Abstract
After a lifetime of activism, co-creator of Occupy Wall Street
A protester outside St Paul’s Cathedral during the Occupy London protest, 15 October 2011
CREDIT: Michael Kemp/Alamy
Barricades in Wall Street during the first day of the Occupy Wall Street protest, 17 September 2011
CREDIT: David Shankbone/Flickr
When the Women’s March came around, I was not swayed by the remarkable crowd sizes – an estimated 1.3% of the US population participated in the march – and was not surprised that marching did not eradicate gender oppression, stop sexual harassment or establish greater political power for women. I supported all of these causes, yet I saw that their tactics were failing.
Most disturbing of all, however, was that I encountered a widespread reluctance to acknowledge the declining effectiveness of contemporary protest, despite the dissipation of Occupy Wall Street, the disappointment of Black Lives Matter, the debacle of the anti-Trump Resistance and the defeat of climate-change environmentalism.
I anticipated that my activist peers would want to have a candid conversation about the failures of protest because they, like me, wanted to make protest effective again. I was wrong. And now activism is at risk of irrelevance.
The continued failure of protest is bad for humanity because, historically speaking, protest has been one of the main drivers of societal evolution. As Karl Marx observed: “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.” Many, if not all, of the democratic rights that we enjoy – including democracy itself – were the result of protest. From this perspective, if protest is broken then social change is stymied.
So I started to dig deeper in the hope of understanding why activists who claimed to want social change were resistant to considering that contemporary methods were not working, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of our recent collective experience. What I discovered was that two ostensibly opposed forces were working together to censor the question of whether our protests were failing.
The censorship is led on one flank by an insular activist clique that promotes a false triumphalist narrative, eschews collective criticism and ostracises all who challenge movement dogma. These folks control the movement’s largest social media accounts, soak up philanthropic donations and hoard activist fellowships. The more persistent that I became about the need for a collective rethink of protest, the more vehemently I was attacked by this insider scene.
One former Occupier and prominent Bernie Sanders devotee declared on Twitter that I was a “fucking charlatan” and an “embarrassment to the movement” that I co-created.
These public attacks are buttressed by a whisper campaign designed to discredit me and, most importantly, to silence all those who might also start questioning whether today’s celebrated protest tactics are ineffective. The clique’s attacks are motivated by a desire to shut down the conversation before it happens out of fear of losing access to the media, donations and fellowships that sustain their careers.
On the other flank is the mass culture industry, social media monopolies and the “influencers” that profit from transforming revolutionary activism into commodified social marketing.
This force made its presence known to me through direct censorship, initially with the total refusal by US publishers to publish my book The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution. In contrast, Knopf Canada, an imprint of Canada’s branch of Penguin Random House, was eager to publish it. The End of Protest is now in the convoluted situation of being published by a Canadian publisher, printed and bound in the USA, transported into Canada and then exported back into the USA. This has slowed, but not stopped, the distribution of my book to Americans. The End of Protest recently entered its fourth printing, demonstrating that there is indeed a market for this question.
Together, these two factions are invested in promoting protest spectacles – such as large-scale marches – that are bound to fail, in order to attract publicity and donations without seriously threatening the status quo.
The next generation of activists must break through the censorship in order to catalyse a sudden explosion of tactical creativity and wild experimentation which, with a bit of luck, will jumpstart the future of protest.
What will this future look like? From a strategic perspective, the most likely scenario is a rejection of the dominant activist theory that if enough people get angry in the streets then change will inevitably have to happen. That approach is not working, and will not work, because it fails to acknowledge the now obvious fact that nominally democratic governments are not required to heed the wishes of protesters, regardless of crowd size. Activists will remain confined to repeating the same theatrical tactics as long as protesters fail to orient towards sovereignty. That means taking power as a social movement and governing in the most democratic way imaginable.
Put simply, there are only two ways that activists can capture sovereignty. We can attain power by using protest to win elections or by using protest to win wars. Elections or wars is the stark choice before us.
I am a believer in the elections route and I draw inspiration from the new breed of electoral social movements such as Podemos in Spain, Italy’s Five Star Movement and the Pirate Party in Iceland. These groups are neither fully social movements nor entirely political parties. And yet they are winning elections as collectives while maintaining control over their movements’ decision-making processes. These activist ensembles are arguably the most advanced form of democracy today.
All this does not mean that activists will stop marching in the streets or occupying public space. Instead, what will change is the goal of these activities. We will no longer go into the streets simply to hold signs aimed at garnering the attention of the media or the people in power. Instead, everything about our protest behaviour will be oriented around completing the difficult, complex and multistage process of winning elections. The Five Star Movement and Podemos, for example, have been successful at transforming street protests and rallies into grassroots petitioning and electioneering opportunities. This direction holds significant promise.
Perhaps this sounds too abstract. So here is a concrete example of the form that the future of protest could take. The greatest barrier to getting a third party on the ballot in the USA is the onerous signatures requirement. Each of the 50 states has different rules and a new party must attain around one million signatures nationwide within an extremely limited timeframe. The Green Party was unable to accomplish this task in the most recent presidential election and was, therefore, not a real contender for the presidency. In fact, some US activists consider achieving ballot access to be a practically impossible task.
Now consider that upwards of four million Americans participated nationwide in the Women’s March. Had that day been oriented towards coming together and collecting signatures for a Women’s Party, I do not think it is difficult to imagine that the most difficult part of getting on the ballot would have been easily accomplished in just a few hours of marching in the streets.
The great strength of contemporary activism is our ability to spread social memes that get millions of people to change their collective behaviour. For now, activists most commonly ask people to simply march and go home. The future of protest will involve a creative re-orientation towards collective behaviour that puts social movements into power.
In the end, activists of the future will share one profound faith: protest alone is no longer an option.