I was told that it may lead to easier or faster release, and I imagine I might be targeted to be imprisoned if I push it if I don’t bring an ID, but I feel like that’s bullshit but I don’t think I should leave it to chance
Would you bring an ID to a protest?
(Did I accidentally start a struggle session?)
You were born at an awkward time. Too late for the civil rights and Vietnam protests. You’re just in time to see the power that be crush public demonstration after 9/11 so that Occupy and economic protests are reduced in effectiveness. So you’re kind of looking at an unfortunate sliver of time. People did learn from Occupy and went on to build better organization. 2020 protests wouldn’t have been so widespread if not for the networks built after Occupy. But you’re not going to get a sense of that by reading headlines on a link aggregator and forming vibes.
The other part of this is people keep saying “but this will ruin my livelihood.” That’s exactly why it’s not working. Everyone is so scared of losing their jobs and not being able to market their labor in the future that they don’t want to participate. Revolutions happen when there is no job to lose and when there is no future. The fact that you still think there’s a job for you in the fascist future as long as you don’t have a criminal record or serious injury is telling. That is your clue that we are not there yet.
Not sure this is really a great counterexample. The 2020 protests were widespread but had 0 lasting material effect, and any ideological effect of enlightening white people about racism clearly didn’t hold either.
That’s why my post is longer than one sentence. Within the context of what I said, it’s clear I’m not providing the 2020 protests as something that brought lasting material change and especially not that it cured racism is a lot of white people. I brought it up because it’s a recent protest that comes after public demonstrations were neutered over the Iraq War. However, despite that, there were people still building networks and gaining useful skills from the neutered protests. A lot of those people were also murdered by the state afterwards.
What do you mean? Police funding skyrocketed.
I disagree. That imaged stayed in my mind as an example we can actually do something useful.
Before that I saw the police and state as unbeatable, especially in the US. But they taught people a good lesson that day.
I don’t know about your local scene but many formerly Bernie people joined leftist orgs and mutual aid groups around this time, 2020 was radicalizing for many Americans
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That’s functionally the same as what I just said. You trying to maintain physical ability or legal obscurity so that fascists in the future have a harder time killing you is the same thing. You’re trying to maintain a livelihood in case the solution doesn’t spontaneously emerge before fascists come after you. It also disregards people who are already crippled or have a criminal record that show up to protests. That goes to the idea about having nothing to lose.
Besides that the strategy of giving up strength/security for material gain is flawed. This assumes you know what you’re trading and how the trade will turn out. You operate in the present without hindsight. It’s easier to look back 20 years and say that the Iraq War protests were mostly ineffective but the people at the time didn’t know that. You can argue that it would have been effective if they all listened to the good leftists and read more Lenin but that’s just more hindsight talking. The leftists of the time who did read Lenin should have been more active in that space and guiding them.
I was on the street of brussel to protest the iraq war. It taught me peaceful protests were useless.