#fuckin'... the Zapatistas are in the global south and they're probably one of the biggest long-term success stories of leftist revolution

[anarchomoop]

So like... I really don't like this framing here. I think that trying to pit "horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprisings" in the US and Europe against more centralized movements in the global south is just like... pitting two bad bitches against each other for no gain. But also the specific claim of like "if it doesn't work out you just get a media or academic career" like I don't know how to break it to this Egyptian revolutionary I am never gonna meet but the people working in the horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprisings do not get to fail upwards like that. They mostly wind up in jail, or dead, or in an endless struggle against the government where they never really gain ground and more and more of their friends and allies wind up in jail or dead while the survivors just keep working at their dead-end restaurant jobs. Like I don't think the anonymized, leaderless protestors in Atlanta as part of the Stop Cop City movement have cushy jobs at Harvard or CNN to fall back on, and we already know that the cops are killing and arresting them, so what's the point of framing it like the tools deployed by capital in the "developed world" aren't largely the same as the tools deployed by capital against the global south.

"Several people told me they believed the movements had unconsciously taken on positions developed in the First World that may not be so applicable in the Global South. One Egyptian revolutionary put it to me this way: 'In New York or Paris, if you do a horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprising, and it doesn't work out, you just get a media or academic career afterward. Out here in the real world, if a revolution fails, all your friends go to jail or end up dead.'"

-Vincent Bevins,"If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution"