Everybody's Protest Politics... Are Boring As F*ck

The "protest" novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us at all, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone.

- James Baldwin from Notes Of A Native Son

Why do we need a permit from the police to protest the latest incidence of police brutality? Why did the press event that took weeks of planning and turning out people get only four lines on the last page of the local paper? Why do radical individuals or groups invest so much in campaigns pushing for liberal change? Or why the majority of nonprofits are funded by foundations with names like Rockefeller, Annenberg, Ford, Walton, Gates - the same rich white oligarchical "titans of industry" that they supposedly organize against?

The revolution will not be televised. It will not come with slogans and propaganda. People will not march down the street. And it is not coming through the ballot box or electoral college.

The current model of community organizing has run on the same treadmill for the past 30 years - and it's going nowhere. Over those 30 years, the racial wealth gap has grown exponentially, wars of aggression continue, and climate change brings increasingly devastating disasters. People are losing their homes and jobs; leaders are being jailed, co-opted, and assassinated; the roots of imperialism have grown so deep and so intertwined that people can no longer imagine a different kind of world.

Press conferences and protests are played out – Rupert Murdoch does not care about your two-hour police-controlled civil disobedience protest in the lobby of his London office (he was in Miami). Your politics are boring.

Community-based organizations still follow the Saul Alinsky-model of organizing to "building power strategically". Readily accepting and working with the system. Working with an electoral campaign or drafting legislation with the hopes that bank/government/whatever-the-fuck accountability will bring about some real change this time around. Your politics are boring.

Organizers and activists are forced to aim for reform or short-term gains. To "save" a closing school - what about the public school system that is systematically failing poor students of color? Or to publicly shame a corrupt politician - what about the structure of electoral politics that allow organized money to push broad-scale political agendas? To put out fires but never to disarm the arsons. Your politics are boring.

(editor’s note: this is not to say short-term gains are not important - they are because oppressed people are forced to operate on survival mode directly because of structural conditions of concentrated power and wealth.)

It’s easy to point at problems. Most folks could wax about all the fuckery in the world. And many do, regularly. To criticize safely from the sidelines. But what does all of your analysis and critique build towards? Your politics are boring.

The difficult part is creating solutions, viable alternatives, liberated and liberative spaces. Solutions that provide for basic needs and rights – food, shelter, education, work, dignity – apart from the system. And in the process, (re)cultivating (re)creating and (re)building community. Models of such structures exist all about us, we just have to look for them.

The Zapatistas have liberated the state in Chiapas.

The Black Panther Party created the Free Breakfast For Children program.

Freedom schools have educated students all over the country for the past 50 years.

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It's abundantly clear to me now that truly liberative organizing comes from the ability to bring folks together to build their own means of sustenance. The same old protest politics are going nowhere. The revolution we dream of is in our hands - it is our responsibility to create the world we need.

When there is no need for "the man" or the state; when we can disengage from capitalism or existing systems of oppression and domination; when we no longer need the system to take care of our needs; when we are no longer cogs in the matrix. Only then are we free, self-determined and autonomous.

Whether it means alternative food systems, collective housing, worker-owned cooperatives, freedom schools... the revolution of daily values and the building blocks of community. To hold our glass up to theirs rather than just merely call their glass dirty. This is the means by which we liberate ourselves and each other.