Claim: The protests are purely performative; and the protests have no clear objectives or demands;
These two arguments arise every time a mass protest takes place, and they’re usually a result of the belief that since such demonstrations don’t topple the regime or economic order, or they don’t fully prevent the actions that the protesters oppose (as if protesting—or anything else—could do this).
From my perspective, there seems to be commonly held misconception among far too many leftists that the “revolution”® must be won instantaneously, for all time, in one fell swoop or the effort is a wasted, utter failure.
Historically, of course, that has never happened, even in examples that these harden left critics cite as successes. I have lost count of the number of times a grizzled veteran of revolutionary left organizing has lamented about how, “there’s no anti-war movement! If this were the Vietnam War, we’d be seeing a mass march on Washington DC right now!”
Such statements betray a profound ignorance of history, not to mention the dynamics of struggle. Nothing, and I mean nothing unfolds like that ever. Let’s look closer at the Vietnam War: those mass protests these lamenters romanticize about? Those happened mostly in or after 1968. Most people believe that war began in earnest in 1965, however, in actual fact, it really began in the 1950s. The tension between those who wished to align with the Western bloc and those who didn’t stretches all the way back to the end of World War II. While it’s true that the US’s heavy involvement in that war began during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the US was trying to impose its colonialist aspirations upon the Vietnamese as soon as World War II ended (out of fear of losing out to Soviet influence). As for the first protests, these did take place in 1965, but as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (who helped organize them) have thoroughly documented, these were tiny and not particularly well received even by those who would later embrace the antiwar movement!
The same dynamic happened with the Russian Revolution in 1917. Contrary to the romanticized notion that it took only ten days to “shake the world”, the overthrow of Russian Tsarism actually required several revolutionary convulsions taking place successively over a span of almost 50 years (and those involved many mass protests and even mass strikes that—if taken as one-off efforts—looked a lot like “failures”). Very often these involved an all too familiar dynamic of “three-steps-forward-then-two-steps-back.” This knowledge is based on Voline’s The Unknown Revolution, admittedly a source with an anarchist bias (one which I believe to nevertheless be historically truthful) that’ll make Marxist-Leninists either cringe or denounce me in a torrent of boilerplate rhetoric, but I suspect even Lenin and Trotsky would agree with the historical context, even if they would outright reject Voline’s interpretation of the outcome.
Likewise, the Spanish Revolution of 1936 didn’t happen overnight. There had been several uprisings that had preceded it. Furthermore, for several decades, there had been a flood of trial-and-error organizing as well as both socialist and anarchist newspapers and pamphlets shared very frequently among the Spanish industrial working class and peasantry that made them very receptive to revolutionary ideas in response to Franco’s fascist coup. That the latter succeeded was due to fractures and tactical mistakes that afflicted all tendencies on the left, along with the betrayal by Stalinist opportunists who, yes, cynically sheepdogged the revolution away from an incipient libertarian communism into bureaucratic state capitalism, which ultimately doomed the revolution, and allowed the fascists to smash anarchist, socialist, so-called communist (but really bourgeois), and liberal republican opposition completely.
All three of the above (whether they can ultimately be judged successes, failures, or something of each is a matter of debate, though I generally hold to the “some of each” conclusion) more or less follow the framework of strategic (mostly) nonviolence as outlined by Gene Sharp in his various writings, and as refined by Mark Engler and Paul Engler in their recent book, This is an Uprising. They also follow the patterns identified by Erica Chenoweth as well as the framework envisioned by Daniel Hunter of Choose Democracy.
Whether one shares the conclusions of any of these authors and thinkers or not, there usually does seem to be a common pattern in which movements always start slowly and gain momentum over time. Those that succeed in fundamentally transforming society usually do so in a combination of methodical incremental changes and sudden ruptures that make rapid changes (that address pent up demands) possible. Sometimes such currents result in revolutions, sometimes not. Sometimes the revolutions happen right under our noses but we fail to notice or acknowledge them, because our metrics of “success” are skewed.
For example, consider the Russian Revolution of 1917. It’s widely accepted that this was a hugely “successful” revolution, because it overthrew tsarism (a particularly Russian form of authoritarian monarchism) and replaced it with Communism (even if Stalinism quickly undermined it), but was it truly a “success”? Marxists will vehemently insist that it was, and the ultimate failure of the Soviet Union from 1989-93 cannot be blamed on inherent flaws in Marxist(-Leninist) ideology, but rather a combination indigenous (Stalin’s “hijacking” of the revolution as well as internal counterrevolutionary forces) and exogenous (constant covert and overt attempts by capitalist opponents) factors. Anarchists, including particularly Voline, argue that the failure was due to inherent flaws in Leninism that made the endogenous and exogenous forces’ ultimate success possible in the first place.
Who is correct? Based on the fact that virtually every other example of state “communist” regimes following similar paths trod by the Soviet Union, i.e. the capture of state power by ostensibly “Communist” revolutions, followed by bureaucratization and the degeneration of them into near totalitarian state capitalist caricatures of what utopian socialists envision, I’d have to go with Voline on this question. In effect, these “revolutions” ultimately change very little. Life may be marginally improved for the working-class masses by these “communist” regimes—even in their most degraded states—when compared to “liberal” capitalist states that make no pretenses of being communist or the regimes that preceded the putatively “communist” successors, but it could hardly be said to be ideal, let alone utopian.
By contrast, the #MeToo movement required no capture of state power to rapidly transform society in several meaningful ways, not the least of which shook the very roots of dominant patriarchal society to its core (and to some extent is still shaking it as more and more revelations about the Epstein files are brought to light). While the impetus for #MeToo had been building for decades (a watershed moment involved sitting Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas—an unapologetic MAGA partisan—in 1991, but its roots reach much further back in time, though the use of the phrase “Me Too” first became popularized in 2006), it reached a point of rupture in 2017. Clearly the catalyst for this was the election of Trump in 2016, and while one could argue that his return to power in 2024 represents an utter failure of that movement, such a conclusion would be premature and erroneous.
While it’s certainly true that Trump was reelected and even received a higher percentage of women’s votes in 2024 than he did in 2020 (as well as Black male and Latino as well as young votes), this is due to more voters, particularly left leaning voters, voting for neither Trump nor Harris (or sitting the election out entirely) than in 2020, thus creating the illusion of a rightwards shift that doesn’t actually match political reality. As it stands, the political attitudes in matters of gender equality, gender equity, reproductive freedom, safe spaces, opposition to sexual harassment, and other issues raised by #MeToo have not shifted rightwards since 2017 (if anything, the opposite is true). What has happened is that those opposed to the goals of the #MeToo movement have found themselves in the minority (where they hitherto were not) and have grown more reactionary due to their loss of institutional privilege (a privilege that Trump and MAGA have desperately tried to restore, but only can attempt through force, since persuasion isn’t within his toolbox, let alone politically feasible). In that sense, the change is irreversible. The revolution has (partially, for now) succeeded.
Part of the problem that leads people to erroneously treat revolutions as one-off events is that few people carefully study all, or even the most significant, events that result in their occurrence. Careful and close studies show that far from being instances where a vanguard power deposes an existing regime, many years of erosion of popular support for the status quo create the ideal conditions necessary to make such a revolution possible in the first place. Moreover, historically, old paradigms often become most repressive and brutal the closer they get to their collapse. That is because the true strength of any order isn’t primarily manifested in hard power (i.e. compulsion by force), but soft power (compliance through persuasion). No regime, particularly authoritarian regime, is perfect, and—especially over time—the inconsistencies, contradictions, and deceptions of said regime are exposed, and it’s the soft power that is most easily eroded as a result (hence the increasing repressiveness that follows). A regime cannot survive on hard power, alone, because it’s both insufficient and too self-destructive. Such regimes typically collapse.
A perfect analogy for this dynamic is the melting of ice on a frozen pond. Due to water’s chemical properties, its liquid state is actually denser than its solid state, so ice floats to the top. As a result, it can also melt from below, particularly in the Spring from solar heating. While it’s a myth that frozen ponds always melt from the bottom up, it is true that when ice does melt thusly, it can still seem as though the pond is still frozen over, that is, until one tries to walk onto it. (That’s why one should be always be very wary of doing so!)
A lot of profound political changes occur “below the surface”, so-to-speak. Rebecca Solnit has outlined numerous examples in her recent colorful series of short books (beginning with “Hope in the Dark”, and concluding most recently with “The Beginning Comes After the End”). The British anarchist, Colin Ward similarly observed this process unfold over his long years as a revolutionary author and editor. While nation states and governments might not change, they most certainly evolve, but, contrary to those who advocate evolutionary change as opposed to revolutionary change (as well as ardent critics of the latter who eschew evolutionary political change as merely a case of “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”[1]), that “evolution” is often dependent upon bursts of “revolutionary” pushing from below.
This gets to the crux of the matter, and the fundamental reason why the sectarian critics misunderstand and misinterpret these mass protests: they’re not intended to be the “revolution”, nor do they even make any pretense of being that. That’s because no revolution can ever be accomplished in a single stroke!
There are actually several, intertwined purposes mass protests actually serve, and they include, but aren’t limited to, the following:
- They allow people, particularly people previously not politically active or radicalized to gather and realize they’re not isolated or alone (if they don’t get past their doubts, they’re not going to be going on strike or charging any barricades anytime soon);
- They allow newbies a (potential) chance to meet more experienced, and perhaps more radicalized or wiser, veterans of past struggles who can potentially provide the direction and confidence to be more effective change agents;
- They allow everyone to meet other allies and comrades they might not currently know, thus allowing them to form bonds of comradeship, which are essential for any struggle, especially revolutionary ones;
- They potentially allow unaffiliated individuals to plug into existing organizations and struggles (most of which have at least some varying degrees of relevance to the mass demonstrations);
- While such demonstrations often don’t convince the targeted authoritarian, capitalist(s), oppressors, bosses, abusers, or regimes to change course—and that’s increasingly likely to be true the more authoritarian latter are—they very much do undermine support for the target of the demonstrations by undermining, or even removing, their “pillars of support”, as is described in the “inverse triangle/pyramid” theory of power.
Indeed, this last purpose bears emphasis for two or three reasons:
- There’s ample evidence to support the argument that “Hands Off” and the three “No Kings” demonstrations have done precisely that in dramatic ways[2];
- Many of the left sectarian criticisms are made by Marxist tendencies that are, themselves, fundamentally authoritarian, and seek to ultimately place their cadre in the position of power, and so the inverse pyramid theory is an anathema to them;
- Meanwhile, many anarchists have the opposite problem: they’re trying to dismantle authoritarian power in one fell swoop, but history suggests that this is actually almost certainly impossible, because there are numerous, not entirely separate, but not entirely mutually inclusive—and certainly not monolithic nexuses of authoritarian power. Eliminating one can frequently result in another quickly filling the vacuum (which is precisely what happened in Spain in 1936-38).
History has taught us some rather stark and not very pleasant lessons, and one of them is that revolutionary transformative change is a never ending, ongoing process, not a one-off “final conflict”. It’s simply not fair to judge mass demonstrations as wanting, ineffectual, or inadequate, because they’re merely a snapshot of a larger historical arc whose ultimate results can rarely, if ever, be divined from the moment. Where they ultimately lead depends on how people act after the demonstrations have concluded and what next steps get taken.
In order to address that matter, it is an essential “next step” to dismiss yet another pervasive sectarian myth: the mistaken notion that these mass demonstrations are entirely, or even mostly, composed of unflinchingly inert, bourgeois, “liberal” (or even “reactionary”) people “who’ll never demand, or even accept, transformative change.”
Footnotes:
[1] “The more the things change, the more they stay the same.” I can never read those words without hearing Geddy Lee from Rush singing them in both languages in the song “Circumstances”, from the band’s 1978 album, Hemispheres. Coincidentally, Rush’s lyrics have often erroneously been pegged as having a “right-libertarian” political orientation, but in actual fact, their political orientation (when it manifests) is left-libertarian, according to the late Neil Peart’s own statements. Sadly, Neil has gone on to the great concert hall in the great beyond. A pity.
[2] See: Do Protests Matter?: A timeline of the last 14 months shows how the breadth and depth of anti-Trump organizing has led to demonstrable changes. Also, why No Kings 3 is on track to draw a record 9 million participants - https://theconnector.substack.com/p/do-protests-matter March 18, 2026)