Nominate most IMPOTENT political protest

[Streathamite]

Third, my nomination for most impotent protest... hmm... I think the guy who kept getting arrested for protesting over 'the right to be naked in public' would get my vote. Anyone come across him? about 4 or 5 years ago? Maybe he got frostbite..

really?? blimey!

 

[Chuck Wilson]

woah woah WOAH hold on a minute there! This is heresy. Your saying that groups like the IWCA might have supported the anti war movement if they had been bigger at the time? I thought there was 0 interest in anything outsied of community politics.

I am quite sure what I said is not heresy and I am not quite sure if you know what heresy is.

My point is this: For those of us who wish to build opposition within the working class communities we ask what the issues are that people want to fight on. From what I have been told and from what I have read the war did not come up as a significant issue in the Mayoral elections on the estates canvassed.

Many individuals in the IWCA supported the marches against the war, I think the Mayoral candidate went on the marches for example. I attended one in Manchester and contributed to the coaches for the national demo.

However the questions is in what circumstance would there more likely to be strikes and walk outs against the war? Where there was a local working class confident through winning local victories and campaigns or where a lot of well meaning folk pitch up and exhort to them that Bush and Blair are the real enemy and that we should be backing the 'resistance' in Iraq.

Outside of the world of gesture politics how do we get from A to B? I think the first answer is the more likely route.



Perhaps you should be thinking again?

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Also, Makepovertyhistorywristbandgeldofery - not only complete rubbish, but actively drew ppl in who might have wandered up to Gleneagles

My nomination, sadly, is also the MPH lah-di-dah bollox this year. Thouroughly co-opted by the Labour Party (even worse than the SWP doing it) and diverted with a big jerk-off gig.
The summit of indulgent jerk-circlism.

The million plus march is there too

The lessons from both, again sadly, is that kick-offs tend to get more coverage. If a million people had gone apeshit who knows what might have happened. If the people at the fancy gig had been on the co-opted march in Edinburgh and the state sanctioned march at Auchterrader (sp?) it would have been better, but if all of them had been there to shut down Gleneagles we could have dunnit.

 

[Azrael]

Has to be the Stop the War marches. Turned out for the big three (or rather, diminishing three) and got well and properly taught the impotence of peaceful protest in isolation. If there'd been strikes/riots/real opposition in parliament it might have been different, but there wasn't.

 

[Japey]

I'd like to nominate the student union/RCP-inspired overnight occupation of Liverpool Polytechnic in 1990. All seemed well and radical until it became apparent that the student union had agreed to pay the heating bill and a figure for overnight rental of Polytechnic property. Nice!

Maybe it's a common tactic, since something very similar happened at my university in 2002. An occupation was organised to protest against a university decision, and it later transpired that the student union had already negotiated concessions from the admin before the occupation happened.
It was just a way to make the union appear radical and a way to bury the campaign by making it appear as if it had won the concessions.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

Protest against Bristol Merchant Venturers' 'Slave Ball': the 'ball' was part of the celebration of 500 years of Bristol's merchantile history which failed to mention the role of the slave trade.

The result of the protest were nine arrests, numerous bruises,the revelation in court that protestors (on beaking into an empty marquee) had helped themselves to canapes (well it got a laugh from the public gallery)...oh and no disruption to the main event.

Louis Mac

 

[X-77]

it is heart-wrenching that the millions + millions that turned out on Feb 15 '03 to show their disgust wasn't enough to stop the corporate warmongers. According to its wiki entry it even made the Guinness Book of Records 2004 as being officially the biggest mass protest movement in history.

As for my nomination, I'd have to agree with the Make Poverty History/Live8 stuff this year, especially on hearing about the VIP area at the Live8 gigs where the champagne flowed all day long - give me strength