I think teaching people how protests work is pretty important praxis and is not talked about nearly enough.
Moderates and liberals tend to think of protest and demonstration as the same thing and anything that is not a demonstration is generally though of as bad or counterproductive.
Most of the populace simply doesn’t understand that blocking roads or getting arrested have strategic value. They consider the goal of every protest to be to raise awareness and support and to convince people like them ™️ that any given cause is worth supporting and that their support is all it really takes to a make change happen. It’s a very self-centered view of how political movement work and it seems unfortunately quite obiquitous.
They see a road block and think “that just makes you look bad” and the thought process ends there because now your movement isn’t worth supporting in their eyes. If you try to explain that blocking off roads is often done to cut off supply lines to financial districts or big corporations and put economic pressure on them or the politicians they donate to, they refuse to engage with the idea entirely or claim that it doesn’t actually work and the only way to protest successfully is to win over people like them even though they’ve probably never been to a demonstration, let alone a direct action event and if they did they’d probably do more harm than good given how ignorant they are on the subject.
We really need to educate people about protesting tactics, how they work, what they actually seek to achieve, and how different methods put pressure on different areas to get different effects and I think you probably can’t teach this to older generations but younger generations are capable of learning and we really need them to learn this.
Teaching people to think in terms of systems and take a structural approach when trying to change a system is paramount because, in the current state of things, the common belief seems to be if enough people wave signs from the sidewalk, things magically work out in the end.
I think this underestimates the understanding of “protest” opponents. I don’t say “blocking roads is a bad idea since it just makes everyone hate you” because I think the people blocking the roads are doing it to be popular and they’re simply confused about how to accomplish that. I say it because the people blocking the roads don’t actually have the power to effect change through social disruption - their movement is not popular enough to be sufficiently disruptive and so their protests only make it even less popular.
(Plus, social disruption can be a tool of the majority against a government that doesn’t represent it, but here we’re talking about small minorities trying to weild influence disproportional to their share of the population. I think it’s good to structure society in such a way that they can’t do that successfully.)
It’s a good point. If there were enough people they were blocking roads in every city on the same day, with thousands coming to cheer them on, it would be totally different then two people screaming obscenities on one highway in one city. The number of people you empower (or coerce I suppose) needs to outnumber the number of enemies you create.