United States | News & Politics

The notion that any single protest can overturn a political system is daft beyond belief. the whole 3.5% rule argument gets the process of change backwards. While it presents a powerful looking statistic, it confuses the final, visible symptom for the cause. The idea that a single, massive peaceful protest can be the key is an idealist view that ignores the material and organizational groundwork that makes any protest meaningful in the first place.

Real social transformation doesn't work like flipping a switch when you hit some magic number. It works through the dialectical process where quantity transforms into quality. The big protest or the general strike, that's the qualitative leap. But that leap is only possible because of a huge, often invisible, accumulation of quantitative work. That work is the unglamorous foundation without which meaningful change is not possible. It's the years of on the ground political organizing in neighborhoods and workplaces. It's building mutual aid networks for food, housing, and disaster relief. It's the patient political education in study groups that turns anger into a shared class analysis.

Without that deep foundation of organized power and dual infrastructure, a big crowd is just a crowd. It can be dispersed because it has no staying power. We've seen this happen time and again with things like Occupy and George Floyd protests. The state isn't moved by moral appeals. It's moved by sustained, organized disruption of its systems. Look at the movements you cite. The Montgomery Bus Boycott wasn't a one day march. It was a 381 day campaign sustained by a community organized carpool system. It relied on existing mutual aid structures as the vehicle to sustain the protest. The Salt March was a direct assault on a state revenue monopoly. These were strategic withdrawals of consent, built on years of prior organization.

The belief that people reject violence and that moral high ground alone wins misunderstands the state. The state holds a monopoly on legitimate violence. It will use that violence to crush any real threat to its power, no matter how peaceful the threat appears on the surface. The moral high ground is a narrative that only exists when a movement isn't winning. When it starts to win, that narrative is promptly shattered by police batons and mass arrests.

So the real task isn't chasing a viral protest moment. It's the slow, quantitative work of building the material fundamentals of popular power from below. The 3.5% moment isn't the start of the struggle. It's the moment that shows the long, hard work of base building has finally created the conditions for a real leap forward. Change isn't an event you attend. It's a process you build every day through organization, mutual care, and collective education.

Not this bullshit again

didn't they try just this with the no kings stuff?

11 million organized people in the same place armed with bricks and sharp sticks could topple any country on earth in about a day. If you could mobilize that many people why wouldn't you just finish the job right then and there?

I’m going to poke a few holes into this. I have no references, so take this as personal opinions that may or may not be accurate.

That 3.5 percent needs the support of a far greater number of the population; passive , active and logistical support is needed from about 1/3 the population.

We are nowhere near 1/3 of the people wishing such stuff.

Most politically active people in the USA who think this is a good idea have absolutely no idea how to implement the above.

And those that do have an idea struggle against the second issue: that these things are not organized from the internet, or have a command structure, but are made up of thousands of like minded groups who self organize.

Spontaneous organizing where people meet each other face to face is currently rare. Most USA neighborhoods do not have much that help with that. What was done in the civil rights era could not be done today

At some point violence against the Nazi party was ethically and morally correct. Everyone should decide when they've crossed that point, but everyone should have that point defined and ideally written down lest we passively sleepwalk into concentration camps (something that we can't really confirm isn't happening already with these non-judicial emprisonments). Every day someone dies in custody.

Nobody gives a fuck about the moral high ground. Kwame Ture quote.

Or over 11 million citizens… or over half of the inhabitants of New York City.

It helps saying in absolutes.

What if everyone started threatening to kill the top dog responsible for this?

You can try this “we go high when they go low” as long as you want. He said it himself: he only understands power and violence.

Shoot and kill the regime. The resulting civil war will be nothing to what will happen when we don’t.

I can’t believe Americans have to be told by outsiders that NOW is the time to use all your properly registered gun. He’s a threat to you, he’s a threat to your neighbours, he’s a threat to his allies, and he a threat to the entire world.

Please actually read Chenoweth's papers, especially the recent ones. Important points as I recall them from last year when this factoid first popped up:

• For these purposes, nonviolent does not equal either compliant or even physically passive. Importantly, this point is about the movement being primarily nonviolent. Her actual papers get into this more thoroughly. If you can't find them, try scihub. :)
• Nonviolent does not equal not destroying property nor does it mean obeying the law.
• Her subsequent research has found that this is far from an ironclad rule and sometimes authoritarians remain in power despite folks following this playbook

From the paper quoted by the linked article: "The rule is derived from—and therefore applies to—
only a specific kind of campaign. The movements
on which it was based were maximalist ones, i.e.
overthrowing a government or achieving territorial
independence.They were not reformist in nature, and
they had discrete political outcomes they were trying
to achieve that culminated in the peak mobilization
that I counted. Because of this, we cannot necessarily extrapolate these findings to other kinds of reform or
resistance movements that don’t have the same kinds of goals as those in the NAVCO dataset.." (emphasis mine).

Yes, we need a mass mobilization to resist these fascist fuckheads. But please take on a real understanding of what this research does and doesn't indicate. More importantly, don't use this as an excuse or justification to police the behavior of others.

For our movement to succeed, we need solidarity between all people who oppose this regime and a diversity of tactics is a strength rather than a weakness.