairo, dipping beneath the barriers of Internet censorship in search of a better world. And it turned out there were more of these netizens than anybody thought.
    The Iranian uprising was defeated: in part because the youth and the professional classes overestimated the break the poor were prepared to make with the hardliners; in part because the workers—having created strong, semi-legal organizations in defiance of repression, and having staged a wave of strikes which would continue into 2011—were not prepared to stake everything on an alliance with Mousavi.
    But all the ingredients were present of the uprisings that would, eighteen months later, galvanize the Middle East and beyond: radicalized, secular-leaning youth; a repressed workers’ movement with considerable social power; uncontrollable social media; the restive urban poor. And there was an élan, a poetry about it, an absence of postmodern cynicism. If you had met Neda Soltan or Oldouz84 in a Starbucks in New York, they would be just like you.
    But still the media and the politicians failed to see it coming. Most reports placed Gaza and Iran in the category ‘Islam versus the rest of the world’, and heard Greece as merely sound and fury, signifying nothing.
    Communiqué from an absent future
    last night around midnight, there was an out of control electrocommunist dance party with maybe 300 people dancing to justice in quarry plaza with glow sticks chanting STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! i’m not kidding, i don’t drink but i think it’s pretty awesome that we violated every single party regulation the university has for 4 or 5 hours and there was no police action. 22
    On 24 September 2009, students at University of California Santa Cruz occupied their own common rooms and held a dance party. By November, student occupations had spread to Los Angeles, California, Fresno, Davis, Irvine and Berkeley. While students have always sporadically protested over politics, this was an economic movement, and its targets were spelled out on the banners they had hung at the rave in Santa Cruz: ‘Take over the city, Take over campus, End capital’. The occupation movement continued to gather momentum throughout the winter of 2009, culminating in a coordinated walk-out on campuses across America on 4 March 2010.
    Something new was happening. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, students had been told they were society’s new archetype. Their knowledge work would ensure a prosperous future; their passion for personal electronics would keep China’s factories in business; and their debt repayments would fuel Wall Street for half a century.
    But by 2010, students all over the developed world were coming under economic attack, through a combination of fee increases, hikes in the cost of student credit and a jobs downturn that had seen casual work dry up. If the students who led the struggles at Berkeley in the 1960s had been a prosperous, nerdy elite fighting for the rights of African Americans, their successors were now themselves victims, on an economic front line. ‘The arriving freshman’, they complained, ‘is treated as a mortgage, and the fees are climbing. She is a future revenue stream, and the bills are growing. She is security for a debt she never chose, and the cost is staggering.’ 23
    Among students and graduates, this sudden loss of confidence in the future was tangible. One of its most eloquent expressions was penned by the Research and Destroy