The Purpose of Protest

In defense of mass action

There is a March on Washington for Palestine taking place this Saturday that has reignited a longstanding debate among activists about the purpose of protests. This debate centers on whether they have any purpose at all. Critics say that these protests have failed to move the needle on this genocide, failed to stop a single bombing, are too orderly, too peaceful, to enact material change. They say that the mobilizations should have escalated by now to unlawful action like targeting weapons companies, or sustained actions like strikes. Some believe that these actions are even counterrevolutionary or counterinsurgent and serve to displace energy that could be directed towards more radical means and funnel it back into low stakes performance that achieves nothing. The harshest critics claim that the orgs leading these mobilizations are intentionally funneling people towards things that don’t work for nefarious ends. To me, these critiques betray a misunderstanding of the purpose of protest and a lack of theoretical knowledge of revolutionary strategy as well as a failure to understand our current material reality.

Photo by Sophie Popplewell on Unsplash

I want to start by saying that I understand, deeply, the frustration and powerlessness that comes from not being able to effect meaningful movement by the ruling class on an issue as important as genocide. I feel, like everyone on the left, a profound despair about the state of the world and the state of our current ability to change it. I know how demoralizing it is to see images of dismembered children every day for 18 months and know that you as an individual cannot make it stop. I feel all of this acutely. However, I worry that this deep frustration and sadness is giving way to an attitude that is demobilizing and anti-solidaristic, which is something this movement cannot afford.

In one of the seminal works by Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, he argues against the Narodniks, who were believers in the idea that the peasantry had revolutionary potential to overthrow the Tsar, but only if they could be led in that direction through secret-society led terrorism that would demonstrate the Tsar was merely mortal and could be killed. Lenin, on the other hand, put his faith in the power of mass organization and believed that being subservient to spontaneity through calls for terror was an attempt to bypass the difficult but necessary work of building a revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat.

Lenin saw calls for spontaneous acts of terror as a betrayal of the spirit of Marxism which demands that revolutionaries work to advance the class struggle by building organizations that teach workers to how wage an all-sided struggle against the bourgeoisie. Instead of reckoning with the lack of class consciousness present in the actually existing proletariat and working to change it, the Narodniks wanted to fast-track revolution through a reliance on “tactics-as-plan”, exalting the use of terror as a substitute for party building — “without the working people all bombs are power less, patently powerless.”¹

I see this same tendency in the calls for escalation or the denunciation of protest as ineffective in the movement for Palestine. While the protests have not had the effect of dismantling western empire or stopping the genocide (a leviathan task), they have worked to advance the consciousness of the masses. They have turned popular support against Israel for the first time in my lifetime. They have added thousands if not tens of thousands of new, trained cadre of revolutionists to their ranks. These are the seeds that must be planted in order for a revolutionary formation to grow. The idea that if those in the revolutionary communist parties can get thousands to attend a march, that also means they can get thousands to participate in sabotage of industrial weapons factories is a total misunderstanding of the level of consciousness present in the broader movement at this point in time. Further, even if thousands could sabotage weapons factories right now, do you really believe this would be enough to change the foreign policy of the empire? The call of the moment is to go where there is energy, and to direct this energy wherever possible into revolutionary organizations. The protest in this case is a means, not an end.

You want to bomb the factories without a cohort of people willing and able do that. You want to grind the gears of imperialism to a halt without the people power that can go up against these forces. You want a revolution without building revolutionary consciousness.

The hard truth is that we are rebuilding a left from scratch and that means the long and brutal slog of moving people into class consciousness one by one by one. The overfocus on tactics-as-plan speaks to a lack of willingness to do the difficult work of building a movement that can actually succeed. A Marxist engages with the world as it is, not the world as they wish it to be. The thousands who attend a protest have only shown they are willing to attend a protest. This does not mean they are willing to engage in escalations that may be illegal or dangerous. The duty of a communist is to lead in these movements and train as many people as they can in order to create a party that is actually capable of breaking the back of this machine. Anyone who is honest with themselves will see clearly that we are not there yet.

“We would be “politicians” and Social-Democrats* in name only (as all too often happens in reality), if we failed to realise that our task is to utilise every manifestation of discontent, and to gather and turn to the best account every protest, however small.”²

The idea that because the most powerful forces in human history have not met our demands, the project is disposable and useless is a sort of liberal conception of what it takes to bend the ruling class to our will. Without the leaders who are currently mobilizing tens of thousands to protest and using these actions to build a revolutionary party, we will forever be trapped in a cycle of being subservient to spontaneity and having bursts of struggle that never materialize into change. The work of building this movement is not something that can be circumvented.

The reason we protest is because this is a widely recognized form of dissent among the masses, and it is the job of the revolutionary to go where the masses are and intervene in every struggle to lead the workers towards revolutionary consciousness. We protest because we know that this is the first step towards building something concrete against empire. The critics of these protests do not seem to understand that these mobilizations are not the totality of struggle, but the entry point.

“Because Social-Democracy* is always found to be in advance of all others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in championing every protest against tyranny. It does not lull itself with arguments that the economic struggle brings the workers to realise that they have no political rights and that the concrete conditions unavoidably impel the working-class movement on to the path of revolution. It intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and political life”³

These cheap denunciations of parties who are working to build a movement that is capable of felling the empire do not seem to present an alternative that includes a step by step plan of how to enact it. Decreeing that we should “just block weapons shipments” is about as useful as tweeting “GENERAL STRIKE NOW!”, as if declaring it casts a spell on the masses that immediately make such a thing possible. I implore the critics to organize their own direct actions. If you are able to somehow manifest the numbers of dedicated cadre who are willing and able to do such a thing, I wish you much success. It is, however, far more likely that you will realize that such a cohort does not yet exist.

It seems as if many believe they do not need to have the masses with them in order to enact revolutionary change. Some even seem to be seeking absolution in their aspersions, declaring that “if not for those damned peace police, we would have won by now”. This is an inversion of reality and an anti-materialist criticism that does nothing to advance struggle. The failure to engage with honesty about our material conditions will be the death of the potential for the revolutionary change you are demanding. Do not “subordinat[e] the struggle for reforms, as the part to the whole, to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for socialism”⁴ . Only unless a mass movement of workers with revolutionary consciousness exists, can the machine of brutal imperialism be dismantled.

While those who offer nothing but criticisms and denouncements declare that we have failed because our demands have not been met, there is evidence that our strategy is working. The entire ruling class has mobilized in historic ways to repress our actions, even shredding the founding document in order to do so. People are being disappeared for the act of protest. Politicians are taking our bloc into consideration in their calculations. Countless dollars have been invested in propaganda to counter our message. If what we were doing had no value, posed no threat to the current order, you would not see such a concerted effort to stop it.

I want to reiterate that I share the anger and frustration and powerlessness of being unable to halt the crime of the century. I would not be engaged with this work if I did not also feel this so deeply. But there are, unfortunately, no shortcuts to building the kind of thing that has the power to take on this evil empire. Instead of turning your fire against one another, keep your eyes trained on the ruling class, who wants nothing more than for the revolution to devour itself. This movement is still in its embryonic stages, being built brick by brick by dedicated revolutionaries. Our ranks are growing every day, even in spite of the boot of the state coming down hard upon it. This is not the time for disunity and condemnation, it is time to see the struggle that is before us, engage with it honestly, roll up our sleeves, and get to work.

“And the revolution itself must not by any means be regarded as a single act […], but as a series of more or less powerful outbreaks rapidly alternating with periods of more or less complete calm. For that reason, the principal content of the activity of our Party organisation, the focus of this activity, should be work that is both possible and essential in the period of a most powerful outbreak as well as in the period of complete calm, namely, work of political agitation, connected throughout Russia, illuminating all aspects of life, and conducted among the broadest possible strata of the masses.”⁵

*Social-Democrats was the term for the revolutionary communists in Tsarist Russia

Find a bus to the March for Palestine here: https://marchforpalestine.org/

Thanks for reading! I am a 100% crowd-funded writer. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider upgrading to a paying membership here. An audio version of this newsletter is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Make sure to subscribe so you can get the latest right in your inbox. If you aren’t able to financially support this project, sharing it with a friend goes a long way. It is your support that makes this project possible. - Scarlet

1. Lenin, V.I. (1902), Revolutionary Adventurism.

2. Lenin, V.I. (1929) What is to be done? burning questions of our movement; C by V.I. Lenin.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.