> No, but putative leftists might want to identify some kind of useful
> programme for engagement with ordinary people - people with bills and
> real economic problems, not students and kids. The kind of people with
> neither the time nor the inclination to get involved in reclaim the
> streets or whatever the leftist mode du jour happens to be.
As I understand it, the anti-roads protests germinated out of the opposition to road expansion projects that affect many people.
I've participated in plenty of anti-capitalist protests and I've seen lots of people my age. We all have real economic problems. From my experience, having spent years in the work force and having to pay rents is a very radicalizing motivation.
> Being serious for a moment, puppets at protests seem to me to indicate
> protest as a lifestyle rather than protest as meaningful action on
> issues. There is quite clearly a subculture out there for whom
> protests are a form of entertainment. The real problem is, that the
> act of protesting stem from the identification of grievance and the
> desire to address it. If you treat it like a nice day out then that's
> all it will be. Yesterday's leftism at best offered some hope of
> amelioration. Today's protests don't even achieve that. It seems to me
> that they're not really meant to.
Many protests are treated as a form of entertainment. Anti-war marches usually have the feel of some mass stroll through the park. I don't see anything wrong with protests being entertaining. I know that the cops hate it when we are having a good time.
Puppets at protests have some useful purposes, which I'm not going to elaborate on this morning. I can't see how puppets are a form of "lifestyle" except for a few people who spearhead puppet projects, like the Wise Fool Collective or WAG in D.C.
> Perhaps I'm sliding into dreary reformism - or out of politics
> altogether - but protest for the sake of it doesn't seem worthwhile to
> me.
I don't know. I might agree with you on some days. I think that protest for the sake of protest is preferable to lots of armchair politics. The Left has a big deficit when it comes to protest. But protest can become kind of mindless, which is when you should just stop protesting, step back, and talk and think about what to do next.
This is one reason why I'm not that concerned about the decline in anti-globalization protests in the U.S. Even if 9/11 had never happened, the movement would have entered this phase anyways, for a variety of reasons.
And I will point out that *protest* per se is just one form of dissent. There is also organizing of groups. Building counter-institutions. Education. Sabotage. Direct action. Illegal attacks and interventions.
We need more full spectrum dissent.
> And don't get too angry about my attack on anarchists - if you're
> serious, and I'm sure you are, you'll have run into no shortage of
> self-described 'anarchists' who are nothing but self-indulgent
> super-liberals with a curious fashion sense. Didn't Bookchin go into
> this stuff in some detail?
LOL! Good point.
Chuck