If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution is a 2023 political history and journalism book by author and journalist Vincent Bevins. The book concerns the wave of mass protests during the 2010s and examines the question of how the organization and tactics of such protests resulted in a "missing revolution," given that most of these movements appear to have failed in their goals, and even led to a "record of failures, setbacks, and cataclysms". The title refers to the theme of self-immolation, which appears at the beginning and end of the decade, from the tragic death of Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010 to the adoption of a phrase from The Hunger Games during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests: “If we burn, you burn with us.”
The book begins by tracing the history of left wing activism from the end of the October Revolution, through the New Left and into the present day. In particular, it traces the history of vanguardism in left-wing movement politics and the shift toward distributed horizontalism in mass protest movements since the early 20th century. The final chapter argues that the lack of central leadership enabled...
Nathan Schneider
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