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 am one of these people this text is throwing shade at.
I don’t think that pitching these as an either-or thing is accurate. You can disrupt the functioning of the economic machinery, while also getting a whole bunch of “undecided” commuters pissed off at you, and doing the latter can undo some of the good effectiveness of the former in accomplishing your goal.
Persuading the general public to take climate change seriously and oppose the ones causing it is absolutely an important task. This high-minded contempt for the opinions of the general public because they’re not as informed as the golden child who is writing this text is counterproductive.
I’m not convinced that a lot of these freeway shutdowns actually are damaging the interests of the planet-destroying ruling classes who according to this they are targeted at. The Battle of Seattle sure as hell disrupted some commuters getting to work, but I don’t think anyone could mistake it as being directed anywhere but at the WTO: Their direct representatives directly being able to conduct their specific meetings. That makes the reaction to it very different. If someone started doing some version of that to e.g. Shell Oil, that would sound great. I don’t know that much about it, but I suspect that the ultimate economic impact of blocking random freeways on Shell Oil’s bottom line is nonexistent.
I’m not trying to be some armchair jerk throwing shade at the people out there trying to make a difference. But yes I don’t agree with this.
(Edit: Updated Greenpeace to WTO, a slightly more recent and applicable example.)
Yeah, I’m with you on #3. A few random white people cementing themselves to 93N in Boston did ZERO to support BLM. Nobody was educated. People who were otherwise neutral on the topic got mad at BLM.
I think a little bit of “unnecessary” disruption is a good thing in protests so a group isn’t easily ignored, but if your ONLY outcome is to make enemies and alienate allies, you did something wrong. Nobody even remembered that the 93N thing was for BLM unless they were already invested in BLM.
Malcolm X had one small thing wrong. It wasn’t that “Silence is Violence” wasn’t true, of course it’s everyone’s responsibility to fight injustice even if we’re not minorities ourselves… It’s that he said the quiet part loud. When you push people to take sides, often they take the *other side *because of your actions, when they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so otherwise.
I have a private theory that the establishment likes to promote protest tactics that they know will be counterproductive if their enemies apply them. Throwing paint at famous artworks is another of these. For some reason, activists especially in the US seem to eat this shit up and apply it enthusiastically.
I have never heard of Greta Thunberg getting arrested at a protest that is anywhere except at an office of government or industry that bears some direct responsibility for the problem. Punishing random commuters while self-righteously declaring that you’re helping was something other people came up with.
Exactly this. If your disruption can be LASER FOCUSED at your target, I think there’s an argument for it. I’m not on board with PETA-level animal activism, but I can understand and respect why they’d throw a gallon of red paint on someone’s fur coat. And if BLM protestors throw white paint all over police cars to protest how the law enforcement is “white-washed”, I would get it too.
But I’m pro-BLM. I used to donate to BLM-related causes. I got that money from my minority-owned job, and the black VP who had an interesting history of anti-racism gave a little rant about “those idiots chaining themselves to cement on the highway” when a BLM protest involved blocking off 93N…
Do you really think there’s anyone out there who isn’t aware climate change is real and a big problem who could be persuaded that it is? As far as I know, it’s universally accepted, except by people who’re convinced it’s a hoax made up by communists so they can take their guns and make their children chop their genitals off, and there’s not enough of a middle group that they could be persuaded in large enough numbers to swing an election.
It’s not like it was a couple of decades ago - people are already aware and positions are entrenched. No one’s going to look at a sign and suddenly take things seriously.
It is universally accepted by people who get their news from honest sources. In the US, that’s like 10% of the populace. If you take someone who’s a victim of engineered propaganda, and blame them for the problem that someone else is engineering and start insulting them and actively punishing them and stopping them getting to work, then get ready for no one to take global warming seriously until it’s even more too late than the too late that it already is.
My point is mainly that the people who are victims of engineered propaganda aren’t going to change their minds if they see a demonstration. If it’s possible at all, it takes a lot of friends and family members who they trust more than their news sources to spend a lot of time and effort to gradually deprogram them. Demonstrations only help when there are people who’ve heard next to nothing about either side of an issue, but would care if they were given some information (not the case with climate change as for all intents and purposes, everyone knows it’s real and a serious problem, or has been convinced it’s imaginary/actually a good thing/isn’t caused by humans), or when there are enough demonstrators to make elected representatives increase their estimate of the number of voters who they need to appease (which needs to be tens or hundreds of millions of people at a single demo - it’s very much a partisan issue around the world, so politicians on the vaguely-more-climate-change-addressing side know the people at a demo won’t vote for the other guy until the demo’s so big that it makes a third party seem like a risk).
Sorry about the hundred-and-forty-one-word sentence.