What are Today’s Protests Missing?
Joshua Keating makes the common observation that latter-day western protest movements—either the diffuse group that protests at major international gatherings, or the anti-war street demonstration in the United States—haven’t had much success. And he offers a common diagnosis: They’re too vague and slipshod:
Collins names Gandhi’s march to the sea and Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington as the ultimate effective demonstrations in this sense. They mobilized huge groups in support of a defineable and acheivable goal rather than opposing an amorphous concept like “capitalism.”
The fact that much of the street activism against the U.S. war in Iraq has been led by a group called Act Now to Stop War & End Racism is a good indication of why the antiwar movement has never really been a factor in debates over U.S. foreign policy. Rather than organizing around a specific political goal, ending the war, these marches tend to devolve into general lefty free-for-alls encompassing everything from Palestine to free trade the environment to capital punishment.
I don’t really think that’s right. Both Gandhi and King led movements that were committed to vaguely defined and quite sweeping visions of social change that, among other things, included opposition to capitalism and all forms of war. Their goals look well-defined in retrospect because they achieved a great deal so, in retrospect, MLK’s leadership resulted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Gandhi’s leadership led to independence for India. But all mass-movements are prone to ill-defined goals.
The difference is that the methods of King and Gandhi were quite different from sporadic sign-waving and noise-making, and also quite different from sporadic destruction of property. Both men led sustained campaigns of non-violent resistance. The point in both cases was that unjust systems, be they apartheid in the southern United States or British rule in India, couldn’t actually be made to work without the cooperation of the subject populations. You might have a rule against black people doing this or that, but uniformly enforcing the rule would be completely impractical. But the threat of enforcement was enough to keep violations of the rules rare, and thus the system worked. When enough people are mobilized, however, you can overwhelm the system’s ability to operate and force people to make changes.
In practice, this is just about the most difficult thing in the world to get people to do. Individually, it’s rational to mind your own business and just cope with mistreatment as best you can. And to get people out of that mode normal involves switching them into a mode of angry, violent resistance that stiffens the desire of the oppressor to beat the subjects down. Organizing people around disciplined, consistent non-violent resistance in which you neither meekly submit to injustice nor angrily lash out against it, but instead move in a calm and determined way to challenge it is extraordinarily difficult. But it works. Getting people to come out every once in a while hold a “protest” is, by contrast, pretty easy. And in the right frame of mind, it’s even fun. I’ve had fun doing it. But it doesn’t really change anything.
57 Responses to “What are Today’s Protests Missing?”
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April 3rd, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Show men a man who won his freedom through peace. I’ll show you 100 who won it through violence.
The truth is, MLK and Ghandi had it easy. Both had large, semi-violent networks capable of playing ‘bad cop’ to their ‘good cop’. Without that, neither would have achieved anything.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
I wouldn’t say they had it easy, or that their movements would have been ineffectual without the undercurrent of violence by other movements, but you have a point. After all that story today where Obama told the CEOs that he was the only thing standing between them an the pitchforks (so it was time to make some concessions).
With the very real threat of violence by an angry mob (and the fact that the majority of the populace would probably not care much if the CEOs were beaten up) it would have been a very different meeting.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Protesters need to at least come up with some new chants. They’re so LAME. I like lefty protests, but if I hear “Hey hey, ho ho, (fill in the blank here) has got to go” one more God damn fucking time, I’m buying a rifle and ammo and joining Glenn Beck and Chuck Norris in Galtland/Paranoiaville.
Also, leave the Pro-Choice signs, Free Palestine signs, Free Mumia signs, US Out of Iraq signs, Viva Zapata signs, and No WTO signs out of each other’s protests. Seriously, people. If you were watching TV and 10 different ads all came on at once, would you buy what they were selling? Could you even figure out what they were selling?
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I went by the protests on Wall Street today. I’m glad that a few hundred people were willing to come out in the rain and hold up signs (some of them very pointed and entertaining).
But did the people at the mic really have to start ranting about Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier? WTF do either of them have to do with AIG?
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Maybe this is just because I am looking at them in retrospect, but the things Ghandi and King fought for and won were things that honest, reasonable people overwhelming agree are right. Ending capitalism? Really? Or world trade? OK. Whatever you say.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I went to a few anti-war protests. But I found that the catharsis they offered was diluted by the way they managed to sweep in everyone who wanted to protest anything. People were on as much about legalizing abortion, gay marriage, and domestic wiretapping–all causes I support, but it caused some schisms and really wasn’t what I was there for. Then there were all the people who were on about one-world government, armed takeover of the White House, extreme isolationism, 9/11 truthers, and a whole host of other things I did not want to appear to be supporting. On top of all that, there was a lot of shitty poetry.
And I really, really didn’t want to be associated with people wearing Bush-as-Hitler bodysuits.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:31 pm
In ref to Mr Soullite (#1), I think it was a bitter, pro-imperial Winston Churchill who speculated that if the Axis had won WW 2, Ghandi would have never freed India from the Japanese Empire. An accurate observation I think.
About the broader point–that specific goals which unite mass protests are most effective, I recall that the anti-VietNam War rallies were huge and narrowly focused. And essentially worthless until Sen Fulbright and a few others took up that cause.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
soullite,
So are you actually advocating violence to win whatever “freedoms” it is you seek (and what are those freedoms, exactly?), or have you resigned yourself to what you believe to be a low chance of success through non-violent means?
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I sometimes wonder the outcome if people refused to volunteer for the U.S. military. Once the draft was activated people refused to answer that call. Once jailings ensued everyone went to jail. What would happen if the government threw a war and no one attended? Of course between the true believers, the militaristic and the destitute knowing of nowhere else to get a paycheck it’ll never happen.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Gandhi marched to the sea? I thought that was Sherman . . .
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:38 pm
The Vietnam peace movement was somewhere in the middle. The draft resistance and so on was never at a level that really impeded the war effort, but over time the sustained protest broadened the debate and encouraged politicians to look at the issues more closely. (It also encouraged Nixon to further retreat into paranoia, and indirectly helped bring him down.)
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Public protest was already ironic by the 1969. After then it had if anything, in its most common cause the anti war movement, a negative effect.
Public protest is uncool. It is portrayed in the media as uncool. Often it is not portrayed at all except if there is violence or the threat of it, by the protesters.
Suppressing public protest has become a fetish of law enforcement and really of the elites. Any planned protest will be filled with police informers who often become provocateurs to insure physical suppression is required.
Laws are proliferating endlessly to control public gatherings. In East Lansing right now to head off another basketball riot, but which will serve handily for any groups in the future. These championship riots are erstwhile basis of these laws but make no mistake the police are fully aware of their utility in all circumstances.
Corporations view public protest as silly if not bizarre, or dangerous. Corporations view themselves as the epitome of a free and democratic society. While then can understand and even support protest against the government protest against themselves is seen as an existential threat that cannot and will not be tolerated. Since they have the seats at the legislative and government executive table, and citizens don’t, the results are predictable.
And I say again. Protest is uncool.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Gandhi’s march to the sea was impressive, but his trip to England was even more so. He put a lot of English weavers out of business. He visited those people when he went to England, and he showed compassion for them. He recognized that his antics caused suffering for other people. And the fact that those people were his enemies didn’t matter. It takes a strong man to love one’s enemy. And in the time between Jesus’s death and Gandhi’s birth, I don’t think a man like that was ever born.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
” Rather than organizing around a specific political goal, ending the war, these marches tend to devolve into general lefty free-for-alls encompassing everything from Palestine to free trade the environment to capital punishment.”
See: NYU
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
The street protest is a means of political communication and exercise of political power that belongs to another era. In asking why there aren’t many effective street protests any more, you might as well ask, “Why aren’t there as many minstrels and town criers as there used to be?”
To get the powerful to take notice to any sort of mass movement, that movement needs to present a show of potential political force that is actually a threat to the power of those that are in charge, a threat that, if not addressed, has the capacity to turn a potential force into an actual force that can seriously damage the interests of those powerful elites, whether through violence or other forms of collective social action. The protesters have to appear as a political force that has the capacity to disrupt the social order: to stop very large numbers of people from working, or from paying their taxes, or from obeying the law.
Most of the protests we saw during the Iraq War conveyed just the opposite message. They gathered together scattered, motley gangs of the marginal. Everything about what the protesters did reeked of the message, “We are marginal and are very likely to stay that way. We even like being marginal.” Why would anybody fear them or feel that attention must be paid to them? Most of these protests are self-indulgent celebrations of alienation, not serious attempts to display the potential to seize power.
Another problem is that the mass protest movements to which some activists are so romantically attached took place in societies with very different class structures than our own. These methods were designed for a day and age in which society is divided into two clear classes, one of which possesses power, but is a minority, and the other of which lacks institutional power, but is a majority. A protest by people who even present themselves as disaffected and isolated not just from the most powerful members of society, but even from the broad middle class majority, is not to be taken seriously as a group that has the potential to force change.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Protests do not work today because nobody will sacrifice anything to make it a success.
Wandering around for a couple hours shouting means nothing.
Actual civil disobedience, putting your job, health, life on the line for a cause is what’s missing.
Nobody is willing. It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon or join a one-off march. It’s harder to dedicate yourself to a cause at the expense of your own personal comfort.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Matt,
I’m not sure I agree with your characterization of King-led protests as not being about specific, achievable goals. Certainly in the larger picture, yes, changing the relationship of African-Americans to the rest of America was far-reaching and perhaps vague. But King’s protests functioned day to day fighting for quite specific changes revolving around segregation and violence. Moreover, the protests stopped in individual cities when those goals had been achieved, and sometimes when they had not. That’s a significant difference between the civil rights movement at its height and the kind of protest we saw as the G-20 movement.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:52 pm
So, I’ve been on both sides of protests, and attending them left me with a bad taste in my mouth because they were so…well, for lack of a better term, masturbatory. In PA, we used to have a lot of Mumia Abu-Jamal rallies, and at the ones I went to, Mumia was pretty much peripheral – people came to oppose racism, or war, or marijuana laws, or whatever else, but didn’t really walk outside of their narrowly defined field. I think the protest has become the preferred form in western democracies because it’s theatrical, and doesn’t involve any real commitment.
There are, after all, a bunch of other tools for change: boycotting, voter registration, sit-ins, strikes, pamphleteering, arguing legal cases, creating legal cases, and the successful examples listed above (Gandhi and King both being examples of this), used protests ALONG with a variety of other mechanisms during a long and often frustrating process of change.
I think what’s really happened is that protests in the western world, where the governments are well established democracies and have mechanisms for popular input into the system, have become a form of theatrical letting-out-of-air. They make the protestors feel good are noisy, but the system keeps moving because the system can shrug off that kind of criticism. The problem isn’t so much that the protests are neutered (I imagine they always were), as that the protestors have stopped using other mechanisms available for social change.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Matt, you hit on the central point, but didn’t bring it home:
“The point in both cases was that unjust systems, be they apartheid in the southern United States or British rule in India, couldn’t actually be made to work without the cooperation of the subject populations.”
That is, isn’t it, really the reason why the anti-war movements of the 60s and 00s both failed, and why the anti-trade stuff does too? Vietnam, Iraq, and transnational corporations don’t need the willing participation of the protesters, so the protests don’t carry any threat to them. Under the circumstances, I don’t see how any anti-war or anti-capitalism movement could possibly succeed.
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Well, I’m still waiting for Obama to personally give me a machete and a mug of banana beer so I can begin killing cockroaches.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
The most successful public protest of the last 30 years or more was the Brooks Brothers Riot of GOP professionals outside the Palm Beach county vote counting room. It is now the stuff of legend.
That is all one needs to know about these things now. Deconstruct it to your hearts content. It is not the protest that matters, it is how it is portrayed. There is no possible way popular protest will be portrayed in anything but a vaguely to highly negative way.
I am actually agnostic on all this. If however the day comes when there are troops in the streets as a matter of course I will man the barricades. Irony be dammed.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:09 pm
The big social justice battles of the modern era – civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights – have already been won or largely won. There aren’t any really big social injustices left to fight. Which is why today’s protests are so splintered and weak. Maybe animal rights will eventually become a big enough issue. Or maybe there’ll be another Vietnam.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
The economic turmoil with the biggest protests that I can think of was the Weimar Republic, and that was a clash of fascists and communists. Maybe ours will be progressives versus libertarians, since we are so much more sophisticated.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Nowadays protest is assumed whenever governments make controversial choices. It’s been absorbed as part of the normal order of business and shunted away into “free speech zones”.
Take yesterday. I live in Oakland, and at the BART station on my way home, there were a couple of dozen people protesting the BART police (after the murder of Oscar Grant by a BART cop). There were an equal amount of protesters and cops (most of whom were hanging around, chatting and taking pictures with their cell phones). As I entered the station, I heard someone shout, “We don’t need BART cops!” about 3 yards away from a BART cop guiding commuters through a maze of barriers erected for the event. A man futilely cajoled “We have to shut down this station,” to a throng of people more interested in getting home. No one stopped, as this was the most minor of inconveniences, one that is hardly unprecedented. I’m willing to bet that this protest changed exactly no one’s mind about anything.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Only one Indian protest really shook the British, and it wasn’t Gandhi’s, it was Bose’s.
In fact, had there not been a massive famine in Bengal in 1942-3…well, that’s alternate history, so we don’t need to go there.
Gandhi’s protests are glorified because they allow the British to feel that they might have lost India, but at least they handed it over to good people. They also allow the Indians to delude themselves into thinking that Bose was an aberration and into thinking that they won their own independence.
You want to know which fucking protest did the most to bring independence to the European colonies? It wasn’t Bose’s either, that was small potatoes.
Matt would rather live in the cloud cuckoo land where nonviolent civil disobedience won the day. But that doesn’t change the fact that the most effective protest against colonialism was Yamashita’s.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:34 pm
The anti-Iraq war rallies of Feb 03 (which, if I’m not mistaken, rank right up there with the largest gatherings of humans in history) really brought home for me the fact that marching is dead as a political tool. Street demonstrations accomplish nothing.
The thing I’ve been rolling around in my head, though, is whether mass demonstration can be transferred online. One of the failings of street marching is that, no matter how many people show up, it just doesn’t have the same shocking impact it used to. We’ve all been there, done that, film at 11.
I’m thinking along the lines of mass twitterings, overwhelming servers with emails, getting everyone to change their facebook status to the same message for a day (I have no idea, I’m thinking out loud). Activists are always chiding bloggers/commentors for not going out and DOING SOMETHING, missing the point that in 10 years the digital world will be the whole world. It IS where the action is.
Just a thought.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:35 pm
So, I’ve been on both sides of protests, and attending them left me with a bad taste in my mouth because they were so…well, for lack of a better term, masturbatory.
Exactly. It’s about self-indulgent pleasure from expressing virtue rather than a calculated, disciplined, strategic plan to achieve something concrete. I’m sure a lot of the people that engage in those types of protests mean well and care a lot, but they are ultimately just wanking.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Re: Maybe this is just because I am looking at them in retrospect, but the things Ghandi and King fought for and won were things that honest, reasonable people overwhelming agree are right. Ending capitalism? Really? Or world trade? OK. Whatever you say.
LFV,
I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but King was a democratic socialist who believed Marx had more than a few things right. Gandhi’s economic thought was idiosyncratic but in essence he believed in an agrarian village utopia in which all classes subordinated their interests to the common good. It was vaguely similar (VERY vaguely) to a Hindu equivalent of the economic system called ‘corporatism’ by Catholic and Orthodox thinkers in the interwar period. This isn’t a good analogy, but its probably better than any other. So yes, both of them were anti-capitalist in principle (and Gandhi was, in general, fairly described as anti-modern in the same way as Tolstoy) although they also had narrower political goals.
Gandhi, of course, succeeded only because Britain had been terminally weakened by the Second World War, and because she felt that she could not maintain her empire in the face of rising Soviet threat.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:39 pm
marching is dead as a political tool.
Bingo. When something becomes commonplace, it loses its capacity to shock the public and those in power.
Marches had their day. Time to move on to other tactics to put pressure on the political establishment. The problem, of course, is the combination of boomer narcissism and boomer envy that caused people to engage in an endless cycle of trying to recreate the 60s-era protest marches.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Activists are always chiding bloggers/commentors for not going out and DOING SOMETHING, missing the point that in 10 years the digital world will be the whole world. It IS where the action is.
Err, unless we’re getting a Resurrection Hub, I’m pretty sure it’ll still be “no man, no problem.”
Whining on the internet won’t stop bombs or bullets. So the action will still be in a very, very physical world.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Was MattY ever aware of who was behind ANSWER, or did he just forget? As I know from going to several of them to take pictures, they were just a grab bag of far-far-left wackiness.
If anyone – right, left, center, up, down – wants to actually do something, you have an incredible distribution medium in Youtube. With enough views to start with you can get on a top list and get even more. How to take advantage of that to push whatever your agenda is is described here.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Street protests won’t do it- we need a third party that actually represents the people.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Spot on–this kind of clarity is rare indeed.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:20 pm
The anti-Iraq war rallies of Feb 03 (which, if I’m not mistaken, rank right up there with the largest gatherings of humans in history) really brought home for me the fact that marching is dead as a political tool. Street demonstrations accomplish nothing.
I wouldn’t be so quick to conclude that. Opinion turned against the Iraq war pretty quickly, with far fewer casualties and military setbacks than Vietnam. I think protests had lot to do with that; they made the American public uneasy about the war from the very start. The protests created a distinct sense that we were not all in this together, and I think that’s what ultimately turned opinion so decisively against the war and the Republicans as early as 2005/6.
Of course, I have no evidence for this, and can’t really back it up. But that’s the impression I got.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Last year I attended a conference in Cleveland to organize the anti-war protests that called itself the “National Assembly”. The stated goal of the conference was to organize large street protests to stop the war in Iraq.
I attempted to convince the conference attendees that A. our ultimate aim should be to lobby congress to end the war, and B. that we should create an umbrella organization to expand the membership of the (active) anti-war movement. Both ideas were rejected very quickly and without much debate. Indeed, the entire conference was organized in such a way as to ram through agreement on the “lets have more street protests” plan with a minimal amount of debate. Jerry Gordon, one of the main organizers, was particularly passionate about keeping the focus upon the tactic of street protests. It was as if stopping the war had achieved secondary importance to having a really nice protest march.
The results were predictably disappointing. Obama has proceeded with more or less what he promised in the campaign: a slow winding down of the Iraq expedition and a ramping up of our involvement in Afghanistan. At this point it’s unclear who the anti-war movement is trying to influence. Obama? The general public? Congress? “People who happen to be looking out their window in DC and other large cities on select weekends?” It’s also unclear who the organizers expect to show up to these protests aside from the usual suspects. A death spiral has begun. It’s signs are: shrinking membership, increased radicalism, factionalism, and increased focus upon internal process rather than achieving external goals.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:38 pm
The civil rights marches were disciplined and informed by a commitment that is lacking in current marches. The civil rights movement was populist and organizers worked with people from all walks of life. They spent time with a lot of people who were different from themselves, in a lot of settings for years, before the marches started. It was a genuine grassroots movement that people were dedicated to. Today’s marches seem to be organized around identity politics and little bonding takes place around the issues. They are transient, because they are transient. However dedicated organizers may be, they aren’t so involved the masses. They’re focused on the media.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:40 pm
It all depends on what the message of the protest and how that is carried out. In earlier times, it was all about getting TV and newspaper coverage on a neglected topic. Now, there’s an element of that, but now organizers can actually do things directly at a protest to reach a larger audience than simply depending on the media.
The A New Way Forward demonstrations will feature things like mass outdoor phonebanks and letter writing sessions, and some of the more theatrical aspects will be filmed and distributed on the web. True, you can do some of this stuff without a massive demonstration, but it still feels good to have visible, tangible evidence that there are a lot of people who agree with you.
April 3rd, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Racial segregation on its public transit system
Selma
Equal voting rights in Selma
Yes, MLK & co. had a big broad issue in mind, but narrowly targeted protests proved extremely effective.
April 3rd, 2009 at 7:27 pm
I think Keating has a point. When war protests are run by movement leftists, you get a bunch of extraneous stuff that not only has nothing to do with the war, but drives out the mainstream. Mumia is a great example of this– lots of people would like to protest the war without endorsing the cause of a cop-killer.
And you also have lots of extraneous stuff that simply dilutes the message. Look at ANSWER’s name– I’m all for ending racism too, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the war.
Protests are like any other form of political messaging. A focused, broadly appealing message works best.
April 3rd, 2009 at 7:52 pm
I think more-focused protests can work (e.g. union protests) that the media can use to focus attention on a particular issue. But when the protesters are portrayable as nutty and/or miscreants, attention isn’t focused on the issue. I think an important question has to do with whether the average citizen can identify with the protest. When you have a bunch of union workers in Chicago protesting against a lockout, I think the answer probably is ‘yes.’ When you have a bunch of people breaking windows and huge numbers crazy leftist sorts with signs calling for the banning of capitalism, the answer is ‘no.’ (This applies to the US and probably the UK; it doesn’t, probably, to continental Europe.)
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Soullite’s point is well taken, (as is the that of the OP). But it should be remembered that nonviolence vs. armed resistance is generally not an either/or proposal. Both Gandhi and Dr.King had parallel, more violent movements both competing and in tacit, defacto conspiracies with them. This dynamic is important and overlooked, but documented.
The point about irony and the uncoolness of it all has it’s merits. Anyone who has been to a protest in the last decade or so knows they are lame and ill organized. But the more important point is about media coverage, or lack be it there of. Television news organization in the US simply do not cover protests; at least not in any meaningful way. And without coverage, particularly Television coverage, the effectiveness, at a National level, of any protest or movement is cut of at the knees. Once again this is important and overlooked. but, obviously, not documented.
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I’ve only skimmed the comments, so I’m not sure if this point has been made yet, but I think part of the difference is the reaction of the authorities. In the 60’s southern cops turned fire hoses and german shepherds on peaceful protesters. This made for great television and helped turn a nation’s sympathy towards King. Today the Man knows well enough that eventually folks will get tired and go home. So they just let them be.
A big part of the effectiveness of past protests was the over-reaction of those in charge. They’ve learned from those mistakes, largely making today’s acts less effective.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:28 pm
If you compare successful protests like those of Gandhi and King, you notice that what they have in common is not only strong leadership and organization, but that those leaders came from within their movements. King was black, fighting racism against blacks with other blacks; Gandhi was Indian fighting for Indian independents with other Indians. Or look at a less organized, and slightly less successful, movement: the anti-war movement of the 60s. Those were students in fear of a draft fighting against a war they were often forced to join.
Compare that to today’s war protesters, who have to draft to fight: their ideals become ambiguous. The same can be said of the protests against the G20 — none of those protesters are themselves members of the G20, nor are they identifiable minorities oppressed by a majority. Successful protests seem to share a lot more in common with Marxist revolutions than any thing else.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:09 pm
“Getting people to come out every once in a while hold a ‘protest’ is, by contrast, pretty easy. And in the right frame of mind, it’s even fun. I’ve had fun doing it. But it doesn’t really change anything.”
Matt’s been going to the wrong protests. Picketting and other forms of protest are routine ways that progressives can make their voices heard.
Back in September, when John McCain held a fund-raiser in downtown Chicago, about 20-30 of us picketed across the street. It was featured on the nightly news and one of the organizers was allotted a moment or two to explain the progressive/labor side of things.
Had this not occurred — i.e. had we not been out there, it would have been a story entirely devoted to McCain flying in and scooping up $4 million even in such a blue town — Obama’s home town — as Chicago.
Our action didn’t change the world but it pushed things forward just a little bit.
April 4th, 2009 at 1:12 am
Well, just some thoughts on protests:
1. Old-school protests tended to be rather undemocratic in organization, that’s the idea of militancy. If you go back to the ‘63 March on Washington, you didn’t get to speak if the organizing committee didn’t like what you had to say, and you didn’t get to carry a sign if it wasn’t one of the signs approved by the organizers.
Ultimately, what we need to jettison is the idea that protest marches are a vehicle for individual self-expression. They’re not; they’re a demonstration of collective power, and they require organization. (f that means some elements get exlcuded, too bad.
2. Old-school protests tended to be very culturally square, before the advent of the counter-culture. Everyone wore their Sunday best because the idea was to present the march as representative of the respectable body public, not a bunch of yahoos who could be dismissed. So maybe we need to dress up for protests?
3. Marches have to be understood as a tactical weapon, not an end to themselves. The old school civil rights marches had specific purposes – desegregate this facility, register these voters, pass this law, and in the larger sense, change public opinion, pressure public officials, and mobilize activists. That way, the protest is tied to a goal that can be achieved. But you do have to do other things – hence, you hold a protest, and then you mobilize the attendees to register to vote, to sign ballot initiatives, to knock on doors, etc. In this respect, the march is merely part of the movement instead of the march being the movement.
April 4th, 2009 at 2:11 am
When I saw the picture accompanying this post, I almost thought Matt was going to say that black people are what’s missing from today’s protests, which are almost entirely made up of upper middle class white kids.
April 4th, 2009 at 10:42 am
The civil rights marches were made important because of the network cameras and the elite medias sympathetic portrayal of them. The civil rights movement was media driven because it became the cause of the media. From this fact comes the story of the liberal media. The media was liberal on subject of civil rights. Let this not be forgotten.
If the media, especially the burgeoning TV news media would have ignored the civil rights protests or had been dismissive in the ways that have become so familiar like in their coverage of anti globalization protests the 64 and 65 civil rights bills would not have passed. Obvious I cannot prove that but it has to be considered a good probability.
The story of simple justice and oppression became compelling and it drove the coverage. Throw in superb rhetoric by King and others, the underdog angle and you had a perfect story. It’s easy enough to imagine today’s media covering the early 60’s civil rights movement. Negros demanding special rights etc etc etc.
Public protest’s measure of success is how much coverage it gets particularly TV coverage. Without coverage can it be said to have even happened? In a very real sense no.
April 4th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Old-school protests tended to be very culturally square, before the advent of the counter-culture. Everyone wore their Sunday best because the idea was to present the march as representative of the respectable body public, not a bunch of yahoos who could be dismissed. So maybe we need to dress up for protests?
This reminds me of a blog comment I read somewhere about the antiwar protests prior to the Iraq invasion. It was to the effect that a protest of 400,000 people all wearing white button-down shirts and freshly pressed khaki slacks and silently marching in a reasonably orderly fashion would be taken as a far more serious threat than 400,000 shabbily-dressed people brandishing signs and giant puppets for dozens of different causes and milling around randomly chanting worn-out protest rhymes.
April 4th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Another difference between the civil rights movement and today: look at that photo next to your post. They were all wearing suits. Contrast that to today’s protesters, who look like rabble and thus can be easily dismissed. This goes along with the point about non-violent resistance. Wearing suits, being gentlemen and ladies, is part of a strategy to make the wider public take you seriously. The essential component of that strategy is non-violent resistance, but wearing suits and singing hymns surely doesn’t hurt.
April 4th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
When I saw the picture accompanying this post, I almost thought Matt was going to say that black people are what’s missing from today’s protests, which are almost entirely made up of upper middle class white kids.
That’s true in Europe as well. And it’s been true since the late sixties.
The Soviets had a good phrase for self-indulgent upper middle class protesters. They also had an entire directorate of the KGB (Fifth) devoted to provoking them.
King might have been a democratic socialist, but I don’t think he held any illusions about how great the USSR was. Not to mention the fact that the Russians in charge were only slightly less racist than your average Mississippi sheriff.
Now, this is not to say that the left wing was a puppet of the Soviets, just that they found it easy to manipulate. That they could probably had something to do with the protesters’ lack of dedication.
Once the draft ended, as people have said above, the protests against Vietnam really fizzled. My parents are great examples of that – elite college education, opposed to the war, but then ambivalent or even mildly supportive once the draft ended.
The people who really suffered, the lower class schmucks who had to serve, like Iraq and Afghanistan today, are too worried about their jobs to protest.
April 4th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.
Mohandas Gandhi
April 4th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Gandhi and King may have led movements with vague, broad big-picture goals, but they also protested against very specific, very acute problems. I think that does help.
Also, I’ll add, protesting the G20 doesn’t make a lot of sense, anyway. It’s a meeting of 20 world leaders, each from a different political environment. There’s just no way to get any political traction against all (or even most) of them. You’re essentially protesting everything about How The WORLD Currently Works, and that’s no different from raving at the top of your lungs on a streetcorner. They’d do better to target each leader individually about more specific issues.
April 4th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
In line with Matt’s point, let me note that King’s 1963 march was called “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” It was organized around a list of demands>/a> covering everything from desegregating schools to a higher minimum wage.
April 6th, 2009 at 10:44 am
I think it is also important to consider the difference from their times to now. There was limited venues to connect and communicate with people of like minds and convictions, and almost all of them required face to face meetings. Activism was more then just about change it also met social needs. People made friends, met their husaband/wife, agreed to be business partners at rally’s. It served an intrinsic social function for a time without cell phones, email, or blogs.
There are plenty of issues to stand up against during these times. The problem is that plenty of people feel involved from behind their computer. Signing electronic petitions on facebook, or spreading a viral email, or just commenting on blogs. The social needs to be apart of something still exist, but the need to leave your house to do it does not.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Fighting passive resistance with passive resistance – ironic.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Street action can definitely have results. Two very recent examples that produced results:
- The BART police protests that turned into riots. The city finally had to charge the officer with murder in order to lower the tension.
- The Thailand airport protests took down their government
April 8th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Um, the “protests” that we now hold up as these paragons of success were parts of broad-based, interconnected strategies. The Selma March didn’t actually change anything. Marches, rallies, organizing, lobbying, lawsuits, and a coordinated PR campaign that took advantage of the political mood eventually (after a lot of time and effort) reached the desired result.
Making fun of (often absurd) individual rallies or marches and then comparing that to the whole of the civil rights movement or India is just silly. I thnk you could compare the anti-globaliation movement to the Civil Rights movement and critique the anti-glob folks as disorganized and lacking a good strategy of achievable mid-term goals and a clear way of reaching out ot people.
Also – MLK and Gandhi were both extraordinary men, but they did not act alone. I’m less knowledgable about Gandhi, so I’ll fous on MLK. Would he individually have been as successful without Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X and SNCC and others? What about without Thurgood Marshall and the legal stragegy that set the stage long before the bus boycott? It gets glossed over now, but the “civil rights movement” itself fought over focus and leadership – many in the power structure did not want a SNCC type group of upstart youngsters. Gay people weren’t as welcome in leadership (at least as the public face) nor were women. There was extreme message discipline.
You couldn’t possibly have such a disciplined movement today b/c of the broad access to information. Nobody is controlling the message or information being filtered to communities – we have thousands of blogs, instant news updates, etc. It is a different world and the “protest” movements need to adapt. I would say that the anti-war organizing around 2003 until now has actually had a measure of success. The large numbers of people coming out to try to prevent the war kept going (although not in quite as large a number) and eventually helped turn the tide of public opinion generally against the Iraq war. They weren’t responsible totally (the many dead and lack of success helped) but they played a roll. But I’d argue that neither did the bus boycotts and marches alone cause the tide turning for civil rights – untenable business models, bad PR, etc. also helped. The Montgomery boycott solved that mid-term goal absolutely. I think one of the problems is that there aren’t short-term goals on something like “anti-globalization” or “anti-war.”
The success of the equal marriage movement, however, is one that I think will be interesting to watch. It has been rather diffuse, with sparks of energy/potests here and there. But now many are seeing the eventual striking down of DOMA or acceptance of gay marriage as foregone conclusions. That doesn’t happen on its own.