Millions across the US rallied against Trump's authoritarian agenda in nationwide No Kings protests, featuring speeches, performances, and massive crowds.
I’m a bit tired of the people who want like a neat list of 2 demands and deadlines and a plan of action and an excel spreadsheet of if-then statements that lay out precisely what needs to happen.
We’re not in charge of fixing shit.
The citizenry does not need to have a clean plan. These protests are as wide as the abuses of power that we’ve seen. They contradict Trump’s ability to take the narrative and shift it. If the protests were all about stopping war, then they’d shift the narrative to something else.
Yes, I understand it’s broad, but the Trump Administration has shown that they are fine going in any direction. So the protests are responding to that directly, and people don’t seem to understand it.
You can cuddle up with your “these aren’t real protests” theories all you want, but these are the largest gatherings in history. At a minimum you have to ask yourself why it’s different. Maybe you think the answer is mass delusion among an unprecedented group - whatever, I can’t stop your reasoning there.
But it cannot be denied that these have spurred more action than any other protest movement, and it’s growing. At a minimum you should try to understand why.
EDIT: clearly struck a nerve with this one. People getting fiery in the comments. It’s the same “if you can’t name the solution then it’s pointless”. I think that’s quite short sighted. Also one comment was talking about economic pain… There is a general strike planned for May 1st. This is a ramping up. If they started with the general strike, there’s no way it would have worked. This one has a chance. People are acting like all they needed was the right list of demands and then everyone would have immediately agreed and then something would have changed. It’s a growing movement. People are buying into the idea. A general strike has an exponentially better chance to work, but yet these protests were apparently pointless. If you don’t think they will work, then get out of the way. The amount of people trying to diminish the efforts of others while doing nothing themselves is baffling. Maybe this isn’t a great use of time or energy, but it’s far more than what you are doing. So get onboard or go start your own thing and win out in the marketplace of ideas.
Demands are the concrete expression of class interest. A movement that refuses to articulate specific objectives is not a political force. It is a cultural festival. Material conditions do not shift because people gather in large numbers. They shift when production halts and when power is directly challenged. To say the citizenry is not in charge of fixing the country is defeatist idealism (a blatantly ridiculous fiction). It surrenders agency to the bourgeoisie. The masses create history but only when they are organized to seize it.
You claim these gatherings are the largest in history yet business continues as usual. Capital flows uninterrupted. The stock market does not tremble at a parade. Where is the general strike? Where is the material cost to the ruling class? Without economic leverage, visibility is meaningless. Western liberal protest culture trains people to believe that moral visibility equals victory. This is a deliberate falsehood designed to protect property relations. History shows that concessions are never granted out of goodwill. They are extracted through force and disruption.
Look at the historical record without the imperialist filter. Gandhi is presented as the saint of nonviolence who shamed the British Empire into leaving. This erases the material reality of the struggle. The British did not leave because of salt marches. They left because the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in 1946 and violent uprisings made the colony too expensive to maintain. The nonviolent narrative is a tool to disarm future movements. The same sanitization happened to Nelson Mandela and the ANC. He is remembered as a peacemaker but he led Umkhonto we Sizwe. The apartheid regime negotiated because they were being bled by armed struggle and mass disruption. They did not negotiate because of moral appeals.
Martin Luther King Jr is held up as the sole face of Black liberation who won through peace. This ignores the material pressure that actually forced legislation. King himself called riots the language of the unheard. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act were passed while American cities were burning. The ruling class conceded rights to pacify the unrest and protect property. The radical elements who advocated for self defense and disruption created the pressure that made the moderates successful. To ignore this is to ignore how power actually works.
These current gatherings are different because they are safe for capital. Police allow them. Businesses prepare for them like weather events. There is no risk to the state. This is why they are parades and not protests. They function as a pressure valve to dissipate revolutionary sentiment. People feel they have acted because they showed up. Their energy is funneled into spectacle rather than organization. This serves the state by preventing the formation of actual revolutionary capacity.
Chairman Mao taught that revolution is not a dinner party. It is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. These events are dinner parties. They may serve as recruiting grounds but calling them protests lies about the nature of struggle. Real action requires risking comfort. It requires disrupting the flow of capital. If there is no cost to the oppressor there is no victory for the oppressed.
Edit: Oh there’s another possible one day “strike” wow. You really should stop being such a pretentious ass and actually try engage with what’s being said.
Just a small clarification, Gandhi’s nonviolent protests were very much attacking the British. Non violence here only meant not to physically cause harm to humans. For example, the non cooperation movement involved boycott of British manufactured goods, returning titles and honours given by the British govt., and mass resignation of Indians from various offices and posts, strikes in factories. It was not a march for one day. It was specifically targeting the system and weakening it.
Maybe I phrased it badly but that’s the point I was trying to make the Indian resistance movement that Ghandi was the face of (both the sections he directly lead and the movement as a whole) was far more confrontational and active than the image canonised later by imperial powers of the hunger striking saint reaching freedom for India through moral appeals. Just like Mandela, MLK etc. the real movement was sanitised and laundered to curb future protests.
Oh, I misunderstood you. I get your point now. Our government too uses the image of ‘non violent’ protests by Gandhi to shut down protests here. The words they use went from non-violent protests to peaceful protests to protesting without disrupting public life (like don’t strike, don’t block roads etc.) What the hell is a protest if it does not disrupt?
We are in charge of fixing shit. Look at all of the movements of the past. They came with demands. Hell, our first one came with damage to goods and property, a Declaration of Independence, and a war. Is it cool that people are rallying? Of course. There are plenty of movements sparked by such a thing, but if the system doesn’t take a hit and feel the pressure, they won’t care. They’re still sitting there, making their money, watching us from their towers.
Stepped right on some ml land mines with this one. For what it’s worth, I’ll back you up a bit. I don’t think all actions have strict utilitarian needs. There is a mountain of soft value to these large scale actions that go missing when we focus only on concrete progress.
If nothing else, these are obvious community building and networking opportunities. The US is starved of these opportunities, and rather than turning our noses up, should be engaged with. Pissing and moaning about structure loses the forest for the trees.
We don’t have examples of these movements being effective without targeted and concrete goals, but we also forget all examples of the moments in between these landmarks. It’s important to develop this momentum into structural progress, rather than upset that the average person is more willing to participate in less-targeted action. Progress doesn’t have prescribed structure, despite what many suggest. Take wins where you can and keep working.
Love this. I think people expect to work through things with the same understanding that they look back on them with.
We have actually mobilized a record number of people. If we’re having the argument about where to point them, I think people are missing the point that it’s the right problem to have.
My issue is this clearly doesn’t work. You’re being mislead that this works. You had 700 million people out there and nothing happened.
But 700 million people used in new and strategic ways can move mountains. Literally. But instead of moving mountains, you’re just in a street for a day.
Think about this. Protesting isn’t new. It’s occurred since the 1900s as a way to force government and the rich to bend to our will through collective action.
Do you people think that the rich and powerful haven’t solved this problem yet? Just think about it for even 10 minutes. It makes no sense that this type of collective action could ever work in today’s world like it has in the past. Say what you like about authoritarians, but they do coordinate and plan. Just look at all the events they attend with each other. It’s not just for drinks and cocktails. They use their resources to prevent us from taking their power away. They have created thick manuals for this very specific form of soft fleshy crowd. The powers that be have paid for the smartest Ivy league quants to think of strategy and tactics like an NFL coach does when reviewing games. They’re so ahead of us on this. The rich control the media. The same media that many of us decided is not important to use anymore or maintain connections on. The media they have heavily invested in. Turns out that this media is needed. If we don’t have a presence on social media then we cannot share our efforts. Without that media, the authoritarians can make this effort into anything they want.
If i was a rich guy I’d love these protests because it gives me an opportunity to arrest and financial bankrupt any of the leaders. So when I see that people are getting angry and there is this potential energy that could erupt against my class, then I can use the media to plan these things. When you all show up, the police can identify the leaders and arrest and charge them after kicking in their heads. The rest go home after 24 hrs. With the pressure now released, there will be another year before I need to rinse and repeat.
Compare this to say the clownvoy. They were connected to the police. The tow truck drivers that would be needed to remove trucks after an arrest were in support of them. They made it family fun with bbq and trampolines and bouncy castles and hot tubs because do you think police want to deal with any of that after they clear it all out. Every part of the clownvoy was set up to mess with the playbook that Authoritarians use to disrupt protests. That is what is lacking on the left. But there are leaders in the left who seem hell bent on maintaining status quo. But people are waking up slowly. The problem with doing these things slow is it gives the Authorities time to adapt. There needs to be serious critical honesty reflection on the left towards how badly these protests have damaged and harmed progress. Digging in is only going to keep the status quo which right now is causing huge losses day by day.
Right after I posted I saw this exemple of media being used in the way I described. My Facebook is getting filled with the posts rapidly. Take those same 700 million people and just image what you could do online with them.
I’m going to offer my call to action that also gets shot down often but I want people to consider it honestly. I know it sounds crazy. It’s not fully fleshed out. But I believe efforts need to be more focused online. It is anonymous. They can’t beat your head in. The authoritarians invest heavily in it. The weakness in their efforts is that the thing they need to invest in can easily be leveraged by us to also spread an idea just like a protest. Except with so much less effort and risk.
What I want people to consider honestly is that I think the proof that this is where we need to focus is that the powers that be are actually trying to dismantle our ability to do this before we wise up to it. This is why they’re trying to introduce digital id’s. It’ll let them be able to identify leaders and voices online who organize and censor them. Right now they cannot do that easily. But they know if those 700 million people that showed up in the streets would instead show up online, their bots, propaganda and efforts would be crushed. You can control the narrative and flip it all back on them. I think we have wrongly been telling people to abandon all the social media we can. To block everyone. To ignore it all. I think that is contributing to all our countries sliding towards the right. We gave them all red carpet access to the eyes and ears of most people. Instead we should encourage each other to connect online. Take control of the platforms again and only then consider going back to the streets when the narrative can be controlled and messages spread.
I’m a bit tired of the people who want like a neat list of 2 demands and deadlines and a plan of action and an excel spreadsheet of if-then statements that lay out precisely what needs to happen.
We’re not in charge of fixing shit.
The citizenry does not need to have a clean plan. These protests are as wide as the abuses of power that we’ve seen. They contradict Trump’s ability to take the narrative and shift it. If the protests were all about stopping war, then they’d shift the narrative to something else.
Yes, I understand it’s broad, but the Trump Administration has shown that they are fine going in any direction. So the protests are responding to that directly, and people don’t seem to understand it.
You can cuddle up with your “these aren’t real protests” theories all you want, but these are the largest gatherings in history. At a minimum you have to ask yourself why it’s different. Maybe you think the answer is mass delusion among an unprecedented group - whatever, I can’t stop your reasoning there.
But it cannot be denied that these have spurred more action than any other protest movement, and it’s growing. At a minimum you should try to understand why.
EDIT: clearly struck a nerve with this one. People getting fiery in the comments. It’s the same “if you can’t name the solution then it’s pointless”. I think that’s quite short sighted. Also one comment was talking about economic pain… There is a general strike planned for May 1st. This is a ramping up. If they started with the general strike, there’s no way it would have worked. This one has a chance. People are acting like all they needed was the right list of demands and then everyone would have immediately agreed and then something would have changed. It’s a growing movement. People are buying into the idea. A general strike has an exponentially better chance to work, but yet these protests were apparently pointless. If you don’t think they will work, then get out of the way. The amount of people trying to diminish the efforts of others while doing nothing themselves is baffling. Maybe this isn’t a great use of time or energy, but it’s far more than what you are doing. So get onboard or go start your own thing and win out in the marketplace of ideas.
Ok, why are you striking? And after what action would you consider the strike to have succeeded?
Demands are the concrete expression of class interest. A movement that refuses to articulate specific objectives is not a political force. It is a cultural festival. Material conditions do not shift because people gather in large numbers. They shift when production halts and when power is directly challenged. To say the citizenry is not in charge of fixing the country is defeatist idealism (a blatantly ridiculous fiction). It surrenders agency to the bourgeoisie. The masses create history but only when they are organized to seize it.
You claim these gatherings are the largest in history yet business continues as usual. Capital flows uninterrupted. The stock market does not tremble at a parade. Where is the general strike? Where is the material cost to the ruling class? Without economic leverage, visibility is meaningless. Western liberal protest culture trains people to believe that moral visibility equals victory. This is a deliberate falsehood designed to protect property relations. History shows that concessions are never granted out of goodwill. They are extracted through force and disruption.
Look at the historical record without the imperialist filter. Gandhi is presented as the saint of nonviolence who shamed the British Empire into leaving. This erases the material reality of the struggle. The British did not leave because of salt marches. They left because the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in 1946 and violent uprisings made the colony too expensive to maintain. The nonviolent narrative is a tool to disarm future movements. The same sanitization happened to Nelson Mandela and the ANC. He is remembered as a peacemaker but he led Umkhonto we Sizwe. The apartheid regime negotiated because they were being bled by armed struggle and mass disruption. They did not negotiate because of moral appeals.
Martin Luther King Jr is held up as the sole face of Black liberation who won through peace. This ignores the material pressure that actually forced legislation. King himself called riots the language of the unheard. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act were passed while American cities were burning. The ruling class conceded rights to pacify the unrest and protect property. The radical elements who advocated for self defense and disruption created the pressure that made the moderates successful. To ignore this is to ignore how power actually works.
These current gatherings are different because they are safe for capital. Police allow them. Businesses prepare for them like weather events. There is no risk to the state. This is why they are parades and not protests. They function as a pressure valve to dissipate revolutionary sentiment. People feel they have acted because they showed up. Their energy is funneled into spectacle rather than organization. This serves the state by preventing the formation of actual revolutionary capacity.
Chairman Mao taught that revolution is not a dinner party. It is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. These events are dinner parties. They may serve as recruiting grounds but calling them protests lies about the nature of struggle. Real action requires risking comfort. It requires disrupting the flow of capital. If there is no cost to the oppressor there is no victory for the oppressed.
Edit: Oh there’s another possible one day “strike” wow. You really should stop being such a pretentious ass and actually try engage with what’s being said.
Just a small clarification, Gandhi’s nonviolent protests were very much attacking the British. Non violence here only meant not to physically cause harm to humans. For example, the non cooperation movement involved boycott of British manufactured goods, returning titles and honours given by the British govt., and mass resignation of Indians from various offices and posts, strikes in factories. It was not a march for one day. It was specifically targeting the system and weakening it.
Maybe I phrased it badly but that’s the point I was trying to make the Indian resistance movement that Ghandi was the face of (both the sections he directly lead and the movement as a whole) was far more confrontational and active than the image canonised later by imperial powers of the hunger striking saint reaching freedom for India through moral appeals. Just like Mandela, MLK etc. the real movement was sanitised and laundered to curb future protests.
Oh, I misunderstood you. I get your point now. Our government too uses the image of ‘non violent’ protests by Gandhi to shut down protests here. The words they use went from non-violent protests to peaceful protests to protesting without disrupting public life (like don’t strike, don’t block roads etc.) What the hell is a protest if it does not disrupt?
A parade
We are in charge of fixing shit. Look at all of the movements of the past. They came with demands. Hell, our first one came with damage to goods and property, a Declaration of Independence, and a war. Is it cool that people are rallying? Of course. There are plenty of movements sparked by such a thing, but if the system doesn’t take a hit and feel the pressure, they won’t care. They’re still sitting there, making their money, watching us from their towers.
so do you guys want trump to have a plan for you? what do you expect to accomplish then?
you guys will only ever fix it when you take charge, your leaders obviously won’t.
Democracy, rule of the people who won’t take charge!
Stepped right on some ml land mines with this one. For what it’s worth, I’ll back you up a bit. I don’t think all actions have strict utilitarian needs. There is a mountain of soft value to these large scale actions that go missing when we focus only on concrete progress.
If nothing else, these are obvious community building and networking opportunities. The US is starved of these opportunities, and rather than turning our noses up, should be engaged with. Pissing and moaning about structure loses the forest for the trees.
We don’t have examples of these movements being effective without targeted and concrete goals, but we also forget all examples of the moments in between these landmarks. It’s important to develop this momentum into structural progress, rather than upset that the average person is more willing to participate in less-targeted action. Progress doesn’t have prescribed structure, despite what many suggest. Take wins where you can and keep working.
Love this. I think people expect to work through things with the same understanding that they look back on them with.
We have actually mobilized a record number of people. If we’re having the argument about where to point them, I think people are missing the point that it’s the right problem to have.
My issue is this clearly doesn’t work. You’re being mislead that this works. You had 700 million people out there and nothing happened.
But 700 million people used in new and strategic ways can move mountains. Literally. But instead of moving mountains, you’re just in a street for a day.
Think about this. Protesting isn’t new. It’s occurred since the 1900s as a way to force government and the rich to bend to our will through collective action.
Do you people think that the rich and powerful haven’t solved this problem yet? Just think about it for even 10 minutes. It makes no sense that this type of collective action could ever work in today’s world like it has in the past. Say what you like about authoritarians, but they do coordinate and plan. Just look at all the events they attend with each other. It’s not just for drinks and cocktails. They use their resources to prevent us from taking their power away. They have created thick manuals for this very specific form of soft fleshy crowd. The powers that be have paid for the smartest Ivy league quants to think of strategy and tactics like an NFL coach does when reviewing games. They’re so ahead of us on this. The rich control the media. The same media that many of us decided is not important to use anymore or maintain connections on. The media they have heavily invested in. Turns out that this media is needed. If we don’t have a presence on social media then we cannot share our efforts. Without that media, the authoritarians can make this effort into anything they want.
If i was a rich guy I’d love these protests because it gives me an opportunity to arrest and financial bankrupt any of the leaders. So when I see that people are getting angry and there is this potential energy that could erupt against my class, then I can use the media to plan these things. When you all show up, the police can identify the leaders and arrest and charge them after kicking in their heads. The rest go home after 24 hrs. With the pressure now released, there will be another year before I need to rinse and repeat.
Compare this to say the clownvoy. They were connected to the police. The tow truck drivers that would be needed to remove trucks after an arrest were in support of them. They made it family fun with bbq and trampolines and bouncy castles and hot tubs because do you think police want to deal with any of that after they clear it all out. Every part of the clownvoy was set up to mess with the playbook that Authoritarians use to disrupt protests. That is what is lacking on the left. But there are leaders in the left who seem hell bent on maintaining status quo. But people are waking up slowly. The problem with doing these things slow is it gives the Authorities time to adapt. There needs to be serious critical honesty reflection on the left towards how badly these protests have damaged and harmed progress. Digging in is only going to keep the status quo which right now is causing huge losses day by day.
Right after I posted I saw this exemple of media being used in the way I described. My Facebook is getting filled with the posts rapidly. Take those same 700 million people and just image what you could do online with them.
I’m going to offer my call to action that also gets shot down often but I want people to consider it honestly. I know it sounds crazy. It’s not fully fleshed out. But I believe efforts need to be more focused online. It is anonymous. They can’t beat your head in. The authoritarians invest heavily in it. The weakness in their efforts is that the thing they need to invest in can easily be leveraged by us to also spread an idea just like a protest. Except with so much less effort and risk.
What I want people to consider honestly is that I think the proof that this is where we need to focus is that the powers that be are actually trying to dismantle our ability to do this before we wise up to it. This is why they’re trying to introduce digital id’s. It’ll let them be able to identify leaders and voices online who organize and censor them. Right now they cannot do that easily. But they know if those 700 million people that showed up in the streets would instead show up online, their bots, propaganda and efforts would be crushed. You can control the narrative and flip it all back on them. I think we have wrongly been telling people to abandon all the social media we can. To block everyone. To ignore it all. I think that is contributing to all our countries sliding towards the right. We gave them all red carpet access to the eyes and ears of most people. Instead we should encourage each other to connect online. Take control of the platforms again and only then consider going back to the streets when the narrative can be controlled and messages spread.