MLK, fred hampton, and malcolm X getting assassinated definitely set back their movements, and it set it back to this day. The civil rights movement after that point basically got disassembled and driven underground. What’s the classic MLK quote, something I’m paraphrasing from the end of his life, it was something like. They’ve given us voting and ended segregation, and that can all be done for free, but now they’re going to have to spend money to actuallt change things. And he was talking about reparations, iirc.
So his point was that it would get much harder after that. After they died, hell, even while they were marching, we got desegregation, but we also still had segregation in everything but name. White flight, redlining, the mass shutting down of public utilities like pools, huge amounts of homes getting demolished and split up under the guise of “blight removal” and the federal highway program, and now we’re seeing gentrification and the massive suburbanization of poverty as poles shift slightly. The progress wasn’t over, but after huge government crackdowns, the civil rights leaders either getting gunned down, bought out, co-opted and turned towards an islamic cult, or turned towards more illegal activities with the formation of more extreme inner city gangs, which is basically what the black panthers were contemperarily referred to as, those movements were then all gimped and made incapable of dealing with the problems and reframing that inevitably followed.
Your movement can be dealt with anyways, is my point. The state will use violence against you regardless of whether you’re “polite” or not, as we’ve seen historically. It’s also insane to ask people who have been writhing under the boot to be “polite”, and to be concerned with “optics” like that’s some sort of reasonable concern over the actual shit they’re protesting. The idea that every interval of every political term, you know, every four years, the voters are the ones that are solely responsible for leverage and change is insane.
You perform a protest, usually in a city, but sometimes that city basically is the entirety of the state’s GDP as oftentimes is the case in america. You perform a protest in that city because it causes a large amount of economic threat. to the city, state, and maybe the country. This can be in the form of direct property damage and cops calling in sick days uselessly and in the form of actual expenditures on police, it can less effectively come in the form of various shutdowns for days on end of particular corridors and maybe services.
You perform a protest near to some piece of legislation, near to its passing, its signing, because the city then knows that if they decide to stick to their guns and treat this as usual then there will inevitably be more protests and more property damage and economic cost to them doing so, which makes donors unhappy, it makes people sitting in the nosebleeds unhappy even if they’re the stereotypical scared white suburban voter, it makes everyone discontented, it threatens power, and it guarantees a kind of escalation unless the protest succeeds.
But the point is that protests aren’t for playing to the nosebleeds and playing to the scared white suburban voter that’s going to see like one city block of a walmart and some big box store going up in smoke, and then they’re gonna freak out. in the 60’s you would get black and white newspaper pictures of people getting hosed down and bitten by dogs and then thr papers would call those people horrible extremists. It doesn’t matter what you do, how polite you are, they’re going to show those pictures to those people and they won’t care. They might even send in a plant to go in and do violencr or act more extreme just so they can incite meaningless violence and get more pictures and more footage.
The protest isn’t for those people watching the news, the protest isn’t aimed at them, so it doesn’t need to be “polite”. In these instances a protest is actually hampered by being overly polite because then it’s not actually disruptive, and if it’s not disruptive then nobody gives a shit and it’s useless.
I won’t argue that it did not set back the civil rights movement, but that wasn’t my question. Regardless though, you’re ignoring the rising prevalence of riots towards the latter 1960s and into the 1970s, and how that may have made progress much more difficult.
Is it any surprise that Hoover, as director of the FBI declared the Black Panthers to be the most dangerous domestic organization in the country in 1969? Does it not make sense that when you turn to violence and destruction, you will make people fear you, making concessions less likely? Or do you think white people in the country could have actually been suppressed by that fear? Connect the ideas. Government power WILL be exercised against violent actions, you WILL be defeated if you attempt those strategies, it’s just wishful thinking to imagine some world where this does not naturally result from any overtly fear-causing activities. You need the support of a majority to enact change in a democratic government, you cannot afford to alienate peaceful allies that do not share your ethnicity.
Don’t try to pretend that MLK Jr’s methods persisted steadily and peacefully after his death, as if peace loving, gentle black people were crushed under some bootheel. That’s not what the Black Power movement was. Maybe it does feel insane, but it’s reality. Thinking you can somehow violently overthrow state power and beat it at its own game is actually insane though. Simple sense dictates that will accelerate your crushing, driving away allies and allocating resources from placating you towards crushing you.
Disruptive protest is one thing, I think its debatably effective unless done at a very large scale. What is absolutely effective, though, is mass demonstration. It has nothing to do with some nebulous scaring people in power, their power is not threatened by inconvenience. It is absolutely threatened by wide-scale voting efforts though. People can get thrown out of office. That is a very direct impact on a specific individual who is at direct threat of losing something they care about–their job. That’s real power. You piss it away if you alienate allies, though, and that’s exactly what rioting accomplishes. They’re not scared of riots. Your enemies WANT you to riot. It’s stupid to give them what they want.
I am saying that you are originating from the wrong thing, here, your cause and effect is wrong. The black panthers and other black power movements were pushing for a different thing afterwards, after the civil rights movements, and that’s precisely why it escalated. It wasn’t up to them to simply be nicer, and then they would’ve won out. Being nicer wouldn’t have gotten them reparations or larger amounts of power in the political or financial systems, i.e., things they had to attain, and engaging in reformism wouldn’t have, either. Well, I can’t say it wouldn’t, because I’m not a guru, but I can say I do think that would be incredibly unlikely, because I don’t really think there’s going to be a reality in which you get a country with a vast amount of white people in it to voluntarily give up a systemic advantage that, in the first place, they can hardly even be convinced that they even fucking have. In fact there were a bunch of people engaging in reformism at the time in a very clear chain up until now, right, and again, they’re just going to have limited political power. Redlining dovetails nicely with gerrymandering, a war on drugs dovetails nicely with being able to arrest every dissident you want under trumped up charges. Reformism, if you’re correct, gets us about as far as we’ve gotten since civil rights, which is not very far at all.
Even throwing that out, right, reformism, I don’t think it’s generally in the interests of the powerful to give up their power. I think the reason they were willing to go along with civil rights wasn’t because civil rights was nicer, it was because civil rights both had a slightly larger amount of support as a result of being a more mainstream political idea than black power, but more importantly, I think it was because people in power could get away with handing them civil rights and then, as remains for all time, still continuing to run the system almost exactly the same way it’s always been run. Like how they instituted sharecropping after slavery, effectively just forcing them into slavery again, or how they implemented voting tests do the same thing, or how, right now, they make it harder to vote in those particular districts by putting the voting booths super far away and making sure they do the bare minimum so lines are going around the block.
Gentle, loving black people were crushed under the bootheel, I don’t know what to tell you about that, they were. They were the ones who also suffered from redlining and all of those practices I described in the wake of that movement’s unraveling. You are putting the responsibility to not commit violence entirely on the protestor and not on the huge state force. One of these is the driving force in these engagements, one of these is causing the vast majority of the violence.
You don’t need a majority of people to be on your side in order to leverage against power, or else no revolutionary movement would ever succeed, and no reform would ever succeed outside of the most socially acceptable centrist styles of reform, which even then is looking increasingly unlikely as the overton window splits in half. We infamously live in a system in which a minority of people have a vast amount of political power, whether that be politicians, newscasters, business moguls engaging in lobbying, or even if I were to just point out the like, seven or however many suburbs in america that are the designated gerrymandered tipping point for their particular districts or local city positions. That’s not a majority of people, making those decisions. To seize or leverage such a system, it’s, as you say, also not necessary to get support from the mass of the people who can hardly even be convinced to care about any politics at all to begin with.
Again, the point of the protests also isn’t to play to the nosebleeds or to convert people with a mass demonstration, because the news is just going to show like two walmarts that have been lit up by some white suburban idiot kid, some undercover cop, or some groyper that decided to start shit, the suburban voters are going to turn their heads and clutch their pearls, and that’s pretty much gonna be it.
I dunno, I might just leave you with the link to cointelpro, which I think is interesting, and hit you with that, and then have my piece. I think at the end of the day you seem like you’re a reformist that believes voting matters and shit, and I really wish that’s something I believed at all, but I think our worldviews are just very divergent. Unless I actually want to get into citing shit and throwing a bunch of historical text around, which I don’t wanna do because it takes too long and nobody ever gives a shit about it anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO here, have that. Maybe also go read my other comment in this post, I dunno, you might get a sense more for what my positions are.
Except significant reform was achieved, white people lost enormous power with the Civil Rights Act, that was an extraordinary victory won through peaceful protest. The reform stopping coincides very, very cleanly with the escalation of aggressive rhetoric and civil unrest. If you go out and further scare and piss people off, there is zero chance there will be any reparations coming from that. They won’t have to when they have such a convenient excuse to lock people up.
While yes, they can manufacture reasons to clamp down, does that mean you should make their job easier, by giving them a more convenient excuse? It’s playing directly into their hands, and foolish.
Historically speaking, the vast, vast majority of revolutions get crushed. Even those that do not get crushed, often fail, catastrophically, at delivering the desired change. Did the Bolsheviks get the world they dreamed of in the USSR? Reform, however, does often work, just slowly. Massive demonstrations do create reform, as BLM did in many cities like Minneapolis.
I’m familiar with the work of people like Hoover as director of the FBI, and domestic CIA shit. Your problem here is you’re thinking you can fight fire with fire, that’s the best way. You are disastrously mistaken and your philosophy will harm your own cause. It’s just temptation to want an easier path instead of the long, slow, but actually possible one. If you think political organizing for mass voting does not work, I’m afraid you’ve just been radicalized into something fundamentally false. It’s not factual, you have to cherry pick to think voting does not work.
MLK, fred hampton, and malcolm X getting assassinated definitely set back their movements, and it set it back to this day. The civil rights movement after that point basically got disassembled and driven underground. What’s the classic MLK quote, something I’m paraphrasing from the end of his life, it was something like. They’ve given us voting and ended segregation, and that can all be done for free, but now they’re going to have to spend money to actuallt change things. And he was talking about reparations, iirc.
So his point was that it would get much harder after that. After they died, hell, even while they were marching, we got desegregation, but we also still had segregation in everything but name. White flight, redlining, the mass shutting down of public utilities like pools, huge amounts of homes getting demolished and split up under the guise of “blight removal” and the federal highway program, and now we’re seeing gentrification and the massive suburbanization of poverty as poles shift slightly. The progress wasn’t over, but after huge government crackdowns, the civil rights leaders either getting gunned down, bought out, co-opted and turned towards an islamic cult, or turned towards more illegal activities with the formation of more extreme inner city gangs, which is basically what the black panthers were contemperarily referred to as, those movements were then all gimped and made incapable of dealing with the problems and reframing that inevitably followed.
Your movement can be dealt with anyways, is my point. The state will use violence against you regardless of whether you’re “polite” or not, as we’ve seen historically. It’s also insane to ask people who have been writhing under the boot to be “polite”, and to be concerned with “optics” like that’s some sort of reasonable concern over the actual shit they’re protesting. The idea that every interval of every political term, you know, every four years, the voters are the ones that are solely responsible for leverage and change is insane.
You perform a protest, usually in a city, but sometimes that city basically is the entirety of the state’s GDP as oftentimes is the case in america. You perform a protest in that city because it causes a large amount of economic threat. to the city, state, and maybe the country. This can be in the form of direct property damage and cops calling in sick days uselessly and in the form of actual expenditures on police, it can less effectively come in the form of various shutdowns for days on end of particular corridors and maybe services.
You perform a protest near to some piece of legislation, near to its passing, its signing, because the city then knows that if they decide to stick to their guns and treat this as usual then there will inevitably be more protests and more property damage and economic cost to them doing so, which makes donors unhappy, it makes people sitting in the nosebleeds unhappy even if they’re the stereotypical scared white suburban voter, it makes everyone discontented, it threatens power, and it guarantees a kind of escalation unless the protest succeeds.
But the point is that protests aren’t for playing to the nosebleeds and playing to the scared white suburban voter that’s going to see like one city block of a walmart and some big box store going up in smoke, and then they’re gonna freak out. in the 60’s you would get black and white newspaper pictures of people getting hosed down and bitten by dogs and then thr papers would call those people horrible extremists. It doesn’t matter what you do, how polite you are, they’re going to show those pictures to those people and they won’t care. They might even send in a plant to go in and do violencr or act more extreme just so they can incite meaningless violence and get more pictures and more footage.
The protest isn’t for those people watching the news, the protest isn’t aimed at them, so it doesn’t need to be “polite”. In these instances a protest is actually hampered by being overly polite because then it’s not actually disruptive, and if it’s not disruptive then nobody gives a shit and it’s useless.
I won’t argue that it did not set back the civil rights movement, but that wasn’t my question. Regardless though, you’re ignoring the rising prevalence of riots towards the latter 1960s and into the 1970s, and how that may have made progress much more difficult.
Is it any surprise that Hoover, as director of the FBI declared the Black Panthers to be the most dangerous domestic organization in the country in 1969? Does it not make sense that when you turn to violence and destruction, you will make people fear you, making concessions less likely? Or do you think white people in the country could have actually been suppressed by that fear? Connect the ideas. Government power WILL be exercised against violent actions, you WILL be defeated if you attempt those strategies, it’s just wishful thinking to imagine some world where this does not naturally result from any overtly fear-causing activities. You need the support of a majority to enact change in a democratic government, you cannot afford to alienate peaceful allies that do not share your ethnicity.
Don’t try to pretend that MLK Jr’s methods persisted steadily and peacefully after his death, as if peace loving, gentle black people were crushed under some bootheel. That’s not what the Black Power movement was. Maybe it does feel insane, but it’s reality. Thinking you can somehow violently overthrow state power and beat it at its own game is actually insane though. Simple sense dictates that will accelerate your crushing, driving away allies and allocating resources from placating you towards crushing you.
Disruptive protest is one thing, I think its debatably effective unless done at a very large scale. What is absolutely effective, though, is mass demonstration. It has nothing to do with some nebulous scaring people in power, their power is not threatened by inconvenience. It is absolutely threatened by wide-scale voting efforts though. People can get thrown out of office. That is a very direct impact on a specific individual who is at direct threat of losing something they care about–their job. That’s real power. You piss it away if you alienate allies, though, and that’s exactly what rioting accomplishes. They’re not scared of riots. Your enemies WANT you to riot. It’s stupid to give them what they want.
I am saying that you are originating from the wrong thing, here, your cause and effect is wrong. The black panthers and other black power movements were pushing for a different thing afterwards, after the civil rights movements, and that’s precisely why it escalated. It wasn’t up to them to simply be nicer, and then they would’ve won out. Being nicer wouldn’t have gotten them reparations or larger amounts of power in the political or financial systems, i.e., things they had to attain, and engaging in reformism wouldn’t have, either. Well, I can’t say it wouldn’t, because I’m not a guru, but I can say I do think that would be incredibly unlikely, because I don’t really think there’s going to be a reality in which you get a country with a vast amount of white people in it to voluntarily give up a systemic advantage that, in the first place, they can hardly even be convinced that they even fucking have. In fact there were a bunch of people engaging in reformism at the time in a very clear chain up until now, right, and again, they’re just going to have limited political power. Redlining dovetails nicely with gerrymandering, a war on drugs dovetails nicely with being able to arrest every dissident you want under trumped up charges. Reformism, if you’re correct, gets us about as far as we’ve gotten since civil rights, which is not very far at all.
Even throwing that out, right, reformism, I don’t think it’s generally in the interests of the powerful to give up their power. I think the reason they were willing to go along with civil rights wasn’t because civil rights was nicer, it was because civil rights both had a slightly larger amount of support as a result of being a more mainstream political idea than black power, but more importantly, I think it was because people in power could get away with handing them civil rights and then, as remains for all time, still continuing to run the system almost exactly the same way it’s always been run. Like how they instituted sharecropping after slavery, effectively just forcing them into slavery again, or how they implemented voting tests do the same thing, or how, right now, they make it harder to vote in those particular districts by putting the voting booths super far away and making sure they do the bare minimum so lines are going around the block.
Gentle, loving black people were crushed under the bootheel, I don’t know what to tell you about that, they were. They were the ones who also suffered from redlining and all of those practices I described in the wake of that movement’s unraveling. You are putting the responsibility to not commit violence entirely on the protestor and not on the huge state force. One of these is the driving force in these engagements, one of these is causing the vast majority of the violence.
You don’t need a majority of people to be on your side in order to leverage against power, or else no revolutionary movement would ever succeed, and no reform would ever succeed outside of the most socially acceptable centrist styles of reform, which even then is looking increasingly unlikely as the overton window splits in half. We infamously live in a system in which a minority of people have a vast amount of political power, whether that be politicians, newscasters, business moguls engaging in lobbying, or even if I were to just point out the like, seven or however many suburbs in america that are the designated gerrymandered tipping point for their particular districts or local city positions. That’s not a majority of people, making those decisions. To seize or leverage such a system, it’s, as you say, also not necessary to get support from the mass of the people who can hardly even be convinced to care about any politics at all to begin with.
Again, the point of the protests also isn’t to play to the nosebleeds or to convert people with a mass demonstration, because the news is just going to show like two walmarts that have been lit up by some white suburban idiot kid, some undercover cop, or some groyper that decided to start shit, the suburban voters are going to turn their heads and clutch their pearls, and that’s pretty much gonna be it.
I dunno, I might just leave you with the link to cointelpro, which I think is interesting, and hit you with that, and then have my piece. I think at the end of the day you seem like you’re a reformist that believes voting matters and shit, and I really wish that’s something I believed at all, but I think our worldviews are just very divergent. Unless I actually want to get into citing shit and throwing a bunch of historical text around, which I don’t wanna do because it takes too long and nobody ever gives a shit about it anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO here, have that. Maybe also go read my other comment in this post, I dunno, you might get a sense more for what my positions are.
Except significant reform was achieved, white people lost enormous power with the Civil Rights Act, that was an extraordinary victory won through peaceful protest. The reform stopping coincides very, very cleanly with the escalation of aggressive rhetoric and civil unrest. If you go out and further scare and piss people off, there is zero chance there will be any reparations coming from that. They won’t have to when they have such a convenient excuse to lock people up.
While yes, they can manufacture reasons to clamp down, does that mean you should make their job easier, by giving them a more convenient excuse? It’s playing directly into their hands, and foolish.
Historically speaking, the vast, vast majority of revolutions get crushed. Even those that do not get crushed, often fail, catastrophically, at delivering the desired change. Did the Bolsheviks get the world they dreamed of in the USSR? Reform, however, does often work, just slowly. Massive demonstrations do create reform, as BLM did in many cities like Minneapolis.
I’m familiar with the work of people like Hoover as director of the FBI, and domestic CIA shit. Your problem here is you’re thinking you can fight fire with fire, that’s the best way. You are disastrously mistaken and your philosophy will harm your own cause. It’s just temptation to want an easier path instead of the long, slow, but actually possible one. If you think political organizing for mass voting does not work, I’m afraid you’ve just been radicalized into something fundamentally false. It’s not factual, you have to cherry pick to think voting does not work.