[I originally posted this in chapotraphouse, but it was deleted for being “pro-cop” even though that very much wasn’t the case. (I believe PSL was actually involved in organizing the protest if I’m not mistaken.) The mod that deleted it openly broke the sectarian rule too.]
Been seeing a lot of people hating on what the protest marshals did during the pro-Gaza protests at the DNC and I feel they definitely did the right thing. Instigating stuff like going up against the cops under the guise of “revolutionary” action just gets a lot of people arrested and doesn’t accomplish anything.
EDIT: Users who were present at the protests have said, counter to what is claimed in the screenshot, that the protest marshals did NOT call for the police. Thank you for clearing this up, comrades!
Just… what?
Thousands showed up for what they intended as a peaceful march. A few wanted to make it violent – something you agree is not a good idea – and were deescalated without any injuries or arrests.
This is supposed to be “ten times worse” than letting a few people get thousands (who did not sign up to get attacked by cops) attacked by cops? When you yourself said fighting the cops here would be silly?
If you don’t want to throw bricks and fight cops, no one is interfering to force you to. If the cops attack everyone, that is the fault of the cops, not of the small agitating minority of protestors. You are ceding all ethical judgment to the police.
The stance here is against people who would split their own movement into “good protestors” and “bad protestors” for the sake of optics that will be promptly ignored or discarded. The subtext of what you are saying is that there was a tacit agreement with the authorities not to escalate- an admission and commitment to impotence. What’s the point of protesting the DNC at all if you’re just going to follow a script that you know will just be ignored because it’s played out a thousand times already?
Throwing burning things into the Third Precinct was inadvisable too, but it worked. Leaving room for people to protest in their own way is how you sustain the life of a protest movement, instead of strangling it.
We celebrate Palestinians who throw rocks at Israeli tanks, for not accepting the premise that disproportionate revenge is “the adversary’s hand being forced (by the less powerful)”. We shouldn’t conceptually exclude this attitude from the imperial core.
At some point an org can’t just let people do whatever they want. The whole point of organizing is to plan what you are doing and then follow the plan. Party/movement discipline is necessary.
Leaving aside how no plan survives first contact, the whole point of organizing is to be transformative. If you are trying to change the world, you leave room for adaptation and change in your own movement. The majority of what becomes possible is not something you can rigidly or linearly plan for beforehand.
The Left in America has largely been “following the plan” for 100 years; the FBI reads their plan and runs circles around them.
When the plan is obviously going nowhere, what do you do? More of the same?
The response to this isn’t to abandon planning and say “everyone do whatever they want when we arrive.” The response is to make simpler plans, figure out how to communicate during the action, establish contingencies, etc. You do want to have a plan and stick to it – “no plan survives” is a statement about how difficult that is, no more.
What do you think was possible here that fighting cops would have accomplished?
I don’t think that “fighting cops”, fun and righteous as it may be, accomplishes anything in and of itself. I wouldn’t have picked a fight there; what I would have done is a tactical matter that I’d share only on private channels. But I sure as hell wouldn’t have turned on the people I went to a demo with.
I won’t try to say that everyone should do as I do; I’m specifically arguing for the opposite of that, to have coordination without subordination. It’s not one single party structure pulling it off, and never was.
My position is that if there’s a diverse composition at your rally, and there have been stirrings of confrontation for a while, if you see people getting physically combative against the cops or against property and you act to impair them or to facilitate their arrest by police, you are becoming part and parcel of policing.
This is an ethical matter of “do you turn to the ruling authority to resolve division in your movement”. For anyone to call themself a genuine leftist, the answer must be an unambiguous “no”.
Iff you feel the need to control people using the tide of law enforcement rather than denouncing them or dissociating from them, you show that you’re not only unfit for allying with, on top of this you’ve got more in common with the forces of repression than the forces of liberation.