January saw the largest protests to ever greet an incoming president – and quite possibly the largest nationwide day of protests in US history. But in the days that followed, Trump moved forward with nearly every aspect of his reactionary agenda that millions of people had come out to oppose.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether he’ll get away with all, most or some of it, but it’s understandable if people ask: do protests even matter?
On the eve of the inauguration, former Occupy activist Micah White wrote: “Today’s social activists have succumbed to one of the most enduring myths of contemporary American protest: the comforting belief that if you can get enough people into the streets from diverse demographics, largely unified behind a clear message, then our representatives will be forced to heed the crowd’s wishes”.
White went on to list a number of mass demonstrations over the past century that he claimed had failed to achieve their stated aims, culminating with the largest day of global protest in human history on 15 February 2003 – then-president George W. Bush dismissed the 10 million people who marched around the world as a “focus group” as he proceeded to launch the invasion of Iraq.
In a similar vein, Zeynep Tufekci wrote in the New York Times that the size of a protest is not a good indicator of its impact on policy, especially in the age of social media, where it takes less organisation and effort to bring large numbers of people into the streets.
Tufekci contrasts the Iraq war protests and Occupy with the right wing Tea Party of the Obama years, which “then got to work on a ferociously focused agenda: identifying and supporting primary candidates to challenge Republicans who did not agree with their demands, keeping close tabs on legislation and pressuring politicians who deviated from a Tea Party platform”.
The role of protests
Leaving aside the fact that the Tea Party “movement” was heavily bankrolled and organised by establishment organisations and the billionaire Koch Brothers, it’s worth asking whether the main point of mass protests should be to win elections.
Many in the antiwar movement did draw this conclusion – but as a result, they focused efforts on the failed campaign of pro-war Democrat John Kerry. By the time Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the antiwar movement had effectively collapsed, leaving little organised resistance as Obama – the supposed antiwar candidate – continued to carry out US imperial policy in the Middle East and beyond.
While we agree that a single demonstration is unlikely to achieve much in terms of immediate results, socialists take a different view of the role played by mass protests. As the late writer and artist John Berger described in his masterful 1968 essay, “The nature of mass demonstrations”:
“Theoretically demonstrations are meant to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling: theoretically they are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the state. But this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist. If the state authority is open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary; if it is not, it is unlikely to be influenced by an empty show of force containing no real threat.”
In this sense, Berger wrote, the numbers present at a protest are significant not because of their impact on the state, but on those who participate:
“The importance of the numbers involved is to be found in the direct experience of those taking part in or sympathetically witnessing the demonstration. For them the numbers cease to be numbers and become the evidence of their senses, the conclusions of their imagination. The larger the demonstration, the more powerful and immediate (visible, audible, tangible) a metaphor it becomes for their total collective strength.”
The power of mass protest
For socialists, this impact on consciousness is the most important achievement of mass protests. Even if – and maybe especially when – they are not immediately successful, they reveal how profoundly undemocratic our society is, and how little the powers that be care about what the mass of society believes.
But at the same time, they point to, and build confidence in, a different sort of potential power. In his book Prelude to Revolution about the French May in 1968 – which began with student demonstrations and ultimately spread into a mass strike wave – Daniel Singer wrote:
“Revision of values is an infectious phenomenon … Do you remember those rare sleepless nights when, lying uncomfortably awake, you vividly recollect the hopes or illusions of youth and set this promise against the fulfilment, when with painful lucidity you ponder the meaning of your life?
“Something of that kind all at once happens to thousands, and it happens during the day. Only this collective blues is coupled with collective hope, is really inspired by it. The prospect of change releases the inner censorship. It prompts one to confess that the present is intolerable, to admit it to oneself but also to others. In factories, in offices, groups gather to discuss what can be done. Hackneyed words like ‘man’s hope’ or ‘man’s dignity’ acquire a fresh meaning.”
What’s more, the example of May ‘68 in France should remind us that mass demonstrations can be inspirational and organisational milestones on the road to more militant and radical action. The mass strikes of industrial workers in France really shook the system to its core, because of the economic power workers have at the point of production. But the student protests and actions opened the way for the working class to take centre stage.
In a more modest example today, one of the most dramatic moments of the “Uprising of the Airports” after Trump issued his ban on Muslims entering the US was the New York Taxi Workers Alliance holding a one-hour boycott of JFK International Airport. This group of mostly immigrant workers may not have had the confidence to take action without the massive outpouring of people a week earlier that showed how despised Trump’s policies are.
Transformation
In our day-to-day lives, it is difficult for most ordinary people to imagine that we can have a real impact on the way our society is organised.
Mass demonstrations can be an aid in that imagining. Katrina Wallace, a friend who attended the Women’s March in Seattle – her first-ever protest – caught on to this right away. “I never saw the point in it before”, she said. “Standing around waving signs, what could that possibly do? But now I get it. It’s not about what it does to them, it’s what it does to us, how it changes the people who are there.”
Of course, this transformation could be lasting or fleeting, depending on what happens next. Do we channel this energy into electing marginally better candidates, as Democratic Party politicians and many liberal groups suggest, or do we use the opportunity to build the self-organisation of ordinary people – to move from demonstrating our collective power to using it?
In her classic pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg talked about this process in the context of the 1905 revolution in Russia, which became known as the “great dress rehearsal” for 1917:
“The most precious, lasting thing in the rapid ebb and flow of the wave is its mental sediment: the intellectual, cultural growth of the working class, which proceeds by fits and starts, and which offers an inviolable guarantee of their further irresistible progress in the economic as in the political struggle … [T]he apparently ‘chaotic’ strikes and the ‘disorganised’ revolutionary action after the January general strike are becoming the starting point of a feverish work of organisation.”
This organising is an essential process for developing our collective forces and beginning to win real change – it both contributes to mass demonstrations actually becoming “mass”, and it benefits from the spirit of the protests.
Consider the example that protest sceptic Zeynep Tufekci acknowledged did seem to achieve something: the 1963 March on Washington. Why did this march, though smaller than some other examples that could be pointed to in history, seem to lead quickly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act?
Because it was an organic part of a movement that was years in the making. The success of the civil rights struggles before it set the stage for the March on Washington to have the impact that it did. As journalist Anand Gopal put it at the “Anti-Inauguration” forum in Washington, DC in January:
“A single protest, as important as they are, has never changed anything. But the social movements of linked protests – that is the lifeblood of resistance. That is the only thing, ultimately, that’s ever changed everything. And by that, I mean civil disobedience, boycotts, sit-ins, prison solidarity networks, abortion funds, sanctuary spaces, all of it. Resistance isn’t a moment. Resistance isn’t a state of mind, but a tapestry which is collective and enduring. It’s so enduring that the status quo cannot sleep at night.”
Political organisation
One of the goals for socialists is to use the opportunities presented by mass protests to continue the work of building lasting networks of resistance.
But we have another goal in mind as well, which is to pose the question: what are we organising for? In today’s context, how do we organise to not only oppose the worst of Trump’s attacks, but make progress in the struggle to win lasting change?
This, Luxemburg concluded, may be the most important role for socialists: “[I]t becomes obvious that the task of social democracy does not consist in the technical preparation and direction of mass strikes, but, first and foremost, in the political leadership of the whole movement”.
Political leadership matters, because as we’ve seen throughout history, injustice and oppression sooner or later provoke resistance, but there is no guarantee that resistance in itself will lead to victory. This comes straight from a foundational statement on political organisation from the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels:
“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”
This remains the task before us today. If you agree, check out a socialist meeting and help us get to work. The future of the movement depends on it.

Leela Yellesetty

Why protesting matters

I want to tell you a story about a woman named Inayyah.
I feel old, but in a good way. Seeing these young protesters in the streets brings on a rush of nostalgia but also an awareness that I no longer possess their intensity. I feel so happy and proud that they are here, the promise they represent. But also that, at whatever intensity, I’m still here too, with my oldness and stories, and that’s important. Inayyah is part of the reason why.
Way back in ancient history, more precisely 2005, it was a long, cold, dark winter in Connecticut. George W. Bush was still president, and though his popularity was rapidly waning in the wake of the racist disregard for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the disaster of the Iraq War, there seemed to be no end in sight.
In many ways, it felt like a winter that would never end. The government of California was set to execute Stan Tookie Williams, a former gang member turned renowned peacemaker, for a crime he did not commit. An international campaign was afoot to stop the execution.
I met Inayyah in the poor, mostly Latino neighbourhood of Fair Haven in New Haven, Connecticut. Our small chapter of the International Socialist Organization had been circulating petitions about Williams. I approached a woman in an abaya and was surprised when I realised she was a white lady with a Southern accent.
Once I explained what was going on, she immediately signed the petition and we started talking. We kept talking so long that she invited me back to her place a few blocks away for tea, where I met her sweet young daughter Sabbah.
Inayyah converted to Islam when she married and while she and her husband were no longer together, she had found a home in the faith. She soon realised that in the post-9/11 era that meant being subject to constant harassment and worse. Yet she refused to cower in the face of it.
On the day the Iraq war started, she wore all black to work in mourning and was fired for it. Since then, she had been struggling to support her daughter while also dealing with health problems.
Despite her personal struggles, Inayyah was deeply moved when she heard Tookie’s story and eager to do anything and everything to stop his execution. She had me come by her house weekly with newspapers and supplies and went around the neighbourhood putting up flyers and gathering petition signatures.
She spoke passionately at a candlelight vigil we held one bitterly cold and windy night. She called and wrote the governor’s office so many times she actually got a personal response from his secretary.
The last time I spoke to Inayyah was right after he was executed. She made me tea with ginger (good for the stomach, she said) and we talked. She had stayed up all night, until the bitter end, when he suffered for an excruciating 36 minutes before succumbing – leading to a lawsuit that effectively halted the use of lethal injections in California.
She told me she had cried all night, but by that morning she was determined. She was full of energy and peppered me with ideas and questions about what we were doing next, how to build the movement against the death penalty, against war and racism and poverty. I agreed to come back the next week with more reports and materials.
The next week her roommate answered the door. She at first seemed suspicious of me, but when I explained how I knew Inayyah, she softened and sadly informed me that she had passed away in her sleep the night before. Then she invited me in for tea and we talked.
I asked her if our group could take up a collection for the family, but she suggested instead we donate to a cause Inayyah was passionate about. At our next meeting, I collected a few hundred dollars donation that I sent in to the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, which ran a letter I wrote about her in The New Abolitionist. The remainder went toward some candies for Sabbah.
It was a devastating winter for me in many ways. In the grand scheme of things though, it was a small episode, in my life much less the rest of the world. In some ways it is a bleak story, of failure and loss. Just a few among many lives lost too soon, that we were not able to prevent. But it is also one thread of a forgotten history that is still winding its way into the present.
After that dark winter came the spring, when millions of immigrants took to the streets in one of the largest mass strikes in US history. The energy from the Tookie campaign continued to fuel the movement to end the death penalty, and following yet another tragic wrongful execution, of Troy Davis, a march in New York City joined forces with the infant Occupy Wall Street and helped swell the ranks, ushering it into the headlines and onto the stage of history.
Inayyah is one of so many who played at least some small part in this trajectory. One of literally millions, if not tens of millions, of people who have participated in some way, however small, in one of the many struggles which have emerged over the past decade, not to speak of before. But her part is larger than that, at least for me. Knowing her however briefly left a permanent mark on me, one which I will always be grateful for.
Especially right now, when we enter what looks to be another long, dark, cold winter, I try to remember that other cold winter and how Inayyah helped transform my despair into determination.
I know she would be grinning from ear to ear right now if she were able to witness the courage and compassion of the young people out of the streets today. She is part of their story too. Inayyah, presente!

I’m thinking about Inayyah

We live in a world of unprecedented inequality. Currently, the world’s richest 62 people possess as much wealth as the bottom one-half of humanity. By any conceivable measure – income, wealth, health care, education, housing – the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us is astronomical and growing.
Although inequality has been on the rise for the past four decades, it is only since the Great Recession of 2008-09, and especially in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign, that this reality has received more mainstream attention.
This is a welcome development. Yet much of the mainstream coverage either obscures or omits a discussion of how all this came about – and what, if anything, can be done about it.
The great inequality, the latest book by radical author and economics professor Michael Yates, offers an accessible and timely response to these questions. In a series of essays, he takes stock of the human and environmental costs of growing inequality, and zeroes in on its root causes. In the process, he offers a valuable primer to both newcomers and experienced activists for how to make the case for a better world.
Inequality has roots in unequal power.
As bad as we think inequality is, the reality is even worse. Citing a recent study, Yates points out that most Americans severely underestimate the actual levels of inequality – yet they still support a more equal distribution of resources.
Even the idea of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent – which in a later chapter Yates defends as a simplified but incredibly powerful political slogan – doesn’t quite capture the severity of the concentration of wealth. Actually, the top one-thousandth of the 1 percent reigns supreme. By way of example, Yates cites the $4 billion in earnings by a hedge-fund manager in 2009 alone:
“This income, spent at a rate of $10,000 a day and exclusive of any interest, would last him and his heirs 1,096 years! If we were to suppose that Mr Tepper worked 2,000 hours in 2009 (50 weeks at 40 hours per week), he took in $2 million per hour and $30,000 a minute. This means he would have paid his social security tax for the entire year in about four minutes of his first workday.”
Unlike most of us living paycheque to paycheque, the wealthy do not spend most of their income – they accumulate it as wealth. This wealth then generates more income, exacerbating inequality and passing it on through generations.
The key to this accumulation, then, lies not – as mainstream economists would have it – in hard work and frugality, but in the fact of ownership. This is Yates’ central argument: “Inequality has its roots in unequal power”.
Under capitalism, those who own the means of production – land, factories, offices, etc. – are able to compel those who don’t own those things to work for them, and generate even more wealth than they are paid back in wages, thereby further increasing the power of the owners. This power relation has profound implications, he writes:
“First, power allows a person unilaterally to change another’s constraints, and it can, when exercised long enough, change the habits of subordinates so that the latter act automatically in the interest of their masters. Second, those with personal power will inevitably also have social power, and this will allow them to make the rules that all must obey, and these will benefit the powerful. These rules, in turn, may come to seem normal, which lowers any costs the powerful would have to incur to maintain their power. Third, wherever there is power, there can be no democracy, since if there were, such power would be abolished by majority rule.”
Yates is not making arguments that will be unfamiliar to readers of SocialistWorker.org. He is defending a basic Marxist analysis of class society – indeed, he continually returns to Marx’s depiction of capitalism as creating poles of wealth and misery. As Yates makes clear, this image grows more starkly accurate by the day.
In a chapter titled “All the economics you need to know in one lesson”, Yates makes short work of what passes as economic “science” in most university courses – “it is no more science than is astrology”.
Contrary to the lessons of Econ 101, the economy is not a collection of individual actors who are free to trade as equals – because existing power dynamics fundamentally constrain our choices. Yet these ideas persist, writes Yates:
“Neoclassical economics serves as a gigantic propaganda device aimed at covering up the power of those with money and convincing the rest of us that the bad things happening to us are either inevitable or our own fault … It’s my fault, or the government’s fault, or it is human nature. The fault never lies with the system itself. This provides the best possible cover for the grotesque wealth of the few, the rotten jobs of the many, and the ruination of the environment.”
Yates also critiques liberal economists like Paul Krugman or Thomas Piketty, who, while attacking inequality, nonetheless share many of the assumptions of classical economists. They believe that inequality can be lessened while keeping capitalism intact.
Even some socialists have suggested that markets could persist after the fall of capitalism. Yates contends, to the contrary, “Markets inevitably force us to act as individuals, responding to monetary incentives. We cannot liberate ourselves while maintaining a wage system and the selling of goods and services for profit”.
This is not an argument against fighting for much-needed reforms that improve the lives of working people in the here and now, but to understand that such reforms will be at best hard-won and temporary, unless we attack the root causes of inequality. “Whenever and wherever we can”, Yates writes, “it is incumbent upon us to name the system, to say forthrightly that capitalism is the cause of most of our misery”.
Besides laying out this central case, the book provides a wealth of illustrations of the tremendous human and environmental cost of inequality. Statistics about income distribution only tell part of the picture, Yates says, in describing some of what he and his partner have seen for the past 14 years that they have travelled the country and surveyed the damage wrought by capitalism. Yates writes:
“I shudder to think what my great grandchildren will see if they make the voyage of national discovery we have. One gigantic urban-suburban-exurban mess of traffic jams, strip malls and concrete, marked by a bunker mentality and reality of the few versus the many (gated and guarded enclaves for the rich, and hideous mass housing and prisons for the rest of us), all of us fearful of ever-more devastating “natural” disasters. Don’t laugh, these things are already here; we’re not that far away from apocalypse.”
Particularly compelling are Yates’ depictions of work under capitalism. “It has been said that the only thing worse than having a job is not having one”, he writes. “This may be true, but what does it say about work?”
In a chapter titled “Work is hell”, Yates dispenses with the mythology that our economy requires an increasingly skilled workforce or that technology will spell the end of work as we know it.
“In the world today”, he writes, “the overwhelming majority of workers do hard and dangerous labour, risking the health of their bodies and minds every minute they toil”. Wages and conditions are driven down to a bare minimum, thanks in part to the existence of a vast reserve army of labour, and to the bosses’ unceasing efforts to increase exploitation and managerial control.
Work under capitalism grinds people down, not only physically, but psychologically and spiritually, alienating us from the very activities that make us human. The injuries of class can lead to a sense of rage and despair, directed both inwardly, in the form of addiction, depression, suicide and more – and outwardly, through hatred and violence towards loved ones, our community and beyond.
Yates goes through a series of anecdotes about workers in different occupations, industries, countries and time periods to illustrate that, despite the tremendous variety, a common process is at work. He concludes with a passage from Studs Terkel’s classic book Working:
“For the many, there is a hardly concealed discontent. The blue collar blues is no more bitterly sung than the white collar moan. ‘I’m a machine’, says the spot welder. ‘I’m caged’, says the bank teller, and echoes the hotel clerk. ‘I’m a mule’, says the steelworker. ‘A monkey can do what I do’, says the receptionist. ‘I’m less than a farm implement’, says the migrant worker. ‘I’m an object’, says the high-fashion model. Blue collar and white collar call upon the identical phrase: ‘I’m a robot’. ‘There is nothing to talk about’, the young accountant despairingly enunciates.”
For Yates, then, the key to tackling the great inequality is to build solidarity among the vast majority of workers who have an interest in dismantling this rotten system. This does not mean that workers are a monolithic group, or that unity is inevitable. To the contrary, “inequalities within the large and diverse working class can have significant impacts, not just in life circumstances, but in consciousness”, Yates writes.
In the chapter titled “Slavery by another name”, Yates addresses the central issue of racial inequality in American life. Echoing his arguments about class inequality, he refutes the idea that racism is primarily a product of individual attitudes or actions. It is built into our social structure and perpetuated by laws and institutions.
Yates points to the ways in which the struggle against these structures has historically raised questions about society as a whole, including class inequality. He raises, for example, the idea of a Freedom Budget proposed by civil rights leaders in the 1960s and recently revived by Yates with co-author Paul Le Blanc.
At the same time, Yates cautions against the approach of some socialists to focus solely on economic demands as a means of tackling inequality:
“This ‘unify the working class’ strategy doesn’t seem quite right to me. If it is true that the social choices made since the beginning of the United States have created racist social structures and these have yet to be eradicated, it makes sense to have as part of radical program a direct confrontation with these structures … The working class will never be unified unless we once and for all confront the institutional racism that surrounds us. Unity requires restitution for past and present damages. Nothing less will do.”
Yates makes a similar point in a chapter on global inequality, addressing the ongoing impact of centuries of colonialism and imperialism. While workers across the world share the experience of exploitation and hold a common interest in overthrowing capitalism, workers in imperialist countries have a special responsibility to reject nationalism and act in solidarity with the workers of oppressed nations.
So how practically can such a global movement against inequality take shape? On this question, Yates doesn’t offer any detailed plans or policy recommendations, writing, “It is our job to push the struggle forward and not just make suggestions”.
In a chapter reflecting on his time working with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union in the 1970s, Yates writes that he witnessed the rise of an inspiring and powerful workers’ movement – and then its downfall, as union leaders came to assert top-down control of the union for their own interests:
“Any movement of the poor is a fragile thing; it will be beset by demons from without and within. The external enemies are well-known, constant irritants and often overwhelmingly powerful. Those inside the union are more subtle yet nearly as destructive: leaders have big and conflicting egos; sexual and racial tensions are hard to overcome; people have honest differences about goals and strategies; it is enormously difficult to create the selfless bureaucracy which alone will insure the movement’s continuity.”
There are no guarantees in this process, but Yates does suggest some general ideas on how radicals can help shape and push forward the movement: build coalitions between various groups which agree on general sets of principles and demands; link local and single-issue struggles to larger systemic ones; pledge ourselves to come out in solidarity with one another; and emphasise democratic and critical education as a fundamental component of organising.
This sort of education is badly needed as we face the great and growing inequality of today. Recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s warning that we are increasingly facing a choice between socialism or barbarism, Yates issues a challenge:
“To those who say that such ideas are utopian and incapable of realisation, I say this: Look around you. Isn’t it truly utopian to believe that we can continue along the path we have been travelling for so long now and with such shameful and deadly results? … Isn’t it time for us to become protagonists, go on the offensive, attack our enemies head-head on, study and learn from both successes and failures, always look for how things are connected, and see what happens? We don’t have much to lose.”

Why protesting matters

I’m thinking about Inayyah

The canyon between the rich and the rest of us

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