If protests don’t work, why do people in power spend so much energy preventing and discrediting and downplaying them?

@calcifer historically, protests—especially large protests—had a pretty hard requirement for a well organized movement that was substantially larger than the protest itself, so much of the protests power was derived from being a visible expression the power of the movement rather an intrinsic power of protesting. a relatively well know. example of this is the march on washington, which didn’t just represent a lot of people who cared about the cause of the march itself (which was already an impressive crowd) but also all the organizations who’d done the work of getting those people there—organizations who had already spent the last several years successfully organizing boycotts and strikes that shut down businesses or even whole cities, sometimes for months at a time (the Montgomery bus boycott lasted over a *year*). And now they were taking this excellent track record to washington and saying “we’ll do all this to you too if we have to, and we wont stop until we win.”

in the modern day this the relationship between the size/power of protests and the org behind them is much less direct—a handful of people with a budget and some media savvy can pull in a pretty large crowd if they get lucky. So while protests are still powerful on a symbolic level, it’s not as clear how much effect it actually intrinsically translates to! But it’s almost certainly lower without an organized movement to back it up.

and naturally the people in power would like the amount of power any given protest exerts to be as close to zero as possible, so they’ll leverage the factors they can control (eg. media coverage, which seems to make a big difference for modern protests in how effectual they are) towards “protests do nothing”. Some of those factors we can’t effectively leverage back (or cant without a much higher level of organization than we currently have) but others we can.

The question then is whether its worth the energy of doing so, or if we should be spending that energy on other forms of organizing and mobilization. So less “protests are useless” and more “shouldn’t we be doing other stuff instead of spending all this energy protesting?” which i can’t really answer definitively—i would say it probably depends on the issue & the organizers (if the option is “protest” or “nothing” definitely protest. just as i’m critical of electoralism as an energy sink but if the options are voting or nothing i’ll pick voting every time)