peaceful protests are useless because the government can safely ingore them. violent protest forces the government to take action, just look at the history of the civil rights movement in the US. The objective of effective protest should not be to announce your displeasure with the governments actions, but to make it more costly for them to continue than to capitulate.
Heres a good quote from Stokely Carmichael about this:
To add on to this, I dont think you have to choose between persuing progress within the current system and building support for revolution, rather persuing progress within the current system shows the proletariat that your movement gets shit done and the two objectives work in harmony. The biggest concern is making sure reformists or other liberal movements do not take credit for any gains made and use them as proof that complete liberation is possible under capitalism when in fact it is not. The revolutionaries have to be seen as the champions of this progress in the eyes of the masses in order to build support for revolution.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The point of protests (in proper revolutionary movements) is to gather support and get your agenda out there so that it is un-ignorable.
Violent protest is the only useful protest if your criteria for useful is government change. But we know government change isn’t coming without revolution or at the very least the serious threat of it.
So yes and no.
They’re worse than useless for pressuring; as in this day and age, they’ve started locking up protestors against unpopular policy, and a solid half of them have gotten federal RICO charges applied to whatever else the prosecutor’s office wants to nail them with. (I’ll let you guess which half did.) (Like for real the more I think about it, I don’t think a single Jan. 6th Rioter caught RICO charges; but the Cop City protestors did? Cracker shit.)
The CPC rolled back zero COVID after about two weeks of protest.
So protests only work to help bad policies pass, got it.
The abandobment of zero covid was a disaster
If you think the point is to pressure change, most of the time, yeah, it’s useless.
It’s a great opportunity to catch people moving up the radicalization ladder to pull them left.
In more extreme moments with sufficient organization behind them, protests can develop into revolutions such as the fascist counter-revolution in Ukraine in 2014. That obviously didn’t change much about the underlying system in Ukraine other than installing a western puppet and further empowering the fascists.
