Protest movements must become robust institutions to have lasting impact

Evidence

We attribute the success of grassroots environmental justice struggles, ultimately, to strong community organizations and regional networks. As we explain at the end of this chapter, and as the next chapter illustrates, the grassroots organizations created in the midst of struggles for environmental justice are crucial in creating an ongoing role for community participation in all decisions that fundamentally affect the participants’ lives. When local groups are able to link their victories in the environmental realm to broader political and economic struggles, the potential exists to redefine existing power relations, to unsettle cultural assumptions about race and class, and to create new political possibilities for historically marginalized communities in local decision-making processes. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 496 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

I think capital is quite happy facing people who are not that organised. It’s good to have a broad-based group of people. But there was a broad-based opposition to the Iraq War — and that’s a major moment of capitalist realism, I think, in the UK. When you have however many millions out in the streets in the UK and nothing happened. That shows that sheer numbers of people don’t necessarily accomplish anything. I think you only accomplish anything when you’ve got organisation, goals and structures, in the end. Otherwise you’ve just got some faith in a kind of spontaneity of the people somehow. When has that ever yielded anything? You’re not up against things which are susceptible to spontaneity. There’s a difference between capitalism and other forms of kind of political social dominance, isn’t there? We can’t just take all of the capitalists out and execute them. Capitalism is a structure — it’s as much a cognitive structure as it is a social structure. You can’t just take out the ruling class. Even imagine this was the case, imagine it was possible — you can’t just take out the ruling class and have got rid of it. Difficult questions are: How do we organise life differently? How do we organise the economy in a way that’s different from the way that capitalism has done? That’s not solved by executing capitalists. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2163 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A major Brazilian protest movement organized as consensus-based and leaderless by design — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 149; Mass protest wins tactical concessions while structural demands remain unmet — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 278; Mass protest can electrify even the most jaded observers — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 406 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Sheer mass protest changes nothing without organization, goals, and structures #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2163
• Movement success depends on durable community organizations outlasting individual fights #corroborates (0.90) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 496
• Protest events alone do not change anything without ongoing political organization #corroborates (0.90)
• Horizontal protest movements that refuse representation get co-opted or crushed by existing powers #corroborates (0.85) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 444
• Hierarchical organization correlates with protest movement success #corroborates (0.85) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 847
• Successful resistance institutionalizes into civic organizations and marginalizes street activism #exemplifies (0.85) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 653
• Modern protest movements are transient swarms held together by stimuli, not durable organizations #complicates (0.82) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 229
• Durable antiracism requires seizing and holding institutional power, not merely protesting #corroborates (0.78) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1260
• Local protest movements can aggregate into a national politics without top-down coordination #complicates (0.75) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 620