Marching: Nostalgia, Life-style or Act of Resistance?
Posted by Mike E on December 2, 2010
Thanks to Chegitz for suggesting this article from the BBC. This piece obviously represents a pretty cynical view — but it raises questions that are of interest. What happens when specific tactics become a routine… and has lost its surprise, its bite, its coherent purpose.
“To make my voice heard,” was the usual reply. Really? Even if the government isn’t listening? Making one’s voice heard wasn’t the reason people went on marches at the beginning.
‘Today, marching seems to be a retro activity, an act of political nostalgia more than a tactic to bring about specific change”
Political Marching: What’s at risk?
By Michael Goldfarb
The driver let us off and I hurried to my meeting at Bush House, home of the BBC World Service. By the time I came out, the University of London students had been joined by others from LSE and King’s College some bearing signs that read: “Tory Scum/Here we Come.”
Only those trained in the principles of non-violence were allowed to march with GandhiTraffic was disrupted, the rest of normal life was not. A young man, not much older than the students, was busy handing out leaflets to join an expensive gym. The queues at the sandwich shops in the area were their usual length.
Where it all began
At the end of the day the marchers were kettled in by police in Whitehall, the street that runs through the heart of Britain’s government buildings. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government’s policy of more than doubling tuition fees was still in place.
This was the second demonstration against the rise in tuition in the past three weeks and it was just as ineffective as the first.
Political marching, protest marching, call it what you will, has become in the new millennium a way of exercising one’s ego. When making a programme recently on the history of protest marching I asked folks over and over again why they went on marches?”To make my voice heard,” was the usual reply. Really? Even if the government isn’t listening?
Making one’s voice heard wasn’t the reason people went on marches at the beginning.
The first successful political march in England took place in 1834. Six agricultural workers from Tolpuddle in Dorset had been transported to Australia in chains. Their crime? Organising a society to prevent a cut in their wages.
For the Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they were called, transportation to Australia was a sentence of living death and tens of thousands of workers marched from King’s Cross to Parliament to present a petition signed by 800,000 people demanding the six be allowed to return to Britain.
The march to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg ended in violenceParliament gave in to the pressure, and the men were allowed to come home.
Over the next century and a half, the political march became an important tool all over the world for those seeking political change and redress of injustice.
Marching did not always work and often ended in violence whether in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886 or outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1905.
But the rallies frequently produced pressure that led to dramatic change. Successful marching campaigns have certain things in common. They need to have a very specific goal and it should be focused on gaining a positive – independence, civil rights a decent wage – rather than repealing a negative.
All in the planning
Most importantly, the cause has to be one for which the marchers are willing to go to jail.
The next thing that is necessary is detailed tactical planning. The paradigm is the famous Salt March in India in 1930. The march was organised by Mahatma Gandhi to protest a tax on salt made in India. This tax meant it was cheaper for Indians to buy salt imported from Britain. How better to keep a colony tied to its ruler?
Gandhi spent months planning how to protest this tax. He decided to march from his ashram in Ahmedabad to the sea at Dandi, where he would make salt. The plan was to walk 10 miles a day for 24 days, along a route that went through Hindu and Muslim villages. This would demonstrate India’s unity and allow international press interest to build.
In the US, marching was a key tactic in the civil rights movementBut the march was not open to just anyone. Anticipating the British authorities might use violence to turn him back, Gandhi trained 70 plus people in principles of non-violence and only they were allowed to march with him.
Hundreds of thousands turned out to watch along the way but only this handful of people actually walked the distance. There was no violence. The march did not accomplish its specific goal: the salt tax remained in place.
But it did something more important: it laid the foundation for a cohesive independence movement and it opened British eyes to the fact that India, the colossally complex jewel in its imperial crown, was a nation capable of speaking for itself and ruling itself.
Twenty-five years later, a young African-American preacher in the American south studied Gandhi’s tactics and used marching as the key tactic is the drive for “Civil Rights”.
In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement staged the March on Washington to bring pressure on then President John F Kennedy for legislation guaranteeing African-Americans’ constitutional rights in the South, where segregation had disenfranchised them for more than eight decades.
Act of political nostalgia
Despite the Kennedy administration’s concerns about the potential for violence, the march went off without a hitch. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech which guaranteed that the march would become one of the most famous in history.
It also made marching the template for the full range of political protest associated with the 1960s. Martin Luther King would later march in Alabama from Selma to the state capital Montgomery. The violence from local authorities that greeted the marchers led to an international outcry and hastened the passage of civil rights legislation in Washington DC.
Marches against the Vietnam War filled out the decade. Sometimes there was violence, as in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Party convention and in 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio. But often the marches, with their hundreds of thousands of participants, went off without a hitch, their main purpose being to remind politicians of the war’s deep unpopularity.
It wasn’t just in the English speaking world that the 60s marked a high-water mark for political marching. French students marching through Paris in May 1968 provoked disproportionate violence from the government of Charles De Gaulle. This in turn cost the government its support in France at large, and the government fell.
Today, marching seems to be a retro activity, an act of political nostalgia more than a tactic to bring about specific change. Very few of those who walk the streets “making their voices heard” would be willing to go much further to change politics.
Marching is a right in free societies. Political leaders tolerate marching but don’t fear it. When more than a million and half people marched through London in February 2003 to protest the impending war with Iraq, it changed absolutely nothing.
In America, there have been million man and million women marches that echo Dr King’s March on Washington, but they seem to want nothing more than television camera time.
This has culminated in television personalities taking over the march on Washington business.
The two big rallies held this past election season were organised by TV stars Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart. I wonder what the future of political marching is. Clearly, it has become a fun day out and chance to be among like-minded people who wanted to make “their voices heard,” or “show politicians I disagree.”
Yes, well, thank you for sharing.
If protest marching is ever going to be a useful political tactic again, those who put one foot in front of another are going to have be willing to take a bit more risk.
Civil disobedience would be the next step, with jail time a possible consequence of one’s actions. How many students protesting tuition rises would risk that?
Carl Davidson said
I don’t know about the Brits, but today’s students here take risks, as they did in the recent battles in California. And there will be more to come.
But we should note the difference in conditions, too. When I was a young student at Penn State, my tuition was under $1500 a term, covered largely by a national defense loan at zero interest. And I could pay my rent and get by on an additions $500 a quarter, working odd jobs as a janitor and book store clerk. Gasoline was 30 cents a gallon. You could find a job almost instantly after graduation or in the summer.
So taking off for a year to go South to fight for civil right or run around the country organizing against the war, or even getting suspended, wasn’t that big on a deal. It didn’t risk tens of thousands of dollars from your family mortgaging their home, and needing to get some of it back quickly to help your sibs through school. Our burdens didn’t come close to what kids face today.
Of course, that additional burden is also an organizing opportunity, an opening to draw even more into struggle. But we should also have a handle on the worries holding some young people back that are a little different today.
Keith said
[moderator note: this comment was moved to become a self-standing post.]
PatrickSMcNally said
> it opened British eyes to the fact that India, the colossally complex jewel in its imperial crown, was a nation capable of speaking for itself and ruling itself.
It would be more accurate to say that Britain’s eyes were opened by the costs of two World Wars and the beginning of a Cold War. The Labour Party was smart enough to see what the French were getting into with Vietnam. I doubt that the British Conservative Party would have done the same.
Carl Davidson said
Keith is on target. What he calls ‘protest mode’ is, in large part, what we called, using old-fashioned terminology, ‘the blind bowing to, and worship, of the spontaneous movement.’ Mass protests come and go, rising and falling in wavelike motion. We have to learn the art of when to fan the flames and when to consolidate, when to cast the net out and when to draw it in, to build and expand ongoing political organizations, both revolutionary and mass democratic. Organization is our primary weapon.
Radical Eyes said
Thanks for sharing that article, Keith.
Another angle on the question of the limitation of protest marching these days concerns the state of mass communication in our society.
Historically one of the effective uses of protest marches has been to draw broader attention to a movement, or to a wrong-doing that demands examination and rooting out. Gather together in adequate numbers and the press will have to/help you get the word out about this issue of concern. Etc.
Media conditions today are certainly transformed compared to the 1850s, the 1930s, or even the 1960s.
On the one hand, we have a corporate mass media that systematically ignores or distort political demonstrations that seek to challenge the power structure in any meaningful way. On the other we have a growth of independent and web-based media that makes it possible for people to “make their voice heard” and to reach hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, without relying on the New York Times or the Boston Globe, let alone NBC, CBS, FOX etc.
That said, I do feel that marches–when they are well organized, focused in their demands, well attended, with spirited chants and speakers etc–can be inspiring and productive of political discussion and organizing opportunities. There is something to be said for periodically reminding one another that “we are not alone” on a particularly issue-struggle. And the physical presence of other bodies and voices is not without significance. But I agree with Keith that the failure to link such tactics to organizing for political power is a major, ultimately disabling limitation.
One concept I often have in my head is that political demos should have an aspect of a “dress rehearsal for taking power,” even if this is ‘only’ on some level of abstraction or imagination–as relayed through chants, speakers, or banners. One of my favorite texts to read at demos or protest gatherings (especially smaller ones) is Marge Piercy’s “The Low Road,” which I hope you all know. In case you don’t, I will copy it in a follow-up post.
Radical Eyes said
Here it is, below. What is really powerful, and potentially useful about this poem in thinking about political demos, is the way it drsaws out the seeds of future radical change that are already percolating in the present. This too can be an important aspect of (effective) political demonstrations. Some sense of a future to affirm, not just a present to oppose (nor a past to nostalgically remember).
[Moderator note: "The Low Road" by Marge Piercy is now its own self-standing post]
Radical Eyes said
On re-reading though, I suppose the last lines “do it again: *could* be interpreted as falling into a sheer repetition of “protest mode!” Nonetheless, the earlier lines suggest a development of organization, even if the closing lines turn abstract. Still the focus even at the end is placed on taking each “one” person seriously, and on expanding organization, and counter-power, not just “registering opposition.”
tellnolies said
I agree with the critique of “protest mode” in so far as we are talking about a politics that confines itself to street demonstrations, as is often the case. But I also think that protests are often precisely what first gets people into motion and makes possible the construction of other forms of counter-power. The student protests in Britain, for example, seem like they are bringing lots of new people into political life. And indeed they are already sparking campus occupations which tend to raise a whole set of questions that simply marching doesn’t.
I think Carl’s point about changed conditions for students since the 1960s is an important one. But the problem is not limited to objective conditions. There arose in the 60s a whole culture of collective living, a disdain for the rat race and so on that were critical in freeing many people up to engage in activism more or less full time. People have found ways to organize under economic conditions far more constrained than those confronting most contemporary college students, which is not to trivialize the very real constraints that they face. Unemployment or underemployment, whether voluntary or not, provides potentially fertile soil for the development of a radical counter-culture. Richard Wright wrote about how in the 1930s the CP offices served free hot meals at the beginning and end of a day of activism. This country is full of cheap vacant storefronts in proletarian neighborhoods that, with a hot pot of oatmeal in the morning, soup for lunch and chili in the evening could be buzzing centers of insurgency.
tellnolies said
Great Marge Piercy poem. I hadn’t read it before.
Radical Eyes said
On the question of the dialectical (objective yet subjective) nature of the “chains” that now bind college students:
Student debt is huge and very real. And yet, it is in a sense a psychological chain as much as anything else.
That is to say, I have it on advice of an experienced bankruptcy attorney that if a student goes AWOL on their student loans permanently, the worst that will probably happen to them is that there credit score will be completely shot to hell, and that they will get many harassing phone calls for years to come. It is too costly–and uncertain–for these college companies to go after and sue college graduates, who don’t have assets anyway.
In other words: All it would take is people silencing there phones, and giving up on the (great American) dream of home-ownership, for a massive debtor revolt to become possible. Indeed, the prospects for such rebellion are even brighter than this; for the appraisal I was given by the attorney assumed that the debt “delinquent” was a lone individual. The situation would be transformed significantly if the debt-rejection took collective form.
Along these lines, we might consider this YouTube video from a while back http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGC1mCS4OVo
It got over 500,000 hits within a month or so of being posted. (She also got offers for compromise from Bank of America as soon as this video went viral! Can you smell the blood in the water?)
The political consciousness of this women doesn’t go all the way, of course, and her focus is personal credit card debt. But I see no reason why a similar call to arms couldn’t be organized and issued on student loan debt.
Carl Davidson said
You’re assuming it’s only the student that bears the debt, and not his or her family as well. But in any case, yes, the burden may still lead to mass revolt and mass default.
Ajagbe said
we don’t march for them. we don’t march so they’ll listen. we march for us. we march to teach. we march to get stronger, and to demonstrate that strength. that’s the point of marching. and, when we’re strong enough, we march to take power.
chegitz guevara said
@radical eyes,
The costs of defaulting on a student loan are more than giving up on the American dream. More and more, every aspect of life is being connected to your credit score. It can keep you from getting an apartment, a job, a car, it affects your insurance rates.
Radical Eyes said
CD and Chegitz,
Yes, yes, I was being one-sided in my comment above. Of course there *are* material costs involved in defaulting of loans, potentially costs that extend to others beside the student him/herself. Don’t mean to make light of these…
Nonetheless, there is an aspect of the “enslavement” here which is psychological, and which is not always even thought through rationally, even at the individual level of “material interests.” (I think here also of the well-documented fact that many people continue paying mortgages that are more expensive than there houses are worth…even though they could rent more and better space elsewhere for less money than they are kicking up to the bank.)
All of this said, should there be a *collectively organized* student debtors revolt, the dynamic of the situation changes dramatically, no?
Duncan said
This was the second demonstration against the rise in tuition in the past three weeks and it was just as ineffective as the first.
This is utter bollocks. If the government was unconcerned with these protests the Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister wouldn’t have repeatedly pleaded with students to stop demonstrating.