Do We Really Have to Go to Another March?

A real resistance needs a strategy that can win

by ANDREW DOBBS

Hundreds of thousands of Americans marked Pres. Donald Trump’s 100th day in office on April 29, 2017 by joining People’s Climate Marches across the country.

Just a week earlier, Earth Day 2017 was the occasion for the first ever “March for Science,” and in many instances the marches were attended by the same people and held at the same locations — only the signs and chants changed.

These both follow the now legendary Women’s March with its millions mobilized the day after Trump’s Inauguration — which also brought out its own marchers on Jan. 20, 2017.

Less than a month later multiple cities held A Day Without an Immigrant demonstrations, and in a handful of cities revolutionaries and socialists also marked May Day this year with smaller, if often more intense demonstrations.

Why are we marching all the time? This isn’t to ask what problems each march was called to address — climate change, suppression of science, official misogyny, capitalism — but rather why did we choose marching as the means of doing something about them?

In many cases it might just be that protesters are marching because they can’t think of anything else to do. In many others, however, the awkward fact is that marching appeals to folks because it allows liberal beneficiaries of the status quo an opportunity to demonstrate their morality without actually threatening the evil that makes their lives so comfortable.

If we want a real resistance to the real threat to human civilization in our midst we have to do more than marching, and we have to get more uncomfortable than just having blistered feet.

Marching in protest is an easy default tactic because it’s been done as long as human society has existed. It’s probably impossible to tell exactly where it started. In Ancient Judea Pontius Pilate’s installation as imperial governor prompted mass demonstrations when he brought idolatrous artifacts into Jerusalem. Protesters marched from Jerusalem to the seat of his government in Cesarea to confront him.

The demonstration famously ended when he surrounded the demonstrators with Roman soldiers and threatened to kill them all, prompting the Judeans to lay down and say that they would rather die than see their holy city defiled. Impressed, Pilate capitulated and removed the idols.

A peasants’ revolt in England in 1381 was less neat in its conclusion. It culminated in a march of 60,000 peasants and poor on London that forced King Richard to accede to radical demands abolishing serfdom altogether before his government could regroup, regain control of the city, revoke the agreements and kill the revolt’s leaders.

These marches and many others appear through the mists of history to have been means to an end and not a self-contained tactic in and of themselves. Judeans wanted to confront Pilate en masse so they all traveled together to his palace; peasants wanted to fuck up London so they went together on foot, hence a march. The march was just the way to get to the place where the demonstrators could confront and threaten the powers that be.

In modern times, however, marches became a tactic in their own right. The labor movement, suffragettes, civil rights activists and opponents to the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, among other causes — their marches were intended as symbols of discontent that didn’t deliver their demonstrators to anything in particular.

To this day there are marches of each type, the ones that take protesters to a point of confrontation with the forces that they are resisting, and the ones that simply serve to express opposition. Both types of marches are tactics, and an effective campaign will deploy these tactics in the service of a strategy. Ineffective efforts, on the other hand, frequently do the reverse — letting tactics lead their strategy.

Guess which way the marchers this year are headed?

In the absence of any coherent strategy movements and organizations will revert to the tactical mean, doing the things most familiar to their constituents. For American progressives this means protest marches along with other liberal tactics.

A real strategy would instead begin by determining the movement’s objectives. The so-called “resistance” marching this year has never asked the questions it needs to answer to figure those goals out and build a strategy around them.