Sheer mass protest changes nothing without organization, goals, and structures

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the anti-Iraq-War protest futility argument from capitalist realism discourse and connects to the logic of DEEPTHINKING on why mass mobilizations fail against structural (not personal) power. — connects to: Mass protest without a vanguard naturally occupies symbolic space rather than seizing state power — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 225; 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 (+11 more)
• QUESTION: Fisher poses organisation-versus-spontaneity as decisive but leaves how such organisation would form against cognitive structures genuinely open.

Broader Connections

• Protest events alone do not change anything without ongoing political organization #corroborates (0.97)
• Hierarchical organization correlates with protest movement success #corroborates (0.92) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 847
• Modern protest movements are transient swarms held together by stimuli, not durable organizations #corroborates (0.86) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 229
• Local protest movements can aggregate into a national politics without top-down coordination #complicates (0.84) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 620
• Networks of local protest can constitute national politics from the ground up #complicates (0.84) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 620
• A major Brazilian protest movement organized as consensus-based and leaderless by design #complicates (0.81) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 149