motherfucker
thing about mobs is Righties think mobs are just the fun stuff, the smashing and the burning and the rarrrrggggghhhh
but radical mobs have infrastructure; yeah there are knuckleheads and random who glom on but a lot of it is serious radicals doing serious work
but radical mobs have infrastructure; yeah there are knuckleheads and random who glom on but a lot of it is serious radicals doing serious work
Righty mobs just know from the rarrrrgggggghhhh; they don’t have legal observers or legal support or bail funds, and they certainly don’t have large numbers of people.
Smashing and burning shit is kind of like being in debt to a bank. If you’re in it by yourself, the city owns you. If you’re in it with fifty thousand other people, you own the city. Because you’re a meaningful constituency!
When mobs get really big, the options are 1) stall + hope 2) stall + concessions 3) abject surrender 4) machine gun crowds. And nobody wants to machine-gun crowds, especially when the crowds have legal support, etc. who know what they’re doing.
Don’t look at the part of the iceberg you see and think that’s all there is.
An addendum: the takeaway from the protests (yes, including the ones that became riots) isn’t “violence works,” it’s “success comes from putting a lot of people together and using them to apply and increase pressure.”
There are a lot of ways to apply pressure!
There are a lot of ways to apply pressure!
Look at the protests in SoCal to open up California. Before those Newsom was talking about three months of shutdown; then he got evidence that huge numbers of people were willing to just ignore the law, so he changed course to avoid losing face.
That’s the rare case where just being out in the street creates pressure, though. (Which is why those naive protests had an effect.)
tl;dr if you want change, learn to put people together and create pressure.
tl;dr if you want change, learn to put people together and create pressure.
