Blocking a road doesn't affect anyone's supply lines enough to affect any change. If it did there would be much harsher laws and penalties when some fuckhead is on their phone and gets in an accident disrupting traffic flow.

Yes, but it’s important to understand it as burning goodwill to do so. And it’s also important to understand that the most effective protests disrupt those with power and garner sympathy from others. ACT UP managed that. They disrupted the medical establishment that was ignoring our deaths and did so while portraying us as a sympathetic people dying in pain after caring for our dying friends.

Disruption without point is ineffective. A pre planned three day strike without the will to move to an indefinite one isn’t effective.

ETA: I guess my point is that disruption is a powerful tactic, but without strategy you’re doomed. Pure demonstration is a popular strategy because it’s low risk, but the reward is shit. A strategy that tries to use the right tactics at the right times to ensure that their next move is even more effective or leaves them better than they started is how you win. Look to the black civil rights movement for good strategy and you’ll see it. They got so good at strategy that later some of the most effective strategists of the gay liberation movement were black people who’d been involved in their civil rights movement.

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 have you considered that I benefit personally from protecting the status quo, and these protestors are trying to change that?" -some suburbanites

But for real, I need to get more involved. I've been to many demonstrations, but never a protest.

I thought we were getting to the blowing-up-oil-pipelines stage, especially now that Law Enforcement in Florida is attacking mutual aid organizations.

That's stupid as fuck. You don't need to snottily educate people on why the dumb shit you're doing has complex implications beyond the visible annoyance to the regular person. You need to find a way of protesting that has that regular person go "Fuck yeah! Let's do this shit!".

I sense some mighty strong projection going on here. The writer comes off like they believe they're correct without the need for any question, completely sure of this idea, for which they provide zero evidence. They then go on to call anyone who disagrees with them ignorant, infantilising and diminishing the opposing point of view before the reader has had a moment to make up their own mind. Meanwhile, the intended audience is being spoon-fed hate and gobbling it up. This is what division looks like. They make you hate your neighbors and demand action from you against them, after all it's what's right: you're a grown up and the opposition needs to be parented. This is the tone that makes sure you never gain power, because you don't believe in moderates, and you downright hate progressives.

These are some super disappointing comments :c I would've thought a more lefty community would understand what protests are about. But nah apparently if you fighting for your rights ever interferes their lives, you and your cause are bad and you should feel bad

I've learned to treat comments that start with "what those people don't understand..." With a little bit more skepticism than others. I find that if your opening move is to imply that not believing your ideas shows ignorance, then chances are really high that you don't have much confidence in arguing your case by its own merit.

Economic pressure can be a strategic move, sure. But, the road block has been largely indiscriminate, and the goal seems to be to create as much disruption as possible. Where's the strategy in indiscriminate disruption? In fact, the corporations you advocate against are probably least hurt by shit like this, because it would be such a comparatively small hit than everyone else.

You are far more likely to inconvenience someone just trying to get by, or someone with something person and time sensitive going on than any corporation you'd like to "pressure". They don't feel this, they don't think about this. You're not disrupting corporate supply chains, you're inconveniencing regular people.

That doesn't even get to the fact that road blockages are extremely dangerous in emergency situations, and you're putting far more lives at risk than your own by going out there.

If you are genuinely interested in taking a structured approach to protests, then I strongly suggest you start thinking of some other methods.

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.

"Idiots will think you're just assholes" doesn't mean we think you're just assholes. It means, if you're doing something for an audience, you have to give a shit about reaching that audience. Half of that audience thinks libraries are communism. Aim lower.

Blocking the road to a factory, or indeed to a financial district, has obvious impact in-itself. Blocking a highway for one day just pisses off random people. For a day. You wanna fuck up traffic for most weekdays out of a month, yeah hey maybe some of them will consider public transit. Maybe. But more likely they'll just clog alternate routes.

A campaign of slashing tires on giant pickup trucks would also piss off random people, to a much greater extent than any form of blocking traffic, but its impact would be obvious, immediate, and lingering. It is an asymmetrical attack that prevents choices the movement is against. Unlike playing human speed-bump at a four-lane intersection. People will still think you're assholes, but they'll also consider buying a sedan instead.

This is an interesting bit of writing, drawing that distinction.

It seems focused on what a protest isn't, could do with more on what it is. What does it look like to think systemically when you turn that into action?

That feels like click bait since it doesn't say what a protest is or does.

For folks wanting further reading on a similar vein to this Peter Gelderloos book "How nonviolence protects the state" goes into further detail about what he thinks is and isn't effective protests. Given the title of the book you can assume he takes quite an extreme approach but makes a good argument I feel. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state

There's no way the Olympics go without a strike in France, it's the biggest opportunity ever

Where can I learn? Many communities I'm in have a TOS they have to abide by.