And the concept of prefiguration, for its part, freights radical movements—sometimes for better, often for worse—with deep obligations beyond the already difficult tasks of winning and securing power, holding themselves to standards that state actors and other powerful opponents don’t have to meet. Graeber, Bevins writes, acknowledged specifically that leaderlessness and anti-hierarchical organizational structures would be poorly suited to revolutionary movements in wartime. “But the problem, at least in the mass protest decade, is that if you are actually successful, someone is going to declare war on you,” Bevins writes. “This might be political warfare, or it might be literal, violent war. If you score any kind of political victory, there is likely going to be someone who feels they will lose, and these people usually go on the attack—and have no philosophical objections to using hierarchy, formal organization, and ‘authoritarian’ internal command structures.”
If the tactics and habits of mind adopted internationally by the activists whom Bevins followed closely over the last decade, mostly in the Middle East and Latin America, have been poor fits for their respective movements, it seems potentially relevant, as he observes, that “repertoires and philosophical approaches” to protest “usually flowed from north to south, not the other way around.” “Several people told me they believed their movements had unconsciously taken on positions developed in the First World,” he writes, “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.”
“I spent years doing interviews,” Bevins eventually concludes, “and not one person told me that they had become more horizontalist, or more anarchist, or more in favor of spontaneity and structurelessness.” Instead, the activists he spoke to, across disparate movements motivated and shaped by different grievances and conditions across the globe, offered up a loose consensus, more supportive of formal structures and leadership in mass movements—or of, at the very least, having a stable contingent of activists ready to represent them and articulate ideologically informed demands. “We thought representation was elitism,” one Egyptian activist told him, “but actually it is the essence of democracy.”