Review: Why It’s All Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,’ Fredric Jameson, a leading theorist of post-modernism, wrote in 2003. Not anymore it isn’t. If the culmination of Francis Fukuyama’s Whiggish ‘End of History’ was the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 – scuttling liberal democracy’s claims to historical inevitability – what’s happened since has arguably been more radical still: revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East, street protests in the West, social unrest on a scale not seen for generations.

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is a journey, both empirical and analytical, through a world in tumult. Paul Mason, economics editor on BBC’s flagship Newsnight and one of the UK media’s most familiar faces, is essentially an old-fashioned beat reporter, but with a patch that stretches across the globe: the book begins a year ago in an occupation in Bloomsbury, central London and ends among slum protestors Manila, with our correspondent popping up everywhere from Tahrir Square to Bakersfield, California in between.

Mason warns readers ‘don’t file (this book) under ‘social science’: it’s journalism’. The 10 chapters that follow alternate – some more seamlessly than others – between first-class reportage and theoretical and historical expositions on the changing shape of politics, society and, most prominently, economics.

Like any good journalist, Mason doesn’t bury the lead. In the introduction he writes: ‘We’re in the middle of a revolution caused by the near collapse of free-market capitalism combined with an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in consciousness about what freedom means.’ In short, the global economic system is banjaxed and the web has fundamentally altered the political visions of the next generation, leading to a renewed search for social justice.

Mason – who, with this dulcet Lancastrian tones and background in leftwing politics, often cuts an unlikely figure among the plummy, small ‘c’ conservative BBC voices – comes to praise, not bury, what he terms ‘the new global revolutions’. Changing technology, and particularly social media, is central to his thesis: Facebook and Twitter don’t cause revolutions – as so many over-excited commentators proclaimed as first Ben Ali in Tunisia and then Hosni Mubarak in Egypt fell amid popular protest – but they do connect people in new and unexpected ways, sometimes with explosive results.

For Mason, the network is king. Like Howard Beale in the eponymous 1976 movie, millions of (mainly) young people are ‘mad as hell and won’t take it anymore’ – but while Peter Finch’s neutered news anchor’s only recourse is to threaten suicide live on air, now decentralised modes of communication allow protestors to directly challenge traditional power structures and ideas.

Big claims are made for the power of the network, supported by Marx, Foucault and other theoretical heavyweights. At times, however, this shock of the new feels slightly oversold and the power of diffuse, coordinated networks to defeat static hierarchies of power more often stated that demonstrated. Why It’s All Kicking Off is at its most persuasive, and engaging, when Mason moves away from sociology and onto the street. His terse dissection of the uprising in Egypt combines a coruscating analysis of the ‘neoliberal fiefdom’ built by Hosni’ Mubarak’s son and would be heir, Gamal, with interviews from Tahrir Square and among the zabbaleen, the 65,000 ‘garbage people’ who eke out an existence sifting through Cairo’s rubbish.

A spectre is haunting Europe (and beyond). Unlike 1848, this shadow is not communism; it’s the young, ambitious, connected graduate with a Blackberry in their hand and no prospects of a decent job. By turns inquisitive and informative, Mason is a peerless guide through the rapidly shifting milieu of global protest and revolution. Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere provides a timely and highly readable firsthand account of a wave of unrest that shows no sign of abating anytime soon.

Why It’s All Kicking off Everywhere is out now published by Verso. This review originally appeared in the Sunday Business Post, January 29.