It Takes More Than Mass Protests to Drive Change
gsb.stanford.edu
gsb.stanford.edu
>“Occupy Wall Street,” she continues, “mobilized a lot of people and got a key point across about income inequality in the U.S. But did it result in real change? Unfortunately, no. Had there been a nice set of organizations able to get access to the political and economic system that the movement criticized, the changes may have been more enduring.”
The idea that OWS could have worked within the system to get the changes they wanted seems misleading to me.
The Tea Party however was grass roots but it took less than twenty years for the Republican party to co-opt it. Before then both they and the Democrats demonized it. Why? Because it took control from the two parties that run the show.
Now the Democrats have a very nascent uprising of their own that they are desperately trying to smother. hopefully it lasts a bit longer than an election cycle or two.
US politics cannot change until two party rule is not the only outcome and this can only come to fruition by having campaign finance reform that blocks incumbents from the gravy train they have and removing restrictions on those seeking to unseat them. As in, the rules have always been written backwards - they always have been written to maintain the status quo and that is the lie that needs to be ended.
There is zero evidence for this and it's basically a smear of the "everything I don't like is funded by Soros" category.
> US politics cannot change until two party rule is not the only outcome
This on the other hand is very true.
Strawman/10
There's no nonviolent way outside the system because the police are violent if you actually inconvenience the system (which marches don't do but occupations do).
The problem basically is the fetishization of nonviolence.
Revolution can change the system.
Also, what do you think about "The success of nonviolent civil resistance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w ?
They've met with UK Sec. of State for Environment [2]. Exactly what the OP advocates.
Majority of Britons now believe that climate change is more pressing than Brexit [3]
And so on.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-48126677
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPtAKjhT02s
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMGqP5rP8v8
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/26/climate-...
That just means we're not going to do very much about either of those! Although grid decarbonisation has been a great quiet success so far. It's just that nobody seems to want to take credit for it and push on further.
If 'violence' has been re-defined to the extent that mis-gendering someone is an 'act of violence' (https://everydayfeminism.com/2017/01/misgendering-trans-peop...), then you could certainly argue that ER have acted violently.
EDIT I see I'm being downvoted. Are we not allowed to have a conversation about re-defining words and being intellectually consistent with the re-defined meaning?
It seems these days that the word 'violence' has been re-defined such that it no longer requires there to be any abusive physical contact between the perpetrator and the victim. As such, merely using words that may cause an individual some emotional discomfort is considered an act of violence.
I don't agree with that definition, and for me abusive physical contact is the defining characteristic of violence. But if that's the general consensus now then that's what I'll use. We can't have a debate if we're all speaking a different language.
Given that 'violence' no longer requires any physical contact, one could make the argument that some of the activities that ER have engaged in could be considered violent. The many ER road-blocks have very real consequences for all the people who are unable to go about their daily lives without being disrupted. When ER blocks a bus full of people in traffic, it's distinctly possible that those people were on their way to job interviews, doctors appointments, meetings with long-lost relatives, charity fundrasiers or any number of other things. This kind of disruption might easily cause significant emotional distress, I would argue at least on par with the emotional distresss suffered by an individual being mis-gendered. So why should one be considered violence and the other not?
That's not even getting to the topic of Ambulances being caught up in ER road-blocks, which has been documented numerous times. ER even address that issue explicitly in their FAQ (https://rebellion.earth/the-truth/faqs/). They attempt to hand-wave this problem away by saying that ambulances can be re-directed away from the road-blocks. It hardly needs to be said that time is often a critical factor when an ambulance is transporting a patient to hospital. The additional time spent avoiding ER activists could easily be the difference between life and death. Is this not a form of violence?
By your own definition, the answer is clearly no.
One definition of violence appears to be used when describing ER as 'non-violent'. But another, very different definition of violence appears to be used when declaring that mis-gendering someone is an act of violence.
My answer to this is to insist on the 'proper' definition - the one you yourself prefer - and to push back whenever the term is misused (I find this is generally done as a smearing tactic).
The alternative is to yield ground and to start saying 'physical violence' whenever one means 'violence'.
It is the intentional or willful mis-gendering that is being argued in that link as being an act of violence.
Revolutions seldom solve issues for the aggrieved. They are opportunistically leveraged by ideologues in the revolution and ends up with even more misery than prior. Revolutions are a last ditch effort. It’s the worst path, but in rare circumstances the only path.
Just because the treasonous colonists took up arms against the King (after many years of trying other means), doesn’t mean that a zoning issue, a gerrymandering concern, a dissatisfaction with the Electoral College, or a debate over UBI should move quickly to armed revolution if the first response isn’t to your liking.
Change has to come from within; you need people like Gorbachev.
Revolutions bring lots of bloodshed and animosity and pits friends against friends. It takes many decades to heal from that. There is also a vast and deep trail of wasted lives in its wake.
Whenever there's a revolution there's a potential counter-revolution. It's rare to be able to spike the guns with carnations, like Portugal.
> Revolutions bring lots of bloodshed and animosity and pits friends against friends. It takes decades to heal from that. There is also a vast and deep trail of wasted lives in its wake.
This is something every would-be revolutionary kid needs to internalise and ask themselves if they are really ready for. The cost is huge and mostly borne by vulnerable other people.
Portugal's carnation revolution is a clear example that change has to come from within.
The man behind the coup was General Spínola, the man in charge of Portugal's fight against independence movements in Portuguese guinea. Prior to the revolution he wrote a book on how the war was unwinnable to pressure Portugal's ruling dictatorship into a political solution, to which the ruling Portuguese dictator refused. Consequently a couple of coups were attempted and when they finally succeeded the dictator surrendered and General Spínola took over as interim president of Portugal, enactig the political changes he defended such as ending fighting and jump-starting a transition to a democratic regime.
Meanwhile, the dictatorship's single-party parliament already included groups of representatives, such as Sá Carneiro's liberal wing, who were not only openly against the dictatorship but also openly advocated for a transition to democracy.
You can't get more internal than that.
This is one of the points emphasised by [0| I call it the 3.5% talk]. The argument is that nonviolent peaceful "revolutions" are not only more successful in toppling regimes, they also make it easier to build a new one.
I think the aversion to violence has made us complacent and resistant to change, expecting progress to always be positive without any struggle or hardship may mean we not only not get the change we need, but also violence will inevitably boil over or will be prolonged over a longer period of time, the cost of which will not be realized until after the fact.
How long will the Israel/Palestinian conflict go on for? How long will crony capitalism vs crony communism go on for? How long will we continue to be present in the middle-east militarily?
Conservative dogma is what causes revolution when no change is allowed within the current societal structure.
But if, on the other hand, the state you are fighting will not flinch before brutally suppressing any dissent and murdering hundreds, thousands, or even millions (such as is the case from the imperialists in South America to the Chinese government in Tiannamen), then no peaceful marching will save you, you need to be ready for physical struggle if you want change)
> the Britons had lines they did not cross, they did not send tanks or imprison and murder leaders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre ; Ghandi was arrested repeatedly and spent several years in prison. https://www.mkgandhi.org/arrestofmahatma.htm
Possibly the main reason the Empire was abandoned was its physical untenability and expense after the war, along with pressure from the United States.
What they did have was a busted economy after WW2, no access to international credit and a treaty with the Americans that was forcing them to decolonialize. The ongoing independence campaign (mostly paused during the war) put them in the position of "double down or fold" and they chose to fold. I think people overestimate the element of ethical embarrassment.
"Non-violent protest" as practiced today by "progressive" groups is the most useless form of protest you can do.
As posters above argued, revolutions present copious opportunities for being hijacked by bad actors/ideologues, and very rarely produce anything other than more suffering than in the original conditions. There is strong quantitative evidence to back this, check out the report from the NECSI.org website.
Best I can tell, the significant upside of revolutions is they change the distribution of suffering, brining it to those who had before benefited, even if overall everyone suffers. I suspect this is the emotional allure of revolution, sticking it to those who have been sticking it to you. This is really a primate thing, studies with monkeys have shown that they’ll allow harm to themselves to get back at those they view causing or benefiting from an inequitable situation (as I recall the study had something to do with grapes).
Real change that produces progress requires consistent engagement over many years (know your representative, etc), individual responsibility and personal sacrifice (start a community group and build relationships, etc.), and compromise. Underlying it all is building and cultivating trust - trust is the foundation of healthy societies.
I think all those things are undermined by our current circumstances in society. These include the physical structure of communication media (social media), economic pressures most people experience (who has the time to start a community group when they’re trying to win at the grind), and current ideological climate. The first two are unconscionable and clearly encouraged directly or indirectly by and for the sake of the economic power holders’ interests. This last one however is insidious and in the interest of ideological power holders’ interest. Folks like you suggest that there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too - just get angry and violent enough and poof there’s your solution, no hard work needed. This kind of, forgive me for using these words but, self serving immaturity occupies the intellectual space and crowds out people coming to terms with what’s required for real change, progress, and suffering-reduction.
Edited: for language/spelling and to add the last two paragraphs.
I think this view is too simplistic; many ideas of a better society are simply incompatible with change "within the system", since the system itself, they argue, inherently fosters the tendencies they're against.
>Real change that produces progress requires consistent engagement over many years (know your representative, etc), individual responsibility and personal sacrifice (start a community group and build relationships, etc.), and compromise.
Does it? Why? What's the evidence to back this up? Consider that, for example, not a single petition made to the English government through their own petition schema has actually accomplished anything. This "know your representative" stuff doesn't even apply to non-violent changes of power. Do you think Gandhi succeeded because he got to know his representative, or he was open to compromise on Indian independence?
>This kind of, forgive me for using these words but, self serving immaturity occupies the intellectual space and crowds out people coming to terms with what’s required for real change
The intellectual space is currently occupied by near-pervasive liberal egalitarianism, and liberal egalitarians suggest that the way things are right now (systematically) is just fine.
The truth is that your anti-revolutionary model assumes that the goals sought by would-be revolutionaries can be accommodated within whatever system they protest, but this is manifestly untrue, and the history of both violent and non-violent revolutions shows as much. It is also shockingly ignorant of revolutions from inside the system itself against the people - the industrial revolution being one (think of the violent enclosure movement in Western Europe on behalf of the State).
Indeed, for an individual, Mass movements, rarely change things. At an individual level, voluntary dropping out is a solution. Reduce the revenue you contribute to the system. Starve it.
Otherwise, a protest at that scale generally results in political power of some form being ceded — but how can you do that for a disunified, leaderless movement?
That’s ultimately what brought them down as well: they took on every issue, so accomplished nothing — and eventually fell to infighting as people who wanted to advance racial and gender issues disrupted the movement by seeding conflict between members.
also a major lack of trust within the group prevents a leader from emerging in the first place
The rise of a progressive wing of the Democratic party is certainly due to OWS bringing income inequality into the awareness of generally apolitical people. Democrats elected legislators from under-represented groups in 2018 than ever. In time, that will change the discourse. Even the rise of right-wing populism reflects some of the same discontent (though that energy is channeled differently and is building on decades of propaganda).
In the age of Twitter and Facebook, protests are a lot more convenient and a lot less difficult to organize. It is not clear that half a million people protesting in NYC or DC means much in terms of actual electoral consequences. Whether they can articulate it or not, politicians definitely know this and react accordingly.
And with better gerrymandering and voter targeting, the votes of protestors could be made irrelevant as well.
(There is a history that needs to be written of how "anti-globalization" moved from a left position to a right one, along the way changing from focusing on goods to focusing on immigrants)
If I had to guess, I'd say the problem facing the American left is complacency. A lot of people still think things are going reasonably well and simply do not empathize with the concerns of OWS or the sunrise movement or the BLM movement. It's hard to move the needle politically if a significant minority simply do not believe that there's a crisis worth reacting to.
That's partially true, but it is still more false than true. Stand this statement on its head:
> If your goal is to tweak the current state of affairs with minor reforms, you should probably seek a seat at the table. But if your goal is to make fundamental change, you have to work outside the system.
That is to say, the author assumes that power relations in society are static, and therefore one can either shout at established power from outside or join it - never deconstruct, topple or replace it.
Oh, just get a seat at the table WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT
“Well, then,” said I, “that is why the good are not willing to rule either for the sake of money or of honor. They do not wish to collect pay openly for their service of rule and be styled hirelings nor to take it by stealth from their office and be called thieves, nor yet for the sake of honor, for they are not covetous of honor. So there must be imposed some compulsion and penalty to constrain them to rule if they are to consent to hold office. That is perhaps why to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. It is from fear of this, as it appears to me, that the better sort hold office when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better men than themselves or to their like. - Republic, I 347.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
So yes, real change has to happen somewhere else. Newly educated people could drive that change, new alliances could be formed, or next steps like boycotts could be organized. Those things could have started at a protest, which is another reason why protesting is valuable.
Focusing on the media, marketing, communications and influence also means fake news, propaganda, Russian troll armies etc are also important. It's the medium and the message and not the aims of the movement that's most important. It over plays the media's hand and down plays how effective a protest movement could be.
A very undervalued tool for making lasting change. It would have been great if someone from the Occupy Wall Street movement had run for mayor of New York.
Did civil rights movement work within the system?
Did Suffragettes work within the system?
For me, I think it's a complimentary thing not an exclusive thing. For change to occur there's protests without and change within.
If instead of gathering people and motivating them with eloquent and carefully constructed arguments, Martin Luther King had led violent protests, he’d have likely changed nothing. He (and others) worked within the system of laws and public behavioral mores so as to not forfeit the right to be heard.
Rosa Parks sitting in the front of bus was exactly the type of action that was needed, not burning the bus. I see that as 80+% working within the system.
The civil rights leaders earned a seat at the table. They got publicity during the Apollo moon launches. They had meetings with important leaders who held the original seats at the table. They did it by being peaceful, strategic, unrelenting, and incredibly savvy.
I can’t imagine how frustrating it must have been to live as a disfavored racial minority prior to the civil rights era. To have leaders exercise the strategy and patience they did is almost unthinkably impressive to me.
Would you say that freedom riders operated within the system of laws or public behavioral mores? If I am not mistaken, breaking the segregation laws was their whole point. And the reaction they received from the white mobs doesn't suggest they operated within social norms either. Or do we have different definition of "working within the system"?
Because you asked for my opinion, yes, I do consider their actions as working with the system of laws (obviously) and public mores.
I believe they had federal law on their side and were seeking to make the changes in real life that the law demanded. In that regard, they were working even more within the system than Rosa Parks.
[0] https://londonstudent.coop/kings-college-agree-fossil-fuel-d...
I can see how that could very easily be read as "peaceful civil rights leaders of today", so the error is on me as the author, but that was not my intended usage.
MLK was not an insider. Rosa Parks was not an insider not even by your own definition: civil disobedience is literally the refusal to follow a given law. The civil rights movement (kind of) worked because 1) there was an implicit threat of violence (the Soviet Union fomenting unrest, riots, etc) and 2) there was a sizeable share of first-class citizens sympathetic to the movement, or that at least wouldn't approve of the necessary measures to effectively suppress it (again, violence).
Without the Suffragettes, the XIX Amendment would not have been written and passed. But without the XIX Amendment, women still would not have the right to vote (somewhat tautologically).
Similarly, without the civil rights movement we would not have seen the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. These acts have been instrumental in maintaining the hard-earned rights demanded by contemporary civil rights activists.
In short, I would say that protestors demand change whereas the "work within the system" codifies progress makes it last.
BUT I won't tire of pointing out that protests sometimes have dramatic effects. So much so that I'm still not sure about the exact mechanisms.
It seems so obvious that a government with all the guns should not be scared by unarmed protesters, right?
Yet there is no shortage of examples showing the opposite. In Ukraine, it was some low five-figure number of protesters on a single square in the capital that brought down the government. Across the middle east, "Arab Spring" rebellions deposed of quite a few entrenched autocrats. Hong Kong, right now, is entirely peaceful and mostly students, and has China closer to a nervous breakedown than Trump ever will.
Even Occupy Wall Street, favorite target of derisively dismissing "Hippies" and the left, has had significant impact: How often do you now see arguments framed as "The 1%" vs "The 99%". If that doesn't count as impact, your expectations are probably off.
I got to experience this first-hand when the G20 meeting happened in Hamburg, Germany: Every single interview with one of the politicians attending that I saw mentioned Climate Change. If that wasn't the result of the protests happening outside, I don't know what did it.
The Arab Spring especially has obviously not resulted in the sort of change people had hoped for. But to suggest it did not have an impact is simply wrong.