Is Protest It?
been a long time folks. a few years i think? i don’t do a lot of writing, mostly because i’m not a great writer - or at least, i’m not as good of a writer as i am a yapper. it’s why i tend to write the way i would actually say something out loud, which doesn’t always translate well to script… yet here i am, deterritorializing the written form, as it were. this may be a jumbled mess, but i hope the point comes across - the point being that perhaps we need to critique protest, understand its potency, and study its utility for durable social transformation.
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one of the most salient shared lamentations about life at the ‘end of history’ is that nothing happens - though maybe we should be a bit more rigorous and clarify that okay, sure, things happen… but that doesn’t mean things meaningfully change. perhaps the closest thing we have had to said change since the fall of the Soviet Union was September 11, 2001: a loud rebuke of economic globalization and decades of US imperialist conquest via hot wars, cold wars, proxy wars, sanctions, trade ‘agreements,’ coups facilitated (or even orchestrated) by Central Intelligence, and neocolonial structural adjustment programs. given the rise and pervasive milieu of the surveillance apparatus in its fallout (ostensibly to heighten ‘security’), it’s hard to say if anything since 9/11 has produced a comparable paradigm shift in the organization of daily life.
and admittedly, shit has gone down. there was the 2007-8 subprime mortgage crisis, giving way to an international economic depression that we’re still seeing the effects of to this day. we were coerced by Big Tech into trading social ties and community for social media and iPhone. we endured the worst of a (still ongoing btw) global pandemic. and US Empire has continued to ramp up, particularly in the Middle East, and also when it comes to Russia/Ukraine, China/Taiwan, and elsewhere. but despite it all, i would still argue that most Americans - save for a brief period early in the pandemic - have not found their day-to-day lives significantly altered; because while conditions certainly have worsened in degree, they are largely the same in kind. paraphrasing a legendary shitposter and podcaster: “everything stays the same, but it just keeps getting shittier.”
we can even consider the beloved liberal talking point of Trump 1.0 as some sort of deviation or upheaval from ‘normal conditions.’ okay, there’s ‘more political polarization than ever,’ but most people, when pressed, still have ideologically incoherent politics - if they have politics at all - or are single issue voters, whether that be second amendment rights/taxes/abortion/etc. and a lot of people really don’t care who’s in government because, setting culture war propaganda aside, the current two-party system offers nothing to the working class and has resulted in similar conditions for most people, no matter who is in power. what else? sure, stuff got more expensive than ever and for several reasons, including: ~$5 trillion in various COVID-19/corporate bailout maneuvers (inflation); the capitalist class jacking up prices because they can (passing costs to consumers); and the Fed decreeing devastatingly high interest rates (Labor discipline). but this is the trajectory we were already on. the pandemic only accelerated this process, the process of capitalism’s ultimate boogeyman and limit - the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
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so despite all the happenings, i argue we still have not seen change; there has not been a shred of structural reorganization of social relations in pretty much any respect for a long, long time. we have seen regress and progress; we have seen reform and revision; some of yall mfers even work from home now! but we are still missing a revolution.
source? SOURCE??? well… despite exhaustion, frustration, and alienation, you probably still get up and go to work, don’t you? you still go home to your families and friends after, finding solace in the value-without-a-price of human connection - if possible - and if not, finding ways to numb yourself to the ever-escalating roulette of Bad News. you definitely still (rightfully) bemoan how expensive necessities like rent and groceries and childcare and gas and health insurance are. you’re still addicted to your phone, maybe even more now than ever, aren’t you? and isn’t our dopamine-poisoned culture still driving us all toward isolation, addiction, and schizophrenia?
and through it all, the United States has remained the capitalist-imperialist hegemon.
nothing has changed.
¿…until now…?
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at long last, Trump 2.0 is here. ‘first as tragedy, second as farce’ indeed. despite their ultimately negligible distinct interests and more niche tendencies (sound familiar?), it appears that the nationalists, oligarchs, and technofeudalists have formed an alliance toward a common task: the completion of the neoliberal project. led by Trump, his pet weasel Elon Musk, and HIS team of pet Nazis that probably can’t legally buy a 40 from a gas station, this rag-tag team of scrappy fascists is stripping the copper wire from the government. many public institutions, government programs, and union jobs Americans took for granted may soon be a distant memory, and people who were already in desperate situations, especially undocumented people, are looking at even tougher times ahead.
but do not despair, dear friends, because what happens when things finally do change? over 50 years of privatization, deregulation, commoditization, and austerity have culminated in this moment, and yes, the end-days of neoliberalism will be harsh. but it will also open up onto something new, with unanticipated consequences - for better and for worse.
we’ll encounter horrors beyond our comprehension, to be sure, but so too will we see opportunities generated; gaps created; weaknesses exposed; assemblages mutated, vibes shifted; and ripening conditions for a revolutionary rupture, revealing the house of cards that reactionary regimes rest upon. we need no further evidence of such than the lessons of Al-Aqsa Flood, the axis of resistance, and the incredibly brave people - both living and martyred - of Occupied Palestine.
and that’s precisely why we need to be ready, because one thing is certain: no economic system is eternal, and neoliberalism - really just a flavor of capitalism - will be replaced when the juice runs dry. what comes next remains an open question: will we devolve into a somewhat familiar but divergent phenotype of fascism? will we replace neoliberalism with a new flavor of capitalism? full on technofeudalism? something heretofore unknown? or… will we finally build international socialism?
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i’ve buried the lede a little up to this point, but now i’ll cut to the meat. i recently read a wonderful book titled If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by
(whose earlier book The Jakarta Method i also highly recommend). in the spirit of this extremely insightful bit of journalistic work, and in the context of the opening paragraphs of this essay, i have to ask a question that may not necessarily represent his thesis and could get me dragged (Nevertheless, He Persisted):why are we protesting?
[so that i may (inshallah) reduce confusion or bad-faith interpretations, by protest i mostly mean demonstrations involving a crowd of people that may either 1) temporarily occupy a fixed space, or 2) move around a pre-determined route, with or without a stated and tangible demand.]
Trump is in town? get angry. protest. go home. new oil drilling permit just dropped? get angry. protest. go home. genocides are unfolding in front of our eyes for all the world to see? get angry. protest. go home. why? why has this formula come to define the terrain of political struggle? and why has it replaced class struggle?
to be clear: i am not suggesting that protest has never worked or is pointless. we know that it can be strategically useful as part of a ‘diversity of tactics’ (i kinda hate how overused this phrase is but whatever, it fits). we should situate protest among a myriad of historical mechanisms for social change, all of which contain mixed success. protest is worthy of study, and what we find is that - much like strikes, boycotts, and so on - protest must be deployed properly for it to be effective.
some examples, in my view, of why we should protest:
alerting a wide audience to a new political development through broad media coverage
activating a mass of disgruntled, possibly nihilistic, but probably curious people
pressuring politicians, State actors, and/or capitalist/imperialist interests with a timely and specific demand, containing strategies of further escalation if not met
alert, activate, & pressure.
there is a common thread running through these, lending credence to my conviction that the proper use of protest is short bursts of ferocious energy. why? mainly because of the numerous historical examples (anti-war movements, Occupy Wall Street, and the George Floyd uprisings, to name a few) that have taught us our first very important lesson: protest movements burn people out. protracted physical participation is damn near impossible to maintain when ‘normal life’ must resume after the protest ends. and it’s this key critique, articulated largely by seasoned veterans of protest movements themselves, that struck me to begin contemplating a more suitable and sustainable approach to long-term dissent, civil disobedience, and (eventually) revolution.
a pertinent refrain that came up in the book is an old favorite from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, quoted here (italics mine for emphasis): “Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection […], and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”
and this is precisely my next critique: protest movements are often unorganized, and therefore often co-opted. on first read of the passage, you may be tempted to interpret Marx as saying that people who can’t represent themselves must have some ‘savior’ come to their rescue to do it for them, in the vein of some vulgar representative democracy. but what he really meant, given the context in which he was writing, is that groups who do not coalesce around a stated, common goal will have their political ambitions articulated FOR them by whatever opposition stands in their way, whether that be the news media, State Department, a contesting ideological group or party, or even a foreign adversary. we’ve seen this time and time again, most recently in Egypt, Brazil, Hong Kong, Turkey, and beyond - so ‘don’t get captured,’ so to speak, should be a major priority. because while it’s incredible to see tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, if they can’t come to a consensus around shared objectives and struggle as a class for themselves, the movement will splinter and either face capture or wither away.
my last point here is that protest movements have, in a sense, lost the plot. increasingly, protest is no longer a means to an end, but an end in itself. it is the coming-to-life of an old 4chan meme:
hear about the bad thing
protest
???
profit
i’ve hinted at this above and it ties a bow on everything, connecting back to the title of this thing: is protest… it? now what? what is #3? THAT’S where we’re getting caught up. protest cannot be the point - it must contain a vehicle to something, if/when the demands of the protest are not met. and the truth is we have no plan after protesting - because we are not organized - so we just continue protesting. and the ruling class knows this; they know that if the initial burst of energy doesn’t shine bright enough, they can wait us out. the longer we protest with no resolution, the more people get burned out. the more people get burned out, the more the protest movement itself fizzles out - or worse - the louder the voices of opportunists that hijack the protest for their own interests. and the louder those voices are, the further away we are from the initial reason for protesting. without organization and finally on its deathbed, protest is denuded of political possibility and devolves into mere group catharsis.
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to recap:
protest is useful but unsustainable.
protest can but does not necessarily entail class struggle.
protest replacing organization has been the primary disaster for whatever ‘Left’ is… left… in the United States.
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frankly, we should stop asking, ‘what do we do to make protest more sustainable?’ and instead ask, ‘how might we proceed when the protest stage is complete?’
how do we funnel the energy and possibility of protest into an organized & coherent vector of class struggle?
what and where are our other weapons?
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part 2 to come, because i’m still thinking.
r u?
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-fidel