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🪵 The Threshold

Massive anti-war protest failed to sustain opposition once US intervention began

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tagsja-picks, contrarian_or_surprising, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@fisher_k-punk_2018, loc. 1952, @bevins_if_2023, loc. 42, @jager_hyperpolitics_2023, loc. 231

4 min read

Massive anti-war protest failed to sustain opposition once US intervention began

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Around the world, humanity witnessed the explosion of mass protests that heralded profound changes. They were experienced as euphoric victory for their participants and met with adulation and optimism in the international press. But years later, after most of the foreign reporters were gone, we see that the uprisings preceded—if not necessarily caused—outcomes that were very different from the goals of the movements. Nowhere did things turn out as planned. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 42 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

So far, however, their record has been meager. Is the global banking sector more tightly regulated than it was in 2008? The collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and the Credit Suisse crisis give reason to doubt it. In Britain, both Brexiteers and Corbynists promised increased funding for the National Health Service; the end of the pandemic found the NHS in its deepest crisis yet. Ambulances queue outside hospitals for want of beds and space in emergency rooms. The United States remains the only advanced industrial nation without a public health system. In Greece, the austerity policies imposed by the institutions were never fully lifted. The Movimento 5 Stelle did manage to introduce a rudimentary version of a universal basic income, after which Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government has vowed to dismantle it. All OECD nations are well short of meeting their climate goals. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 231 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The 2014 anti-World Cup protests failed to stop the tournament — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 529; The American public absorbed antiwar protests with bemused tolerance rather than hostility — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 1049; Large protest events repeatedly fail to produce lasting political change — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1952 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

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