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’m all for blocking relevant roads. but if your movement just throws themselves onto any intersection without being able to explain how blocking this specific one is relevant, your movement needs better planning.
But then you are risking an actual reprecussion for your actions, and would have to deal with consequences of several really pissed of corporations with a recipe about how much money did your actions costed them in damages, that would be pretty hard to wriggle yourself out of.
Which is exactly why (proper) protesting isn’t easy to do in the slightest, and you have to really believe in the cause to resort to such things. And that is how it should be. It’s also why you only end up with with random people blocking inconsequantial roads or ruining glass-protected paintings. Because they want attention, they want to feel good that they’re doing something, and protesting is the edgy thing to do that nobody understands. But at the end of the day, they want to go back to their instagram so they can post about it, instead of dealing with the consequences.
If you resort to such a drastic action, and protesting definitely is a drastic action, at least the kind the post is talking about, you should sacrifice something other than your free time and a pocket change in fees, otherwise it has no value. That’s why demonstrations held at a weekend or holidays feel so cheap, if you aren’t even willing to take your time off for it, whats the point?
I wouldn’t for most of them. So I don’t attend. But all these “feel-good” demonstrations and protests are only succeeding in undermining the grave nature of protests and demonstrations, to the point where no-one really needs to take them seriously.