I grew up in a protest to save my neighborhood from being demolished for a highway.
What the news reported was the protests in front of city hall to finally convince them to move the highway.
What you didn’t see was the incredible legwork getting dozens of local businesses to support us. Getting bake sales in schools to fund billboards. Doing social disobedience by blocking traffic and having people arrested. Disrupting city hall over and over and over. This was my life for months.
And it finally worked.
Can’t let people know where their power lies. If enough people believe in the ritual magic of peaceful, ignorable protests, then they will justify violence against protestors who actually put real pressure for change and the system can just overlook acts of violence against protestors rather than having to actually commit them itself.
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Mad props
It’s easy to imagine yourself as a hero with a molotov cocktail. Not as much fun walking door to door with a petition.
Man this is something I struggle with outside of politics too
If you completely trust everyone in your coalition it is not a coalition.
A one day boycott is about as effective at sending some kind of message as taking off a condom after the first thrust is at preventing a pregnancy.
Americans are seemingly incapable of doing anything other than virtue signalling online.
I say this as an American.
I moved over from corporate tech work to take a pay cut to do tech work at a non profit helping the homeless, to actually, literally do praxis.
No one, none of my friends, none of my family, nobody seemed to understand why I believed that ones actions should align with ones beliefs.
Americans are largely performative, self-obsessed narcissists.
I am beyond disgusted with this country.
I spent a decade telling people what is currently occuring is not only possible, but becoming increasingly inevitable.
90% of people told me I was mentally ill.
10% said yes they agree, but what can you do?
Fine. Fuck it.
There is nothing we can do I guess, as doing something would involve actual planning, risk and sacrifice, and we’re all a bunch of either vapid preening esoteric socialites, or murderously stupid death cultists.
Beam me up Scotty, no signs of intelligent life here.
No one, none of my friends, none of my family, nobody seemed to understand why I believed that ones actions should align with ones beliefs.
When I was in high school, I wanted pursue college to do clean energy or agricultural research. Nobody who was in a position to help me fix my education track wanted to talk about anything but careers and income. I’ve just been watching everything get worse and they’ve just been enjoying their popcorn and circuses since then.
People march in the street, they get ignored, they protest and get ignored. Nobody in power even cares about protests.
Literally nothing will happen until a mob starts “unelecting” this administration. So who is it going to be? Who is going to throw their life away for a bunch of strangers who don’t give a fuck about them? Who will throw their life away for a country or society that doesn’t give a fuck about them?
You realize you’re asking for Jesus Christ here
“There are no heroes left in man”
As an old Canadian socialist with the lumps to prove it, I agree. There is so much performance, and so little action. I spend time on reddit, trying to get keyboard warriors to understand that posting an opinion will not magically cause the fascist Administration to collapse and get a lot of “The media refuses to cover us!” bullpuckey. There are thousands of newsrooms in the USA that are not owned by billionaire tech bros or MAGA devotees (see, for example https://www.trustworthymedia.org/ › list-of-independent-media ) and most social media is still wide open to pictures and facts about your actions. If you are acting, let the independent media – most but not all of whom are progressive, check first – know and post your pictures (faces blurred if need be) and stories everywhere you can reach people.
Meantime, buy Canadian, buy local, or don’t buy at all, at least it’s something!
Your link is lib media, it is exactly them who will keep them in line and sell real progressives out.
If not blatantly collaborate with the regime.
Scratch a liberal…
I don’t buy anything on most days normally. Days isn’t going to do anything and stop telling yourself it will.
Stop it entirely or as much as you possibly can. Never order from Amazon again. Where you do need to buy stuff buy as little as possible. Stop visiting pubs and restaurants. If your goal is to damage the US economy. Avoid as much as you possibly can that goes towards it.
imho the chapter on “Tactics” in Alinski’s Rules for Radicals provides a lot of ideas on how to avoid performative activism.
From the description
First published in 1971, Rules for Radicals is Saul Alinsky’s impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one. […] Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.
In today’s social climate with today’s regard for rational discourse & democratic tradition? Are we doomed?
Alinsky lived in a time of McCarthyism and Nixon and the Southern Strategy. I’m not an expert on the guy, but I don’t think he’d say we’re doomed.
What do you mean by “ground level infrastructure?” Like educating people? A forum for communication? Everyone is on social media and social media is censoring that stuff. Civil rights era people eere in churches because those were the social venues of the day.
Ground level infrastructure meaning the ability to get people out to do anything from marching to rioting to picketing to canvassing to voting. The Civil Rights movement wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if it hadn’t actually mobilized people and thus made people aware of / afraid of organized resistance. The Black Panthers deserve a lot of credit as well for being the armed hard core of the movement.
We’d get a lot more of what we want peacefully if oligarchs were afraid we’d rally and fuck up their businesses bottom lines AND that they might get assassinated by radicals.
wikipedia/cargo_cult
hah ! that’s almost a cargo cult
Not almost. It is. Cargo cult activism.
I will steal that.
I see it as good practice and normalizing not shopping at those places
But people think it’s activism to not shop when it should literally just be the default. Get out of the consumerism mindset.
It’s wild how much everyone looks like a sucker and a mark once you’ve been out of the consumer mindset for a few years. You start to see between the lines a lot more and realize how much dumb shit is pushed on people. Buying a new phone every two years made a lot of sense when they doubled processing power and functionality. New flagships though? Forget that, why the hell would I want an AI powered advertisement and tracking machine in my pocket? The non AI powered tracking machine that’s 4 years old in my pocket is fucked up enough lol.
That’s fair
Yep. The best way to affect change is to make yourself a threat to power if your demands aren’t appeased. Protests by themselves aren’t effective in doing so.
