Can We Be Honest About Marches?
aka parades
From Eleanor Goldfield:
I don’t know how many marches I’ve been to (honestly, who keeps a running tally?), but sitting here rolodexing through the memories, I can say that many have been transformative, both negatively and positively. A few more than that have been kinda boring, and a bunch have been somewhere in between.
Overwhelmingly, I don’t regret going to or helping to organize marches…aka parades. What I do regret is the time I spent thinking that this was how we really change the lived experiences not only of our own communities but of the architects of our oppression. I can forgive myself that up to a point because hey, that’s what we’re taught, if we’re taught anything about “dissent.” We’re not taught about the Haymarket Affair, massive organized strikes that birthed May Day, the international Labor Day. We’re not taught about the Mine Wars where mine workers organized across vast chasms of cultural divisions to not only march against coal barons but take up arms against them, winning basic worker’s rights. No, we’re taught about the kinda protests against the Vietnam War that were also somehow drug-induced dance parties, which are clearly bad, right? We’re taught about how MLK Jr. walked across a bridge and changed the world, but never about how he connected issues such as racism, capitalism and war, connections that ultimately got him assassinated.
In short, we’re not taught about the deep and difficult behind-the-scenes work of changing our lived experiences. We’re taught that walking is synonymous with a march of progress. The myth is seductive because it sometimes feels like that too, right? When you lock arms with folks and take an intersection, when the din of shouted chants seems to shake the air, when hundreds or thousands of people show up for a collective purpose, that shit can be absolutely intoxicating!
And by all means, drink it up. But in your revelry, don’t conflate a personally transformative experience with experiences that threaten the system. Marches, parades, vigils, etc. are not useless. They are simply useful in ways more akin to a BBQ or a film screening than they are to coordinated and targeted actions that actually leverage our power.
And in this capitalist colonialist shitheap of a system, our power lies in our ability to give or withhold our labor. That’s it. (More on our power outside the system later). We don’t have purchasing power. We don’t have political power though of course we’re told that we do. But just in case you need a Princeton study to point out that the US is an oligarchy where our wants and needs don’t mean dick diddly to the powers that be, there is one. We don’t have social power, as in we don’t know the “right” people to get our demands met - see above re oligarchy as to who does. We, the unwashed masses, have our imposed places in the gears of the great machine of US empire. And I gotta say, the people running those gears don’t give a shit if you hold a sign, so long as the gears keep grinding.
Again, this does not mean that marches are useless, especially for people who are new to a place or to their place in politics (including kids). When someone goes to a march and interacts with the self-selecting groups of people also there to kvetch about a particular issue, it can do many things: make them feel less alone in their despair, be a release valve for the understandable rage they feel, bring joy through that collective kvetching and being in a space with like-minded folks, connect them to orgs and people actually organizing behind the scenes to address that issue, inspire them to act and show up in new and creative ways, introduce them to other issues that are invariably connected to the one they showed up for.
As an example, the first time I was pepper sprayed, I was at Occupy LA in downtown Los Angeles. I was there doing some media work and holding space with folks to protest the cancer that is capitalism. I wasn’t really thinking about the role of police in that system. But hey, nothing shifts your focus to how cops uphold and protect the architecture of oppression like getting pepper sprayed by cops upholding the architecture of oppression. After I’d finished coughing and weeping, and in conversations with people who knew way more than me about the history and legacy of policing in this nation, I started my journey to becoming an abolitionist. Now, would I have started on that path without getting pepper sprayed that day? Possibly. But as any teacher will tell you, nothing beats a hands-on lesson.
Now to be clear, I am not out to romanticize violence, especially as a recipient of it. I think some on the left want to cosplay as Che and conflate radical action with getting the shit kicked out of them by cops. In times and places such as ours, that is a very dumb and very dangerous paradigm. The adrenaline rush you get from being at a protest that escalates into police-powered violence certainly feels impactful, but it’s important to remember that our interactions with state agents do not equal impact on the state. Therefore, they are not tactical actions in and of themselves.
Those who get arrested on purpose or pick fights with cops are not doing anything revolutionary. They are more often than not endangering community members around them, especially non-white, LGBTQ+ or other folks who don’t scan as white, male, cis and straight. This is not to excuse police violence or to say those who get beat up by cops are “asking for it.” Hell no. It is to once again contextualize our actions in a larger tactical framework. Acting in self-defense against the state is not a role-playing exercise or a fun night out. It is a community necessity that must be rooted in collective organizing and understanding, considering the needs and risks of the most vulnerable and oppressed among us.
Police are violent. We must prepare for this rather than seek it out. And know that actions - including marches - don’t need to encounter state violence to be impactful.
One of my first marches was against the second Iraq War in 2002 when I was 15. My mom and I made vigil candles and held them up in front of anti-war signs she designed so that passing cars could read them. I don’t think many did. Some who did yelled at us, some honked in appreciation and agreement. Even now, when I’m very aware that the millions who marched around the world didn’t stop yet another war of US imperial aggression, I feel it was important for me to be there. It inspired me to speak up and speak out in other places and times. It gave me comfort to know that even if I was alone at say school, I wasn’t alone in the ass-flap of Charlotte, NC, and certainly not the world. There were others out there who didn’t want war. And I felt that I could take them with me. Hell, I still do.
Standing on a road, marching through a square, these can be powerful moments. And they are not the leveraging of our power. They may change us. They do not change the system. And that’s ok.
So yes, go to that march, that parade if you want to. Organize some too! Just be honest about what it means, and the work that needs to get done outside of that. When you march and someone chants, “the people united will never be defeated,” is that just something to say or do you actually value the work of collective organizing beyond the photo-op? When the cops tell you you gotta stay on the sidewalk, and y’all obey, but someone still insists on chanting “whose streets? our streets!” as if irony had a soundtrack, do you feel ridiculous? And if so, what are we gonna do about that?
There has been an exorbitant amount of energy poured into organizing marches, vigils, parades and so-called protests that amount to a group of like-minded folks talking at each other for a while on a sunny afternoon. There has been a whole lot less energy poured into actual outreach, community building, and direct action that leverages the power that we actually have. And that is not ok.
To quote my brother from another mother Antonio Gramsci, “the old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” In this time of monsters, are we really hoping to placate the beasts with cleverly worded signage? Are we really hoping that we can appeal to the humanity of those perpetuating genocide, torture, terrorism and war crimes? Are we naive enough to think that they just aren’t aware of what they’re doing?
I don’t want our banners of solidarity to be our collective death shrouds. I don’t want the genocide to end because there’s no one left to kill. I want it to end because it was stopped. I want us to get to the other side of empire, as many of us who can. I want us to care for each other in ways that show that there’s something other than this death-making machine. This too is our power, our power outside of the system. Our power to imagine, and brainstorm, and be weird and wild and creative and fluid - all the things which the system tries to beat out of us so we’re good, obedient proles. We have to build what we want to see amidst the horrors we see, and that takes a lot of imaginative power, the kind that goes beyond configuring parade routes.
This walks in parallel with our systemic power. Direct action: general strikes, targeting the centers of the death-making machine, not walking outside begging for life. This of course requires the slogging work of community building, the kind that is uncomfortable (see previous Substack post) and not Instagram material.
Our power both inside and outside the system manifests in so many ways, ways we have etched into our bones, ways we don’t know yet but will. It looks so many different ways. But what it isn’t is performative. It’s not about a public display. Right now, too many are spending too much time on public relations while the actual work of surviving, connecting, building and fighting goes undone. Our power is here when we’re ready for it. Deep down, we know it. They know it. That’s why they’ll always smile down at you holding that sign, putting on a good show. And I love a good show too, y’all. But sometimes the show needs to not go on. Sometimes we gotta rain on their parade, and our own.
(If you wanna hear an audio version of this topic, check out my latest Radical Nuance at Patreon.com/ArtKillingApathy)
I keep repeating myself marches really aren’t as effective as a full throttle shut down bigger shutdown than Covid. That means the only people that report to work, policeman and medical staff, and of course, the people that run the electrical grid shut the entire country down and not for one day, three days five days with demands that DC sit up and listen And stop this insanity
This is an absolute gem of a substack article.