I just went down to our local lib demonstration. All I could really feel was depressed. All those people waving signs but I wonder how many are willing to do anything more than that? Shit most of them were pretty old, tbh. I approached some people I clocked as comrades but I was very awkward and we didn’t have a conversation.
I guess I don’t really have a question here. Just feel like everybody has identified (some of) the problems, but have totally misidentified the solutions. Will these protests ever accomplish anything? Can we radicalize the protestors without them having to get beaten by cops? Or is that what it will take?
Protests are more of a ritual than a tactic these days. Protest is a tool, one of the tools in a toolbox to get what you want. They are not an end in themselves. If the protests aren’t disrupting anything, if they aren’t organized towards obtaining something or making somebody do something, they’re not any better than a block party or an online petition.
The most you can really hope to achieve is to bring an org there to sign people up and actually have the org do something useful like mutual aid.
yeah they’re a cargo cult of the whitewashed narrative of the civil rights movement.