Summary: Except for issues about which the 1% have no interest (e.g., who sleeps with who, how the peons marry), reform efforts in America have proven themselves mostly ineffective for several generations. Here we look at one aspect of that failure, our reliance on demonstrations — and why this results from deeper errors: our failure to organize around leaders and programs. Perhaps when we’re desperate we’ll become serious about reform (unless it’s too late by then). At the end are links to learn how we can do better.
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(1) “Do protests ever work?“, Joshua Keating , blog of Foreign Policy, 2 April 2009 — Excerpt:
{Phil} Collins names Gandhi’s march to the sea and Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington as the ultimate effective demonstrations in this sense. They mobilized huge groups in support of a definable and achievable goal rather than opposing an amorphous concept like “capitalism.”
The fact that much of the street activism against the U.S. war in Iraq has been led by a group called Act Now to Stop War & End Racism is a good indication of why the antiwar movement has never really been a factor in debates over U.S. foreign policy. Rather than organizing around a specific political goal, ending the war, these marches tend to devolve into general lefty free-for-alls encompassing everything from Palestine to free trade to the environment to capital punishment.
(2) “Why Demonstrations and Petitions Do Not Work“, Phil B, undated — This doesn’t show that demonstrations do not work, but rather that the bar for their success is quite high. Excerpt:
There are two main reasons why demonstrations and petitions do not work.
- the leaders who make decisions and influence changes are well shielded from protesters. These leaders most likely never even know that there are riots and protests nearby and even more so for peaceful demonstrations and petitions.
- business leaders with money and power belong to a much higher class than the average demonstrator. As a result, these leaders do not care much about the issues and causes of most middle and lower class people.
- a lot of rich people can not even relate to most of these issues either. Therefore, demonstrations and petitions mean very little to rich people when compared to the average person.
(3) “After the Protests“, Zeynep Tufekci (Asst Prof, U NC), op-ed in the New York Times, 19 March 2014
Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.
This muted effect is not because social media isn’t good at what it does, but, in a way, because it’s very good at what it does. Digital tools make it much easier to build up movements quickly, and they greatly lower coordination costs. This seems like a good thing at first, but it often results in an unanticipated weakness: Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.
Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn’t just to challenge power; it’s to change it.
(4) “Why Street Protests Don’t Work“, Moisés Naím (bio), The Atlantic, 7 April 2014 — “How can so many demonstrations accomplish so little?” Excerpt:
Street protests are in. From Bangkok to Caracas, and Madrid to Moscow, these days not a week goes by without news that a massive crowd has amassed in the streets of another of the world’s big cities. The reasons for the protests vary (bad and too-costly public transport or education, the plan to raze a park, police abuse, etc.). Often, the grievance quickly expands to include a repudiation of the government, or its head, or more general denunciations of corruption and economic inequality.
Aerial photos of the anti-government marches routinely show an intimidating sea of people furiously demanding change. And yet, it is surprising how little these crowds achieve. The fervent political energy on the ground is hugely disproportionate to the practical results of these demonstrations.
…The hodgepodge groups that participated had no formal affiliation with one another, no clear hierarchy, and no obvious leaders. But social networks helped to virally replicate the movement so that the basic patterns of camping, protesting, fundraising, communicating with the media, and interacting with the authorities were similar from place to place.
… In fact, government responses usually amount to little more than rhetorical appeasement, and certainly no major political reforms. … How can so many extremely motivated people achieve so little?
One answer might be found in the results of an experiment conducted by Anders Colding-Jørgensen of the University of Copenhagen. In 2009, he created a Facebook group to protest the demolition of the historic Stork Fountain in a major square of the Danish capital. Ten thousand people joined in the first week; after two weeks, the group was 27,000 members-strong. That was the extent of the experiment. There was never a plan to demolish the fountain — Colding-Jørgensen simply wanted to show how easy it was to create a relatively large group using social media.
… The problem is what happens after the march. Sometimes it ends in violent confrontation with the police, and more often than not it simply fizzles out. Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government.
… Achieving that motion requires organizations capable of old-fashioned and permanent political work that can leverage street demonstrations into political change and policy reforms.
… What we’ve witnessed in recent years is the popularization of street marches without a plan for what happens next and how to keep protesters engaged and integrated in the political process. It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is the way to change society.
(5) For More Information
(a) Reforming America: steps to political change – all posts about the theory and practice of organizing and executing reform movements
(b) Posts about organizing to reform America:
- The First Step to reforming America — Organizing
- The second step to reforming America — Building a big organization
- How to recruit people to the cause of reforming America
- How do protests like the Tea Party and OWS differ from effective political action?
- How to stage effective protests in the 21st century
(c) Posts about the Tea Party Movement
(d) Posts about the Occupy Wall Street Movement
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