A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
peaceful protests are useless because the government can safely ingore them. violent protest forces the government to take action, just look at the history of the civil rights movement in the US. The objective of effective protest should not be to announce your displeasure with the governments actions, but to make it more costly for them to continue than to capitulate.
Heres a good quote from Stokely Carmichael about this:
To add on to this, I dont think you have to choose between persuing progress within the current system and building support for revolution, rather persuing progress within the current system shows the proletariat that your movement gets shit done and the two objectives work in harmony. The biggest concern is making sure reformists or other liberal movements do not take credit for any gains made and use them as proof that complete liberation is possible under capitalism when in fact it is not. The revolutionaries have to be seen as the champions of this progress in the eyes of the masses in order to build support for revolution.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The point of protests (in proper revolutionary movements) is to gather support and get your agenda out there so that it is un-ignorable.
Violent protest is the only useful protest if your criteria for useful is government change. But we know government change isn't coming without revolution or at the very least the serious threat of it.
So yes and no.
Violent protest is the only useful protest if your criteria for useful is government change
Roadblocks and disruptive protests fit this category. Make it more expensive for them to disobey the people than to submit.
They're worse than useless for pressuring; as in this day and age, they've started locking up protestors against unpopular policy, and a solid half of them have gotten federal RICO charges applied to whatever else the prosecutor's office wants to nail them with. (I'll let you guess which half did.) (Like for real the more I think about it, I don't think a single Jan. 6th Rioter caught RICO charges; but the Cop City protestors did? Cracker shit.)
The CPC rolled back zero COVID after about two weeks of protest.
CPC is not Washington
So protests only work to help bad policies pass, got it.
The abandobment of zero covid was a disaster
To be fully honest, I am not qualified to pass any judgement on the policy. I just wanted to point out that certain non-capitalist countries actually listen to their protestors.
If you think the point is to pressure change, most of the time, yeah, it's useless.
It's a great opportunity to catch people moving up the radicalization ladder to pull them left.
In more extreme moments with sufficient organization behind them, protests can develop into revolutions such as the fascist counter-revolution in Ukraine in 2014. That obviously didn't change much about the underlying system in Ukraine other than installing a western puppet and further empowering the fascists.
If the government were the target audience, perhaps. Although governments do listen to protests. They want you to think they're useless so that people don't join in for thinking that they're useless.
But there is another target audience, the public. Don't underestimate how much protests empower onlookers who agree with the message but haven't quite plucked up the courage to join in yet.
Seeing tens, hundreds, or thousands march in the street is not necessarily going to change minds. It may change a few but more importantly, it gives those who already agree a change to know that they're not alone.
That's powerful, particularly in a world where the right wing control almost all media and use that control to give the impression that everyone is right wing and you'd be cast out if you thought different.
Peaceful protest is completely useless, just think about it what pressure does a march on a Sunday put on anyone.
When they ignore you and change nothing, it's good for international opinion to be able to point to widespread popular protests and say "we tried doing it their way" when you escalate.
More personally, I find they're a good place to find likeminded people
Also good for inviting people to, who could be likeminded if they were to witness solidarity in person. I was always sympathetic to some causes but had that liberal nothing-will-ever-change view. Then sometime invited me to a protest. Seeing people come out to stand up for what's right made me rethink that view.
It's like when people say don't vote for a third party because it's a waste. Well, of course it's a waste if you agree with me but you won't vote for them because I won't and I won't because you're convincing me not to. If it works, it only works if we both do it. We only have to decide to do it.
Going to protests, you see the people who are willing to make change with you, even if the protest alone won't secure the victory. Once it becomes clear that such people exist, and how noisy they can be, an array of political choices suddenly opens itself up. Protests are a visible wedge of the possibility of radical politics.
I think so! At least, I don't think protesting is going to lead to change. What it does lead to is a group of really pissed off people, and contrary to what a lot of neolib discourse suggests, a group of really pissed off people can get things done.
I find them great for networking and spreading your own ideas. The protestors are there because they want change. It's actually pretty trivial to educate them on what will actually lead to it. They probably will forget about what you've taught them after their single-issue cause gets resolved, though.
Protests provide a radicalization opportunity, an opportunity to seize narratives, and an opportunity for organizations to connect and gain new members. They're pretty much useless for affecting the government, as others have pointed out, but that's kind of the point. When hundreds of thousands of people are marching in the street for months and the government is still saying "Yeah, we don't care. We're just gonna keep bombing brown kids instead of fixing homelessness" then that's kind of hard to ignore for people who are just coming into their political consciousness.
