Public Comment

Understanding Dissent

Thomas Lord
Wednesday December 10, 2014 - 10:22:00 PM

There is a popular set of expectations regarding protest that goes something like this:

1. Protesters must share a common political aim.

2. The political aim must be reducible to a few simple "talking points".

3. The purpose of the protest must be to build popular support for the political aim.

4. Achieving popular support requires that protests must respect property and not be significantly disruptive.

5. Protests must have leaders and organizers who plot the conduct of the protest.

Public discussion in the Berkeley Daily Planet and on Berkeleyside has largely concerned the ways in which recent protests in Berkeley fail to live up to these expectations. Many Berkeleyans have expressed anger, rhetorically stamping their feet over violations of these expectations of protest.

Others try to minimize the thwarted expectations by attributing transgressions to "splinter groups" and "small minorities" who supposedly "hijack" otherwise legitimate protests.

Such self-congratulatory expressions of indignation and anger are as powerless as they are detached from reality.

Let's examine protest without such preconceptions: 



1. Protest does not require a common aim other than the aim to protest.

A protest requires a certain kind of "group identity" among protesters. This is only tautological. If protesters do not have the common aim to protest then no protest occurs. If protesters are deliberately acting as a group then they have, minimally, some common aim to do so.

No further common aim is necessary.

Protesters need have in common nothing more than their individual dissatisfactions with a general state of affairs and a general idea how to stand up to this state of affairs.

Recent protests in Berkeley have been unified by dissatisfactions with the police -- with the state of policing in the U.S. Nothing more specific is needed for individuals to come together in protest.

Thus, for example, recent Berkeley protests have included slogans as diverse as "Black Lives Matter"; "The Police State Must Fall -- They Can't Arrest Us All"; "Justice for Mike Brown"; "End Police Brutality"; and "Shut It Down".



2. Protest does not require "talking points".

Protests consist of individuals, acting as a group. Each individual and the group are standing up to a state of affairs.

People have never needed articulable "talking points" before standing up to a state of affairs.

People show resistance all the time, in all aspects of their lives, without necessarily being able to give some reason, in a few words, for their effort to change things.

To insist that protesters must agree to talking points is nothing, more or less, than insistence upon the commodification of protest. Talking points are a unit of exchange in commodified news reporting, commodified electioneering, and commodified human relations.

If we recognize that people and their protests are not a commodity, then we should expect protests to be ambiguous, contradictory, and ultimately inarticulable.

The only certainty of protest is that a group of individuals has stood up collectively against a general state of affairs.



3. "Grass roots support" is not at stake.

A passive "approval" or "disapproval" by the supposed masses is normally of no consequence to protests. Popular sentiment is passive, inert. Protesters object to some state of affairs, but rarely (if ever) are they objecting to a deficit of popular sentiment.

People do not take to the streets to change approval ratings, except in the false narratives of people who are trying to "prove" a protest is bad.

Some have criticized recent protests in Berkeley for offending residents by damaging businesses and for offending commuters by interrupting their travel. Yet the protests appear to express individual dissatisfactions with the police. Attitudes of approval (or disapproval) from some residents and some commuters have little relevance to the state of policing locally or nationally. Little if anything of the state of policing is changed by popular opinion.

Perhaps it is a difficult pill to swallow for the self-appointed spokespeople of "the masses", but their feelings as they watch and read the news are relatively unimportant to anyone but themselves.



4. Disruption and threatened further disruption is the form protest takes.

If a group of people object to a state of affairs and they themselves have the direct ability to alter that state of affairs then the people do not protest; they simply take matters into their own hands and change the state of affairs.

Protest, in comparison, necessarily has the form of individuals standing up as a group to a state of affairs which is not within their direct control. Protest can only ever operate indirectly.

Moreover, if people object to an impersonal and agentless state of affairs, they do not protest. People do not protest the weather or the time of day.

Protest, instead, always has the form of standing up by trying to alter the behavior of certain others.

Moreover, protest seeks to overwhelm and overcome the will of others not to change their behavior.

Even the protests led by Dr. King did not operate by winning over the hearts and minds of white racists. They operated as a threat aimed squarely at the continued operation of society. Again and again the civil rights protesters demonstrated their ability and willingness to "shut it down".

It is always so:

If people do not need to use one form or another of force to alter the behavior of certain others, they have no need to protest; they can ask, or persuade, or rally, or petition, or otherwise forcelessly bring about the desired change.

Protest arises when no forceless change is possible; it always seeks to forcibly disrupt the state of affairs required by those whose behavior must change. Protest takes the form of a threat: disruption will recur until behavior is changed.

Protests in Berkeley are standing up for individual and diverse objections to the general state of policing. What, then, must these protests disrupt? What can the protests disrupt to influence a target as big as policing in the U.S.?

Empirically, policing functions to protect and facilitate an economic order. That includes the role of policing in order to protect the operation of governments that fund and establish policing.

It is that very broad state of affairs -- the dominant political and economic order -- that those who control policing demand.

The Berkeley protesters are not unified against any one officer or group of officers. Their dissent is not unified around a single targeted department. The individual dissatisfactions with the state of policing are wide-reaching and varied.

Accordingly, the protest has the form of a wide-reaching, varied attempt to disrupt the economic and political order as a whole.

Protesters have been using the slogan "Shut it Down" to name that broad target. And: "The whole damn system is guilty as hell." Protesters have acted simply and directly in keeping with such slogans. They have, with little effort from each individual, imposed millions of dollars in direct and indirect costs on the state. They have, for several nights running, prevented regional police from operating normally. On December 9, they prevented the City Council from functioning.


5. Organizers are superfluous.

A protest becomes organized as soon as the people who will protest share a common idea of where to participate, when, and how. Without these essentials, protesters cannot act as a group. With those shared ideas, nothing more is needed.

A half century ago and earlier it was the precise function of protest organizers -- of protest leadership -- to establish the idea of a common plan among protesters. It took hefty organizations with considerable participation in society to create, for example, the actions of Freedom Summer.

Yet if a protest can establish a common plan without organizers, then organizers are not needed at all.

Organizations and individuals have stood in front of the Berkeley crowds but none can take credit for organizing them. The methodology needed to "shut it down", today, is increasingly common knowledge. It is as much the shared idea of society as "The Wave" at a sporting event or the sea of lighters and smartphones held up at a rock concert.

Choices of time and place, today, are easy to infer from circumstance and for groups to agree upon in a leaderless fashion. Protesters just pass along the idea to one another.



Taking it All In

On the one hand we have romantic myths of protests organized by strong leaders, winning over the hearts and minds of popular support, championing the cause of political reform. No actual protests in history appear to embody this romantic mythology, though people sometimes talk as if it were otherwise.

On the other hand we have the simple reality that thousands of people have converged on Berkeley to stand up against an intolerable state of policing in the U.S. In response they have been acting in unison, simply, to disrupt the functioning of the dominant political and economic order as broadly as possible. These events have occurred, and succeeded in their disruption, without the need for strong leadership or organizing.

The growing capacity of the people to "Shut It Down" has been on display in the form of a demonstration.

The radical and militant disruption of society -- the simple bodily blocking of its continued "business as usual" -- has suddenly become not only a popular idea with many, but a practicable one.

There are no talking points for these protests and that only makes them stronger, not weaker, for they rely on no refutable theory.

To succeed, the protests do not need to win over the masses, only to disrupt business as usual and Shut It Down.

The disruption of the dominant economic and political order is perhaps the most direct attack on the general state of policing that can be imagined.

Much more than legislative reform or any other political shift, this form of protest directly interferes with the operation of the policing to which people are standing up.

However uncomfortable the protests may be for residents of the region, there is scarcely any point in criticizing the protests for not living up to a romantic, mythological ideal.

Perhaps instead it is time for more people to examine the current state of policing in the U.S. and ask what it is that has created this level of radical dissent: how we got here and what can be done to address the ills that motivate these protests.

Perhaps it is time to stop pretending our politicians can rein in the militarization of the police.

Perhaps it is time to recognize there is more at stake than deploying "body cameras" and raising rates of indictment of uniformed officers who shoot civilians.

As the police have become more akin to a standing army and as we have learned more and more about the mass surveillance of all people by our government, society has seemed barely to blink. Our obscene and racially skewed rate of incarceration has seemed more an abstract topic for idle discussion than a present political crisis.

Our ordinary political process is paralyzed by powerlessness in the face of the police state.

A militant minority has begun taking to the streets in opposition to this state of affairs.