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I’m on several deadlines, and the next few months will see shorter works from me. The fact that the world now changes every 48 hours also means that I will be writing more quick responses like this one.
Many thanks to G. for the feedback.
I am writing this only hours after Donald Trump announced that the U.S has bombed Iran, and in the week following massive protests on June 14, and, following that, ongoing protests demanding “No War on Iran.”
I have lost count of how many war protests I’ve attended over the last many decades, and I know people well into their seventies and eighties who have been protesting all their lives.
And yet, the wars rage on. Some of us have been screaming “No War on Iran” over and over, for years now. So, do protests really matter?
In January and February 2017, thousands of people showed up at airports around the country to protest the first Muslim Ban. Did they work? Well, yes, and no. Certainly, they raised a massive amount of awareness, all over the world. Joe Biden eventually repealed the ban, but by then individuals and families had suffered the consequences and “only a small fraction of affected refugees who were already cleared for resettlement when the ban was issued have actually arrived in the U.S. since the settlement was reached two years,” according to an International Refugee Assistance Program press release from 2022. More recently, Trump, having learnt from the first time, recently issued an even more draconian ban that will be more difficult to contest and overturn. Despite all our protests against the war on Iraq, it went on, and decimated a country and a region.
Why bother, then?
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Consider the effects of the Vietnam war protests, which effectively polarised and shaped the discourse. Did they alone end the war? No, but they were a barometer of public opinion, and they gave rise to a generation of politicians with a very different set of perspectives on the matter of war. (Then, 9/11 shifted everything, extending the machinery of war and the surveillance state, and here we are.) Consider also the global AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, which created significant changes in public policy and health initiatives (with, admittedly, different results in various parts of the world). Protests do work in shifting public discourse, and they help to put pressure on politicians to show up. Recently, in Illinois, U.S Senator Dick Durbin showed up to criticise ICE officials as they waited to kidnap immigrants, and it is unlikely he would have been prompted to do so without having witnessed his constituents call for action and literally put their bodies on the line. Historically, politicians have responded to mass demonstrations at key moments.
Whether or not protests work depend on how they are framed, and what comes after. An organiser friend points out a classic principle of her work: that there is a difference between mobilising people to show up and actually organising them to create real change. The protests these past few weeks, like the ones in Los Angeles and in cities and towns everywhere, as ICE continues with its raids and kidnappings, have been remarkable in showing the extent to which people will show up for strangers and friends. But none of this will matter if politicians do nothing to effect change, and if protesters simply go home resolved to do little else. Will the resistance to ICE by ordinary people, with much more to lose, make a difference?
Not all protests are worthwhile, or bring about real change. The massive immigration rights marches in 2006 looked like the beginning of change and reform, but they quickly morphed into a faux but popular movement for undocumented youth which, in turn, ended up in the disaster of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Swiftly, the discourse on immigration as a labour problem became an affective one, focused on sad, beautiful youth who would bring new meaning to the promise of “America.” By 2012, all there was to show for the protests was a toothless executive order from Obama and, despite warnings from several activists, thousands of young immigrants were persuaded to leave “the shadows,” leaving them vulnerable to Trump. This was a clear case of protests misdirecting the focus of a movement, and deliberately throwing vast numbers of people under the bus (most immigration rights groups abandoned their constituents who were not undocumented youth, seeing theirs as less winnable cases.)
Can protests make change happen? Again, yes, and no: as with immigration, protests can lead to the worst possible change. They can also reflect the emotions of the times. The most effective use of a protest is to demonstrate anger, but we are also living in times that are very different from, say, 1972. The surveillance state is much more extensive, the machinery of repression is much more brutal (people are being fired for op-eds), and the universities and institutions we once thought were bastions of political debate and free speech are surveilling their own students. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia grad student kidnapped from outside his home for organising around Palestine, has only just been released, after over three months. In all that time, we have seen intense and ongoing protests demanding that he be freed, and they most certainly did have an effect. But, as Khalil points out, there are many still languishing in immigrant prisons, with no one to advocate for their release. Ideally, organisers should find ways to mobilise those who show up at protests and channel their energy into clear demands and actual programs for change. The world has shifted its axis on the question of Gaza, and there can be no doubt that the unceasing protests everywhere have had their effect. (Worldwide, protests are often more fraught and far more intense than in the U.S.)
Do protests matter? I often have my doubts.
But then I think about a world without protests, and I know I never want to feel the weight of the silence and the sight of empty streets as bombs rain down on people.
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For more on organising, see “The Art of Organising,” from Labor Notes.
On DACA, see “DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now.”
See also, “People Are Fighting for Strangers.”
And Suyapa Portillo Villeda’s “The Battle for Immigrant Los Angeles” takes on the issue of “violent” versus “non-violent” protests.
Image: “Second Movement I-VI”, Anni Albers. 1978.