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’m all for blocking relevant roads. but if your movement just throws themselves onto any intersection without being able to explain how blocking this specific one is relevant, your movement needs better planning.
“But have you considered that I benefit personally from protecting the status quo, and these protestors are trying to change that?” -some suburbanites
But for real, I need to get more involved. I’ve been to many demonstrations, but never a protest.
That’s stupid as fuck. You don’t need to snottily educate people on why the dumb shit you’re doing has complex implications beyond the visible annoyance to the regular person. You need to find a way of protesting that has that regular person go “Fuck yeah! Let’s do this shit!”.
And what do you probably that hasn’t already been tried and failed?
Why go for new things? Just do the same thing the other side does, but do it better.
The other side has the entire backing of the oil and gas industry, as well as the growth of capitalism itself. The other side is on the side of the massively dominant ideology and economy system.
And? If that’s such an insurmountable problem, why even bother?
So your solution is to give up?
I don’t have a solution. But I know that aggravating the situation for the wrong people isn’t at all helpful.
Let’s say you have a cold. You’re dizzy, nose is stuffed, throat is scratching and shivering like hell.
Then somebody shows up and yells into your ear “Hey, you should do something about that!”.
Will that help you? No. It will only add a headache on top of all the other issues.
because not fighting means getting killed, being marginalized, getting the groundwater poisoned, losing rights, getting put into concentration camps, etc? its not complicated. lots of people don’t have the luxury to just not “bother”. they aren’t blocking roads cuz they like it, people who do direct action can get put in fucking prison. they’re doing it because they don’t have the choice to sit on the sidelines and whine about how annoying protests are.
like, for real, do you think the people who built the civil rights movement didn’t hold meetings on this exact thing? that they didn’t talk about blocking roads and airports? that they didn’t do sit-ins and other kinds of direct action? like, if you think this is stupid as fuck, you must think a great deal of the people who built and participated in the civil rights movement were pretty fucking stupid, because they were doing this shit, and it was against the law, and it was the law that broke first.
I think people need to adjust to the times. Just because it worked for people in the past doesn’t mean it will work again now.
Times change, people change, tactics change.Governments and corporations have studied past protests and never stopped looking for ways to break them apart.
Without the means to counter their updated forms of interference, those old, rickety forms of protest will only fail.
I never said to stop protests and demonstrations. I said to do them differently or to do them better.
i’m sorry, but you really aren’t in a position to be saying anything about how effective these strategies are. direct action continues to be a huge part of basically every modern social movement up to and including the largest protests in history. if you aren’t open to learning those reasons, you have no grounds to contest their efficacy.
I sense some mighty strong projection going on here. The writer comes off like they believe they’re correct without the need for any question, completely sure of this idea, for which they provide zero evidence. They then go on to call anyone who disagrees with them ignorant, infantilising and diminishing the opposing point of view before the reader has had a moment to make up their own mind. Meanwhile, the intended audience is being spoon-fed hate and gobbling it up. This is what division looks like. They make you hate your neighbors and demand action from you against them, after all it’s what’s right: you’re a grown up and the opposition needs to be parented. This is the tone that makes sure you never gain power, because you don’t believe in moderates, and you downright hate progressives.
they’re kinda right though. the things this person is saying aren’t new. the principles of direct action were instrumental in the success of the Civil rights movement, and many other activist movements throughout modern history. i’m really not sure where you think this person is coming from, though, with the whole “spoon-fed hate” thing. they’re a leftist. a socialist or an anarchist, something of that flavor. the action they’re demanding is action against climate change, against bigotry, against capitalism. or at least, i don’t really see many people who aren’t somewhere around that headspace talking about “praxis” and “direct action”. they kinda come off like a smartass to me, but the point they’re getting to is something pretty fundamental to organizing effective movements, and they’re talking about it because tons of people aren’t aware of the theory and politics that has grown up around making changes in society.
like, just for history’s sake, in the SCLC, the org MLK lead during the civil rights movement, Selma, among many other things, was organized by James Luther Bevel, the SCLC’s Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education. he turned out to have sexually abused his daughters, so uhhh… not a great dude , but if you look at his wikipedia you can see how instrumental he was to the civil rights movement as it is known today, and how the idea of direct action was foundational to that movement and its success.
You’re referencing well planned and executed protests. They picked their targets and actors to garner sympathy from the public.
The difference is that the original post is claiming that any protest anywhere is just as valid. It isn’t. Blocking random roads does nothing but turn people who just want to get to work against you. They aren’t agents of Capitalism moving to oppress us, they’re your neighbors and the people you want to be turning to your cause.
By all means, if you’re agitated about an issue to protest, please do. Block a road, maybe. But be damn sure you pick the right road to block.
i’m not really seeing any claim that “any protest anywhere is just as valid”. they’re talking about educating people on the strategic value of civil disobedience and direct action. that is important for any social movement that wants to succeed.
Blocking random roads does nothing but turn people who just want to get to work against you.
this isn’t true. it can turn people against you, for sure. that isn’t the only thing it does though. it can delay the construction of an oil pipeline. it can disrupt the logistics of an industry. like, the activist’s dilemma is important, taking care to recognize the PR of what you do is important, but direct action is about doing the thing you want done, rather than waiting for public opinion to turn.
if you are an indigenous activist trying to keep an oil pipeline from poisoning your water, or the government from leasing your land to corporate agriculture, it doesn’t matter if people are “on your side” or not. you need to stop the fully legal process that is guaranteed to make your people suffer, knowing that nobody but you and your people are historically likely to defend your home. there are so many situations where just waiting for public opinion to turn isn’t gonna stop the thing you want to stop.
Can’t wait for public opinion?
The entire point of protesting is changing public opinion to your side!
no, its to achieve your goals. this is fundamental to the idea of direct action. you’re doing stuff. you aren’t trying to build support for helping homeless people, you’re going out there and feeding them. you aren’t waiting for people to legalize desegregation, you’re defying segregated public space. you aren’t begging public officials not to build an oil pipeline in your home, you’re chaining yourself to equipment.
if you confine protesting only to convincing bystanders to be on your side, you’re just saying the only way to win a just future is to be popular. what consolation is that to the marginalized? to those who have never enjoyed widespread public support, and can’t expect it to solve their problems?
if you think protests are only to alter public opinion? you don’t know very much about protesting. direct action has been part of protests since the beginning.
I thought we were getting to the blowing-up-oil-pipelines stage, especially now that Law Enforcement in Florida is attacking mutual aid organizations.
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.
“Idiots will think you’re just assholes” doesn’t mean we think you’re just assholes. It means, if you’re doing something for an audience, you have to give a shit about reaching that audience. Half of that audience thinks libraries are communism. Aim lower.
Blocking the road to a factory, or indeed to a financial district, has obvious impact in-itself. Blocking a highway for one day just pisses off random people. For a day. You wanna fuck up traffic for most weekdays out of a month, yeah hey maybe some of them will consider public transit. Maybe. But more likely they’ll just clog alternate routes.
A campaign of slashing tires on giant pickup trucks would also piss off random people, to a much greater extent than any form of blocking traffic, but its impact would be obvious, immediate, and lingering. It is an asymmetrical attack that prevents choices the movement is against. Unlike playing human speed-bump at a four-lane intersection. People will still think you’re assholes, but they’ll also consider buying a sedan instead.
For folks wanting further reading on a similar vein to this Peter Gelderloos book “How nonviolence protects the state” goes into further detail about what he thinks is and isn’t effective protests. Given the title of the book you can assume he takes quite an extreme approach but makes a good argument I feel. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state
Where can I learn? Many communities I’m in have a TOS they have to abide by.
Where to learn how to protest? I’d look into the great ones of the modern age: The Indian Independence, US Civil Rights, and Gay Rights movements are all good examples of effective protest movements.
That feels like click bait since it doesn’t say what a protest is or does.
This is an interesting bit of writing, drawing that distinction.
It seems focused on what a protest isn’t, could do with more on what it is. What does it look like to think systemically when you turn that into action?
Yes, but it’s important to understand it as burning goodwill to do so. And it’s also important to understand that the most effective protests disrupt those with power and garner sympathy from others. ACT UP managed that. They disrupted the medical establishment that was ignoring our deaths and did so while portraying us as a sympathetic people dying in pain after caring for our dying friends.
Disruption without point is ineffective. A pre planned three day strike without the will to move to an indefinite one isn’t effective.
ETA: I guess my point is that disruption is a powerful tactic, but without strategy you’re doomed. Pure demonstration is a popular strategy because it’s low risk, but the reward is shit. A strategy that tries to use the right tactics at the right times to ensure that their next move is even more effective or leaves them better than they started is how you win. Look to the black civil rights movement for good strategy and you’ll see it. They got so good at strategy that later some of the most effective strategists of the gay liberation movement were black people who’d been involved in their civil rights movement.
We had bus drivers protests. They were not allowed to strike because “essential service”, so instead they publicly announced that they would “forget” to check people’s tickets.
Effectively they gathered people’s sympathy while distributing profits. That was effective!
I remember Extinction Rebellion blocking roads in the UK. There was a woman with a disabled child in the car. She pleased with them to let her through and the protesters said their cause was more important.
I think protests like this cause more harm than good.
Even extinction rebellion state these tactics need a rethink.
Does it increase awareness of climate change, sure. Does it polarise the population and turn more people against protests/the cause?
Yeah you let the person in immediate need through.
But I’ve seen it be effective. But as I’ve said you don’t do it randomly. It’s a key component of striking actually. You block entrance into an area. But yeah it’s everyone’s favorite tactic because while it’s not low risk it’s not gonna get you terrorism charges like dropping some thermite into a coal fired power plant will. But that thermite is a self executing protest. Green energy is cheaper to build and maintain, it only becomes more expensive when compared to existing power plants when you still have to build it.
Blocking a road doesn’t affect anyone’s supply lines enough to affect any change. If it did there would be much harsher laws and penalties when some fuckhead is on their phone and gets in an accident disrupting traffic flow.
I do think that there are different degrees of value. Blocking the roads is certainly a much less effective tactic than blockading a harbour right as coal ships are trying to leave or blocking the direct entrance/exit to a specific place of business.
But that doesn’t mean broader action is completely useless. In some cases it’s honestly the best thing you can possibly do (this example comes to mind as a brilliantly targeted action despite the thing being blocked being a whole major road). In others, it’s the simple fact that office workers do contribute to the economy, and you’re damaging the economy, which frustrates the elite.
Exactly! Blocking roads is a good protest against a city. If you’re targeting a business target it. If you’re targeting a specific action make that action massively inconvenient. Damaging oil Derricks for example. And run PR while you do it or you’ll get popular support to crack down on you. You can’t win a fair fight against the United States government. You just can’t. But you can reduce their will to fight hard while you make certain actions inconvenient.
I’ve learned to treat comments that start with “what those people don’t understand…” With a little bit more skepticism than others. I find that if your opening move is to imply that not believing your ideas shows ignorance, then chances are really high that you don’t have much confidence in arguing your case by its own merit.
Economic pressure can be a strategic move, sure. But, the road block has been largely indiscriminate, and the goal seems to be to create as much disruption as possible. Where’s the strategy in indiscriminate disruption? In fact, the corporations you advocate against are probably least hurt by shit like this, because it would be such a comparatively small hit than everyone else.
You are far more likely to inconvenience someone just trying to get by, or someone with something person and time sensitive going on than any corporation you’d like to “pressure”. They don’t feel this, they don’t think about this. You’re not disrupting corporate supply chains, you’re inconveniencing regular people.
That doesn’t even get to the fact that road blockages are extremely dangerous in emergency situations, and you’re putting far more lives at risk than your own by going out there.
If you are genuinely interested in taking a structured approach to protests, then I strongly suggest you start thinking of some other methods.
