You know, they’re halfway there. Protests against the owning class that appeal to their better angels absolutely don’t work. When your entire idea of what a “protest” is is standing around in your state-approved square and not even engaging in the most mild of civil disobedience, let alone disruption of the lives and profits of the owning class, protesting is almost completely worthless.
Of course, if they reflected on the prompt and how the people of France do actual civil disobedience, they might come to the fuller conclusion.
Lol I always loved the “let’s all lie down and calmly get arrested” protests from 2020. Peak lib performance.
Trump got reelected and the libs are planning a “We won’t take this lying down” protest. Trump has a rally in response. During his speech he riffs…
“They wanna do a ‘lay down’ protest? Is that right? Lay down to get stepped on? How dumb is that? Democrats. If they do that - they’ll get stepped on. Like - I’ll do a Trump Elephant Stampede. Lotsa people don’t know this but horses won’t step on people. They won’t do it. But you can get a elephant to do it. Strong and powerful. We need lots of elephants. But maybe not so many elephants are there so we can use cows too. Cows step on people too.”
“Cow people like boaters. They love me. Love me. Love me. Love me. I can get as many cows as I need. Trump Elephant Stampede. I can do it. Official act. I’m like the boy in The Twilight Zone. I think it - it’s official and I can do it. I can do anything…”
The libs have to rethink their plans.
Extinction Rebellion was not rebelling against extinction, but rather rebelling by going extinct.
A weird number of climate protestors think that if enough of them get sent to prison for non violent protest the rest of society will be massively inspired and will rise up.
They’ve learned that Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King got sent to prison and then taken the most baffling lesson from it.
What kills is that french protests themselves weren’t limited to crust punks throwing bricks at the police. They encompassed regular people going to their regular job and using it to fuck with those in power as much as they could. As a small example, electricians cut power to the houses of key politicians and their political headquarters.
As a small example, electricians cut power to the houses of key politicians and their political headquarters.
If that happened in the US there would quickly be a bipartisan “electricity terrorism” bill.
Without savings or mutual aid networks, how can anyone afford to stop participating in the machine for a protest lasting long enough to affect any change?
This was the grand goal of the great American experiment: a completely subservient propagandized populace, forced by material conditions to execute the will of the bourgeoisie.
We’re stuck. It sucks.
yeah, I typed that comment, and then I was like, “oh, this is why capital likes us alienated.”
😞
100%, to add unless shit’s bad and directly under threat people deep down are fearful of seriously harming each other, so Murikkkans may have more guns than humans, but they don’t use them in the whole rebel sense, this was by design by founders in the concept of the ‘polite society’. Yet another method of control.
Protests don’t work, riots do
Why are so many folks convinced that anyone calling for even the tiniest bit of force is a fed? Where does this come from?
While they aren’t wrong, it can come off with that same energy of the “firebomb a wallmart” meme. I’m not such a fool to think protests and riots are the be-all-end-all. Mutual aid networks, organizing workplaces and buildings, boycotts, etc will sometimes do more good than a flash in a pan that gets any revolutionaries present arrested and out of commision.
from Phil Neel’s Hinterlands book, I kinda got the impression that a good venue for class conflict (as opposed to downtown city cores, where empty, non-functional temples to the FIRE economy are resistant to protest by design… nothing physical needs to happen there, nothing is disrupted, protest is symbolic), are the logistics infrastructures… the warehouses/fulfillment centers, the freight rail switching stations, etc. just outside of big cities, these are the places where many workers find themselves, abused but in great numbers compared to capitalists and cops… and strikes have immediate consequences to capital formations in paralysis.
he doesn’t say this explicitly, but it seems clear that the strategy must adapt to the transformed geography of class conflict in the 21st century.
The chapter on the Fergesun protests/riots was really fascinating. Big cities like Paris and London were designed specifically to make it easier for police to fuck up protestors, but nobody ever saw unrest coming to the suburbs.
I liked the book but I felt it was written backwards, I couldn’t figure out his angle until he got to the big picture stuff towards the end.
