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.
I call BS, this wouldn’t affect them in the slightest.
Plus, they can play this game way better than the activists can.
I’ve seen the point of view “well if our grouping just puts enough pressure on, they’ll cave, and it’s not really relevant whether our tactics were legal or well-targeted or people understood them.” And yet, all of a sudden when the cop says “hey there’s like 50,000 of us and I pepper sprayed you and hit you a bunch of times with my baton to put pressure on you, and it’s not really relevant whether it was legal, come with me” they’re all shocked and surprised that that could have been the outcome.
I’m not saying it’s right for police to brutalize protestors. I’m saying the east-Indian independence movement and the US civil rights movements offer some really vital examples of how to effectively mobilize a resistance against a much stronger but unjust opponent, and “fuck the public opinion I’m just gonna punish everyone until the system changes” is about the absolute worst set of tactics you can adopt.
Agreed. But it fucks with ambulences. Protestors are usually good about getting out of the way for real emergencies, but when road block-offs are things like “giant blocks of cement”, there’s no choice.