it's reflective of a wider loss of plot in the protest movement. people have power to take power through halting or seizing production. they don't just have the power of collective thought. "awareness" is consequently absolutely useless - except to sell a product. and, the results of it are in front of us.
i'm less reacting against the tactic out of support for the status quo, and more because it's just not effective. there's a consistency in my criticism across diverse issues.
we used to understand that the problem of police violence is systemic and intentional and has to be approached by pulling the weed out from the roots. this probably actually does mean targeted assassinations, but at a much higher level than that of day-to-day cops.
the only reason the civil rights movement got anywhere at all was due to open carry. peaceful civil disobedience is merely upholding the status quo. if you want anything to change, you have to scare them.
power only understands power. if you walk in with a flower, you just get stamped out. you can march millions of people through the street every day until the bombs fall, all you're doing is broadcasting that you're harmless. rather, you have to force concessions through the use of force or through the implication of the use of force.
there's been much written about gandhi and game theory. these are the people that actually understand the tactic. marching to the sea was only useful as a tool because it broadcast to the british what the size of a potential army was. and, gandhi himself was explicit: if he could have armed them, he would have. he just lacked the resources. the proper understanding of these tactics, from gandhi himself, was that violence is unnecessary under the threat of violence. and, this is actually the same logic of nuclear deterrence: the threat must be credible in order to be effective.
what these protest movements need to be focusing on is ensuring that the threat they pose to the status quo is actually credible. so long as the focus is on peaceful marching and "raising awareness", they offer no credible threat and therefore are in no position to demand concessions.
the "spirit of protest" that came out of the 60s has been an abject failure, if it wasn't intentional social engineering. if generational change is to have any chance of success, it must reverse the focus on "peaceful protest" and "awareness" and go back to a more directly confrontational and openly belligerent approach. we have to generate a credible level of fear in order to force action. we have to be a credible threat.
if you want to hold to a kind of classical leftist discourse, the modern application is not in citizen protest and civil disobedience, but in organizing police strikes. halting production worked in producing concessions because it broke the system down from the inside. could you imagine non-workers showing up outside the factory and demanding concessions? lower prices, perhaps? they would have been laughed at.
these protesters are being laughed at....
the idea is that any complex system requires it's constituent subsystems in order to function properly. it's really good old fashioned materialism, right. so, you can break the system by breaking the subsystem. therefore, organizing strikes is a good tactic. what is breaking down when you send citizens out to block a highway? are you threatening a general strike? you're not, really. not credibly, anyways. and, the likelihood of it ever being credible is so remote...
but, if you could organize a police strike then you'd be effectively "halting production" and the system would have to react with concessions, or risk collapse.
yeah, i know. not very "moral". no faith in class harmony, state enforcement of the rule of law or market interactions as a way to organize society. kind of dangerous, perhaps. so, not very "conservative". kind of left-wing, even, huh?