From major cities to rural towns that have never seen mobilizations like this before, protesters made clear that in America, we don’t do kings,“ the No Kings coalition said in a statement.
Someone should tell them that the issue was settled 250 years ago.
Problem is Trump is trying real hard to bring it back
Thank goodness there folks in the streets holding funny signs and going "rah rah sis boom bah" or whatever, otherwise he might actually succeed.
Better that crying about your weakness and uselessness on lemmy.
It's about equivalent in efficacy. Definitely more fun though! Did you see the guy in the frog costume? Such fun!
Someone should have told that to Hitler.
I'm a bit tired of the people who want like a neat list of 2 demands and deadlines and a plan of action and an excel spreadsheet of if-then statements that lay out precisely what needs to happen.
We're not in charge of fixing shit.
The citizenry does not need to have a clean plan. These protests are as wide as the abuses of power that we've seen. They contradict Trump's ability to take the narrative and shift it. If the protests were all about stopping war, then they'd shift the narrative to something else.
Yes, I understand it's broad, but the Trump Administration has shown that they are fine going in any direction. So the protests are responding to that directly, and people don't seem to understand it.
You can cuddle up with your "these aren't real protests" theories all you want, but these are the largest gatherings in history. At a minimum you have to ask yourself why it's different. Maybe you think the answer is mass delusion among an unprecedented group - whatever, I can't stop your reasoning there.
But it cannot be denied that these have spurred more action than any other protest movement, and it's growing. At a minimum you should try to understand why.
EDIT: clearly struck a nerve with this one. People getting fiery in the comments. It's the same "if you can't name the solution then it's pointless". I think that's quite short sighted. Also one comment was talking about economic pain... There is a general strike planned for May 1st. This is a ramping up. If they started with the general strike, there's no way it would have worked. This one has a chance. People are acting like all they needed was the right list of demands and then everyone would have immediately agreed and then something would have changed. It's a growing movement. People are buying into the idea. A general strike has an exponentially better chance to work, but yet these protests were apparently pointless. If you don't think they will work, then get out of the way. The amount of people trying to diminish the efforts of others while doing nothing themselves is baffling. Maybe this isn't a great use of time or energy, but it's far more than what you are doing. So get onboard or go start your own thing and win out in the marketplace of ideas.
Demands are the concrete expression of class interest. A movement that refuses to articulate specific objectives is not a political force. It is a cultural festival. Material conditions do not shift because people gather in large numbers. They shift when production halts and when power is directly challenged. To say the citizenry is not in charge of fixing the country is defeatist idealism (a blatantly ridiculous fiction). It surrenders agency to the bourgeoisie. The masses create history but only when they are organized to seize it.
You claim these gatherings are the largest in history yet business continues as usual. Capital flows uninterrupted. The stock market does not tremble at a parade. Where is the general strike? Where is the material cost to the ruling class? Without economic leverage, visibility is meaningless. Western liberal protest culture trains people to believe that moral visibility equals victory. This is a deliberate falsehood designed to protect property relations. History shows that concessions are never granted out of goodwill. They are extracted through force and disruption.
Look at the historical record without the imperialist filter. Gandhi is presented as the saint of nonviolence who shamed the British Empire into leaving. This erases the material reality of the struggle. The British did not leave because of salt marches. They left because the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in 1946 and violent uprisings made the colony too expensive to maintain. The nonviolent narrative is a tool to disarm future movements. The same sanitization happened to Nelson Mandela and the ANC. He is remembered as a peacemaker but he led Umkhonto we Sizwe. The apartheid regime negotiated because they were being bled by armed struggle and mass disruption. They did not negotiate because of moral appeals.
Martin Luther King Jr is held up as the sole face of Black liberation who won through peace. This ignores the material pressure that actually forced legislation. King himself called riots the language of the unheard. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act were passed while American cities were burning. The ruling class conceded rights to pacify the unrest and protect property. The radical elements who advocated for self defense and disruption created the pressure that made the moderates successful. To ignore this is to ignore how power actually works.
These current gatherings are different because they are safe for capital. Police allow them. Businesses prepare for them like weather events. There is no risk to the state. This is why they are parades and not protests. They function as a pressure valve to dissipate revolutionary sentiment. People feel they have acted because they showed up. Their energy is funneled into spectacle rather than organization. This serves the state by preventing the formation of actual revolutionary capacity.
Chairman Mao taught that revolution is not a dinner party. It is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. These events are dinner parties. They may serve as recruiting grounds but calling them protests lies about the nature of struggle. Real action requires risking comfort. It requires disrupting the flow of capital. If there is no cost to the oppressor there is no victory for the oppressed.
Edit: Oh there's another possible one day "strike" wow. You really should stop being such a pretentious ass and actually try engage with what's being said.
Just a small clarification, Gandhi's nonviolent protests were very much attacking the British. Non violence here only meant not to physically cause harm to humans. For example, the non cooperation movement involved boycott of British manufactured goods, returning titles and honours given by the British govt., and mass resignation of Indians from various offices and posts, strikes in factories. It was not a march for one day. It was specifically targeting the system and weakening it.
Maybe I phrased it badly but that's the point I was trying to make the Indian resistance movement that Ghandi was the face of (both the sections he directly lead and the movement as a whole) was far more confrontational and active than the image canonised later by imperial powers of the hunger striking saint reaching freedom for India through moral appeals. Just like Mandela, MLK etc. the real movement was sanitised and laundered to curb future protests.
Oh, I misunderstood you. I get your point now. Our government too uses the image of 'non violent' protests by Gandhi to shut down protests here. The words they use went from non-violent protests to peaceful protests to protesting without disrupting public life (like don't strike, don't block roads etc.) What the hell is a protest if it does not disrupt?
There is a general strike planned for May 1st. This is a ramping up.
Ok, why are you striking? And after what action would you consider the strike to have succeeded?
We are in charge of fixing shit. Look at all of the movements of the past. They came with demands. Hell, our first one came with damage to goods and property, a Declaration of Independence, and a war. Is it cool that people are rallying? Of course. There are plenty of movements sparked by such a thing, but if the system doesn't take a hit and feel the pressure, they won't care. They're still sitting there, making their money, watching us from their towers.
My issue is this clearly doesn't work. You're being mislead that this works. You had 700 million people out there and nothing happened.
But 700 million people used in new and strategic ways can move mountains. Literally. But instead of moving mountains, you're just in a street for a day.
Think about this. Protesting isn't new. It's occurred since the 1900s as a way to force government and the rich to bend to our will through collective action.
Do you people think that the rich and powerful haven't solved this problem yet? Just think about it for even 10 minutes. It makes no sense that this type of collective action could ever work in today's world like it has in the past. Say what you like about authoritarians, but they do coordinate and plan. Just look at all the events they attend with each other. It's not just for drinks and cocktails. They use their resources to prevent us from taking their power away. They have created thick manuals for this very specific form of soft fleshy crowd. The powers that be have paid for the smartest Ivy league quants to think of strategy and tactics like an NFL coach does when reviewing games. They're so ahead of us on this. The rich control the media. The same media that many of us decided is not important to use anymore or maintain connections on. The media they have heavily invested in. Turns out that this media is needed. If we don't have a presence on social media then we cannot share our efforts. Without that media, the authoritarians can make this effort into anything they want.
If i was a rich guy I'd love these protests because it gives me an opportunity to arrest and financial bankrupt any of the leaders. So when I see that people are getting angry and there is this potential energy that could erupt against my class, then I can use the media to plan these things. When you all show up, the police can identify the leaders and arrest and charge them after kicking in their heads. The rest go home after 24 hrs. With the pressure now released, there will be another year before I need to rinse and repeat.
Compare this to say the clownvoy. They were connected to the police. The tow truck drivers that would be needed to remove trucks after an arrest were in support of them. They made it family fun with bbq and trampolines and bouncy castles and hot tubs because do you think police want to deal with any of that after they clear it all out. Every part of the clownvoy was set up to mess with the playbook that Authoritarians use to disrupt protests. That is what is lacking on the left. But there are leaders in the left who seem hell bent on maintaining status quo. But people are waking up slowly. The problem with doing these things slow is it gives the Authorities time to adapt. There needs to be serious critical honesty reflection on the left towards how badly these protests have damaged and harmed progress. Digging in is only going to keep the status quo which right now is causing huge losses day by day.
Right after I posted I saw this exemple of media being used in the way I described. My Facebook is getting filled with the posts rapidly. Take those same 700 million people and just image what you could do online with them.
I'm going to offer my call to action that also gets shot down often but I want people to consider it honestly. I know it sounds crazy. It's not fully fleshed out. But I believe efforts need to be more focused online. It is anonymous. They can't beat your head in. The authoritarians invest heavily in it. The weakness in their efforts is that the thing they need to invest in can easily be leveraged by us to also spread an idea just like a protest. Except with so much less effort and risk.
What I want people to consider honestly is that I think the proof that this is where we need to focus is that the powers that be are actually trying to dismantle our ability to do this before we wise up to it. This is why they're trying to introduce digital id's. It'll let them be able to identify leaders and voices online who organize and censor them. Right now they cannot do that easily. But they know if those 700 million people that showed up in the streets would instead show up online, their bots, propaganda and efforts would be crushed. You can control the narrative and flip it all back on them. I think we have wrongly been telling people to abandon all the social media we can. To block everyone. To ignore it all. I think that is contributing to all our countries sliding towards the right. We gave them all red carpet access to the eyes and ears of most people. Instead we should encourage each other to connect online. Take control of the platforms again and only then consider going back to the streets when the narrative can be controlled and messages spread.
Stepped right on some ml land mines with this one. For what it's worth, I'll back you up a bit. I don't think all actions have strict utilitarian needs. There is a mountain of soft value to these large scale actions that go missing when we focus only on concrete progress.
If nothing else, these are obvious community building and networking opportunities. The US is starved of these opportunities, and rather than turning our noses up, should be engaged with. Pissing and moaning about structure loses the forest for the trees.
We don't have examples of these movements being effective without targeted and concrete goals, but we also forget all examples of the moments in between these landmarks. It's important to develop this momentum into structural progress, rather than upset that the average person is more willing to participate in less-targeted action. Progress doesn't have prescribed structure, despite what many suggest. Take wins where you can and keep working.
If nothing else, these are obvious community building and networking opportunities. The US is starved of these opportunities ...
americans are indeed starved, but it's not an accident we find ourselves in this condition.
it's also true that these could serve a networking oppurtunity, but given american's collectivism-phobia, it's going to literally take generations using things like the no kings to make a dent.
you're not wrong, like most arent, you're just missing some blanks and most of us here can see some of them like i just did.
What's the solution to this that won't take generations? And for what it's worth, if I wasn't clear, I don't believe the No Kings efforts to be particularly effective in concept or practice.
Love this. I think people expect to work through things with the same understanding that they look back on them with.
We have actually mobilized a record number of people. If we're having the argument about where to point them, I think people are missing the point that it's the right problem to have.
Trying to redefine the word protest doesnt redefine the action. These were not protests.
What are they then?
They are echo chamber parades. Protests have clearly defined goals, demands, potential threat to the system. Protests dont have a scheduled start and end date/time.
They claim to be protesting Trump as if he's not a cog in the machine, a cog, if replaced, would not change how the machine operates. They should be protesting the entire system that created people like Trump, Biden/Harris, Obama, Pelosi, etc.
It will be the same for their May 1 'general strike.' A 1 day, couple of hours event of no consumption, which will result in nothing.
I agree. But, please, as a rule of thumb, when you make comments like this please end them to direct people for MORE action not less. I think we spend too much time criticizing without directing to action. The criticism is correct. But is useless without a direction to actually enact change.
Something as small as placing leftist literature in your local bookshare dropoff, to organizing a tenants/workplace union, working with mutual aids, learning your neighbors names, joining DSA or PSL for meetings to get your foot in the door, etc.
We can't critize liberals for going outside without directing them where else to go. It's just doomerism at that point.
One thing I did was ask my friends to join ONE other protest or organization with me between the last "No Kings" and today's. Only had one actually join me. But they've been more active since.
Use these events as opportunities to EXPAND organizing. Don't just offer criticism that essentially is just telling them what they are doing is useless and they should stay home. That's not how we get more people organizing.
We don't go from what we have now to an armed vanguard pushing ICE out of our cities in a single leap. We do lots of stupid "performative" shit to spread leftist agit-prop. These protest are an opportunity to do that.
The biggest failure of these no Kings protest is not on the liberals. It's on our complete inability to radicalize them. WE as Marxist are failing THEM. It's our job to educate them.
We can't educate them until they drop the ego that they have it all figured out and real activists with the experience are all wrong. They can't even lay out simple demands and will insist we need to support the same people that created this mess in order to get out of it.
That's part of educating them. I'm not saying I have the answer on how best to reach them. But I know sitting back and saying "they can't even understand that " is not working.
We may need real material decline or militant attacks from the state to radicalize them. But, as that continues to happen, we can't have leadership in the "performative" groups just filled with liberals.
We need to have influence in these far reaching groups like DSA or whatever wine mom groups organize to join "No Kings". They don't need criticism that tells them what they are doing is "not enough". That just leads to inaction. They are not ready to risk their job and treats to do that. They need direction when they lose their jobs. They need direction when they lose their treats.
Yes, it's fucking pathetic that these stupid liberals are doing nothing as people are hurt. You don't have to like them. You can be mad at how useless they are. But its our job to literally put ourselves in these organizations to lead them (and we are not). Yelling at them will not change them.
It's great if you're in your local Marxist organization or PSL or whatever. But we don't build these groups by hoping liberals "see the light" and come to us. It's our job to go to where the masses are. And whether that results in Marxist organizations growing and people leaving the Democrats or DSA for more radical organizations. Or, if those organizations themselves become more radicalized because of our presence in them. Both are progress. And we are NOT doing that enough.
Sometimes you have to wait until liberals are asking the right questions for them to be ready to accept the answers. And that likely means their material conditions declining. But we need to be in positions of leadership to be able to give those answers. We can't just scream at them from our tiny groups that they have never heard of.
Avoiding these nonsense parades is doing more, not less. We need reading clubs right now, not parades and direct actions. There is no vanguard party in the US and no movement that is being built into one. That needs to come first, so that next time a revolutionary moment presents itself we're in a place to do more than criticize how the Libs are mismanaging it.
If this is a protest, what are their demands?
Not only do they have no demands, they make no threats should those non-demands not be met.
I’ve had it with these motherfucking .mls on this motherfucking .ml.
we should have a meme of this and share it with everybody so we can respond w the meme each time. lol
You're here in a .ml community.
Pep rallies.
🇺🇸 IF HILLARY/KAMALA WERE PRESIDENT WE'D ALL BE AT BRUNCH 🇺🇸
https://bsky.app/profile/latimeriidae.bsky.social/post/3mi52awgh7s23
Walking thru the “Ultra Normie” No Kings rally in my extremely rural, white town and there are Patagonia wearing moms carrying signs that say “DEAD PEDOPHILES DONT REOFFEND” and “ICE GETS THE WALL” and I hi fived an old guy with a sign that said MY DADDY FOUGHT NAZIS AND SO WILL I” this is wild
they are.
just useless parades.
good place to recruit people to activate them though. Only good thing there
Not useless then. If there are still more "I want to be at brunch" signs than there are "end American Imperialism" signs that's a failure in our job as leftist to radicalize them.
With everything that has happened since the first "No Kings" to this third one. I am more disappointed in leftist failures to radicalize liberals than I am liberals themselves. It's our job to educate them.
The defensiveness is such a difficult thing to break through IRL. Trying to convince liberals it isn’t just Trump and isn’t just republicans probably isn’t the best strategy for getting liberals to see the issues with America as a system (or at least the way I’m doing it). Though strangers tend to be a bit less willing to push back as much as family and friends of family it seems.
