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Nobody Saw It Coming: How the World’s Collective Imagination Failed

President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on 14 January 2011. By 11 February, Hosni Mubarak was gone, and protests were spreading across the region: to Yemen, where the first ‘day of rage’ took place on 27 January; to Bahrain, where protesters occupied the Pearl Roundabout on 14 February. Then, on 17 February, security forces started shooting marchers in Bahrain and the Libyan people rose up against Gaddafi. On 25 March the long, tortured battle for freedom in Syria began.

Nobody had seen this coming. Nobody with any influence, anyway. The stock image of Arabs in the Western media was of a passive but violent race, often filed under the categories of ‘terrorism’ and ‘insoluble problems’. The Middle East specialists in the diplomatic and intelligence communities worked with a scarcely more sophisticated version of the same view. The Economist magazine’s celebrated yearbook, published in December 2010, contained just four predictions for North Africa and the Middle East: Sudan would split; Iran’s economy would suffer; Iraq would continue to be a headache; and there would be new peace talks over Palestine.¹ Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Saleh and Assad were deemed to be of no interest.

Even after the fall of Ben Ali, they failed to see it coming. In an article titled ‘Why the Tunisian revolution won’t spread’, Stephen M. Walt, Harvard professor of international relations, opined that: ‘The history of world revolution suggests that this sort of revolutionary cascade is quite rare, and even when some sort of revolutionary contagion does take place, it happens pretty slowly and is often accompanied by overt foreign invasion.’²

Even when Tahrir Square was occupied, they could not see it coming. On the night of 25 January, Hillary Clinton told reporters: ‘Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable.’³ On the same day, Israel’s military intelligence chief told the Knesset much the same thing. He predicted that Mubarak would ‘be able to keep the demonstrations in check’, and echoed Clinton’s words: the regime was ‘stable’.⁴

And even when the revolution was all but over, some could still not see it. Peter Mandelson, the former Labour minister, made an extraordinary plea to the global elite to save the Egyptian dauphin, Gamal Mubarak:

Gamal Mubarak … has been the leading voice in favour of change within the government and the ruling party. Of course, it is easy to cast him as the putative beneficiary of a nepotistic transfer of family power, the continuation of ‘tyranny’ with a change of face at the top. This analysis, in my view, is too simplistic.

For a good six months, then, the Western political elite, media, academia and intelligence services were effectively driving with a shattered windscreen. But why?

The specific myopia over the Arab states is not hard to explain. Decades ago, Edward Said tried to warn the West about the self-deluding nature of its narrative on the Middle East:

Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.⁵

Said’s words were written in 1980: long before 9/11, before two invasions of Iraq had laid the basis for sectarian civil war there, and before the West began to conflate the narrative of Islam with al-Qaeda’s narrative of ruthless, nihilistic terror. For Carnegie scholar Tarek Masoud, the misapprehension goes deeper than the problem of cultural stereotypes:

Those of us who study the region not only failed to predict the [Mubarak] regime’s collapse, we actually saw it as an exemplar of something we called ‘durable authoritarianism’—a new breed of modern dictatorship that had figured out how to tame the political, economic, and social forces that routinely did in autocracy’s lesser variants.⁶

This gets closer to the root cause of disorientation, and holds lessons valid beyond the Middle East. A flaw in the West’s political psyche had convinced people that dictatorships could be stable and sustainable, flying in the face of a 200-year-old doctrine equating capitalism and freedom. But none of this explains the depth of the disorientation: something in the intellectual Kool-Aid had atrophied our ability to think beyond the present.

Indifference to class, the one-dimensional mindset of the professional ‘Arabists’ and outright self-interest all played a part in misleading the political right. But the left, too, was disoriented. The key problem was spelled out by the theorist Fredric Jameson in 2003: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’⁷

Twenty years of capitalist realism

When a cheetah catches a gazelle there is always a moment where the prey gives up: it goes floppy, bares its neck, becomes resigned to its fate. You have got me, it seems to say, but now you have to kill me; in the meantime I will try to think about something else.

This has been the relationship between the right and the left since the early 1990s. The organized working class of the Fordist era was smashed, the Soviet Union—if no longer a role model, then at least a pole of opposition to US dominance—was gone. State capitalism and Keynesian economics had been supplanted. Modernism, the beloved republic that had begun with Picasso and Kandinsky, had been overthrown by such geniuses as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Rock and roll was dead several times over; the airwaves now sizzled with litanies to rape and murder by black dudes with diamond earrings. What to do?

If we look at the main intellectual contributions from the left in this period, they are effectively rationalizations of defeat. Jameson’s seminal 1991 account of postmodernism defines it as a ‘condition’, reliant on new technology, a new mass psychology of passivity and the fragmentation of meaning within culture. In this condition, he writes, there is

an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything … What we now begin to feel … is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.⁸

On top of this there was the media: vast, powerful, impervious to criticism, corporate, and monopolized by the rich. Chomsky and Herman’s celebrated book on the media, Manufacturing Consent, outlined the ways in which control over the media allowed capitalism to assert a new cultural dominance:

The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.⁹

While that may have been correct when the book was first published, it is striking that the emergence of the Internet did not fundamentally change its authors’ analysis. In their 2002 introduction to a revised edition of Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman concluded that the Internet, while a powerful tool for activists, would make no difference to the ability of corporate interests to control the media, or to its essential role as propagandist for big corporations. They judged that the rapid commercialization and concentration of the Internet ‘threatens to limit any future prospects of the Internet as a democratic media vehicle’.

When it came to philosophy, leftists who had railed against ‘bourgeois ideology’ now abandoned the very concept. Slavoj Žižek rejected the idea that ideology was ‘false consciousness’, arguing, effectively, that ideology is consciousness: it is impossible to escape the mental trap created by capitalism, because one’s life inside the system constantly recreates it. Instead of rebellion we are reduced to perpetual cynicism: we are trapped, like Neo in The Matrix, in a world we know to be half true. But we can’t escape: ‘Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.’¹⁰

Add it all up and you get the mindset of the left in an era of defeat. Nothing can change. Dissent is not strong enough to break the media’s stranglehold; only irony or flight are possible.

By the late 1990s, Western mass culture was dominated by this zeitgeist of impotence. Future movie historians will look at the Hollywood catalogue and see this as the dominant theme of the 2000s: from The Matrix and The Truman Show to the Bourne movies, from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to films as various as Avatar and Inception, through all of them there flows the notion of ‘manipulated consciousness’: the suspicion that the hero is trapped within a malevolent system that controls his mind, but which he cannot defeat. This is no longer the external control of Orwell’s 1984, but a pre-programmed alternative reality against which the hero cannot deploy core human values like love and decency.

In an influential essay, cultural commentator Mark Fisher describes the impact of all this on a generation that has known nothing else. He calls the resulting phenomenon ‘capitalist realism’, defined as

the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it … a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining action.¹¹

Up to 2008, the left’s inability to imagine any alternative to capitalism was like a mirror image of the right’s triumphalism. The establishment’s tramline thinking on Islam and its theories of ‘durable authoritarianism’ conformed, like the rest of its ideology, to Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis and the paeans of various commentators—Thomas Friedman foremost among them—to the triumph of globalization. Together, left and right created a shared fatalism about the future.

The right believed that with indomitable power it could create whatever truth it wanted to. In a famous phrase, Karl Rove, senior advisor to then US President George W. Bush, scorned those without power as the ‘reality-based community’. Study reality, if you will, in search of solutions, Rove is said to have told a journalist, but

That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.¹²

But then Lehman Brothers went bust. Here was a reality the neocons had not created, and against which they were powerless. The date was 15 September 2008. Suddenly, it became possible to imagine the end of capitalism. Indeed, faced with a 50 per cent loss of global stock market value in six months, the scale of the disaster forced even some investors to contemplate it. But few, even now, were prepared to imagine an alternative.

If the rule of men like Mubarak, Gaddafi and Assad had been seen as somehow separate from the rule of free-market capitalism, maybe political science would not have become trapped in the same fatalism as economics. But support for these pro-Western dictators—or more especially for their sons—had always been sold on the basis that they were ‘liberalizers’: freeing up their home market for corporate penetration and, one day soon, reforming their constitutions. This was the theme of the famous essay by Anthony Giddens, which declared Gaddafi to be a follower of the Third Way and Libya on the road to becoming ‘the Norway of North Africa’.¹³

Consequently, the failure of imagination leaked easily from economics into politics, diplomacy and social affairs. Few could conceive the fall of Mubarak or Gaddafi; the collapse of Rupert Murdoch’s political leverage; the appearance of half a million young demonstrators on the streets of Tel Aviv, or Arab teenagers shouting ‘Fuck Hamas’ in the streets of Gaza City.

In my book Meltdown, in June 2010,1 grappled with the reasons for this deep psychological complacency:

It appears—because it has been the case for twenty years—that every problem is solvable … that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it?¹⁴

Now, that question had become concrete. On 17 December 2010, a street vendor called Mohamed Bouazizi walked into the traffic in the Tunisian backwater of Sidi Bouzid, carrying a can of gasoline, and set himself on fire: he had, he claimed, been slapped by a corrupt local official, and his street goods had been confiscated. Within eight months, what began with Bouazizi had ripped away the fabric of autocratic rule across the Middle East.

And with hindsight we can now see that the fabric had already begun to fray elsewhere.

Athens and Gaza

From late 2008, events began to happen in which the new predominated over the old; in which the forces that would defy fatalism began to flex their limbs. Almost simultaneously the neocon faction of the US political elite lost the ability to ‘create reality’ as described by Karl Rove— starting with the loss of the White House.

The clearest precursor event for the new unrest was the December 2008 uprising in Athens. For three weeks after the police shooting of fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in the student district of Exarcheia, students rioted, struck and occupied their universities, their actions eventually drawing in parts of the Greek labour movement.

The disturbances in Athens created a template of ‘social explosion’: an uncontrolled and randomly provoked reaction to economic crisis, in which students and uneducated urban youth come together to make mayhem. One second-generation Greek immigrant remembered:

This was my first time ever to cast a stone, first time I covered my face … I had been before in demonstrations and protests but never before I had participated in riots. It was something like an initiation for me and I have to admit I felt liberated, you know. It made me feel like I regained control over myself.¹⁵

The next precursor moment is the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which began two days after the Greek riots ended, on 27 December 2009. Operation Cast Lead would radicalize many Egyptian youths and discredit sections of the mainstream media in the eyes of young people both in the West and in North Africa. Though in fact a military victory for Israel, it appeared as a moral defeat to the Arab youth, and to Muslim youth in Europe. In the West it would bring onto the streets the same core alliance of anti-capitalists, inner-city youth and the labour-orientated left as had staged mass protests over Iraq earlier in the decade. On 9 January 2009 a quarter of a million people took to the streets of Madrid; big demos occurred in every European capital, plus huge protests in Jakarta and Manila. The London demonstrations ended with violence and large-scale arrests: more than sixty Muslim men aged between seventeen and twenty were jailed.

One of the few commentators to predict the Arab Spring was the sometime adviser to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Alan Woods. As demonstrations flared across the Middle East during the Gaza war, Woods observed that ‘all the pro-Western regimes there are hanging by a thread … Saudi Arabia … Egypt … Lebanon … So is Jordan, so is Morocco. These ruling elites were terrified by the demonstrations that took place during the Gaza war.’¹⁶

The invasion of Gaza even struck home among some sections of the Western political elites. ‘Our policy is disgusting,’ one Labour ministerial aide told me in January 2009. ‘If I were not a government adviser I would be on the anti-war demonstrations myself.’

Iran: The ‘Twitter Revolution’

Then came Iran. On 13 June 2009 the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was re-elected with 62 per cent of the vote. Turnouts above 100 per cent in two provinces, massive discrepancies between pre-election polls and the results, plus widespread ballot-rigging, sent supporters of the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi onto the streets within hours. ‘If Iran sleeps tonight,’ tweeted @mehri912, ‘it will sleep forever.’ It did not sleep.

The first of the iconic cellphone videos shows a crowd of protesters moving swiftly down Tehran’s Valiasr Street, chanting: ‘Mousavi, take back my vote!’ These are office workers: men with briefcases, women wearing the minimum headgear required to avoid harassment from the religious authorities. Another YouTube video, fifty-eight seconds long and shot on a cellphone, shows what happened next.¹⁷

It starts with a crush of people against a shop façade, women screaming as they fight for space. Now the camera-holder, like the men in front of him, elbows his way forward as uniformed cops start batoning protesters, none of whom show any sign of belligerence. This is pure dictatorship: the collective punishment of a crowd for the act of being there. Riot police with shields run after them as they flee, beating their legs and backs, and on the soundtrack, again, we hear women screaming.

Next the cameraman spins round; the visored face of a policeman looms into shot as he hits the cameraman on the leg and tells him to get lost. Off-camera you hear the repeated thud of truncheons on flesh and more screaming. Then the shot becomes of running feet.

By nightfall, that video was zipping around the global Farsi networks via blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. If it had been taken by a TV cameraman, that fifty-eight-second single shot would have won awards. It captures reality in a way you rarely see on TV news: terror, chaos, innocence, the sudden tremor in the policeman’s face as he bottles out of hitting the cameraman again. But the point about the video is that it was not shot by a news crew, nor was it shown in full on any TV network.

Social media’s power to present unmediated reality has never been better demonstrated. And the Iranian demonstrations produced hundreds of similar videos, both of the protests and the crackdown that confronted them. Thanks to Twitter, these images exploded like a virus onto the screens of young people all over the world. The Washington Times called it ‘Iran’s Twitter Revolution’:

Hackers in particular were active in helping keep channels open as the regime blocked them, and they spread the word about functioning proxy portals. Eventually the regime started taking down these sources, and the e-dissidents shifted to e-mail. The only way to completely block the flow of Internet information would have been to take the entire country offline, a move the regime apparently has resisted thus far.¹⁸

Though the Ahmadinejad regime now took down Twitter, Facebook and SMS, it could not prevent the imagery circulating. No revolution in history had been recorded so comprehensively, and in such minute detail. In one video, police pick on a bystander at a bus stop; as they baton him a woman in a headscarf, about five feet tall, karate-kicks the police, two of whom then turn on her. One batons a car bonnet, randomly, in frustration. Then they stop and the woman merges again into the queue at the bus stop.¹⁹

Future social historians will gorge themselves on evidence like this, the micro-detail of social responses to unrest: but for now, its importance lies in the way it enables participants to judge what kind of history is being made in real time. Banned from reporting in Iran, the mainstream media quickly began to realize the value of this user-generated content, and to run it. The momentum of the protests fed off this cycle of guerrilla newsgathering, media amplification, censorship and renewed protest.

By the time the death of protester Neda Agha-Soltan was shown on YouTube, on 20 June 2009, the once-forlorn slogan of the anti-globalization movement had become a reality: the whole world actually was watching.

Bystanders posted three separate videos of Neda’s shooting by a member of the regime’s Basij militia: Time magazine called it ‘probably the most widely witnessed death in human history’.²⁰ Blood trickles over her face. Her eyes roll sideways. She says, ‘I’m burning.’ Her grey-haired singing teacher vainly tries to staunch the flow of blood. Later, the crowd detains the alleged perpetrator and his security pass is photographed: this too gets uploaded to YouTube.

Another image resonated across the world that summer from Tehran: the so-called ‘rooftop poems’. As demonstrations were repressed, student dorms invaded and young men handed over to the Basij rape-gangs and torture squads, protesters retreated to the rooftops by night to call out Allah-o-Akbar. On 16 June an anonymous young woman, whose YouTube username is Oldouz84, began improvising poems as she filmed the rooftop cries. In the last clip, taken the day after Neda’s death, she whispers:

Allah-o-Akbar is no longer about being a Muslim. It’s become a call for unity, whether Muslim, Jew, Zoroastrian, faithless or faithful. The voices are coming from far away: they leave you shaken … Too many children will not hold their parents tonight. It could have been you or me.²¹

It’s 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 group of activists at UC Santa Cruz. Entitled Communiqué from an Absent Future, it became required reading among student radicals everywhere. It perfectly captures the impact of ‘capitalist realism’ on the youth of the 2000s: ‘Safety … and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.’ But now the postmodernist dreamtime was at an end:

‘Work hard, play hard’ has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for … what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam, or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.²⁴

And General Motors, by this point, had gone bust. As the stimulus packages ran out, and the first waves of post-Lehman austerity began to hit public-sector pay and pension rights in 2010, those in power comforted themselves with one thought: that postmodern society had eradicated solidarity. The young would never go out onto the streets to fight for the rights of the old, established workforce; the feral youth of the inner cities would never combine with the educated elite. There might even be an ‘age war’ between the baby boomers and the iPod generation. There would be strife, but it would never be coherent.

On 19 October 2010, the Paris bureau of Associated Press issued the following newswire: ‘Masked youths clad in black torched cars, smashed storefronts and threw up roadblocks Tuesday, clashing with riot police across France as protests over raising the retirement age to 62 took a radical turn.’

The age of capitalist realism was over. Things would now kick off in the most unlikely places, and involve people nobody ever expected to resist.