10 ms·

It Takes More Than Mass Protests to Drive Change

rudiv 7y ago
>“With the rise of the internet,” Soule says, “modern movements can mobilize constituents through their websites and social media. If your end goal is to get 500,000 people to turn up on the Mall in Washington, D.C., Twitter is great at that. Facebook is great at that. But if your goal is to actually make lasting change in the system, you have to work within the system — to essentially get a seat at the table.” >“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.
- locopati 7y ago
  > But did it result in real change? Unfortunately, no. 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).
- jkoudys 7y ago
  I agree you need a seat at the table, and historically mass protests have been a way to get that seat. It only happens when the movement is reflective of a group willing to change their behaviour though - strikes, boycotts, etc. Criticism without a clear alternative or consequence isn't going to do much.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  OWS could not effect change because it was not created by the people, it was not grassroots. It was a funded operation of political operatives. hence the same reason why it was not lambasted by both parties. 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.
  - willis936 7y ago
    People who make the rules aren’t going to want to change the status quo. Getting money out of politics is hard and I would argue it would be hard to treat it as the first step. Removing the two party system is an attainable goal prior to removing money from politics. Those in control could believe it is acceptable to have the will of the people more accurately represented through a majoritarian voting system.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    > OWS could not effect change because it was not created by the people, it was not grassroots. It was a funded operation of political operatives. 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.
    - zuuow 7y ago
      >Soros Strawman/10
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  There's no way inside the system because it's the system OWS wanted to change (And Extinction Rebellion wants nowadays). 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.
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    Extinction Rebellion is strictly non-violent and they seem to be very successful afaict. Or do we different definitions of "nonviolence"? Also, what do you think about "The success of nonviolent civil resistance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w ?
    - srean 7y ago
      Nonviolence needs an influential audience / gallery to play to. If none such exists then it is not effective.
      - perfunctory 7y ago
        What influential audience did freedom riders play to? Or would you say they were ineffective?
        srean 7y ago
        Wouldnt that be non-racist white folks ?
    - citboin 7y ago
      In what way has extinction rebellion changed anything?
      - perfunctory 7y ago
        For one, UK parliament has declared a climate emergency [0]. So did NYC [1]. And many others. It doesn't mean much but still. 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-48126677 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPtAKjhT02s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPtAKjhT02s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMGqP5rP8v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMGqP5rP8v8 [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/26/climate-more-pressing-than-brexit-say-71-of-britons-poll https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/26/climate-...
- FakeComments 7y ago
  OWS failed to get a seat as a reward for their protests because they had no one to give a seat to. 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.
  - hbt 7y ago
    leaders are targeted. their reputation is tarnished by the media and isolated / detained by police. also a major lack of trust within the group prevents a leader from emerging in the first place
- b_tterc_p 7y ago
  OWS seemed kind of lame to me. There were a lot of people there, but they didn’t seem especially clear on why they were there.
  - mrfusion 7y ago
    The media creates that impression on purpose by choosing who they interview.
    - b_tterc_p 7y ago
      Perhaps. But was it wrong? Like, the women’s march when trump was elected. Many many people. Lots of them genuinely angry. Was it a serious protest... ehhh maybe?
      - anarchodev 7y ago
        Yes it was wrong, which will become clear if you spend any time with the people who were involved. Which you can very much still do, because the coalitions and communities formed during that movement are still active today, struggling against the rise of fascism in the US.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      If that's the case, it would be wise for the leaders of OWS to correct that narrative.
      - b_tterc_p 7y ago
        The narrative I understood was that there were basically no leaders
        staticautomatic 7y ago
        True. David Graeber wrote about this in The Utopia of Rules, where he explained that OWS was essentially felled by bureaucratic demands that it could not satisfy without formally organizing. An interesting lesson in the practical realities of anarchism.
- didibus 7y ago
  I'm not sure how to take this. Does it imply that you don't believe the US political system will be able to deal with income inequalities, and that it is doomed to fall apart? Cause otherwise, the only other outcome is that the system changes itself from within over time and quality of life remains high for its citizen and the country stays prosperous and able to sustain itself. Which would mean someone will eventually work with the system to change it, otherwise it's doomed to fail.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thecleaner 7y ago
"Seek a seat at the table." 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.
- empath75 7y ago
  Unless your goal is to flip the table over...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Very often, that seat has a lot less power than it might seem from the official title. Plus, in the pursuit of that seat you are often vetted, effectively if not literally, for not posing the danger of possibly fomenting significant change.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
From what I remember of Occupy Wall Street and similar topic, the headline will find a receptive audience here at HN. 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.
einpoklum 7y ago
> If your goal is to get 500,000 people to turn up on the Mall in Washington, D.C., Twitter is great at that. But if your goal is to make lasting change, you have to work within the system. 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.
- empath75 7y ago
  Yeah the whole thing has a “Let them eat cake” sort of vibe. Oh, just get a seat at the table WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT
  - admax88q 7y ago
    A lot of people didn't think or that though. So many people would prefer to yell from the sidelines evey now and then about how politicians are all the same and don't reflect the will of the people. How many of them have actually joined a political party p ran for office and even _tried_ to get a seat at the table.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” — Plato
      - yesenadam 7y ago
        Didn't at all sound like Plato so I checked. I guess it's this (my italics) : “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%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D1%3Asection%3D347b http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
wsxcde 7y ago
A related point made by Zeynep Tufecki is that mass protests in the past used to be show of force. If you could get half million people to travel to Washington and participate in a mass protest, that meant these people cared enough to take time off from work for a few days, spend money on travel and participate in a policitically and socially risky activity. It also meant you had several tens of thousands of organizers in diverse parts of country who managed the logistics of getting so many people to come together for the protest. The implication was clear -- give us what we want, if you don't, we definitely have the votes to take you down. 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.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I think after OWS, and before that the various "G20" etc anti-globalization protests, it became very clear that the police could effectively contain and suppress mass protest and that it would not be allowed to change anything. 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)
  - wsxcde 7y ago
    I think we disagree on this. I interpret the failure of OWS et al. as the inability of the protestors to take their ideas mainstream. While gerrymandering, voter targeting and propaganda via mass media do dilute the protesters' votes, change is clearly possible. We saw this with the Arab Spring where the protesters were up against a much more authoritarian and anti-democratic state. 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.
perfunctory 7y ago
> But if your goal is to actually make lasting change in the system, you have to work within the system — to essentially get a seat at the table.” Did civil rights movement work within the system? Did Suffragettes work within the system?
- chippy 7y ago
  We need to consult a historian. I think they'd say yes - there's also a few historians who would go further and say that suffragettes actually didn't do much at all - that it was politicians within the system who changed things. This seems uncharitable to me and slightly fishy also because the same (conservative) experts write that it's the left wing who tend to over emphasise the effects of on-the-streets protests and riots. For me, I think it's a complimentary thing not an exclusive thing. For change to occur there's protests without and change within.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  As compared to a revolution or doing nothing, yes the civil rights movement worked within the system. 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.
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    > worked within the system of laws and public behavioral mores 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"?
valgor 7y ago
Protesting is about bring awareness and education to the public over topics the media was not airing. For example, the media was not talking about income inequality before OWS protest started happening. OWS shifted national discourse for a lot of people. That means it was a very successful protest. 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.
- chippy 7y ago
  It's funny how one of the aims of a protest is about getting their story in the media because the media is not paying attention to it. It basically means that a protest has to play by the medias's games. There's always critical commentary after a protest about the amount of coverage given to it. Coverage becomes the aim rather than the actual aim. The media for their part do cover them - they have to play their side - but they won't be on the protest's side! 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.

>“With the rise of the internet,” Soule says, “modern movements can mobilize constituents through their websites and social media. If your end goal is to get 500,000 people to turn up on the Mall in Washington, D.C., Twitter is great at that. Facebook is great at that. But if your goal is to actually make lasting change in the system, you have to work within the system — to essentially get a seat at the table.” >“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.

locopati 7y ago
> But did it result in real change? Unfortunately, no. 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).
jkoudys 7y ago
I agree you need a seat at the table, and historically mass protests have been a way to get that seat. It only happens when the movement is reflective of a group willing to change their behaviour though - strikes, boycotts, etc. Criticism without a clear alternative or consequence isn't going to do much.
Shivetya 7y ago
OWS could not effect change because it was not created by the people, it was not grassroots. It was a funded operation of political operatives. hence the same reason why it was not lambasted by both parties. 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.
- willis936 7y ago
  People who make the rules aren’t going to want to change the status quo. Getting money out of politics is hard and I would argue it would be hard to treat it as the first step. Removing the two party system is an attainable goal prior to removing money from politics. Those in control could believe it is acceptable to have the will of the people more accurately represented through a majoritarian voting system.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > OWS could not effect change because it was not created by the people, it was not grassroots. It was a funded operation of political operatives. 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.
  - zuuow 7y ago
    >Soros Strawman/10
JulianMorrison 7y ago
There's no way inside the system because it's the system OWS wanted to change (And Extinction Rebellion wants nowadays). 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.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  Extinction Rebellion is strictly non-violent and they seem to be very successful afaict. Or do we different definitions of "nonviolence"? Also, what do you think about "The success of nonviolent civil resistance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w ?
  - srean 7y ago
    Nonviolence needs an influential audience / gallery to play to. If none such exists then it is not effective.
    - perfunctory 7y ago
      What influential audience did freedom riders play to? Or would you say they were ineffective?
      - srean 7y ago
        Wouldnt that be non-racist white folks ?
  - citboin 7y ago
    In what way has extinction rebellion changed anything?
    - perfunctory 7y ago
      For one, UK parliament has declared a climate emergency [0]. So did NYC [1]. And many others. It doesn't mean much but still. 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-48126677 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPtAKjhT02s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPtAKjhT02s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMGqP5rP8v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMGqP5rP8v8 [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/26/climate-more-pressing-than-brexit-say-71-of-britons-poll https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/26/climate-...
FakeComments 7y ago
OWS failed to get a seat as a reward for their protests because they had no one to give a seat to. 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.
- hbt 7y ago
  leaders are targeted. their reputation is tarnished by the media and isolated / detained by police. also a major lack of trust within the group prevents a leader from emerging in the first place
b_tterc_p 7y ago
OWS seemed kind of lame to me. There were a lot of people there, but they didn’t seem especially clear on why they were there.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  The media creates that impression on purpose by choosing who they interview.
  - b_tterc_p 7y ago
    Perhaps. But was it wrong? Like, the women’s march when trump was elected. Many many people. Lots of them genuinely angry. Was it a serious protest... ehhh maybe?
    - anarchodev 7y ago
      Yes it was wrong, which will become clear if you spend any time with the people who were involved. Which you can very much still do, because the coalitions and communities formed during that movement are still active today, struggling against the rise of fascism in the US.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    If that's the case, it would be wise for the leaders of OWS to correct that narrative.
    - b_tterc_p 7y ago
      The narrative I understood was that there were basically no leaders
      - staticautomatic 7y ago
        True. David Graeber wrote about this in The Utopia of Rules, where he explained that OWS was essentially felled by bureaucratic demands that it could not satisfy without formally organizing. An interesting lesson in the practical realities of anarchism.
didibus 7y ago
I'm not sure how to take this. Does it imply that you don't believe the US political system will be able to deal with income inequalities, and that it is doomed to fall apart? Cause otherwise, the only other outcome is that the system changes itself from within over time and quality of life remains high for its citizen and the country stays prosperous and able to sustain itself. Which would mean someone will eventually work with the system to change it, otherwise it's doomed to fail.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

thecleaner 7y ago

"Seek a seat at the table." 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.

empath75 7y ago
Unless your goal is to flip the table over...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
einpoklum 7y ago
Very often, that seat has a lot less power than it might seem from the official title. Plus, in the pursuit of that seat you are often vetted, effectively if not literally, for not posing the danger of possibly fomenting significant change.

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago

From what I remember of Occupy Wall Street and similar topic, the headline will find a receptive audience here at HN. 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.

einpoklum 7y ago

> If your goal is to get 500,000 people to turn up on the Mall in Washington, D.C., Twitter is great at that. But if your goal is to make lasting change, you have to work within the system. 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.

empath75 7y ago
Yeah the whole thing has a “Let them eat cake” sort of vibe. Oh, just get a seat at the table WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT
- admax88q 7y ago
  A lot of people didn't think or that though. So many people would prefer to yell from the sidelines evey now and then about how politicians are all the same and don't reflect the will of the people. How many of them have actually joined a political party p ran for office and even _tried_ to get a seat at the table.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” — Plato
    - yesenadam 7y ago
      Didn't at all sound like Plato so I checked. I guess it's this (my italics) : “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%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D1%3Asection%3D347b http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

wsxcde 7y ago

A related point made by Zeynep Tufecki is that mass protests in the past used to be show of force. If you could get half million people to travel to Washington and participate in a mass protest, that meant these people cared enough to take time off from work for a few days, spend money on travel and participate in a policitically and socially risky activity. It also meant you had several tens of thousands of organizers in diverse parts of country who managed the logistics of getting so many people to come together for the protest. The implication was clear -- give us what we want, if you don't, we definitely have the votes to take you down. 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.

pjc50 7y ago
I think after OWS, and before that the various "G20" etc anti-globalization protests, it became very clear that the police could effectively contain and suppress mass protest and that it would not be allowed to change anything. 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)
- wsxcde 7y ago
  I think we disagree on this. I interpret the failure of OWS et al. as the inability of the protestors to take their ideas mainstream. While gerrymandering, voter targeting and propaganda via mass media do dilute the protesters' votes, change is clearly possible. We saw this with the Arab Spring where the protesters were up against a much more authoritarian and anti-democratic state. 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.

perfunctory 7y ago

> But if your goal is to actually make lasting change in the system, you have to work within the system — to essentially get a seat at the table.” Did civil rights movement work within the system? Did Suffragettes work within the system?

chippy 7y ago
We need to consult a historian. I think they'd say yes - there's also a few historians who would go further and say that suffragettes actually didn't do much at all - that it was politicians within the system who changed things. This seems uncharitable to me and slightly fishy also because the same (conservative) experts write that it's the left wing who tend to over emphasise the effects of on-the-streets protests and riots. For me, I think it's a complimentary thing not an exclusive thing. For change to occur there's protests without and change within.
sokoloff 7y ago
As compared to a revolution or doing nothing, yes the civil rights movement worked within the system. 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.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  > worked within the system of laws and public behavioral mores 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"?

valgor 7y ago

Protesting is about bring awareness and education to the public over topics the media was not airing. For example, the media was not talking about income inequality before OWS protest started happening. OWS shifted national discourse for a lot of people. That means it was a very successful protest. 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.

chippy 7y ago
It's funny how one of the aims of a protest is about getting their story in the media because the media is not paying attention to it. It basically means that a protest has to play by the medias's games. There's always critical commentary after a protest about the amount of coverage given to it. Coverage becomes the aim rather than the actual aim. The media for their part do cover them - they have to play their side - but they won't be on the protest's side! 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.