s. prasad, crossing the rubicon — review
- populist protests still don't do anything for political change even when they've evolved in experience and shape
prasad calls every uprising against the state a revolution regardless of what it achieves, whether as he notes "antisocial violence" spreads afterwards, what type of new institutions or parties it creates, or even what were its reasons for existing. "but the revolutions in south asia will almost certainly encounter new limits and impasses. it will be the task of the next wave of revolutions to find a way beyond these." is this a way to talk about revolutions, with the phrasing that the very ability to enact it encounters a challenge? its true that different generations encounter different obstacles in mobilizations, yet, revolutions originally meant the return to an older political order, the sequential orbiting of an earlier form of social organization, before political theology converted it into a horizon. now, prasad uses the term revolutionary colloquially as the result end-goal of a mass uprising, but uses the actual term uprising when he's referring to the real event. theres an aspect of mythologization or ideologization that permits a revolution to call itself such, and a fundamental principle of this should be that it gestures not just towards creating a new social order, but that the desired image of this order itself promises to herald a new epoch of history, or a new vision for a future that by itself already contains its own ideal in its self-image rather than its current formation.
in fact, the conceptual stakes have been raised so high by political theory itself, that bangladesh would have to not just force president hasina to flee, not just retaliate after a curfew (even if its precisely the curfew that created the struggle necessary to inspire the retaliation), not even take over the government, and not even produce an entire ideology on top of it. in fact, it would have to encounter its own self-image in a political horizon of its making, it would have to produce an ideology in the form of a testament instead of the form of a political order. and, lets not even talk about how today's populace is populist because it has a fundamental lack of motivated self-existence which cannot be replaced by a sudden ideologization (since this ideologization would at best be a booster to an otherwise permanently non-ideological political uprising), but mass uprisings in and of themselves seem to be political for prasad rather than ideological.
just look at how he speaks about the "successful failure" in sri lanka: "after some weeks of uncertainty, parliament appointed the former prime minister of the old regime to lead a new government. order was soon restored in the streets. the occupied government buildings and the encampments that resembled egypt’s tahrir square were soon cleared by the army and police. this outcome might not have been what sri lankan revolutionaries aspired to. but it was not a descent into chaos. nor did it lead to a dictatorship. there was no military coup or civil war. and, more recently, a marxist was elected president." ironically enough, this precisely captures the pre-programmatic political reading of revolution, where the old government literally steps back in like a market choice flip after a coup rather than popular power actually manifesting, ironically accidentally allowing prasad to use a different meaning of revolution.
prasad can be seen as hinting to the idea that there are apparently a lot of sri lankian revolutionaries simply waiting to temporarily overcome social divisions, but a lot of their own motives look very ridiculous in hindsight. for example, the actual reasons behind the uprising outside of a vague notion of "economic downfall" is related to the national embarrassment that it went from a rice exporter to a rice importer overnight as the government randomly banned chemical fertilizers, or the fact covid desecrated its tourism sector. the "mass uprising" follows naturally a reinstalment of the police because the "sri lankan revolutionaries" are clearly fighting for economic reasons, something prasad himself knows very well, since he mentions revolutionary defeatism (recent military defeat) as a key driver for mobilization. this follows his insightful conceptualization of "drift", the idea that sri lanka could have survived economically regardless in some capacity, but didnt exactly want to do that, or as he says: “uprisings tend to result not from a stagnant condition of despair and disillusionment, but from rising expectations that have been thwarted."
another revealing part appears towards the beginning with prasad's brief indirect mention of the wider context behind what would become the no king's protest coalition, which happened only a month before the article was published but likely after it was already written. nonetheless, prasad describes it in this way: "trump’s blitzkrieg has reduced nearly all of us to the status of spectators. how will it be possible to break this spell? while there had been no shortage of writing discussing the urgency of the moment, the first hundred days of the new trump administration saw little signs of resistance. but then, suddenly, cracks in the spectacle began to appear. crowds gathered to confront ice agents during raids"
this "suddenly" was really not so sudden at all, but rather a largely disorganized mass media upheaval that rests largely on moralizing and politicizing anti-trump rhetoric rather than on ideologizing or politically theorizing upheaval, as is common for the states, given that the protest was apparently started by a random guy on reddit. this "republican experiment" prasad talks about that supposedly collapses spectacle and rulership in one form of strongmanism really is nothing more than just an aesthetic of a particular type of political order rather than something the masses are unprepared for, or something that actually has the character of preventing a mass mobilization. the "republicanism" latent in the strongmanism of signing a bunch fo executive orders on your first day, the idea of strenght collapsing into one decision poll, the idea that the government suddenly has a change of heart that everyone needs to bare witness to, doesn't implicate the procedure behind this change. just because a lincoln-esque parliament doesn't "stage the show" in much the same way or create the mythology of executive power, that doesn't suggest that that type of social organization would suddenly be immune to arriving at pre-decided political ideals. this "image" of republicanism without a vetoed strategy or without a supposed consensus doesnt guarantee a democracy or a consensus anyways.
prasad himself is likely well aware of this given the magazine he's writing for, which then poses the cruical question of why it's framed in such a way, and why he suggests that the "cracks" lead to an "uprising" rather than the much more feasible idea that a giant urban middle class population has nothing better to do than cosplay the idea that they'll stop migrants flowing out of the country and being shipped in trucks? in fact to an extent, the political conditions behind this act aren't all that disasterous either, given that america's concept as a foreign land is already an "economic abstraction" or in other words, nobody on the land would truly get outraged by others getting deported, because its quite likely nobody actually feels that they belong to the land in a way that is grounded to begin with.
not to mention, the actual no kings protest is organized by a large number of seemingly random organizations (social groups who happen to behave like institutions, really) who ironically have to teach the citizens basic strategy after they are already mobilized, or alternatively, only make the plans to protest on random "days" (no kings day) where a big part of the success of the protest is dependent on how many people showed up, a classic sign of late-populist "demonstration". this same demonstration is really the demonstration of the citizens general outrage towards the big beautiful bill, the concept of deportation, the idea that tariffs become political weapons, the idea that the rhetoric around the iran war is one where america collapses on its own behalf or rather suggests that it is losing.
and if you look at this way, not only is deportation very similar to actual social unrest in the south east in regards to why it happens, but in many ways in regards to how it happens, the "swarming" of the white house is quite similar to the swarming of sri lanka's parliament, a "mobilization" that gets kicked out a few days later and reinstated by police watch. in the article itself this idea shows up under "exhaustion" as "a key limit of contemporary struggles has been their inability to overcome the reigning separations in the societies from which they emerge.” prasad should have to answer why this is the case, but never exactly manages to do that, because as he says it in his own analysis, outcome and chance are apparently symmetrical. then again, there is no way that the inability to overcome separations is purely the failure of the radicalized blocs anymore than it is the conformism of the citizen blocs. more specifically, this type of conformism, with interests so latent, that the reasons for mobilization become not only more bizarre but more nuanced, allowing leaders like trump and erdogan more leeway into existing, more ability to transform or evolve within social rhetoric rather than against or outside it.
"there are plenty of reasons to be cautious. the last decade and a half of mass protests have provided ample examples of just how much chaos an uprising, whether successful or not, can unleash, particularly in the middle east." in many ways, uprisings are less "revolutions" than they are "envolutions", in that they are characterized by a mass "surrounding" of stakes, a stakes-accelerator, but also that chaos itself as "organized noise" has a particular function outside of mobilization as such. if prasad is right that the uprising rarely arrives now as a deprication, but as an outrage, then the mechanism suggests it is supposed to perform the opposite action of a genocide culturally, to spawn latent meanings where none exist within the remnants of a political vacuum, but one that uses much the same tools of organization as a genocide would, or rather, as all modern ecologies partake in, the mass collection of and organization through broadcasted info circuits and collectivist logic.
"protests are only effective by being disruptive. in order to accomplish anything, this disruption must spread. as struggles become more intense, new groups of people are pulled in, and new tactics emerge. but as struggles escalate and generalize, their aims often change. once enough momentum is built, whatever initial demands set the struggle in motion are stripped away. what is left is the universal demand: the fall of the government. " and if by fall of the government, prasad should mean "temporary, often symbolic disappearance of the current governing unit" then that could be broadly accurate, even if it's hilariously unimpressive. but on another hand, what it points to more generally is the idea that since a protest is always characterized by similar elements or actions, that the causes or reasons for the emergence of a protest actually exist on top of or against its demands, that demands don't just converge but that they nullify as reasons increase.
simultaneously, the "interest bloc" making up a protest only converges if demands converge, but this protest bloc quickly generalizes as demands remain unmet, since the general logic underscoring a protest never acquires demands in the manner of a ladder, that is, with consecutive strategy. in fact, maybe there is no consecutive strategy to be had without the mass questioning its own logic. what stops the populice from being able to do anything about their own condition is, far from being the cause of some autocracy or private military, often the cause of the existing form of social organization, which, given its constant self-contestations or wagerings, has no room to actually sacrifice any element of itself towards its own desired cause.
- populist protests still don't do anything for political change even when we can try to make them do many things at once or not be populist because the world is still populist anyways
however, contrary to the rhetoric that these blocs are intentionless and easily moulded or unclear about their aims, there is an idea that lines up with idris robinsons' "organized konfusion/ordering of disorder". in anarchsit theory, disorder is clearly the consequence of a movement's compression rather than its essential characteristic (and especially not its intrinsic goal, as argued by reactionaries). however regardless of which of these it is, and, with a decentralized but intended overseer, such as in the case of bangladesh where prasad notes that student committees are involved in shifting slogans or strategies, the idea that these movements somehow entirely intend to seperate themselves from official statist rhetoric is partially overstated.
prasad quotes lily lynch: "the students have been careful to avoid association with serbia’s official opposition, which is itself tainted by venality and easily smeared by pro-government media. their aim is not simply to swap one patronage network for another. it is to transform the entire political culture. as one protest sign put it: “this is not a revolution but an exorcism." yet, in fact, its much more likely that a movement like this succeeds precisely because and only under the condition that it characterizes its own intentions as seperate from a position that would be too closely correlated to corruption. the presence of the idea of a uniform anti-official rhetroic itself is an aspect of populism rather than its absence. and in many ways, the intersection between emerging chauvinist leftist populism and marxist leninism especially in the balkans itself has recently become more obscure, especially since the leninist position becomes more theoretically bastardizing about itself the more its interests line up, and the public becomes more advantageously positioned against autocratic power the more it can leverage the media to present it as an uprising to begin with. the "exorcism" angle fits cleanly then, since what is being exorcised is the public's association with official power rather than its dismemberment from the organizing logic behind it. that isnt to say that the mobilization doesnt disrupt daily life or the economy, in many ways the organized refusal to participate in daily life is the central tenant from which an alternative logic from reality can enfold, or even the temporary freedom from having to participate in civil life, and this may be one of if not the only real true goal, and only real successful venture of the modern populist protest (demonstration).
what prasad does give us around the midpoint is a blurry albeit decent theory of new struggles that doesn't just ride off robinson. prasad proposes: "struggles often pass through a sequence of “rhythmic markers” that serve as pivots or turning points catalyzing new energies. often this occurs when a new social group enters the stage, or when a new leading tactic emerges. as movements unfold, they reach impasses. this happens when a tactic exhausts its disruptive potential. disruptive tactics then need to spread to new layers of society or new tactics to emerge. for this to happen, experiments need to take place. " he notes how one single movement could encompass many variations of different strategies that change the literal composition of the uprising itself, moving from "rioting to mass nonviolence to occupation of public space to a general strike".
"yet, consistent with existing patterns within the protests, there are actually several overlapping boycotts having their origins in different layers of the movement." as prasad notes, its very likely that a lot of these movements are organized by different groups or identities that end up bleeding into one another. but the question at some point becomes phenomenological, what is causing particular mass formations to look a certain way? is the public going outside into the wild and learning what provokes? how come their understanding of their own resistance sits hand in hand with new media environments or increasingly arbitrary forms of organization?
what if the public learned to organize in a way that mimics the symbolism of popular power rather than resisting it? prasad notes that separate groups like more civil ones may copy the opposition parties' forms of organization in a separate second wave of attacks, or otherwise may borrow their rhetoric but slightly shift its premise or logic. boycotts themselves appear to arise as useful tools within an environment that increasingly removes the agency of the protestor is anything other than a unit of organization, or in other words, the protest clearly becomes a body-politic the less he plans (strategizes) and the more he becomes involved in the manifested logic of a certain movement, or happens to copy the patterns of an existing form of mobilization.
prasad continues with his theory by calling it the "synecdoche theory of revolution", a bid to make the populist protest slightly more believable, or rather, slightly less not believable. he starts off by arguing that squares tend to gather a representative group of the populace accidentally through occupation that forms a visible group, that then is designated naturally to "stand in" for everyone not protesting, and that eventually this square itself hosts the necessary, or rather gains a sense of its own moral force. the representation itself does also host a variety of different identities which themselves get along or learn that they share a common goal. yet, prasad reminds us of the composition problem, where, even if a large group was in gezi park, a majority of non-attendees of the protest may have still happened to support erdogan's vision at the time, or otherwise, may have wildcard motives others dont know about since they fail to become visible.
yet, in the marxist framing, this composition problem only delivers itself as a problem of symbolic centrality or in other words the legitimacy behind an identity, but the "meta-hosting" of identities outside of the protest itself may be an additional problem, for its not only that identities cohere or make sense of one another, but that they happen to exist at all in more confined or less knowable places in ways that have an undisclosed power of determination, which isnt the exact same problem as a purely diagnostic demographical one. prasad argues that may 68 won partially because de gaulle won the following election partially because of the protest, but that this protest itself followed a general strike that pushed this situation in this direction. furthermore, prasad ends on this "in order for the uprising to succeed, it might need to have found some adequate form of leverage and a means of overcoming or suspending the divisions within the movement that have already begun to reemerge."
this actually recalls his earlier ideological commitment to support an uprising as automatically revolutionary, but this time around, this tendency underscores the need to assert that an uprising's divisions always distract from its means, or more specifically, the idea that an uprising itself can always assume its own class interest if it moves beyond its failed identification with alterior motives. yet in modernity, where subjectivity is displaced and forced to reintegrate, this common object may not be dispersed just because of media or environment ecologies. it may be that this "organized konfusion" that idrison and prasad trace may not at all be "civil uprising getting accustomed to new forms of social organization" but rather the more brutal idea that intentional mobilization is learning that every single boycott, strike, square or movement now exists in the same way that subjectivity does under capitalism today: as self-originating, limited to its self-description, fragmented on its intensions, entirely synthetical and syncretic to mixed interests and requirements (or in other words, entirely resistant to the logic of a common uprising prasad so desperately envisions).
more specifically, this criticism isnt just one of overfitting, but one of retrofitting, it may be that what exists today in the shell of an uprising is only the idea of an uprising itself, and that uprisings, their entire character, even when resembling their function and status under industrial regimes of society, no longer have the same function, essence, operational philosophy etc, even if the public itself is more confused about it than the results show. the only thing worse for ideological mobilization than populist protests disregarding the theoretical politics behind a protest is populist protests actually making use of ideology only to leave radicals to discover that protests no longer exist for-themselves.
what is it about the rubicon that so well connects to this idea of a synecdoche? its precisely the loss of agency that coheres with mass formation. just take a look at prasad's best idea in this work, expressed earlier into the paper: "but if erdogan ever falls, the dismantling of the armed forces as an autonomous force may turn out to be the biggest gift that he could have bestowed on his successors. the revolution in turkey, whenever it comes, might have more breathing room. it might not take place within the constraints imposed by the armed forces or under the threat of a military coup." prasad argues that the the strongman is an inadvertent benefactor of future revolution by doing what revolutions failed to do, clearing the dual state. but if only jurisprudential and executive power can create the empirical conditions necessary for the abolition of entire units of government, or, if democracy can only arise out of a latent republicanism, who does this fall on more, the citizens of the state. the citizens of the square, or the radicals? whichever one can be seen as most contributing to this, it shows us that crossing the rubicon is not in the hands of those who want to determine its outcome, but in the hands of those who do not care to. there is no level of real life political defeatism worse than this.
towards the end of the first and by far largest subchapter, prasad starts hammering us down with personalized interpretation of his own otherwise analytically argued theory. suddenly, the distinction between neoliberalism as "the government as a manager of economic capital" and "post-neoliberalism as the government experiments with ideology" suddenly becomes unclear. prasad tells us "the center cannot hold. globalization is unraveling. the breaking down of the neoliberal order finds its reflection in the emergence of various populisms. but these also act as an accelerant.", a statement that appears seemingly randomly after he says that erdogan intentionally lets inflation grow by refusing to let banks increase interest rates if the economy is growing. what this really means is that as services grow and people get more money -> they wanna buy more stuff -> services arent growing at the same rate as the stuff they wanna buy -> the bank usually steps in and makes it harder to buy stuff as much -> and erodgan stops this process, the global economy mediates this by dispersing responsibility or creating the conditions for uneven inflation, yet, as prasad notes, clearly countries themselves are interested in accelerating or degrowing various aspects of the economy as diplomatic globalization decreases in value.
yet, the idea that countries experiment ideologically is a stretch too far, given that turkiye could have interests in doing this that are still geopolitical, even if not globalists. the statement "but clearly the winds have changed direction. politics are back in the driver’s seat. ideas, however incoherent, can become a real material force, as the new populists attempt to test the limits of the absolute domination of capital." confuses where politics emerges from. is it not precisely populist economies that arise out of capital's prior interests? or in other words, the dispersion of interests follows not in the lack or fall of a narrative or vision of these interests, but in their real mediation (realized precisely by the populist order?)