Review of Paul Mason's 'Why It's Kicking off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions'

[polly7]

Review of Paul Mason's 'Why It's Kicking off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions'
By Mark Kosman

http://www.zcommunications.org/review-of-paul-masons-why-its-kicking-off-everywhere-the-new-global-revolutions-by-mark-kosman

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

"Some people may dismiss Paul Mason as just another journalist, especially since he advocated more effective policing to contain the 'Black Bloc' after the 26 March TUC demo.[1] Yet, this is no reason not to read Why It's Kicking off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.

Simply by bringing together insightful reports from the uprisings of 2010/11 - in Egypt, Greece, Israel, Spain, the UK and the US - Mason helps the reader get an overview of the present state of global class struggle. But, more than this, he puts these struggles in a historical and theoretical context and so provokes more interesting questions than any other recent book.

Mason's main historical analogy is to compare the uprisings of 2011 with the waves of unrest in Europe in 1848 and in the period before the First World War. He argues that the radical intelligentsia, the newly unionised workers and the slum dwellers of the 19th century can be compared to the 'graduates without a future', the shrunken trade unions and the precarious workers of today. He also claims that the globalisation of the world economy, the revolutions in communications technology and the striving for individual freedom at the start of the 20th century can be compared to similar tendencies at the start of the 21st century.

Driven to struggle by an unprecedented economic crisis, Mason sees the internet networked individual as the key participant in the uprisings of 2011. He even goes so far as to say that, "in the revolutions of 2011, we've begun to see the human archetypes that will shape the 21st century" (p152).".....

[orwell]

1. Open Source is a key component.

As long as the vast majority in a highly complex technological society must hand over its political power to the oil, telecommunications, medical/industrial complex the class war can not be won.

We have become reliant on our corporate masters for our daily bread and they know it. Unless that chain is broken by radical new paradigms such as Open Source, distributed energy, worker owned enterprises on a mass scale, we have ceded out power to the elites. They know this and we know this.

That is what fuels the sense of powerlessness in the vast majority of people.

It is all well and good to protest, but when you have to stop at the gas station to get there it is already game over...

[cbrer]

2. Your premise

Only holds true in Western societies. Wouldn't it be a hoot if the class struggle was first won by third world nations?