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Why Mass Movements Fail
Hedges, Chris
http://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/03/chris-hedges-organized-power-vs-organized-power/Date Written: 2023-10-03 Publisher: Consortium News Year Published: 2023 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX24978 The wave of global popular protests that erupted in 2010 and lasted a decade were extinguished, meaning new tactics and strategies are required, as Vincent Bevins explains in his book If We Burn. Abstract: - Excerpt: Many mass movements, because they failed to implement hierarchical, disciplined, and coherent organizational structures, were unable to defend themselves. In the few cases when organized movements achieved power, as in Greece and Honduras, the international financiers and corporations conspired to ruthlessly wrest power back. In most cases, the ruling class swiftly filled the power vacuums created by these protests. They offered new brands to repackage the old system. This is the reason the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama was named Advertising Age's Marketer of the Year. It won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference. It beat out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. The professionals knew. Brand Obama was a marketer's dream. Too often the protests resembled flash mobs, with people pouring into public spaces and creating a media spectacle, rather than engaging in a sustained, organized and prolonged disruption of power. Guy Debord captures the futility of these spectacles/protests in his book Society of the Spectacle, noting that the age of the spectacle means those entranced by its images are "molded to its laws." Anarchists and antifascists, such as those in the black bloc, often smashed windows, threw rocks at police and overturned or burned cars. Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism were justified in the jargon of the movement, as components of "feral" or "spontaneous insurrection." This "riot porn" delighted the media, many of those who engaged in it and, not coincidentally, the ruling class which used it to justify further repression and demonize protest movements. An absence of political theory led activists to use popular culture, such as the film V for Vendetta, as reference points. The far more effective and crippling tools of grassroots educational campaigns, strikes and boycotts were often ignored or sidelined. Subject Headings |