I'm incredibly sick of useless protests

The state where I live would like to build a gigantic data center. It will be an ecological catastrophe, of course, but also destroy a community and hurt workers incredibly in the long run. Across the political spectrum, people are opposed, and a grassroots movement is coalescing around it.

And of course, this comes with...drum roll...a protest. Yet another protest. With all the same characters in play. DSA. PSL. "progressive" democrats. All to gether together to hear speeches from the same people who spoke at the may day protest, and the same people who spoke at the anti-ICE protest, with the same 300 attendees, etc., etc., over and over.

I know some of these people, known them for years. They're good people, and they're not at all wrong about anything that they say. But I thought that by now, after years in the struggle, good organizers would have finally figured out when a protest is useful and when it's not. These are all useless protests, and they actually do more damage than good.

Here's a simple test for whether a protest is likely to be useful or not:

1. Is anything about the world different after the protest is done?

2. Are the people you're protesting forced to do anything at all because the protest took place?

3. Is the protest backed by real, actual masses of people who will actually participate in future actions on the specific issue at hand?

If the answer to more than one of these questions is "no," then you're doing something more or less *pointless*. It serves only as a release valve for tension, as a disorganizing and discoordinating factor, as a distraction from any number of more important things you could do around the issue, an excuse for people not to do anything more, and as a convenient target for right-wing forces want to point at a rabble.

Since the middle of the 20th century, protest ha been divorced from real collective action. "Protest" used to almost always mean not just people shouting at buildings: they generally came with consequences. They were close to strikes, to sit-ins, to occupations, to work slowdowns, etc. People spend a day or longer protesting. They weren't working. They brought their friends and coworkers. They talked with people there, exchanged ideas and information and had organizations to join. A protest came with an *implied* time commitment. IN this sense, they often had a measurable impact. They had some weight. Not perhaps as much weight as a more direct action, but certainly more than now. As workers are forced further and further into exploitation, spending more and more time working; and as more and more time is spent with entertainment of infinite varieties, protest has been reduced to a purely formal process, totally pro forma, without content or any real weight. You can go to a protest for less than an hour and say you were there "supporting." It requires not commitment of any kind. More and more people attend solo. No one is talking to each other, no one is learning, and the only people who attend are those who already agree, who happen to be online in the same way as the organizers and travel in the same circles. There is no actual mass audience.

Thus, there is no wight to the standard contemporary protest. They can literally just be ignored without any consequence at all.

There are exceptions of course, but the obvious exceptions show where the problems with standard contemporary protest are. Consider Minneapolis recently: longstanding community organizations and strong labor unions led those protests. They were also explicitly connected to an actionable threat such as a literal strike. They cost money, they cost time, they showed an underlying strength and determination. But even then, even with all that, the most that could be accomplished was some very large protests and a partially successful one-fay strike. And ICE is still in Minneapolis wreaking havoc.

Protests are not magic. They do not automatically (or even usually) lead to a stronger position for either the groups that organize them or for the working class as a whole. They don't even really get much attention. Protest is what people do whenever they ave no idea what else to do, or, sometimes, when conditions are right, when you have an opportunity to bolster support and move people toward *something else* that is more powerful.