When asked, Vincent Bevins remains silent for three seconds. Just as it seems he is about to answer, he simply lets out a "mmm...." And remains silent for another three seconds. Finally, he speaks.
"I am a journalist," he responds. And then another silence.
Six seconds without answering can feel like an eternity in a conversation, especially in an interview. Some interviewees do it to unsettle the journalist. The silent treatment usually works with partners and the press.
But Bevins is not taking his time out of hostility, but to think. The interview is not tense. Bevins' tone resembles the debates organized almost daily by the Frontline Club, the club of war correspondents in London. The gravity that should weigh on the conversation when surrounded by the 200 million books lining the walls of the brutalist Scandinavian-style British Library, the largest library in the world, is not apparent. Perhaps it is due to the presence of hundreds of students from the nearby University of London preparing for their final exams.
The question that prompts Bevins' silence was very simple, just three words: "Are you a Marxist?" But the simplest questions are often the most challenging to answer. In the last five years, this Californian journalist who once worked for the Financial Times and contributed to The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times has become the 21st-century version of a relatively common type of writer 50 or 60 years ago, but disappeared with the fall of communism: narrating revolutions, political changes, and socio-political dynamics in countries far from the West. And most of those authors were, in different variations, Marxists.
For example, Bevins' latest book, If We Burn (Capitán Swing), follows the same tradition as The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon's classic on decolonization with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. But If We Burn is not just a straightforward political analysis like Fanon's but something more ambiguous.
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This is probably due to many reasons. One of them is the book's theme. If We Burn deals with something that today seems to have happened in a geological era past when dinosaurs roamed the supercontinent of Pangea, but actually occurred between six and 15 years ago: the wave of street protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that spread worldwide between 2010 and 2020. "Never in human history had such a large number of people protested," explains Bevins. From Chile to Hong Kong, from Spain to Israel, the world was shaken by a decade of discontent.
What stands out most in If We Burn is the failure of the vast majority of these uprisings. China extinguished the remaining individual and political freedoms in Hong Kong. The Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia had a brief stint with democracy, and even the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria in December can be considered the epilogue of that revolution. None of these three countries have a political perspective other than dictatorship.
Moreover, many of these left-wing protests gave rise to the far-right movements that are now dominating the global political debate. This is what fascinates Bevins. Especially in the case of Brazil, where a wave of protests in 2013, 2014, and 2015 caught the left-wing government of Dilma Rousseff completely off guard.
"This book is because I am perplexed, confused, and even a little disturbed by a question that arises from my work as a journalist in Brazil: how is it possible that what started out being led by anarchists and leftists socially exploded to such a popular following that it attracted a series of newcomers who were part of what we would now call the new far-right movement and who not only confronted the organizers but brought Jair Bolsonaro to power and, with him, the most far-right government in the Western world?"
The case of Brazil is not extreme or exceptional. The Israeli tent revolt in 2011 did not prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from becoming the longest-serving prime minister in the country - nearly 18 years - with each passing day adopting a slightly more ultranationalist program. Occupy Wall Street in the United States in 2011 is now a thing of the past, in a country where the world's richest man, Elon Musk, is dismantling government agencies overseeing his companies, from which he continues to profit despite holding an official position.
And for those who expected the Syrian civil war to finally bring the elusive mirage of democracy to the Middle East, they may have to shelve those dreams with the victory of Ahmed Al Sharaa, whose main ideology seems to be the pursuit of power. That is, unless Syria ends up being divided among Netanyahu (still facing protests), Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who faced protests during the period analyzed by Bevins in 2013 when the opposition in that country established a certain alliance with Brazil's) and Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who also risked losing power due to street pressure, albeit a little earlier, in 2009 and 2010.
It is not just a phenomenon of the Third World (in Fanon's time) or the Global South (today). It is more of a global change. Fourteen years ago, the occupation of Sol in Madrid had just begun. Four years later, Podemos, a far-left party born from that movement, began its triumphant march in Spanish politics. A decade has passed, and Podemos faces the real danger of definitive extinction. Meanwhile, the anti-system party that has risen, and continues to do so, is its ideological antithesis: Vox. It is nothing more than the Spanish representation of a realization that Bevins has come to in his preparation to write If We Burn: "In 50% of the cases I investigated, the protest organizers told me that they had failed or undergone an ideological shift." The anti-system right replaces the anti-system left.
If We Burn is somewhat the reverse of Bevins' first book, The Jakarta Method, whose subtitle gives little insight into its content: Washington's anti-communist crusade and the mass murder program that has shaped the world we live in. The Jakarta Method was a description of a strategy in which the sectors Bevins considers the enemy prevailed. The book was a resounding success, receiving praise from mainstream sources like Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times to Trumpist conservatism in The American Conservative.
If We Burn is, on the contrary, an analysis of a defeat by the ideologies with which the author sympathizes. He nonetheless acknowledges that two of the protests he analyzes in the book—those of Hong Kongers against China and those of Ukrainians against Russia—had a conservative political orientation. "This book is about something that didn't happen, something that was supposed to happen as long as you had enough people in the streets to overthrow a government or bring it to its knees," he explains. In some way, many of these movements had that critical mass of followers. But they failed.
Why? That's the big question, which, according to Bevins, has several answers. One is that each country is different. The differences between Kyiv and Santiago de Chile are bordering on abysmal. But this journalist, who turns 41 in three weeks, offers two ideas, which could be reduced to two words: program and leaders. Perhaps, although he doesn't say so, everything revolves around the idea of organization.
"A social movement must be able to achieve more than just shutting down a country for a few days. It needs to know what it will do as social tension continues, as some opportunities open up and others close, as circumstances change," he declares.
The second element is even more visible: "A form of representation is needed. When a union closes a factory, it is able to make demands of the company and negotiate them. The great paradox of the protests is that, as they grew in scale, encompassing more and more groups of the population, they were unable to have clear representation either before society, before the ruling elites, or before governments." The famous anonymous revolts of the social media era, which anyone can join with a click of a phone, where virtual assemblies on Facebook or Zoom decide the course of action, need leaders.
Hence his silence on the question of whether he is a Marxist or not. "I read Marx and Adam Smith as a teenager, but I don't feel obliged to use their interpretative lines if they don't convince me," he explains. The other argument has nothing to do with the method, but with the product, that is, with If We Burn, a book that combines political philosophy, journalistic reporting—sometimes almost local news, due to the exhaustive description of Brazil; other times, that of a globetrotting journalist—and historical references. That's too much to include Marx. "I would describe it as a global history, constructed from interviews, which includes descriptions of protests and revolutions and which seeks to extract experiences that will be useful for future generations."
However, throughout the conversation, Bevins gives the impression of being genuinely, if not a Marxist, then an old-school leftist, who doesn't seem to sympathize with the transformation of the traditional left into today's identitarian left (called woke by its critics). "Sometimes, when you lose on the material level [in politics], you grab onto whatever's cultural," he explains.
"That's precisely what a Ukrainian told me on the Maidan: 'If you present the elites with a series of economic and cultural demands, you'll get them to give in on the cultural ones, because it doesn't cost them anything,'" he maintains. Indeed, very few people care about same-sex marriage, although some may be offended. Businesses can have their LGBTQ+ day, or their women's day, because it doesn't cost them anything. But what they are very concerned about is the regulation of their sectors, the taxes they will have to pay, and the salaries they will have to pay their workers.
Vincent Bevins, the chronicler of the failed 21st-century revolutions that ended up spawning political movements antithetical to what they stood for, thus ends up advocating for a classic left: a 78-year-old New Yorker named Nancy Fraser, who coined the term progressive neoliberalism to refer to this new left. For Bevins, "Fraser's critique of the left is more relevant than ever, because what's at stake today is much more material and less identity-based than before."