Not that this goes in any way of effectively dealing with this question, but I thought this short article from the August 28 edition of the New Scientist has some relevence:
When do you want it? now!
Chaining yourself to bulldozers and throwing paint over company executives is more likely to influence environmental policy than schmoozing on Capitol Hill. So says an analysis of the impact of the green movement in the US between 1960 and 1994.
The study compares the number of bills passed by Congress with tactics employed by green groups in the same year. Jon Agnone, a sociologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, found that sit-ins, rallies and boycotts were highly effective at forcing new environmental laws. Each protest raised the number of pro-environment bills passed by 2.2 per cent. Neither effort spent schmoozing politicians nor the state of public opinion made any difference.
But conventional politics does play a part. Environmental legislation is 75 per cent more likely to pass when Democrats control both houses of Congress. And it gets a 200 per cent boost in congressional election years, presumably because politicians see it as a vote winner.
Agnone, who presented his results on 17 August at the American Sociological Association's meeting in San Francisco, says protest groups lose their edge when they become part of the system. Their most effective weapon is disruption. "If you make a big enough disturbance then people have to recognise what you are doing."
This is no surprise, says John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA. "We know that unless a politician feels real pressure, or a chief executive senses a threat to his market, everything else is just talk."
From issue 2462 of New Scientist magazine, 28 August 2004, page 4
That said, a part of me feels like we need to look at protest movements of a hundered years ago or so and see what worked for them and what didn't. I feel that a part of the effectiveness of the civil rights movement is the fact that television was a reletively new media form and a novelty. There weren't 5,000 stations vying for people's attention, and it's safe to say that most people weren't accustomed to seeing that sort of imagery. Now it's commonplace (especially after the Seattle WTO demonstration) and people are desensitized.
When I was involved in student activism (late nineties till early '00s) it seemed like the success of some actions was based on the amount of media attention given to it. Of course, this makes sense to a certain extent, since you want to get your message out to a broader audience, but barring a few good yet insular media venues (Free Speech Radio, Pacifica Radio, Indy Media, Democracy Now!), the news media doesn't give a toss unless they feel that something will sell copies and ad space. Not to even mention the intellectual laziness of a news media that sees itself as stenogrophers of the powerful. As Chomsky said, there's no need for censorship when journalists are trained not to question the dominant authority.
More recent movements that I can think of that were effective (right now I'm thinking of the anti-apartheid movement of the 80's) were so because in addition to masive street protests there were more local programs of forcing universities to divest from companies that were involved with the South African government (ie, Shell and the diamond trade). This was obviously a more local tactic in the overall strategy of the movement, and I think that local focuses are generally more effective. It makes for a slightly smaller Goliath.
As such, I don't think that protest by itself is ever really effective. Protests create these large flashy exhibits which help draw attention to things, but they shouldn't be seen as the main strategy, just one tactic to it all. When we do have marches and protest, they also need to be more that feel-good measures. Here where I live (Madison, WI) I feel that's all they are. There's a template to which everything ascribes to, and they seldom seek to actually be confrontational. There's no storming of offices, there's no public humiliations, or anything of the sort.
The system as it stands is entirely resistant to populist attempts at social change. (Has it really ever been otherwise?) It seems to me that if we are to be effective we need to be aware of the antibody responses (to use a metaphore) of the political and economic body and be able to adapt to and overcome them. It's been done before, but we've overexposed the target to our tactics and it has developed an automatic response. I really feel that by looking back and incorporating forgotten tactics in modern ways we could overcome atrophied defenses (to entirely overuse a metaphore.)
One other note: modern day protest movements are different beasts than the civil rights movement, women's suffrage, or the labor movements. Those all had clear and definite impacts on the people who engaged in them. They were marching for their own lives. It was intimate and personal, and as such had a broader populist aspect. This isn't to say that such an intimacy is impossible to demonstrate in the issues of the day, but so far I for one haven't seen a broad or solid attempt to do so.
I hope this is all fairly coherent, as I wrote it in a staggered fashion. First real post of a long-time lurker. |
