Mass protesting can be an effective tactic if it is clearly communicated that the movement is an organized threat, mainly of violence but sometimes other actions such as a strike. If a protest is communicating that a movement is acting peacefully, but next time they won't be, then it is fulfilling the actual role of protest and might be successful. Basically every protest in the US lacks this threat of violence (some of the most militant of last summer's protests broke that threshold) and it has been decades since there has been threats of organized violence in the US.
The largely nonviolent protests of the sixties and seventies were somewhat effective because you had large masses of people 1. withholding labor (at a time when the labor pool was small due to the Vietnam war) and 2. smaller vanguards emerging ready to exercise violence. Once the war ended and the people returned, only the most militant sections of the movement carried on, namely black people who were much more conscious of their oppression than whites, and this was not enough to sustain a movement against the reaction.
Protest is kinda like a petition, in that it is not that the petition itself poses any sort of threat, but is rather mere spectacle. It is the organized signatories of the petition which constitute a threat to the status quo. If petitioners or protesters do not constitute a serious threat, if the forces in power can brush them aside, then there is not much point to protest. Maybe it will heighten some people's political consciousness since there is something inherently exciting about taking to the streets, but it will not produce a change of social relations.
Mass protesting can be an effective tactic if it is clearly communicated that the movement is an organized threat, mainly of violence but sometimes other actions such as a strike. If a protest is communicating that a movement is acting peacefully, but next time they won't be, then it is fulfilling the actual role of protest and might be successful. Basically every protest in the US lacks this threat of violence (some of the most militant of last summer's protests broke that threshold) and it has been decades since there has been threats of organized violence in the US.
The largely nonviolent protests of the sixties and seventies were somewhat effective because you had large masses of people 1. withholding labor (at a time when the labor pool was small due to the Vietnam war) and 2. smaller vanguards emerging ready to exercise violence. Once the war ended and the people returned, only the most militant sections of the movement carried on, namely black people who were much more conscious of their oppression than whites, and this was not enough to sustain a movement against the reaction.
Protest is kinda like a petition, in that it is not that the petition itself poses any sort of threat, but is rather mere spectacle. It is the organized signatories of the petition which constitute a threat to the status quo. If petitioners or protesters do not constitute a serious threat, if the forces in power can brush them aside, then there is not much point to protest. Maybe it will heighten some people's political consciousness since there is something inherently exciting about taking to the streets, but it will not produce a change of social relations.