Indignez-vous! Activists need elites and elites need protest.

The fuel of activism is there.  We need to build an engine to make it work for us.  That may be the Natural community and the RULE of TWELVE.

Left or right is a binary story we tell ourselves.  The 10 Commandments are global.

The RULE allows governance to become cumulative.

Indignez-vous! Activists need elites and elites need protest.

What I concluded after Davos, and kept to myself for six years. Unabridged from today’s Globe and Mail.

Oct 23

micahbornfree@substack.com

On Monday the Globe and Mail asked me to write about the protests in France. I had three days and 850 words, and I used them to say something I’d kept to myself for six years. The piece ran this morning under a headline I wouldn’t have chosen, “why protests fail,” because the argument is the reverse: protest is the most powerful force we have, and we keep throwing it away. The Globe’s edit is tight and I’m grateful for it, but a newspaper has limits. Below is the unabridged version, with the paragraphs that didn’t fit: the ants, the full story of the Roman plebs on the Sacred Mount, and Hands Across America, which I think is the clearest proof that elites can build an engine when they decide to. If you’d rather read the published version it’s here at the Globe and Mail or on Apple News. And if you only read one paragraph, read the last one.

The Secession of the People to the Mons Sacer, engraving by Bartolomeo Barloccini, 1849.

Indignez-vous! Fifteen years ago, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and the indignados of Europe detonated a generation’s apathetic irony with an earnest, idealistic cry for systemic change. Now, the world watches a new visceral movement emerge from the grassroots to shake awake the status quo. This time out of France, one of the most historically significant countries for revolutionary politics – the French Revolution in 1789, the Paris Commune in 1871, Mai 1968. There is a familiar pattern to these events, too: First the students, and then the many. More than 500,000 turned out over the weekend in protests. But in scenes that spread across the world, the demonstrations tipped from discontent into insurrectionary urges, arson at the 143-year-old Limoges Town Hall, looting in Paris and Marseille.

The history of social movements shows that these eruptions are contagious. The fever we witnessed in Limoges might just as suddenly appear in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. But the signs of dissipation are already visible. Three weeks ago the students had one clear demand for teachers and classrooms; today the movement has absorbed a whole set of frustrations around the cost of living, and the aims are muddled in the public’s eyes. With the world shocked at the damage done, the government has imposed strict curfews, insists the movement has been hijacked, and waits for the fire to burn itself out.

The question is whether the provocation of the minority will sabotage the goals of the majority, and it’s a question I’ve been considering ever since the rise and dissipation of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. I helped draft the call for the movement’s inaugural protest while an editor at Adbusters, the Canadian anti-consumerism magazine, and have spent the last decade grappling with why our movement failed to live up to its full potential.

In Occupy’s case, the dilemma playing out now in France manifested as the split between the insurrectionary impulse of Oakland and the prefigurative vibe of New York City. One coast wanted a riot, the other a utopia. The ultra-leftists on the West Coast wrested control of the movement’s narrative just long enough to push through the alienating May Day General Strike. It was Occupy’s final act, and a failure.

So why do we, activists and authorities alike, keep repeating this scene? What is the repetition trying to teach us? Until we figure that out, these flashes will continue to be squandered and the dissipations will repeat.

In the first 10 years after Occupy, I fervently believed that if activists were to update their model of protest, then the next movement wouldn’t fall into the trap of repeating our mistakes. I wrote a book on the topic and gave lectures around the world. But as the collective memory of Occupy began to fade, I was approached by one section of society that still cared to study the movement: elites. I ambivalently accepted invitations to speak first at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris and then the World Economic Forum in Davos. Through those experiences, I realized I had misdiagnosed the problem as internal to movements, and so I ceased all public communication for the next six years: I quit social media; I studied in quiet; I changed my name; I moved to rural Iowa.

The conclusion I had come to was one that neither activists nor society were ready to hear: Activists need elites and elites need protest.

If we strip away the political content of protest movements and look at them as a social phenomenon, something remarkable becomes apparent: In spite of repression, and with little to no funds as well as minimal planning, activists are able to manifest hundreds of thousands of people in the streets who break their normal routines, risking arrest and their physical safety. In these moments, human society, for a time, opens itself up to the possibility of transformation. It is like when ants sprout wings and swarm: As the nuptial flight of ants founds new colonies, so too does the eruption of a movement found the next stage of history.

Edwin Drake at the site of the Titusville well circa 1866.

When I watch the fires engulf the town hall in Limoges, I don’t blame outside agitators or political extremists. You can’t have a movement without the full cast of players, and trying to remove them is just the flip side of the political purity test. Instead, I’m reminded of the 25-year period after the first petroleum wells were drilled by Edwin Drake in 1859. Petroleum in those days was used to make lamp oil, and gasoline, a byproduct, was considered worthless and dumped into rivers or burned – that is, until Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach and Karl Benz pioneered the gasoline engine in the mid-1880s, turning the waste product into the vital force of modern civilization. Gasoline couldn’t create the engine; the engine can’t create gasoline.

Society’s understanding of protest is stuck in the lamp-oil era. What is most valuable is treated as a nuisance. Leon Trotsky saw the problem in 1930, when he wrote: “Without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.” For Trotsky, the engine was the Bolshevik Party. Nearly a century later, we can see the flaw in his steam-age piston-box: a political party cannot harness the full spectrum of the people’s fuel. The engine must run on revolutionaries, reformists and everyone in between. What does this look like? Consider the secessio plebis: in 494 BC everyday people walked out of Rome and camped on the Sacred Mount, and elites, unable to run the city without them, brought them back not with coercion but by granting a new form of power – an assembly for the common people within the Roman state, and tribunes the elites could not touch, armed with a veto. The people could not have built it; the elites could not govern without it. Today’s political and technological elites have failed to do what activists cannot: build the engine that converts the unrefined manifestation of the many into a force for social transformation. At the same time, activists have failed to do their part: work with the engine-builders to shape what gets built.

I understand the activist refusal. I shared it for a decade. The fear is co-optation: being used, rather than being useful. But gasoline that refuses every engine is a fire that burns itself out. We have been discarding – through repression and the class-war mindset – what may be the most vital social force humanity has ever discovered.

Every protest that flares up is an opportunity; every protest that flares out is a tragedy. Our societies face many hard problems. Some of these are so ingrained, interconnected and vast that they can only conceivably be solved through the voluntary, unpaid action of millions of everyday people working collectively in new ways: whether it’s pulling off planetary-scale climate mitigation, changing the rules of how we live and work, or even venturing off-world. Only activists can provide this force, and only elites can provide the engine. In 1986, before the internet, Hands Across America mobilized 5.4 million people, two per cent of the country, into a human chain from California to New York that ran through the White House, where Reagan himself joined hands. It was a high-water mark of human coordination, made possible by the organizer of “We Are the World,” grassroots activists and sponsors like Coca-Cola. Its creator said the aim was to implant in each person the idea that “a power will be created that nothing can hold down.” Imagine what today’s engine-builders could do with the fuel of Limoges.

So to the political elite who control the police: Do not discard the fuel. Accept the risk of getting burned. The elites of Rome also had the most to lose from the people’s protest on the Sacred Mount, and the assembly they built out of fear gave their civilization another thousand years. To the technological elite with the resources that activists lack: Build the engine. Scale coordination. And to the activists: The fuel is yours. Demand an engine.