E234 - Vincent and the Vortex w/ Vincent Bevins
Added 2023-12-27 05:46:16 +0000 UTCVincent Bevins chats about lessons of the uprisings of 2010s, as outlined in his book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
Song: Kacey Musgraves - Slow Burn
Comments
Really great interview, thanks!
Ed M.
2023-12-31 18:00:05 +0000 UTCGreat episode, thanks for going out of your comfort zone Andy —the clover thesis of riot as the new strike is dead
Nik
2023-12-28 15:36:02 +0000 UTCNice choice Andy, appreciated the Kacey Musgraves
Nick M
2023-12-28 15:35:32 +0000 UTCPart of the problem is the carousel of reaching into the past for outdated tendencies for answers whether that's anarchism, ML, MLM/3rd worldism, black nationalism etc I agree with the failures of the strategies you listed but also the autonomous movement strategy has been a complete failure as well. The left needs to build power in a way that fits the milieu we're in. Om a smaller not the cold War was a bipolar not multi polar world. That's an important point to make as that was an era of competing ideologies while the multi polar world we might be moving into is about competing capitalism which can be very dangerous see ww1.
Ryan Dutter
2023-12-28 01:48:20 +0000 UTCeps like this are what keeps me subbed. Bevins has been on pod after pod articulating his views with absolutely zero pushback. Really appreciate you guys doing this episode. We need to grapple with the failures and limits of the “endnotes decade” of uprisings without abandoning the horizon of self administration of society!!
Daniel E
2023-12-27 23:12:17 +0000 UTCBased on his book, I was expecting to be disappointed by Bevins' takes on the protest decades. I mostly was. His disdain for libertarian Marxism is obvious in how he speaks of them as folks who want 'revolution the next day'. Meanwhile, his explanation of the horizontalist fetish of the 2010s seems to derive from the primacy of the US culture industry; "if only the ML parties of the Global South had been trusted more, greater gains could have been made." I'm glad Andy slightly pushed back on this argument, as its defects are obvious: the last period of multipolarity we had was the Cold War, and whenever Global South MLs got into power then, they either fell prey to imperialist subversion or, more importantly, degenerated into your standard reformist outfits. That the Brazilian communists have ever so slightly avoided this fate seems beside the point, as the teleology of the ML playbook is still the same. Overall, while there is some appeal to the idea that the 2010s were the farce that followed the 1960s tragedy, such an analysis ignores the way that there was more to either era than hedonistic horizontalism. Michael Hardt's analysis of the 1970s is far more useful in this regard, since it actually shows what comes after a 'protest decade': an attempt to create new kinds of organization. Instead of tying ourselves to waning state power, increasingly incapable of distributing its meager surpluses, this organizational innovation and prefiguration is what we should be going after IMO. If I were to summarize my issue with Bevins beyond gesturing at his ML sympathies, I would describe it as a regression to past forms and strategies. We tried seizing state power, we tried popular front defensism, we tried putting the center left in power in the US. All of these strategies ran up against the fundamental limits of Capital and Empire, as these forms were retooled rather than abolished. Hence why we must try something new, even or especially in the imperial core.
The Inner Moon
2023-12-27 09:56:29 +0000 UTCBig ups to Bevins from his LB/OC comrades.
GolfBaller
2023-12-27 09:41:28 +0000 UTC
