An Interview With Paul Mason in Avgi Newspaper

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An interview with Paul Mason in Avgi newspaper, Greece, 19 Jan

2014

English version

- Is there a red line connecting all the movements described in your book?

Are there any shared characteristics?

Yes - but its not red. Its white - in every one of these movements you see

people with white wire coming from their ears. This is a connected

generation of young people who have turned the very thing that was

supposed to enslave them into a weapon: not just technology but

specifically network technology. What was supposed to keep them trapped

in a bubble of individuality actually freed them to break out of it.

What links Sol, Gezi and Tahrir is not Facebook - although they did use

these things - it is their common experience of being a generation that

cannot live with the conditions presented to them: by the breakdown of

neoliberalism, by the corrupt, conservative and repressive state, by the

development model which from New York to Cairo always favours the 1%.

When the Arab Spring inevitably went into a period of reaction, a lot of

people said - you book is wrong: then Gezi happened, then 1m people on

the streets of Brazil.

Recently the Economist magazine discovered that these movements were

linked by inequality, corruption, economic crisis and a collapse in trust. I

still think this misses something - where it;s really kicking off is in peoples

heads. There is a Human Spring that you cant make go away with tear

gas and batons.

- How do you define the subjects of the movement? Is it young people and

their problems, is it class struggle, is it religion, is it conservatism, is it the

left, and who sets the tone?

I dont buy the whole analysis of the autonomists - that the working class

has become replaced by a collective worker who can be the precariat, ahousewife, a docker, a graffiti artist. For me thats a form of declamatory

thinking. However when the autonomists say - theres not one mole

undermining capitalism but a tribe of moles - they are describing reality.


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Look at every demo in Syntagma; labour movement splits going back 70

years mean theres always two or three different official demos; then the

black bloc arrive - of course there are some plainclothes cops but if you

look at the demographic: young, skinny, male, alienated, probably from

outside traditional labour movement families. Then - at the height of 2011 -

you got a whole mass of more amorphous ordinary people. I was in the

streets near Ermou when I saw all kinds of guys - kebab stall owners,

pensioners, people with no face covering, women with gold bracelets and

Fendi handbags - all going crazy over the memorandum.

At the centre of the movements, driving forward and keeping them

going, has generally been what sociologists call networked

individuals people who live a connected lifestyle, whether theyre a

coffee bar worker or a lawyer: that doesnt mean there is no place forthe proletariat just look at the scale of Greek and Turkish union

mobilisations during their respective struggles.

But all movements have a kind of symbolic type and the networked

young people are that - in the book I call them Jacobins with a

laptop.

- In the preface of the greek edition of your book, you are suggesting that

the Greek Gezi Park is yet to follow. If Gezi is yet to follow, what happened

in December 2008? Some people believe that it was the "ground zero.

I actually say in the book December was the first of the modern struggles -

the precariat, the youth, the scale of hopelessness, right after Lehman

went bust.

All I am saying is in Gezi, I saw a level of social mobilisation I have not

seen in Greece. I saw it in Spain too, and Egypt. The best way to describe

it is when you get guys with good haircuts, gym-toned arms, probably

owning a decent car, coming up to you in balaclavas and saying theyre

going to not defend the barricade but actually attack riot cops armed muchheavier than the Greek ones.

The level of anger in Turkey - albeit from a defined half of the populationthat is secular - was so great that it blasted away all the existing divisions:

Stalinism, Kemalism, the anarchists. I have never seen such a big cross

section of society stand facing tear gas for hours, singing songs, giving


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away free food.

Maybe Greece wont have anything that big. Maybe the time for it has

passed. My most likely scenario with Greece is a political crisis if ND lose

power. As you know I interviewed Tsipras and I put to him: what do you do

to avoid becoming the Greek Allende - I think its a question people in

Syriza are not so comfortable with. I think its a reasonable question

though.

- If Snowden's revelations are valid, NSA knows potentially pretty much

everything about everyone. So, are we doomed?

Actually whats not properly recognised about the way the NSA/GCHQworks is - as far as I know - that the mass collection of data came out of

their strategy for dealing with the Iraq insurgency: collect all phone calls,

email addresses, metadata so that when an attack happens, you can data

crunch and find out who did it.

The left is not in that business. The left is in the business of a legal,

transparent, democratic struggle against austerity. So I am not sure how

much use the data is for the old, cold-war style anti left surveillance and

disruption operations.

I also think the level of legal oversight on the western military - Geneva

convention, convention on human rights etc - is likely to get imposed on

the intelligence guys now. The British drone pilots operate their aircraft with

a lawyer on hand 24/7 - so if the signals intelligence people do not, they

will probably have to.

I think any attempt to use mass surveillance against legitimate protest

movements or parties: i.e. ones that do not openly espouse and organise

violence, is going to be a hard sell even for the intelligence agencies in

Europe and the USA.

- Say that in Britain Tories and Labor form a coalition government andimpose 30% of GDP austerity over 3 years and abolish every labor right,

cripple the NHS and so on. How would the people react?


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I can guarantee you there is not going to be a Labour/Conservative

coalition in Britain unless zombies attack the planet. Actually I expect the

next year to start seeing a discussion about a Liberal-Labour coalition, and

also a fairly clear difference emerging over the scale of austerity. The

Conservatives have openly said now, that their aim is to shrink the state,

not just balance the books - so if growth revives and keeps going, there will

be a clear opportunity for Labour and even the Libdems to say: we will

soften the austerity.

The real problem in Britain is the total alienation of people from the political

class. And if you were expecting me to say it will explode no country

explodes where theyve just printed 12% of GDP in money and started to

filter it into peoples pockets.

An Interview With Paul Mason in Avgi Newspaper

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