I think teaching people how protests work is pretty important praxis and is not talked about nearly enough.

Moderates and liberals tend to think of protest and demonstration as the same thing and anything that is not a demonstration is generally though of as bad or counterproductive.

Most of the populace simply doesn’t understand that blocking roads or getting arrested have strategic value. They consider the goal of every protest to be to raise awareness and support and to convince people like them ™️ that any given cause is worth supporting and that their support is all it really takes to a make change happen. It’s a very self-centered view of how political movement work and it seems unfortunately quite obiquitous.

They see a road block and think “that just makes you look bad” and the thought process ends there because now your movement isn’t worth supporting in their eyes. If you try to explain that blocking off roads is often done to cut off supply lines to financial districts or big corporations and put economic pressure on them or the politicians they donate to, they refuse to engage with the idea entirely or claim that it doesn’t actually work and the only way to protest successfully is to win over people like them even though they’ve probably never been to a demonstration, let alone a direct action event and if they did they’d probably do more harm than good given how ignorant they are on the subject.

We really need to educate people about protesting tactics, how they work, what they actually seek to achieve, and how different methods put pressure on different areas to get different effects and I think you probably can’t teach this to older generations but younger generations are capable of learning and we really need them to learn this.

Teaching people to think in terms of systems and take a structural approach when trying to change a system is paramount because, in the current state of things, the common belief seems to be if enough people wave signs from the sidewalk, things magically work out in the end.

  • mindbleach
    111·
    10 months ago

    They see a road block and think “that just makes you look bad” and the thought process ends there because now your movement isn’t worth supporting in their eyes.

    “Idiots will think you’re just assholes” doesn’t mean we think you’re just assholes. It means, if you’re doing something for an audience, you have to give a shit about reaching that audience. Half of that audience thinks libraries are communism. Aim lower.

    Blocking the road to a factory, or indeed to a financial district, has obvious impact in-itself. Blocking a highway for one day just pisses off random people. For a day. You wanna fuck up traffic for most weekdays out of a month, yeah hey maybe some of them will consider public transit. Maybe. But more likely they’ll just clog alternate routes.

    A campaign of slashing tires on giant pickup trucks would also piss off random people, to a much greater extent than any form of blocking traffic, but its impact would be obvious, immediate, and lingering. It is an asymmetrical attack that prevents choices the movement is against. Unlike playing human speed-bump at a four-lane intersection. People will still think you’re assholes, but they’ll also consider buying a sedan instead.