I wonder if it's bad for our future prospects that literally every mass protest movement in the US in my adult lifetime has either completely failed or not bothered to even make a demand.
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The net effect of the George Floyd protests was increased police funding and bipartisan demonization of serious police reform. That was the biggest coordinated protest in US history. I'm not saying the organizers or protestors did anything wrong. I'm saying we're in a bad situation.
The first mass protest movement I remember as an adult was against the Iraq War, widely recognized (in retrospect) as an obvious mistake and preventable tragedy. The protests had no effect whatsoever. Absolutely none. An unelected fraud lied us into a war unimpeded.
Our political system and elites are not merely unresponsive to popular demands -- they view them as by definition illegitimate. Protest creates a REQUIREMENT to do the opposite of what protestors want. This is bipartisan. What do you do in that situation? I honestly don't know.
I notice that for some strange reason, many folks post way more often about "protesting" and marching and rallies and petitions than they ever do about something called "direct action," but I'm sure this is just because they're far too busily engaged in all kinds of direct action to post through it
Direct action is defined by trying to identify a vulnerability and to assessing the tactical and strategic capacity of the people involved to hit that vulnerability effectively. Bus lines depend on revenue of Black passengers? Boycott them. Go back on board when they stop segregating. Done.
yeah, it’s amazing how often people love to quote MLK on the arc of justice, non-violence, etc., and at the same time completely neglect what he said about using one’s own body in direct action to *force* a crisis that will compel transformation of unjust laws
Take fossil fuel divestment, for example--McKibben's proposition was that university and institutional endowments somehow could change general views of fossil fuel companies and somehow lead to overall political pressure to cut their federal subsidies. Which was just magical thinking.
Which was copying the Divest from South Africa movement, which arguably had some effect on international attitudes. But why it worked to the extent it did would not translate to fossil fuels.
One would think that the disanalogy between "one particular country" and "the foundational global energy source for everything" would have jumped out at everyone involved more immediately
Well, for one, stop protesting in forms and genres that are basically following the template of the civil rights movement as if that is a completely replicable case suitable for all purposes. For another, a lot of protest has had no specific idea of what political chokepoint it's aiming at.
Which has value, actually--it creates solidarity, it creates sociality, it at least takes a stab at maintaining and renewing a foundational vision. But it's not direct action aiming at a vulnerable chokepoint that forces a response.
Unfortunately I don't see how we ever get viable third, fourth or fifth political parties on a national level (they might work in smaller scale in states or regions) without getting rid of the electoral college. Which is almost impossible to do.
I'm not a political scientist but it feels like the story of the protests in retrospect will be the way they were co-opted for electoral politics. Sometimes they were used to increase voting and donating, sometimes they were used to give politicians something to left punch about. But not, you know
to have demands met. I'd like to say the problem seems to me to be that the weakness of the protests was that their point was to influence, not to force, the way a strike forces but in a world where they'll probably just kill you if you shut anything down it's hard to know what to do
I'm kind of working on a theory that the Democratic Party is uniquely opposed to mass politics of any kind since maybe the 1968 election and that has shaped all of their responses since.
The thing is, all of the candidates who tried to run on a more mass platform post 68 got their asses handed to them in the primary process. Its really underdiscussed but critical, IMO, to understanding how we got here: left-flavored populism was a loser, up and down the ticket, for decades
And it became a loser because the people pushing it wouldn't put racial integration back in the box. They weren't even progressives on race, they just took it seriously as an issue and they lost over and over and over to candidates who were explicitly racist or just wanted to ignore the whole thing.
I don’t think so. What about the tea party? That’s where we are today—in tea party America. They didn’t all go to the streets but they sure showed up at any open forum after Obama got elected
Heard, tho sometimes perceiving mvmt outcomes in terms of the either/or of failure/success obscures more than it clarifies. Even if specific demands aren't achieved, the ground sometimes shifts in ways that are felt later + that open new possibilities. Also Bevins' "If We Burn" speaks to your point.
Fine, fine, but even those kinds of changes don't seem to have occurred. Remember when Occupy supposedly made Obama literally *mention* inequality and that was a sign it was working? That was really stupid
Yeah I agree the metric of whether or not a prez mentions it is not the best metric. We should measure in other ways. OWS failed to do a lot but it also seeded a significant number of new organizing practices and formations and sub-movements that remain with us and that have improved ppl's lives.
I'm referring less to the specific way OWS was organized and more to the fact that it catalyzed new formations. The Debt Collective for instance. Which has contributed to material improvement in people's lives.
It may seem like a needlessly technical point, but the point to me is that the time or the physics of how change takes place isn't always legible in terms of absolute success or absolute failure. And that it's worth recognizing this if we want to learn from past + develop winning strategies/tactics.
I've got a half-baked Occupy-inspired theory about horizontalism, consensus, and Quakerism undermining the ability of US left movements to make concrete demands, exercise discipline, and implement long-term plans, but there's obviously a lot more to it.
I remember Feb 2003 protests against invasion of Iraq - in US, Canada, all over. Largest protests in Europe, but also tens and 100s of thousands in US cities. Largest mass protest in history. Dwarfed anything from Vietnam era.
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Nothing.
The thing is that it's weird and it doesn't have to be that way, and I happen to know for a fact that the US government does respond to mass protest and civil disobedience, because it did when it happened against the Navy in Vieques (Puerto Rico). If anything, I'd think they'd ignore the colony
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Nothing.