The Revolution Is Not Being Televised

During the Egyptian insurrection, the Mubarak regime tried to counter the multitudes on Tahrir Square by avoiding mentioning them on the state-run TV. The so-called liberal media in the United States highlighted that this authoritarian media blackout brought to light the freedom of expression we enjoy in “the West.” This is why the US media silencing of over a week of protests on Wall Street reminds us that New York City and Cairo, despite the different scale and tone of the unrest, are not that different from each other after all. Further, the power of the media in the United States to silence political events that may disrupt the status quo is comparatively vaster and probably more widespread and effective. And in the nation that defines itself as the land of the free, media blackouts are created not by the state but by that peculiar branch of corporate America that, with the full support of the state, profits from the creation of what qualifies as news.

For the past eight days, a remarkable grassroots movement against the capitalist looting of the commons inspired by similar protests in Spain, Greece, and Egypt has disrupted Wall Street, the spatial core of the global financial system. A crowd has camped out in public spaces, staging protests, and organizing assemblies to debate the social devastation created by the bankers based in the surrounding buildings. From day one, the blackout of the protests in the US media was eerie. Whereas a handful of wacky Tea Party activists always receives widespread coverage, “occupy Wall Street” was treated by all major corporate media outlets as a non-event (with a few exceptions that highlighted the media blackout, like Keith Olbermann). On Friday, September 23, as the protests entered their first week, The New York Times confirmed where its priorities are in the production of what is (and what is not) newsworthy by running on its front page an article about the worrisome rise in the theft of pigs in rural Illinois.


On Saturday, September 24, The New York Times was finally forced to partly lift its Pravda-esque silence. But this only happened because protesters became dangerously mobile and began marching uptown spreading their noisy anti-capitalist message and were arrested by the dozens for no other reason than protesting. The article trivializes the protest as a quasi-hippie gathering led by “noble” but confused and misinformed youths who “say” that the financial system “favors the rich and powerful over ordinary citizens.” The abrupt and unambiguously hostile coverage reflects the shift from what Michel-Ralph Trouillot called a formula of erasure to a formula of banalization, which are both operations of silencing. The silencing is the mandate by corporate America to treat potentially threatening political movements as non-events.

In other entries, I analyzed how the spatial spread of the insurrections of North Africa and the Middle followed a process of resonance expansion, through which thousands of people coming together on the streets created politically affective messages that resonated with countless other bodies elsewhere, often through alternative media that evaded state censorship. This is why counter-revolutionary efforts in those countries sought to contain the expansion of those insurgent resonances by all possible means, including violence, censorship, and the transformation of the official media into a machinery set out to prevent the spatial expansion of those resonances. In the United States today, more so than in any other country on the planet, the political machineries that work tirelessly to prevent anti-corporate resonances from expanding are owned by the same corporate forces that profit from the devastation that is wreaking North America and Europe. As Michael Parenti forcefully put in the film The Panama Deception, “The media is not associated with or allied with corporate America. The media is corporate America."


As in Egypt or Tunisia, the protests in New York are spreading and growing through alternative media and the internet. But this expansion has so far been largely contained by the media blackout. Maybe it is time for the protesters in NY to follow the lead of protesters elsewhere in the world and challenge the blackout not only by calling and emailing news stations (as many are doing) but also by protesting at the gates of those stations’ buildings. In Egypt, the multitudes in Cairo eroded the censorship of the state-run TV by simply surrounding its main building and demanding to be heard. Hours before Mubarak fell, these multitudes forced those inside the TV station to turn their cameras onto the streets and change the tone of the coverage. The same happened in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 13, 2002, when millions of people took to the streets to oppose the US-sponsored coup against Hugo Chávez. As protests raged all over Venezuela, the private TV stations that were involved in the coup and controlled all airwaves played movies and soap operas. This Orwellian erasure of the insurrection by the corporate media only came to an end when thousands of protestors surrounded the stations demanding that their opposition to the coup be shown on TV. Indeed, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, as Gill Scott-Heron wrote in the 1970s. Except that we should probably change the tense of the verb in this now famous phrase, for this is not a silencing that will happen sometime in a distant and abstract future but is happening right now, in the year of the beginning of the globalized insurrections against the imperial order of things.


The popular insurrections in Cairo and Caracas remind us that the seemingly deterritorialized power of media conglomerates is ultimately grounded in the actual spaces where a select group of individuals manufacture and disseminate “news.” And those events reveal that under conditions of media censorship it is ultimately in those spaces that these actors are politically most vulnerable and, in the US, most sensitive to their public image as sources of news. Any such protest at the gates of The New York Times will no doubt trigger, aside from aggressive tactics by the NYPD, predictable accusations that it involves “fascist thugs” trying to curb the media’s “freedom of expression.” But the past eight days in New York have made apparent that this is just the freedom of corporate America to shut down the growing grassroots opposition to its ongoing looting of public wealth.

Imperial Velocities and Counter-Revolution

Just when the state velocities of the Gaddafi regime were outpacing, outmaneuvering, and routing the Libyan insurgency, they were hit hard and slowed down by the much faster and more powerful air velocities of the imperial military machine. The waves of jets taking off from European bases and unleashing violence on a sovereign nation across the Mediterranean mark a turning point in the insurrections of North Africa and the Middle-East: their transformation into revolutions with planetary repercussions that demand the direct engagement of imperial fighting forces. The high-speed weapons from North America and Europe hitting North Africa are dramatically expanding the spatial trajectories of the violence involved in this upheaval. It is now clearer than ever that this mess is not (never was) an Arab affair. The geographical elongation of the military theatre of these insurrections means that we are witnessing the start of the imperial counter-revolution.

These revolutions caught the regional and global elites off guard and created a powerful transformation in the affective distribution of fear in myriad geographies. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, or Bahrain protesters confronting state violence on the street emphasized over and over again that they were not afraid anymore. These expansive revolutionary resonances, in turn, struck fear in the regional and global elites. This alarm is now the affective fuel of an expansive counter-revolution that seeks to re-inscribe fear in now-restive, emboldened multitudes. North Africa and the Middle-East are now traversed by contradictory affective-political forces fighting for supremacy in terrains defined by insurgent, state, and imperial patterns of speed.

Counter-revolutions also expand in waves following bodily resonances. And like revolutionary waves, they also need to cross a threshold to gain momentum, to stop being atomized local events and become spatially expansive forces. While counter-revolutionary measures started with the first riots in Tunisia, this regional threshold was Gaddafi’s swift crackdown of the Libyan insurrection. His regime’s resolve to physically wipe out dissent in the streets resonated among other equally threatened elites. It reminded them that revolutions can, indeed, be stopped and defeated. Counter-revolutionary resonances are, by definition, of a fearful and reactionary kind, which seek to disperse resonant multitudes through violent striations and fragmentations. While revolutions are negativity (rupture of the real) as well as affirmation (the creation of something new), counter-revolutions are pure negation and are guided by one goal: the destruction or containment of insurrectional negativity (Benjamin Noys would probably see this anti-revolutionary negation as part of the destructive negativity of capital. But I think I prefer to distinguish, as Diana Coole does, between negation as reactive force/Hegelian abstraction and negativity as critical disintegration of the positivity of the real- a perspective that in fact agrees with Noys' call to rescue negativity as part of critical-radical political ruptures).



The beginning of the bombing campaign now led by NATO marks a remarkable torsion in this counter-revolutionary wave, in which localized operations to neutralize revolutionary upheaval have now been folded upon an imperial mandate. And the paradox is notable. In Libya, the imperial counter-revolution is presenting itself as protective of an insurgent population and is unleashing its firepower on the forces that kicked off the counter-revolutionary wave. But the paradox, while real, fades upon closer examination. The imperial counter-revolution in Libya aims to crush the Gaddafi counter-revolution not to salvage the revolution but to neutralize it more effectively and claim a moral high-ground in the global propaganda machine. It is an attempt to assert imperial sovereignty in spaces torn apart by revolutions; an attempt to make sure that any post-Gaddafi government does not dare challenge the imperial order of things.

Already inspired by the Libyan counter-revolution, the ruling elites in Bahrain and Yemen were further emboldened by this military intervention by their global patrons and weapons-suppliers. Well-aware that Obama’s calls for the respect of human rights are hollow and do not apply to loyal US clients, they joined this wave by unleashing massacres on the streets at the exact moment when the first barrages of US, French, and British missiles and bombs were hitting Libyan soil. That Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates sent troops to contribute to the repression of dissent in Bahrain also signal that we are indeed witnessing a regional counter-revolutionary wave involving international forms of cooperation. Tunisia and Egypt seem to be in a more liminal situation, in which revolutionary resonances on the streets are still strong enough to put some limits on current state attempts to contain them. Elsewhere in the region, this counter-revolutionary convergence and its subordination to an imperial mandate was embodied by the United Arab Emirates and Qatar: sending military forces to Bahrain to help crush the revolution and to Libya to help enforce the no-fly zone. This wave may have different and convoluted local materializations, but its patterns point in the same direction: restoration of imperial sovereignty.


My colleague Max Forte at Zero Anthropology has argued that the imperial military intervention against Gaddafi means that the Libyan Revolution is now dead. I cannot really say that is the case, given the volatility and unpredictability of everything we have seen so far in the region. But the revolution is certainly very seriously compromised, for the ideologically-vague leaders of the insurgency are now willing clients of global powers and, as several reports indicate, are now receiving assistance from CIA operatives on the ground as well as praise from the US neo-cons.

But what interests me here is the salience of imperial velocities in the spatial form of the counter-revolution. The same way that revolutions are movement and acceleration (as Paul Virilio has argued), counter-revolutions are machines of de-acceleration: they try to slow down and halt revolutionary fervors. These machines of de-acceleration work at different spatial scales: the deployment of high-speed weapons systems that can outpace enemy vectors, the production of militarized striations in space to prevent the expansion of revolutionary unrest, and the creation of striations on the internet and in networks of instant communication that aim to dissipate insurgent affects. Imperial actors are actively working on all these fronts.

The most apparent strategy of de-acceleration is the display of imperial military velocities. The bombing of Libya by jets and missiles is both an act of violence set to slow-down the Gaddafi military machine and a global spectacle: a reminder that imperial speed and might can rapidly disrupt the state velocities of individual nation-states. These velocities, limited to the smooth space of the skies, cannot defeat on their own well-entrenched forces on the ground. As is clear after two weeks, the air strikes may not be enough to lead a disorganized insurgency to victory. But they have changed the temporality and spatial shape of the conflict and created a marked de-acceleration of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary speeds on the deserts of North Libya.

And in having a trans-continental reach that enables them to strike anywhere on the planet (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan), these speeds also affirm that the whole globe is under imperial sovereignty: that there is no outside of Empire, as Hardt and Negri have argued. But Derek Gregory would add that these imperial interventions also produce a new outside: places of barbarism in need to be disciplined by civilizing violence, the same way that the drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan create those geographies as opaque, barbaric enclaves outside of the civilized global order. This spatial folding produces spaces of exception: spaces in which bodies become what Agamben called homines sacri: bodies that can be killed with impunity by imperial forces. And to add a spatial dimension relatively absent in Agamben's analysis of the state of exception, these bodies can be thus killed because they are in a space of indistinction, outside and inside of Empire at the same time.


The clash of imperial, state, and insurgent velocities now taking place in Libya also help us understand that the power of the latter, which I examined in The Speed of Revolutionary Resonance, depends on the spatial terrain in which they operate. When the bombing campaign began, the Libyan insurgency was about to be crushed by rapidly advancing armored columns encroaching on Benghazi. The rebels had been routed partly because they had confronted an arboreal, centralized, and faster military machine in the open: in the smooth space of the desert. In that wide-open, flat terrain with few places to hide they were easy targets of tanks, artillery, rockets, and particularly jets.


There is a historical paradox in this weakness of a non-state, mobile insurgency in the smooth space of a desert. For many centuries, smooth spaces such as deserts, prairies, and steppes were the most favorable terrain for what Deleuze and Guattari called the nomadic war machine: the mobile military assemblages that historically challenged state power in central Asia and parts of South and North America. At that time, the maximum speed of the nomadic war machine was the same of state-run cavalries: that of the horse. This parity in speed often allowed non-state cavalries to outpace and outmaneuver regular troops through rhizomic patterns of dispersion, multi-polarity, and swarming. With the hegemony of the state in the control of high-speed weapons and systems of communication since the late 1800s, this old salience of rhizomic speeds to confront the state in smooth space has been shattered. Smooth spaces such as flat deserts are now terrains in which rhizomic insurgences can be easily outpaced and destroyed by state militaries. Yet it is also the space in which state velocities are most vulnerable to imperial air power, as the Libyan tanks destroyed on desert roads by French, British, and US jets clearly illustrate.

It is not surprising the only place where the Libyan insurgents put up a more effective fight was in their defense of the city of Misurata in the west, where they have managed to withstand relentless waves of attacks due to their dispersion in a dense, striated urban fabric. Modern armed insurgencies only stand a chance against regular armies in striated space: jungles, mountains, cities, or rugged terrains. A major reason why the rhizomic velocities created by the multitude on the streets of Egypt outmaneuvered the state was that they took place in intricate urban terrains. This striation allowed for multiple patterns of dispersal and multi-polarity in response to police repression that enhanced the multitude’s rhizomic speed. This is why regular and imperial militaries dislike and fear counter-insurgency operations in opaque, rugged spaces. And this is why (as Eyal Weizman has analyzed) the Israeli Army has drawn on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about smooth and striated space to smooth out urban space in military operations in Palestine, by opening large holes in walls and buildings in their attempts to outmaneuver and disorient mobile clusters of Palestinian fighters.




Yet the weakness of the Libyan insurgency is not reduced to the terrain. Most observers on the ground agree that this is an enthusiastic but inexperienced, poorly armed and trained force, which reminds us that resonant bodies alone are never enough to topple the state. History is full of examples of extraordinary revolutionary upheavals that were destroyed. Old questions of organization, training, and coordination are decisive in the transformation of massive conglomerates of resonant bodies into an affective political force. But another weakness of the Libyan insurgency is that it does not seem to have exploited its rhizomic form. By and large, its main actions seem to be reduced to caravans of pick-up trucks with mounted machineguns and rocket launchers moving up and down the main road along the coast of the Mediterranean, both charging ahead and retreating at high-speed. Theirs has been a mobility and speed fixed in the narrow space of a single road: visible and predictable. But the power of insurgent rhizomic velocities, as the case of Egypt shows, has always been multi-polarity, spatial saturation, dispersion, opacity, and unpredictability. In fact, it is the Gaddafi regime that seems to be rapidly adapting to the aerial power of imperial velocities by incorporating some of the rhizomic moves that have defined seasoned guerrillas. The Independent, for instance, reported the recent use of “guerrilla techniques” by small pro-Gaddafi units that ambushed and destroyed vehicles of revolutionary fighters and promptly disappeared.

Elsewhere in the region, the counter-revolutionary de-acceleration is apparent in the creation by the state of multiple spatial striations that aim to slow down the spread of unrest. An emblematic case is Bahrain, where the recent crackdown has included setting up myriad military checkpoints and the saturation of the relatively small national space with military forces. The militarized striation of roads has long been favored by states fighting insurgencies (from El Salvador to Iraq) and is ultimately a strategy of de-acceleration and control over movement. An infamous example of the slowness these checkpoints create is the maze of Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, examined by Derek Gregory and Eyal Weizman. And in Bahrain and elsewhere, this attempt to restrain, slow down, and control the movement of bodies is further enforced by massive arrests, curfews, and bans on demonstrations.



The counter-revolution is also fought on the internet: a space that is indeed, as Julian Assange recently put it, “the greatest spying machine ever created.” This global machine exposes billions of the devices to sophisticated technologies of state-corporate surveillance scanning the web, like the eye of the panopticum, for signs of suspicious activity (a reality captured by a good number of Hollywood movies). In the Middle-East, Facebook has been a double-edge sword that has allowed for rapid coordination among activists but also revealed to the state the identity of activists, leading to myriad arrests from Egypt to Bahrain. Secondly, as analyzed by Jillian York, filtering technology (Websense, SmartFilter, Netsweeper, Cisco, manufactured by corporations in the United States and Canada) is used by multiple states in the Middle-East to block-off access to particular sites, eroding the rhizomic speed allowed by the internet through the creation of powerful striations originating from arboreal nodes. And the counter-revolution has also involved using these nodes to inundate the rhizomic channels of the internet with propaganda: from disseminating messages on Facebook (as the Mubarak regime did), to developing software that allows a single person to create multiple fake identities and post pro-US comments on discussion boards (as revealed by The Guardian), to the recent rise of suspicious tweets in English with false information seemingly coming from Libya (analyzed by Max Forte).

Max Forte rightly observed in a comment on this blog that while North Africa and the Middle-have been engulfed since January in high-speed insurrections, many parts of the world are still defined by “the stillnesses of everyday life, the non-moving grain of local circumstances.” And indeed, multiple striations and local political circumstances create very diverse patterns of political speed in different parts of the world. The counter-revolutions now gaining momentum in the region aim to create a similar stillness, to roll-back the insurrections to the days when political slowness dominated the public spaces of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, or Syria. But political and affective terrains have shifted too dramatically to allow for a unilinear restoration. It was precisely the closure of the streets as a space of protest by the state, Armando Salvatore recently observed, that pushed many Egyptian activists to create affective connectivities on the internet that eventually allowed them, years later, to reclaim the streets and wrest them from state control.



A particularly potent moment of the counter-revolution in Bahrain was the destruction by the state of the Pearl Monument, the focus of huge demonstrations against the regime and the main node of revolutionary resonance in the nation. “We did it to remove a bad memory,” said the Foreign Minister of Bahrain, candidly revealing the fearful affects that inform their counter-revolution. The bad memory that the Bahrain elites tried to conjure away by tearing the monument down is the power of that place to attract and inspire resonant multitudes. It is also the bad memory of Tahrir Square, the spatial node of the Egyptian Revolution that haunts these elites like a nightmare. Yet in turning the monument into ruins, they have now produced a powerful absence, a ghost: a negativity that has charged the square with even more affective and political power. A similar negativity has haunted Tiananmen Square in Beijing since the 1989 massacres, which requires that the Chinese regime keep a tight security apparatus on the square around the clock. In his book The Funeral Casino, Alan Klima asked how long must the Chinese police occupy Tiananmen Square to continue suppressing commemorations and demonstrations. “Forever,” he answered. And he added, “No one can control forever.” Contingency and unpredictability are part of the nature of politics. But it is very likely that the day multitudes force the regimes in China and Bahrain to loosen their grip on the streets, Tiananmen Square and Pearl Square will be both reborn again as nodes of political resonance.

The Shifting Geographies of The Global Multitude, 2001-2011

As we enter a new decade, it is time to assess the global geographies of the multitude emerging in the early 21st century. And this requires rereading the major political events of the past ten years through a spatial and eminently transnational lens, which asks not only "when?" but also "where?"


A decade after Hardt and Negri’s pivotal Empire, it is also important to examine the multitude not as an abstract, disembodied entity but as the massive coming together of bodies in actual spaces, communicating through political resonances that move rapidly across national boundaries and continents. My aim here is to sketch for the past decade the broad spatial layout and direction of these rhizomic global flows, which Deleuze and Guattari would see as escaping coding by corporate power.

The media tells us that Al Qaeda’s attacks on US soil on September 11 2001 defined the decade. But what the media silences is that the global importance of 9/11 lies in the fact that it took place amid a wave of extraordinary political ferment in many parts of the world, and that it created a decisive spatial shift that has shaped the geographical pulse and contours of the global multitude since.

This is why the most decisive moment of the decade was not just September 2001 but the period that goes from July 2001 to April 2002: when the political momentum of the global multitude shifted globally from the north to the south, from North America and Europe to South America. And this is a shift that can be followed by the changing location of the major confrontations between the multitude and the state for the control of local spaces.


The battle of Genoa, Italy, in July 2001, when 200,000 people clashed for several days with the police around the walled fortress of the G8 meeting, marked the peak of the anti-capitalist riots that were spreading in North America and Europe like wildfire since Seattle in 1999 and had also engulfed Quebec City, Prague, Davos, and Washington DC. A transcontinental unrest of this magnitude, oscillating back and forth between North America and Europe, had not been seen in this part of the world since 1968.


Six weeks after Genoa, the live TV coverage of the collapse of the World Trade Center in NY was to dramatically change the political climate in North America and Europe. An empowered imperial machinery was to restrict dissent at home and launch new waves of military operations across the globe. The multitude of the global north created extraordinarily massive street protests to try to prevent the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but 9/11 clearly dissipated the anti-corporate momentum that had turned Genoa into an urban battle zone comparable to Paris in May 1968.

On the one hand, the imperial military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq created a radicalized, effective armed insurgency among the multitude of many parts of the Middle-East that rages on and erodes imperial power to this day. Yet this anti-imperial insurgency has little in common with the inclusive agenda of global emancipation that had coalesced on the streets of Seattle or Genoa, and is rather defined by exclusions (of women, sexual and ethnic minorities, non-Muslims) that are profoundly reactionary and nativist in nature.


But the protests with a global agenda of emancipation that 9/11 stopped on its tracks in North America and Europe were not restricted to those spaces. In fact, they were part of a much broader wave of global protests born in the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, on January 1st 1994, when a ragtag indigenous army surprised a world brainwashed into believing that the left was dead for good by denouncing the destructive effects of NAFTA and celebrating justice, equality, and global solidarity.


At the dawn of the 21st century, this wave had spatially expanded and was sweeping much of Latin America, the outcome of the social devastation created in the region by unregulated capitalism in the 1990s. In 2000, this growing rebellion reached explosive expressions in the Andes in the uprising against water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and in the massive indigenous protests that toppled the government of Ecuador.

While in late 2001 the US was invading Afghanistan and imposing an Orwellian obedience at home, the anti-neoliberal protests in Latin America not only continued but also became more radical and spatially widespread. The contrast between what was happening during those months in the streets of the global north and the streets of much of Latin America could not have been more apparent.


The Argentinean uprising of December 2001 was the first major landmark in this continental shift emerging right after 9/11, partly because in the previous decade Argentina had been the poster child of the IMF for its obedience to the dictates of global capitalism. By the end of 2001, with the economy devastated and a 25% unemployment rate, the government’s freezing of bank accounts led to a major urban insurrection in downtown Buenos Aires. After two days of clashes in which 38 were people shot dead by the police, the multitude forced the president’s resignation, profoundly changing the Argentinean political landscape and sending a potent message across the continent.

The most massive and decisive unarmed uprising of the multitude the world has seen in the 21st century, nonetheless, was yet to come, and took place a few months later in Caracas, Venezuela. Not surprisingly, the corporate media has systematically invisibilized this pivotal moment in global political history.


On April 11, 2002, the Venezuelan elite and its military cronies in conjunction with the Bush administration toppled the government of Hugo Chávez. Elected in a landside victory in 1998, his government was the first in the region to openly challenge the dictates of Washington and the interests of the local elites. It became therefore imperative to crush it to prevent this experiment from spreading. The Venezuelan elite and the US had spun their talking points so many times that they were convinced they were true: that Chávez was an unpopular dictator and that few people would lift a finger in his defense.


Yet on April 13, 2002, after the new regime abolished all democratic institutions and the US and the IMF rushed to recognize an actual dictatorship in the name of democracy, a generalized popular uprising shook the country. Millions took to the streets in all corners of the Venezuelan geography to demand the release of their legitimate president and oppose the new regime.


And while the multitude was occupying most public spaces in the country, clashing with the police, and eventually surrounding the presidential palace, the private media confirmed it was a major force behind the coup by imposing an eerie blackout that erased those masses from all Venezuelan TV screens. This Orwellian invisibilization of the multitude was captured by the title of the brilliant, arresting Irish documentary on the coup, The Revolution Will not the Televised (countless videos posted on YouTube also document the extraordinary collective effervescence that took over the streets of Venezuela that day).


Yet the popular insurrection quickly overran the attempts by the media to silence it, and the multitude surrounded the TV stations demanding that the cameras were turned on those streets flooded by Chávez supporters. The uprising also mobilized thousands of ordinary soldiers and low and mid ranking military officers who turned against the coup across the country, retook the presidential palace, and disobeyed the order to assassinate Chávez, who had been captured and sent to an undisclosed island.

In its control of the national space, the multitude evaporated the dictatorship into thin air. Late that night, Hugo Chávez was back in control, the presidential palace was surrounded by a cheering multitude, and the US and the New York Times editorial had to backpedal hard from their earlier and enthusiastic support of the ephemerous Carmona regime.

The popular revolt against the coup was a turning point in the Bolivarian revolution; it radicalized the Venezuelan multitude and moved the Chávez government further to the left, a shift that was subsequently supported by Venezuelans in a notably high number of landslide electoral victories. It also proved decisive in empowering the multitude elsewhere in Latin America.




In 2002, despite growing social unrest across the continent, Venezuela was virtually alone in a Latin America overwhelmingly governed by center-right and conservative governments. The shockwaves created in Caracas spread across the continent and resonated with local demands for change. The following year, Lula in Brazil and Kirchner in Argentina took office with a center-left agenda and in Bolivia a widespread popular uprising led to the resignation of its openly neo-liberal president. The empowered Bolivian multitude would overwhelmingly elect Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer and union leader, as president of the country in 2005. Also in 2005 a center-left coalition took power in Uruguay and by 2007 governments with a Bolivarian ideology were also in power in Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Honduras. In 2008, this wave of democratically elected left-leaning parties arrived in Paraguay and the following year in El Salvador.


The imperial machinery has been tireless in its efforts to undermine and demonize these dangerously independent experiments in grassroots democracy spreading throughout the continent, brilliantly portrayed by Oliver Stone in his must-see documentary South of the Border. Some have been successful. In 2005, a multinational imperial plot implemented by the US, Canada, and France removed President Aristide from office in Haiti, who had led the clearest expression of this continental progressive wave in the Caribbean. And in 2009, the military coup in Honduras managed to neutralize with US and EU support, and often through paramilitary terror, the massive unrest and resistance on the streets created by the toppling of president Manuel Zelaya.


Yet elsewhere the attempts to remove from office and destabilize these governments have failed, not only in Venezuela in 2002 but also in Bolivia and more recently Ecuador, a clear sign of the solidity of these governments’ popular support.

These governments are far from forming a homogenous bloc and some of them have a lukewarm commitment to true social change. Many of these governments are also torn by apparent contradictions with their progressive discourse, particularly in Brazil, Argentina, and Ecuador, where peasant, indigenous, and rural workers’ organizations have firmly opposed their governments’ support for extractive industries (oil, mining) and agribusiness led by transnational corporations. In December 2010, similar tensions emerged in Bolivia, when the multitude on the streets forced Evo Morales to back down on his decision to stop subsidizing the national price of oil.


Yet with all their limits and imperfections, all of these governments have expanded the social rights of the poor and minorities, put limits to corporate power, encouraged new forms of democratic participation, and asserted a foreign policy of greater independence from US dictates. And contrary to the predictions of the media noise machines, most of these countries are experiencing rapid economic growth, reduced poverty rates, and weathered the 2008-2009 global recession relatively unscathed. This is why most of these governments have won new rounds of electoral victories despite the unrelenting hostility of the private media, which throughout the continent present them as “dictatorial” largely for failing to prioritize the interest of elites not used to not being in charge.

In short, as we enter the second decade of the century it is clear that the vanguard of the global forces pushing for progressive, non-violent social change is in Latin America.


The contrast with the current political trends in North America and Europe could not be more dramatic. In this part of the world, the recent global recession and the clear role of unregulated financial markets in creating it did not lead to a Keynesian backlash (as many had hoped) but to a renewed, aggressive corporate offensive to dismantle the welfare state, erode social rights, and punish the poor, the unemployed, women, and immigrants -all in the name of "deficits" and "tax cuts."

Variations to this wave exist here and there, and the 2008 election of Obama briefly seemed to partly counter this move in the US. But by and large, the punitive capitalist restoration that began globally in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall continues unabated in North America and Europe, partly because the seismic political shifts triggered by 9/11 dissipated the collective forces that could have potentially halted it.



Yet the multitude in the global north, partly influenced by political developments in the south, is beginning to take massively to the streets in defense of old rights. In an anti-corporate riot of an intensity not seen in North America since Quebec City in 2001, in June 2010 a multitude in Toronto tried to shut down the G20 meeting and was heavily repressed by the police. The spatial dynamic of the protest was very similar to the 2001 street clashes in Genoa and Quebec City: with the multitude trying to breach physical walls erected to protect the world political and financial elites from public wrath. More importantly, since early 2010 a notable and often violent wave of social unrest led by the youth is sweeping Europe. Huge rallies, often repressed by the police, against the corporate confiscation of social rights have recently shaken the geographies of Greece, France, the UK, Italy, and Ireland, among other countries, and anticipate future unrest.


This wave is in fact the expression of global political turbulences I cannot do justice here, but that in 2010 included the international grassroots efforts to breach the Israeli blockade of Gaza; the anti-elite uprisings that shook Bangkok for several months and that in Central Asia toppled the Kyrgyztan government; the wave of strikes by millions of Chinese workers, and the ongoing armed insurgencies in the Nigerian delta to oppose the social and environmental devastation created by Shell. These and countless other conflicts have clear local dimensions but are nonetheless part of much wider, interconnected, oscillating patterns of unrest.



The case of the US is quite peculiar in these global political landscapes, confirming that the disruptive affects that 9/11 had on anti-corporate activism in this country have been severe and long lasting. In fact, in the last two years the regular organization of rallies in public spaces has been led by the most reactionary wing of the Republican Party, The Tea Party. Eleven years after Seattle, the right seems to be more aware than the left that the concentration of passionate bodies in space is a fundamental, often decisive political force (especially when amplified, like in this case, by a militant media). A notable exception is the grassroots mobilizations that have taken to the streets all over the US, several times in the last few years, in defense of progressive immigration reform and inclusive forms of citizenship.

The geographies of the global multitude will continue shifting, more often than not in unpredictable ways. Yet it is clear by now that we are witnessing a growing global polarization between, on the one hand, a multitude that has been able to shape state power in Latin America and, on the other, the neoliberal, imperial onslaught that is gaining speed in North America and Europe and many other places. This polarization, I have tried to show, can be traced back to the turbulences of 2001-2002 and their subsequent geographical divergences.


As these global tensions unfold, we should keep in mind that the role played by the Venezuelan media in trying to hide the image of a powerful multitude taking over the national space in April 2002 was just the local expression of an Orwellian media blackout that has reached quasi-global proportions, and of which most people in the so-called liberal democracies of the north are not even aware of. And while the democratic pulsations of the multitude are hidden from the minds of metropolitan audiences, Big Brother repeats that the war on terror is peace and that the democracies forged by the multitude are dictatorial.

The democractic struggles of the multitude disseminate across the spaces of the globe through resonance, as the Invisible Committee reminded us, and the control over the tone and content of this moving resonance is therefore of fundamental political importance to pierce through hegemonic messages. This is why Wikileaks, the last weapon of the techno-nerd vanguard of the global multitude, has been so fiercely demonized by the state and corporate elites.


And the creation of a global smooth space that speeds up the travelling resonances created by rhizomes of localized struggles necessarily implies breaking down the striations and media barriers that keep vast sectors of the world population separated from each other. The New York Times, CNN, and FOX NEWS work tirelessly to prevent the pulsations coming from Latin America from breaching the borders of the US and resonating among ordinary people. And they have partly succeeded in making most Americans feel wary of the ascending power of the Latin American multitude, which they often see as exotic, distant expressions of irrational, threatening passions disconnected from US sensibilities.


But the growing rifts whitin Latin American societies are not that different from those taking place within US society. This is why those who in Latin America hate and despise Hugo Chávez, Cristina Kirchner, and Evo Morales and call them “dictators,” “communists”, “Nazis,” and “fascists” act and sound very much like the members of the American Tea Party. They share the same confused, angry, fearful language because they are part of the global backlash against the rise of the multitude.