A Note On Contemporary Social Movements
Without clarity, vision and direction, all efforts shall dissipate into hot air and fizzle out on the road to nowhere. The upheaval of the 2010s should have sufficed to demonstrate that even if you set fire to a thousand buildings, burn tires, barricade traffic, put shopping districts to the torch, vandalize the streets or even march incessantly and militantly, you will still stand no chance to those with organization and cohesion at their disposal—and a will to win.
A good number of those movements leading the charge are likewise reluctant to embrace information warfare as part of their arsenal, as many still truly believe that if only disinformation is cut out of the equation, things will inevitably return to the way they were in 2015. That line of thinking, sponsored by certain NGOs and much of the legacy media, is nothing short of delusional—a fool’s errand.
Vincent Bevin’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (2023) remains the best documentation of the tumults of the last fifteen years. The political projects that did succeed, such as Fidesz in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland, MAGA in America, MORENA in Mexico, and Nuevas Ideas in El Salvador, still have that insurgent fire in them—but their embers have already forged their own pillars within the state apparatus.
Even if these movements all crumble by tomorrow, they would have already made their mark upon history’s script. Therefore, they would not be too far off from the victors of 1848, who prevailed while others folded: Frederick VII of Denmark, Louis Napoleon, Garibaldi, and the Meiji nobles and agitators.
As for the rest, the graveyard remains. Be it Podemos, the Arab Spring, SYRIZA, the Five Star Movement, third wave feminism, the climate justice initiative, BLM, the 2021 Thai student movement—all of them are now moot. They faded as if nothing happened. Some blame demonization, red tagging and a chilling effect of repression. But these blunt instruments are only effective when one’s entire scheme is—for all intents and purposes—already bankrupt. They are simply means for bringing about some kind of non-consensual euthanasia.
Why so? There is a lingering hesitance to take command, and those that do with no reservations are rewarded. People no longer respond to pity or weakness—those have already had their day in the sun. They do, however, prize strength and decisiveness above all else. Those lacking both qualities would be better off in a cosplay convention with a furry suit or a Haruhi wig.
Meanwhile, others continue to flail about and expect that some moral reckoning shall arrive. This is no longer possible: and to yearn for such is what distinguishes those who shall continue to wallow in failure from those who shall be victorious. As per Zizek's provocation: stop falling in love with yourselves, foist an alternative, or be thrown into the pit like yesterday's trash in the rubbish bin!
The first step in resolving this paralysis is to comprehend what power is, not as it is often made out to be. Power is neither to be spoken to nor against. It is simply a form of truth, and always correlative with the firmness of the spirit and the intellect. It does not corrupt or abuse by default, as it is dependent on who wields its chassis, its pen and its rifle. It only becomes corrosive when the so-called better angels of our nature continue to retreat before it, hence ceding it to the inept and the opportunistic.
The masses and their chiefs shall render themselves once more as the indispensable agents of their fate and age, but only upon laying their intent bare and out in the open: namely, by declaring themselves to be more suited to the task of leadership than the present grandees and dons of the establishment.
The less we pull our punches, and the more we continue to affirm struggle as a default in this land, the closer our polity becomes to its own maturity and adulthood. Triumph is only granted to the daring and audacious. Stop watching Rent and Hamilton.
Allen Casey S. Gumiran is an essayist and a lecturer specializing in Geopolitics at DLSU-Dasmarinas, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science in 2018. He is currently taking up his Master of Arts in Philippine Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman. A contributor to Esquire Philippines and Rappler, he specializes in current events, foreign affairs, military science, philosophy of history, psychoanalysis, and political economy.