The Power and Vulnerability of Protest

Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash

How to use and not use protest.

So, there’s a bunch of protests going on across the country and I’m in favor of them. I’ve attended some, and I will attend more. They’re fun and they make a statement. But what I really care about is actually ending fascism, protecting the climate and freeing people from lives of senseless servitude to abusive a-holes.

Street protest has a role in making this happen. But it’s not a complete strategy and without more going on, it will fail.

What, exactly, do you imagine street protests can accomplish?

Well, if you’ve seen archival news footage, street protests appeared to oust dictators. Mubarak, Ceaușescu, others. Hey, in December 1989, people crowded into the main square when Ceaușescu was giving a speech, shouted him down, and a few days later he was out of power and on trial.

But street protests are the tip of the iceberg. A whole lot needs to happen below the surface for it to work.

Weakening the Power of Thugs To Do Evil

At these protests, at least one person yells out “eat the rich” and the crowd typically laughs. Just as the thin-skinned American Reich seeks to brutalize any citizen who dares to object to the regime, some people—understandably—want to extract revenge on our ultra-wealthy oppressors.

That would be a mistake.

Part of the reason we are angry is the intentional provocation by the elites. They poke at us, try to push our buttons. Call us lazy, tell us the WE are sponging off the government (and who’s government is it, anyway?), and that they are the masters and we’d better just shut up and do what we are told.

They want to demoralize us, to show us we are powerless, to demonstrate that our anger is no match for their guns. If we give in to their provocation, those street protests will be the key to a victory by the elites. A few demonstrators will behave badly and police will shoot the “rioters.”

They will wound and kill as many as they want. They will do it in more than one city. And the movement will be over.

Let’s not let that happen. Let’s be smarter. Let’s look at the iceberg, the parts below the water level.

Because the secret of success is to remove the ability of the thugs to get anything done.

Actually, WE Are The Power

What successful movements do is get various parts of the government apparatus, and also the commercial apparatus, to refuse support to the regime.

People switch sides and withdraw from lifting a finger for the regime. People won’t do the work. They won’t carry out the plans of the dictator. And, importantly, enforcers like the police and the military side with their families, friends and loved ones—and refuse to fire their weapons.

This is not a fantasy. This has happened many times. People who seem as passive and helpless as Americans do today have ousted hated regimes. Too many of us feel certain that it can’t happen here, because it hasn’t happened-yet.

And maybe the protesters are too optimistic, at least some of them. I think the idea is this:

1. Protests can swing votes and defeat cruel self-serving politicians at the polls.
2. Protests can spotlight wrongdoing by political leaders and force them out through investigation, exposure and prosecution.
3. The dictator, if unable to squelch protest, will be unable to govern in the face of a stubborn visible popular opposition.

I don’t believe this works. The American system of goverment is too compromised to be changed from within. Protests HAVE a value but they do not directly pose a threat to the people in power. The failure of these kinds of protests to achieve any change (for example, Occupy) reinforces the status quo. And we “learn” a bunch of false “lessons” from these failures.

We “learn” that we need to defeat the system from within. We “learn” that we need specific tangible demands. Learning these lessons helps the powerful stay in power because what we DON’T learn is how to defeat them.

The Strategy That Works

At this moment in history, extracting a few concessions from the elites would be too little and way too late. Our demand is actually THIS: we the people, the billions of ordinary people across the planet who do all the work, make all the decisions. Wealthy shareholders, corporate honchos, and self-important billionaires will not be obeyed or listened to. Their time is over.

THAT is our demand. Not more jobs, or higher wages, or even getting the rich to pay taxes. The demand is that they are done. Period. No negotiation.

How can we make such a demand? How can we enforce it?

By recognizing and exercising the power we already have, the power we have always had: the power of our labor.

We withdraw our labor. We go on strike.

As it happens, a general strike is being organized now, and YOU can (and really should) sign up. You should sign up even if you are a student or retiree and aren’t in the work force. (You can support the strike in other ways.) You should sign up because we need bigger numbers. And because this is the central tactic that enables us to win.

Because streets full of protesters is nothing compared to empty offices, empty factories, abandoned oil rigs, and government offices with no staff. Of course, not everyone will participate-we are aiming for only 3.5% of the population. But that tiny percentage has historically proven to be enough.

SIGN A STRIKE CARD RIGHT NOW AT https://generalstrikeus.com/strikecard

The general strike is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal of nonviolent noncooperation. It is a challenging weapons to deploy but it can deliver a decisive victory.

A Positive Vision

We need an effective strategy, which would be an escalating series of nonviolent tactics, withdrawing cooperation from the abusive systems in stages, ending with the evaporation of the obsolete and destructive ways that were destroying human life and the biosphere of our Earth.

But we have another issue. What are we doing next? What about our competing visions for the future? Won’t the end of the old ways be replaced by civil war and chaos?

That’s a real danger. Historically, division within the victorious side has provided an opening for a new dictator. Mubarak was ousted. And succeeded by el-Sisi.

We don’t want a civil war and we don’t want a new dictator.

There is an attachment to various -isms-socialism, communism, and other ways to organize and control people. But all of them are imposed.

We don’t want to be imposed upon. We don’t want servitude of any new bosses. We want full complete lives as human beings. We don’t want to serve any masters, even those who see themselves as benevolent.

We want a civilization in which people CAN serve the common good but do not have any demands thrust upon them. Ideally, the civilization we seek is one where most people WANT to contribute and do so voluntarily.

And if there are some free riders? Who the hell cares? The perfect is the enemy of the good.

This new system isn’t about governmental structures. It’s about values. It’s about valuing life and time and the planet we live on. It’s about our common humanity. It’s about rejecting hatred and violence and bigotry and embracing each other.

The new system is “enforced” by recognizing that we each have a few short decades to live, and we choose to live as sane, caring people who won’t waste our lives fighting each other, or producing widgets in factories and offices for undeserving elites.

We are a people that enjoy being together, playing, expressing ourselves, walking in Nature, telling and listening to stories, eating a meal, making love, sitting quietly at night looking at stars and contemplating our place in the universe.

THIS is our vision. We CAN achieve this.