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Seriously, especially on the level of abstraction of "protest". Next let's decide whether conversations and having friends are good thing or bad thing.
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.
Yup. Last year's protests were more successful than Ferguson's, for instance.
Western protest movements are intentionally coopted by liberal elements seeking to uphold the status quo. This doesn't mean they're never successful and pointless to engage in, quite the contrary, it's one of the major ways that true revolutionary energy is built. The western proletariat is just so housebroken and propagandized that any such energy that gets built up eventually dissipates when capital makes extremely basic concessions (see: George Floyd riots). I can see why that's discouraging, but that's how they want you to feel. Don't give up. Public demonstration is how we show our power.
Like protests with signs? Likely meh result. Protest changing some aspects of material calculation for porkies? The only way lol
There could be other explanations for the tear gas / anti-protest bills though. Maybe the pigs are sadists who enjoy being in a battlefield type situation where they are perfectly safe and can assault whoever they want without consequences. Maybe the pols want to clear the protests for a more venial reason: they represent an inconvenience but not a significant challenge.
This logic reminds me of people saying "If voting didn't matter, they wouldn't try so hard to do voter suppression!" idk where I land on the value of protests but I don't think the violent repression is necessarily proof of their effectiveness.
protests are less effective in our society and imo organized labor is better, like it or not the "cards we hold" in a capitalist society consists of our labor and time and organizing to systematically boycott our own economic output unless material conditions improve is one way to work towards a better future
that being said, protests can often be the "foot in the door" in terms of getting acceptance and visibility for issues and it's silly to completely discount them just because they tend towards the median. I feel like even the people who would say KTP at a protest don't do so because they're a) afraid of blowback and b) know it would probably harm the movement more than help it atp
Setting aside that there are different types of protests, protesting is a tool. Whether an effective protest is or bad depends upon how it is situated.
'There’s not a lot of political extremists, but they are the ones we hear from the most. EXCEPT in a protest environment."
You think the average person is more likely to encounter a position significantly to their left outside of a protest than at a protest? We have very different views of typical discourse. I live in the American North East, so maybe geography is at play.
