Large protest events repeatedly fail to produce lasting political change

Evidence

It’s somewhat ironic that theories of the “Event” have come to the fore in the most fashionable areas of academic political philosophy at just the moment in history when it has become clear that events in and of themselves don’t change anything. From the G20 protests, to the millions marching against the Iraq war, to the Arab Spring, to the short-lived student campaign against fees in the UK — the narrative of evental politics since the late 1990s has been reliably repetitious. Euphoric outbursts of dissent are followed by depressive collapse. Eventalism is the manic flipside of the general depressive tendency in boring academic Marxism — in which an ostensible Leninism/ Maoism (everything will change after the revolution!) obfuscates a de facto Adornianism (nothing could ever happen, everything is bad, so we might as well keep on taking the state’s pay cheques). — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1952

Categorization

• SEED: An essay contrasting ‘evental politics’ (mass protests expecting transformation) with ‘directional’ slow organizing would speak to current post-2020 protest fatigue.
• XREF: Ties to Fisher’s broader critique of the left’s ritualism and to literature on protest cycles and movement ‘moments’ vs. infrastructure. — connects to: March 2013 crowds rejected the left parties that had built the protest — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 430; Mass protest’s outcomes rarely matched participants’ goals — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 42; Protest events alone do not change anything without ongoing political organization (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Sheer mass protest changes nothing without organization, goals, and structures #corroborates (0.93) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2163
• Protest events alone do not change anything without ongoing political organization #expands (0.92)
• Hyperpolitical-era protest movements have produced almost no durable policy wins #corroborates (0.90) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 231
• Protest movements must become robust institutions to have lasting impact #expands (0.85)
• American mass protest marches typically serve as ritual catharsis rather than political change #expands (0.85) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 532
• Horizontal protest movements that refuse representation get co-opted or crushed by existing powers #expands (0.78) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 444
• Political movements must seize fleeting protest moments or lose them to ruling patience #complicates (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1508