We now live in a world of a thousand woes and ten thousand protests. A new crisis arises seemingly every other month: The wars. The climate. GMO foods. Gay rights. Banks. Tuition. Gun rights. And so forth.
Topic 1: Everything has been Occupied and nothing has changed. Do these protests ever amount to anything anymore or have they devolved into masturbatory activism effective only at letting off steam?
Topic 2: The 60s have gone and gone and left in their wake a proud history of citizen action, but were those simpler times? Now, thanks to real-time news, every cause is everywhere, and every person hears every rallying cry – all the time. Do people now suffer from activism overload, making them less willing and able to focus on any one particular issue, thereby making it less likely that any of the causes will be successful? Is the global conscience stretched too thin?
I think the biggest problem with non-violent protest is that the authorities have figured out the most effective way of dealing with them: ignore them. Much of the power of protests in the old days was due to how easily the authorities were provoked into brutality against unarmed, nonviolent people. Which of course made them into martyrs, and the authorities into brutal oppressors. Ignore the protestors and they just become “those irritating guys”.
I suspect one thing that may have contributed to this phenomenon is this: you can always win by banking on public apathy
Force people to do something? Or if the public is directly threatened? You get major protests – for example, the draft during vietnam. Or food shortages in several countries in the recent past.
If the issue doesn’t necessarily affect people directly? Or if it only has conceptual/theoretical risks to the public good? You get public apathy – and therefore activism doesn’t work, especially non-violent activism.
All of the examples you mentioned – the wars (involving a volunteer army), climate change, GMO foods, etc, do not directly threaten the public, and thus you have apathy.
I don’t think you can fairly compare in terms of strategy, discipline or competence the occupy movement and the Civil Rights movement much less with Ghandi.
There’s a huge difference between a movement led by Martin Luther King and a group composed mostly of elite whites who’s main goal seems to be to feel better about themselves and act out some fantasy of what the 60s was like.
I don’t mean to so much critique Occupy in particular as much as similar protests for similar causes. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like every day there’s a new group rallying around a new cause du jour, causing much fanfare and little actual change. Occupy was a convenient, but hardly the only, example.
I think it’s more subtle than that: the “establishment” (open to a better term; haven’t found one yet) has learned to co-opt protest movements. Back in the day, it took two or three years to co-opt and thus blunt the original anti-war movement. For Occupy, it took about three days.
I have been on the edges of communities that took their grievances to the [California] capitol steps - teary moms, sick kids, angry signs and all. It’s become a scheduled event, with time slots for a congresscritter or two to appear and the newsfeeds to capture some sound bites, then you clear the area for the next group. Utterly useless. Utterly meaningless. But when you speak up in the planning group and point this out, you might as well just hang a big juicy broccoli-and-garlic fart for all the useful reaction you get. Everyone “knows” this is the way to do things. (Sure it is - it’s the establishment’s controlled way, now. Play along, kiddies.)
(Better yet, try a new tactic like “not having any leaders” and see what you get.)
It’s not ignoring. It’s co-option, and it’s the deadliest force any meaningful social effort can encounter.
The wars are basically over. GMOs are not as bad as you might think. Gay rights activists are winning. Gun control activists are losing. Climate change is something that will have to be won by green energy. As for college many of these degrees are turning out to be essentially worthless.
I was an Occupier and I think they made a statement but I think the movement has ran its course. Overall life is pretty good now, not perfect of course but we’re not in the horrible times so many people believe we are in.
Considering I’m a liberal who never watches Fox News this is a really stupid question.
Now, if you think I’m wrong then please explain how I’m wrong about the utter failure of a group that didn’t face one hundredth the opposition that the Civil Rights movement faced.
OWS members never wound up being lynched and the didn’t face police harassment remotely as bad as what the Civil Rights movement faced.
Perhaps a good place to start would be to compare their leaders.
Who was the leader of the OWS movement and the face of it?
This isn’t a good comparison, because OWS didn’t have a leader. Not having a leader, or any sort of hierarchy, was a key aspect of its organization. I would recommend reading more about OWS before adopting such a condescending tone – it’s actually pretty fascinating, and far more complex than “elite whites acting out 60s fantasies.”
It’s also difficult to do the same sort of non-violent activism that Gandhi and King did because you can’t really engage in civil disobedience against GMOs, or against abortion, or against gay marriage, or against Wall Street, because you can’t really intentionally break the unjust law and go to jail for it. How are you going to engage in civil disobedience to protest gay marriage-- by not getting one? How do you engage in civil disobedience against GMOs, by not eating them? OWS weren’t civilly disobeying unjust laws that enforce wealth disparity, they were breaking trespassing, loitering, and sanitation laws. Abortion protesters can’t engage in civil disobedience against abortion; all they can do is choose not to get one. Certainly there are other ways to non-violently protest these things, but you can’t replicate the moral force of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the lunch-counter sit-ins, or the Freedom Rides, or the voter registration drives in the South, or Gandhi’s salt production media stunt without having an unjust law to break directly.
Historically movements that have focus and continue to focus on single issues are able to move the politics in their favor. Organizations with grand pictures of how society should be tend to fail. The Prohibition movement was a joke when it started but a small percentage of people managed to force their idea’s on the entire country by refusing to let up on the issue. Martin Luthur King Jr didn’t try to make blacks accepted as a whole he stuck to what was important which was equal legal rights.
The Occupy Movement never had any focus and couldn’t effectively rally on an issue they wanted or how they wanted something done. They are really an just example of a failed movement.
Nonviolent Activism is still very effective and will continue to be. The NRA has been focusing on single issues and moving the ball in their direction for years. It’s only recently there has been organization on the other side of the issue. The nonviolent actions of the Newtown families has really changed the game politically. They are sticking to the goals and keeping constant pressure in that direction.
Non-violence if not necessarily pacifism. At least, not in the absolute sense. Nonviolence protest depends upon the decency of those being protested to. It is the refusal to threaten as much as a refusal of retaliation. As such, it is a gesture of faith in your opponent, that he is human and wrong, not evil. And when the problem is resolved, you can live together.
I admire pacifism as a moral guideline, but have to admit that there are times that only violent resistance is possible, when your enemy is, in truth, evil. But a moral and civilized man must see that as the very last, the most desperate action. Bad enough a man might sell his soul, far worse if he fling it at an enemy like a stone.
Thankfully the Civil Rights movement had greater standards for success.
That said, that was a movement of outsiders trying to break into the mainstream who faced severe consequences if they failed.
By contrast, the OWS movement was basically a movement of well-off, well-educated white people who liked to pretend they were poor, oppressed rebels, who were completely disorganized, had no idea how to portray themselves or win people over to their cause, and when it failed simply went back to their suburban lives.
Had they been better organized and had an idea how to win people over they might not have failed so spectacularly.
Look, nonviolent activism has its limits, but violent activism has its risks. There is always the risk of losing, for one, and the consequences are hard. There is the risk of stalemate, like in Syria at present, of which the consequences are both hard and bloody. And, the consequences of winning can be harder still. Even when they can be sure of winning, revolutionaries can never be sure of how things will turn out. You swear the Oath of the Tennis Court, and the next thing you know, Emperor Napoleon is getting his tail chased from Moscow to Paris.
Given that Occupy was basically an anarchist organization without set demands, a utopian community against Capitalism, it’s not really fair to mock them for failing to change the entirety of the socioeconomic system of the United States of America. I thought OWS did a fantastic job of bringing the idea of the 99% to mainstream America, and I believe its offshoots (Occupy Sandy, Occupy Our Homes) are still around.
Is there any other recent protest movement in the US that has garnered anywhere near the attention, popularity or localization that Occupy did? I can’t think of any. They must have been doing something right.