The other day I purchased a slim volume entitled ‘John Berger: The Undergound Sea’, edited by Tom Overton and Matthew Harle, on the miners and the miners’ strike. The bulk of the book was given over to Berger quotes and atmospheric – or fuzzy, depending on your mood – photos of miners at work and out and about. I was interested but by no means bowled over. But then towards the end of the book there was an interview between John Berger and Joe Roberts transmitted in 1963. The latter talked about his time down the mines. He was born in 1890, son of a miner, and said he had no choice but to go down the pit: ‘the moment I was fourteen I had no option whatsoever. I had to go down the pit owing to financial circumstances.’ This was pre-health and safety. The conditions in which he worked are unimaginable to us now, though they will at least still be understood by the subsequent generations of miners who struggled below ground until eventually abandoned and cast aside by Thatcher in the 1980s.
Incidentally, I’ve also just read Brad Evans’ ‘How Black Was My Valley’, what I would describe as a prose poem born of personal acquaintance and scholarship that exquisitely captures lives in mining and the grinding poverty that surrounded it in the ‘black’ Welsh valleys of his youth. Berger’s interview with Joe Robert’s takes us back to lives of daily danger well before Evan’s time. We must not forget what has been won and what lost since these days.
But the reason for this blog lies elsewhere. At the end of the Berger volume is a series of reflections on his part on protests and oppositional movements. There are fascinating and raise several issues I have commented on over recent years (see my blog in March this year on ‘Making Social Change Happen’). I shall quote liberally from Berger here.
Here we go:
‘The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality – the intensity of rehearsed awareness – may, on different occasions, vary considerably: but any demonstration which lacks this element of rehearsal is better described as an officially encouraged public spectacle.’
‘A demonstration, however much spontaneity it may contain, is a created event which arbitrarily separates itself from ordinary life. Its value is the result of its artificiality, for therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities.’
‘A mass demonstration distinguishes itself from other mass crowds because it congregates in public to create its function, instead of forming in response to one: in this, it differs from any assembly of workers within their place of work – even when strike action is involved – or from any crowd of spectators. It is an assembly which challenges what is given by the mere fact of its coming together.’
‘State authorities usually lie about the number of demonstrators involved. The lie, however, makes little difference. (It would only make a significant difference if demonstrations really were an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State.) The importance of the numbers involved is to be found in the direct experience of those taking part in or sympathetically witnessing the demonstration. For them the numbers cease to be numbers and become the evidence of their senses, the conclusions of their imagination. The larger the demonstration, the more powerful and immediate (visible, audible, tangible) a metaphor it becomes for their total collective strength.’
‘I say metaphor because the strength thus grasped transcends the potential strength of those present, and certainly their actual strength as deployed in a demonstration. The more people are there, the more forcibly they represent to each other and to themselves those who are absent. In this way a mass demonstration simultaneously extends and gives body to an abstraction. Those who take part become more positively aware of how they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate and implies a common opportunity. They begin to recognise that the function of their class need no longer be limited: that it, too, like the demonstrations itself, can create its own function.’
Demonstrations, Berger concludes, express political ambitions before the political means to realise them have been created. They can contribute to their realisation but cannot themselves achieve them.
‘The question which revolutionaries must decide in any given historical situation is whether or and strategy for the performance itself.’
It is a cliché that our increasingly authoritarian neoliberal governments in the twenty-first century can actually gain succour from ‘ineffective’ protests, which they advertise as reflective of their democratic openness. But as I write this the Biden regime in the US, especially, Sunak’s in the UK and others across the EU are being confronted by student agitation, campus sit-ins and encampments against Israeli war crimes in Gaza. This is all reminiscent of the student protests against Vietnam in the 1960s. Committed to Israel ‘right or wrong’, the neo-Imperial West is giving Israel free reign to slaughter Palestinian civilians, including thousands of women and children, reinforced by the vigorous Zionist lobbying that Hil Asked has clearly exposed in his study, ‘Friends of Israel’. Students – and faculty too – protesting in many American university campuses are at this very moment being assaulted and arrested by riot police called in by university authorities with big investments in Israeli companies. But repression, because this is what it is, using excessive force against peaceful protesters, can, and seems in this instance likely to, fuel resistance.
My old friend from Emory University, sociologist and world systems theorist Terry Boswell, showed empirically that accumulated protests typically precede more revolutionary collective action. This lends a certain strength to Berger’s observation.