IT'S five years since the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) that took the world by a storm. It all began in September 2011 and ended in November 2011. At its height, 'Occupy' protests happened in around 951 cities in 82 countries around the world. These protests brought forth the wide inequalities existing between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Many analytical/critical articles and commentaries were written on these protests. The End of Protest, A New Playbook for Revolution, as the title signifies, is an audacious attempt by Micah White, one of the co-founders of the OWS movement.

White accepts that the OWS was a 'constructive failure', but qualifies that it is not a 'total failure' because it was 'the strongest, most sophisticated and broadly based social movement in fifty years'. It demonstrated the 'efficacy of using social memes to quickly spread a movement, shifted the political debate on the fair distribution of wealth' and 'trained a new generation of activists' who formed the basis of many subsequent movements like the  Black Lives Matter.

According to White, an honest assessment of the OWS reveals that it 'failed to live up to its revolutionary potential', 'did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1 percent or solve income inequality'. White states that it is a constructive failure because OWS revealed certain limitations or flaws in the prevailing theories of social change through collective action. His deductions are: 'change won't happen through the old models of activism; western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy; protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual'.

White terms OWS as the 'first practical demonstration of a new kind of Internet-enabled people's warfare', which captured the imagination of people. However, identifying what he calls as the 'dangers of the Internet', White states: “Over time the Internet becomes detrimental because protests start to look better online than in real life. By sharing beautiful photos of dismal events, people start to prefer the online experience to real-world participation. The result is that we become spectators of our own protests and momentum collapses”. Calling Internet as a 'double-edged sword', he offers three rules for activists using social media: “Never broadcast inaccurate news, never conceal a defeat, never exaggerate a victory”.

White also expresses his reservations on 'clicktivism'. “By encouraging people to believe that political reality can be altered by clicking, sharing and signing petitions, clicktivism propagates a false theory of social change”. He states that clicktivism encourages complacency due to its 'feel-good online activism' and might turn away people from conventional forms of activism like demonstrations, sit-ins, etc., and make them embrace more 'slacktivist forms'. He also quotes how the British and US intelligence agencies are using various 'analytical tools' to influence and distort Internet polls, traffic and page views.

White advices that for a protest to be successful, it should not be conducted in the same manner twice. He says every protest should carry with it an element of surprise that should catch the authorities off-guard. Accordingly, each generation must discover 'anew the form of protest best suited to challenging power as it is constituted at that historical moment'. Emphasising on culture as one of the arenas of protest, he states that corporations are using all the means at their disposal to promote consumerist culture. He says that toxic advertising stunts our imagination and declines our creativity. In order to cleanse these 'info-toxins' from our system, we should all become 'mental environmentalists'. This is very important because our protests for a better society to succeed, should be creative, innovative and capture the imagination of the entire humanity.

So far so good. But from here, White, who directs a 'Boutique Activist Consultancy' – a think tank which offers suggestions on conducting protests and specialises in 'impossible campaigns' – ventures to offer a new 'unified theory of revolution'. It is here that his hollowness in understanding social change and the existing social relations gets exposed.

White fails to recognise the role of western States and their repressive machinery in quelling protests. White and his companions have naively expected the US State to concede the demands of the OWS. As he writes in the book, they had complete faith and genuinely believed in State propaganda about democracy and human rights and in President Obama. They were really surprised when police used force to evacuate occupiers. They were blind to class and its interests.

White consistently fails to correctly appraise the strength of the ruling classes and the State machinery. According to his assessment, the ruling classes have lost 'self-confidence' and together with the corruption among the elites and inefficiency of the government, they do not have the strength to continue in power. He states that the conditions are ripe for a revolution as along with this, people are suffering from rising inequalities. He reasons that a revolution is not taking place due to the adoption of wrong protest tactics and refuses to identify the unfavourable correlation of class forces.

For White, innovation and creativity in protests have nothing to do with material realities, but are entirely spiritual. It is from here he takes off in an idealist tangent, mixing it with anarchist theories. He talks about epiphanies, spiritual realisation, symbolism, lunar cycles and theurgism (derived from Greek, meaning the merger of the spiritual with the terrestrial). White gives enormous importance to the spiritual aspect in the success or failure of any protest, even stating that the experience of the past two thousand years of revolutions demonstrated that spirit was the deciding factor in all uprisings.

White does not hide his anarchist views – in fact, he approvingly speaks of anarchism. True to anarchism, he presents general platitudes against exploitation, but fails to understand the causes of exploitation and the development of society. He refuses to recognise classes and class struggle as the 'creative force' for the transformation of the society. His aversion towards class struggle can be particularly noticed as he never acknowledges the working class or its pioneering role in the struggle against capitalism. What makes it deceitful is, he conveniently quotes Engels, Lenin and even Mao at times, but never acknowledges the importance they had accorded to class struggle in social transformation.

Precisely at the same time as he was writing this book, the US society was witnessing a new wave of working class struggles. In Verizon, one of the biggest communication companies, the workers struck work for nearly a month and were able to force the management to agree to their demands. Also, there were workers struggles demanding an increase in the minimum wage, whose impact was so much that even Hillary Clinton was forced to include it in her presidential campaign agenda. In this background, ignoring working class and its struggles – all the more by a person who claims to have studied the entire history of protests and revolutions dating back from pre-Christian era – appears to be a deliberate slight.

The ruling classes are using the prolonged global economic crisis to intensify their exploitation and attacks on the working class and common people. Many of the protests against these attacks appear to be not yielding the necessary results or are not being successful. That should be a reason to not only ponder on the tactics of the protests, but also situate those protests in the overall correlation of class forces and prepare the people to be ready to strike at the first opportune time.

The entire history of the Great October Socialist Revolution, whose centenary the world is observing now, teaches us precisely those lessons that are needed to bring about a social change. The strategy and tactics adopted by the Bolsheviks placed immense faith on the people, gave appropriate slogans and never gave up hope. They did not wait for divine intervention, but worked towards the maturity of the revolutionary situation. And more importantly, they as the vanguard party, had dedicatedly and consistently worked among the proletariat so that the ‘revolutionary class' was ready to “carry out revolutionary mass actions strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government” when the revolutionary situation had matured.

Lenin termed anarchism as 'a product of despair' and the 'psychology of the unsettled intellectual'. The failure of the OWS, as White graciously acknowledges, rightly called for an introspection about protests. Instead of analysing the reasons objectively and drawing correct conclusions, White appears to be in real despair and tries to gain succor from spiritualism and epiphanies.

Anarchists neither trust the working class and its revolutionary role nor the vanguard party. They do not attempt to identify the weakest link in the chain of capitalism or in its advanced stage, imperialism. Without the identification of the weakest link and concentrating our attack on that point, we cannot expect a revolutionary transformation. Many a times, it may so happen that anarchist acts appear bold and attractive. But they are not ‘revolutionary' as, most often than not, they blindly rain their blows, lose their strength very fast and get despaired at their failure. At times it also so happens that instead of helping the revolutionary movement, the acts of anarchists impede its growth. It is for these reasons that anarchism should be exposed before it gains traction.

White's book can easily be ignored, but it should not be, because many young people around the world are getting attracted to anarchism and are very fast getting disillusioned and losing hope. The materialist basis of exploitation should form the basis for organisation and not spiritual realisations. To win over these youth, who are discontented with the capitalist system, it is necessary to walk them in the correct revolutionary path – the path of scientific socialism. That should also be one of our tasks in observing the centenary of the October Revolution.