cover image Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

Paul Mason. Verso (Norton, dist.), $19.99 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-84467-851-8

A first-hand witness to the protests in Cairo, Mason (Live Working or Die Fighting) dissects the revolutionary events of 2011 in Egypt, Britain, Greece, and America, before moving on to discuss the history, sociology, economics, and politics of unrest. From the 1848 "wave of revolutions" across Europe, to the French, Czechoslovakian, and American protests of 1968, Mason posits a common cause: the disconnect between the masses and the political systems and power structures. At the forefront of these modern uprisings are unemployed youth, the urban underclass, and organized labor. Armed with technology and social media%E2%80%94cell phone video cameras, Twitter, YouTube, etc.%E2%80%94protestors are able to mobilize sans central leadership, broadcast without Big Media mitigating their message, and%E2%80%94perhaps most importantly%E2%80%94use digital space to take to the physical streets. Mason gets bogged down in discussing the sociology of poverty and enumerating individual cases of the poor struggling to succeed, but overall his study stands as a good primer on a young revolution and its predecessors, and where we might go from here. (Jan.)