Protests without determinate winnable goals breed generalized despondency

Evidence

I think built into many of these movements is a kind of inbuilt expectation of failure, so that it’s not a problem if things actually fail. With the student thing there was at least — although it actually did fail, it could have succeeded, at least theoretically. It had a determinate aim. The people they were exerting pressure on had the power to make the decision not to impose those student fees, etc. Unless there are determinate winnable goals, a kind of generalised despondency will result. It’s what my comrade Alex Williams calls “feel-good, feel-bad”. You feel good because you’re out in a protest doing something. But ultimately you feel bad because — and these two things are completely sutured together, the feel-good and the feel-bad — you feel bad because you don’t expect to achieve anything ever. It’s just a kind of carnival of the defeated. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2157

Categorization

• XREF: Coined by Alex Williams, this ‘feel-good, feel-bad’ diagnosis feeds directly into the demand-based politics of the later accelerationist manifesto Inventing the Future. — connects to: Mass protest’s outcomes rarely matched participants’ goals — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 42; Austerity protests can win determinate goals unlike symbolic anticapitalist carnivals — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1470; Protest movements need determinate goals and institutional embedding to last — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2158 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Specific winnable goals distinguish effective anti-capitalist struggle from mere carnival #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1470
• Austerity protests can win determinate goals unlike symbolic anticapitalist carnivals #corroborates (0.88) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1470
• Protest movements need determinate goals and institutional embedding to last #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2158
• Decentralized pursuit of non-domination breeds accumulating petty despotisms, not freedom #expands (0.74) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 456
• Protest movements should be judged against their own stated goals #qualifies (0.72) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 57
• A major Brazilian protest movement organized as consensus-based and leaderless by design #exemplifies (0.72) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 149