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The New Urban Question by Andy Merrifield
Critical review Urban Jacobinism
In this chapter, Merrifield manifests two necessities concerning insurrection
issue. The first one is to conceive a plan of action, to have a strategy and to
channel all the anger and dissatisfaction into a common goal. I think it is
obvious that planning is essential in any kind of acting. As Thomas Carlyle
(philosopher,

satirical

writer,

essayist

and

teacher)

said

the man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - waif, a nothing,
a no man. Have a purpose in life, and, having it, throw such strength of mind
and muscle into your work as God has given you. I think the same principle
rules the social movement and to effect a social change the actions cannot
be spontaneous and reckless. At this point, it is reasonable to challenge that
if an insurrection needs a leader. I think, yes, it does. The leader mentioned
here is not the man known in general but much more a representative and
even an anonymous one. From this respect, I found Merrifield open to
misinterpret due to restricting leadership issue just with Blanqui and
Robespierre. A leader of a movement can also be considered as a group of
people comprised of anonymous ones as ar which represented the
common goal of the movement and united people for the sake of real
democracy in the Gezi movement. Anyone can say that it is hard to trust
someone without knowing their face or name but I think the main
consideration here should be the idea reflecting the common goal of the
insurrection. I think it is why in 2012, Time called Anonymous one of the
"100 most influential people" in the world. They have no a single leader for
its own, but the group itself is an initiator of the protests which makes it a
leader of that action. In other words, for a social movement there should be
a person, a group of people or an institution of which names, interests or
personal gains count for nothing but the first priority is to leading the mass
with an agenda based on and planned accordingly common desires and
values for the revolution.

The second requirement Merrifield presents is to plan the aftermath of the

insurrection. For me, it is possible to evaluate the Gezi movement as not a
full-failure but a disappointment in terms of consequences, because I believe
the main intention was not just to show the potential of the crowd or to lift
up the voice en masse. These were the first steps of the major aim which is
to break the current system and for this moment this goal has not been
achieved. Therefore, planning the aftermath can be a solution in the
forthcoming movements. However, I think Merrifield fails by representing the
insurrection as an equation between two unknowns. He also fails by
evaluating any movement as a successful one in general (that is why I
remarked Gezi movement as a disappointment for me) because all the
social, political, environmental or any kind of action/movement can be root
in numerous reasons depend on country, time, reason and etc. In my
opinion, if he attempted to provide a concretization to express his ideas on
insurrection by this mathematical equation, he should have considered the
unknowns vary. I think that is why Merrifield is not able to satisfy anyone
(and actually he does not have to) who lives in different country and has
different conditions than what he presents as examples and that is why in
Turkey we figure Jacobinism in all negative aspects without considering what
he could try to express. I hope that as he emphasized the new in the title
of the book, we will comprehend what his new urban Jacobinism involves at
the end of the book.