The End of Protest

Is protest broken? Micah White, co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, thinks so. Disruptive tactics have failed to halt the rise of Donald Trump. Movements ranging from Black Lives Matter to environmentalism are leaving activists frustrated. Meanwhile, recent years have witnessed the largest protests in human history. Yet these mass mobilizations no longer change society. Now activism is at a crossroads: innovation or irrelevance.

In The End of Protest Micah White heralds the future of activism. Drawing on his unique experience with Occupy Wall Street, a contagious protest that spread to eighty-two countries, White articulates a unified theory of revolution and eight principles of tactical innovation that are destined to catalyze the next generation of social movements.

Despite global challenges—catastrophic climate change, economic collapse and the decline of democracy—White finds reason for optimism: the end of protest inaugurates a new era of social change. On the horizon are increasingly sophisticated movements that will emerge in a bid to challenge elections, govern cities and reorient the way we live. Activists will reshape society by forming a global political party capable of winning elections worldwide.

In this provocative playbook, White offers three bold, revolutionary scenarios for harnessing the creativity of people from across the political spectrum. He also shows how social movements are created and how they spread, how materialism limits contemporary activism, and why we must re-conceive protest in timelines of centuries, not days.

Rigorous, original and compelling, The End of Protest is an exhilarating vision of an all-encompassing revolution of revolution.

Quotes and thoughts while reading:

As all books seem to do from time to time, this one came at a very poignant one for me. Donal Trump was just elected, and this book was finally calling out my name from the bookshelf. Let's jump in, there's a lot to write about.

"Whether you support of suppress protestors, history shows that dissent is necessay for social growth and collective renewal. Revolution grants us the social freedom essential for humans to break old habits an reach their true collective potential." (p 6) I like this idea, in that it fits with the general notion I have that "Yes" men really aren't going to make the world a better place. And that going with the flow isn't always the most beneficial thing for society.

"The habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting substitutes for effective success." - Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (p 34) This is one of my biggest fears, that people will feel like they've done something when they've marched, but nothing will really have changed.

    "The deeper lesson of the defest of Occupy is that Western governments are not required to comply with their peple's demands, even if those demands are articulated by a historic social movement backed by millions of people in the streets. We have been acting as if the people have sovereignty over their governments when they act collectively. Now it is clear that the people's soverignty has been lost. We were wrong to believe that bigger and bigger street protests could force prime ministers and presidents to heed the wishes of the people. Activism, it turns out, has been chasing an illusion.
    The repertoire of protest tactices that contemporary activists rely on - like marching and similar kinds of disruptive public behaviours - were designed to incluence twentieth-century democracies. They were designed to influence elected representatives who had t listen to their consituents... It seems that popular protest functions only when it is aligned with the pre-existing Western geopolitical agenda." (p 36) All of this leaves me questioning - so what does this mean for our particular time period?

"So, what does this new paradigm of activism look like? It is defined by a shift away from materialistic theories of social change toward a spiritual understanding of revolution. It is a turn from voluntarism and structuralism toward subjectivism and theurgism. Activists of the future will target the mental environment to spark collective epipanies that achieve real-world victories... The contagious collective epiphany is the one force capable of conjuring a political miracle." (p 43)

"The Equal Access Act decrees that is a public school allows Christian students to form an after-school club, they must allow a Muslim or Hindu, or, my argument went, an atheist club... When the principal and vice-principal thwarted those efforts, I sent a letter describing the situation to the Americans United for Seperation of Church and State, the Washington, CD, legal non-profit that had been instrumental in having the Equal Access Act passed in 1984. Americans United offered free legal aid and sent a letter to Grand Blanc High School threatenining a lawsuit if my atheist club was not allowed to form. The school capitulated without contest..." (p 46) This is a great story of using your resources, and fighting for small things, that in the long run can have a big impact.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK (p 55)

"In the absence of kairos, a Greek word for a destined opportune moment, we rush to action, relying on well-worn activist tactics in herited from previous social protests. But protesting in expected ways makes us an easy target for arrest, and is a waste of our most precious recouse: the creativity of the human spirit." (p 65)

"Most of the ontemporary activism is voluntarist. The essence of voluntarism is the belief that the actions of individuals can change the world... voluntarism is defined by 'the belief that oe can move mountains, ignoring objective laws and obstacles.' Voluntarists have total faith in the power of action. Voluntarist activists believe that collective action can overcome all odds." (p 75)

Be sure to check out The Strategy of Social Protest by William Gamson. (p 77)

"One of the laws governing revolution, according to researchers at the New England Comples Systems Institute, is that the price of food determines social unrest more than oany other single factor. Based on their analysis of the Food Price Index, a monthly average of food commodity prices on international markets that is compiled by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO), these researchered discovered that riots tend to occure "above a thershold of the FAO price index of 210." For comparison, during the Arab Spring and Occupy uprisiings of 2011, the Food Price Index was 229.9." (p 82)

"The Ghost Dance was explicitly understood by its participants as a ritual with political consequences. The dance was effective enough to warrant being violently suppressed by the U.S. government. A rational voluntarist would be hard pressed to explain why dancing in a circle far away from cities would be a threat to a government. A structuralist activist, however, understands that a protest does not need to target authorities to be effective, it need only be recognized as protest at the right time." (p 90)

"Subjectivism is the intersection of spirituality with the primacy of the internal world. Believers in this theory of revolution maintain that active contemplation and meditation(from an outside perspective this may look like passivity) is superios to physical action because out minds determine reality. Strict subjectivist argue, therefore, that the most effective way to change the world is to change our perspective." (p 91)

"Theurgism, the position that revolution is an objective supernatural phenomenon... Western activists are not willing to make this leap of faith and therefore reject theurgism entirely. Materialism has secularized protest theory and given us structuralism. But what is the forces controlling political revolutions are other wordly, supernatural or spiritual? If you belive it is possible that god, or spirit, intercedes in history, you may be a theurgist." (p 93-96) I like this one the most - simply for it's contextual use of solar flares.Solar flares are entirely out of the control - yet they have real world effects.

One story I was not aware of was the story of Paul - the apostle:
    "St. Paul the Apostle, originally Saul of Tarsus, is an example of a theurgist activist. Saul was a brilliant Jeish Pharisee who aided in the persecution of the early Christians. Around AD33, Saul had an epiphany on the road to Damascuc. He has a vision of Jesus and was struck blind for days. He was healed by a Christian who claimed Jesus had instructed him in a dream to find Saul. Soon afterwards Saul experienced a spiritual awakening, converted to Christianity and became Paul. Protected by his Roman citizenship, a privilege gained at birth and not possessed by other early Christian leaders, Paul became the social movement's greatest theologian, establishing numberous churhces and spreading the new religion to non-Jews for the first time. In his letters to the early Christian community, Paul explains the principles of this activism: "For though we live in the world we are not carrying on a wordly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not wordly but have divine power to destroy strongholds"(p 97)

Insert image of page 103 here

    "Inayat Khan, one of the first teachers of Sufism in the West, related an anecdote that captures the true spirit of leaderlessness. A mendicant dervish was standing in the road when the kind, preceded by his entourage, approached. Everyone else stepped aside, but the dervish remained standing in the street. First the pages, running before the procession, pushed the dervish and told him the king was approaching and that he must step aside. The dervish simply smiled and replied, 'That is why.' Next came the bodyguards, who jostled the dervish and demanded that he get out of the way. The dervish smiled and replied, 'That is why,' and remained standing in the street. Next came the courtiers who scowled at the dervish, pretended to ignore his presence and stood away from him. Still the dervish remained. Finally, the king arrived and, immediately noticing the dervish, greeted him first. The dervish smiled and said, 'That is why he is what he is.'
     Explaining the moral of his fable, Khan writes that the interaction between the kind and the dervish represents true democracy. The king treats the dervish as his equal while still recognizing their differences. True democracy, for Khan, is when a person thinks, as the king does, that 'I am equal of any person; there is no person lower than I.' Notice that he doesn't say there is no one above him. Authentic horizontalism is different than vulgar horizontalism, which refuses to acknowledge that anyone is higher than oneself and whish pulls others down instead of ascending upwards."(p 130)

I think it's interesting to acknowledge how prescient Micah is - there's multiple times where he's right about what's coming next. Here's this in relation to Standing Rock:
"The failure of the Ghost Dance may have makred the end of an era of armed resistance in the psat but there are signs that indigenous groups may take up arms in the future to defend their territoris."(p 149)

"Activists place too much emphasis on celebrating the social protests that spread quickly. Speed is exciting, but the most enduring victories are those that take generations to unfold..."(p 155) The example that followed is how Christianity was able to take hold, finally, in the 4th century. But how the Christians were persecuted for nearly 400 years - and through two events, both Theurgistic, they were able to become the dominant force in Europe to this day. That's quite the turn around.

"As activist of the future, the ground of our struggle is humanity's mental environment - our collective unconcious, the shared pool of myths, dreams and desires that shape how the world manifests. The future of protest begins with the realization that the external world is a reflection of our interior world. What we see is a mirror of ourselves. Our communal reality is constructed through our shared culture. And every time we experience a commercial interjection, a fatal lie lodges in our world view. The true danger of pervasive advertising is the damage it does to out "mental ecology", the inexplicable interior world that is uniquely human. A clean mental environment is an indispensible ingreditant to a thriving civilization. Perhaps we cannot conceive a sane future because our collective imagination has been usurped by advertisers, money worshippers and commercialism. We are in a double bind. Kicking consumerism out of our heads and finding solutions to the global problems humanity faces become the same struggle. The strategic imperative of our revolutionary stuggle - our collective uprising to unshackle our spirits and revive our imagination - comes into view." (p 169) Whew.

"I am haunted by an eco-fascist nightmare. I see the return of human slavery on a global scale after industry scientists demonstrate that human labour is the most sustainable source of energy. Building on energy efficiency calculations that were carried out when the memory of American slavery was still fresh, scientists could prove conclusively that an energy slave fed a minimal diet is 'greener' than any known form of non-renewable energy resource... The virtues of 100 percent employment overnight would be touted. We will see people chained to bicycle-powered charging stations for the elite's electric vehicles. The honeybees will die off and the crops will need pollinating..."(p 179) Literally - this is all Black Mirror material. Another example of Micah's prescience?

    "Philosophers have long considered the spiritual and political consequences of real-time communication. In Being and Time (1927), the German philosopher Martin Heidegger was concerned with the effects of radio on human existence. 'All kinds of increasing speed which we are more or less compelled to go along with today push for overcoming distance,' he writed. He warned of the unforseeable consequences that technology was having by 'expanding and destroying the everyday surrounding world.' And thirty years after Being and Time, Heidegger bemoaned the uprootedness of his contemporaries, for whome the media world had become more familiar than their own place on earth:
    'Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with which modern techniques of communication simulate, assail,and drive man - all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his naive world.'
    Heideggar lamented the collapse of distance, but from thr perspective of activism, this uprootedness makes the revolutionary waves all the stronger." (p 185)

"The Grange's mottos is 'In Essentials, Unity; In Non-Essentials, Liberty; In All Things, Charity.' I would like, however, suggest one small change. May the motto of our World Paty be instead 'In Essentials, Unity; In Non-Essentials, Liberty; In All Things, Mutual Aid.'"(p 203)

    "Perhaps protest bots will be used only at te most basic processes of recruitment, or maybe we will see the day when urban revolutionaries equipped with smart glasses and smart watches are given real-time strategic instruction on how to avoid the police and most effectively swarm the streets bu a computer algorithm that monitors their (and the adversary's) collective locations.
    With the increasing automizations of warfare, and recent concern over the emergence of killer robots that select their own targets, it is increasingly plausible that some aspects of the political revolution will be automated. Protest is, after all, war by other means."(p 206)