Taking action to directly effect the thing rather than convince others is called “direct action.” Liberals tend to conflate this with protests.
Causing capitalists financial stress is valid and can be a form of direct action. You’re making the economic incentives of doing awful things weaker relative to not doing awful things, and if the cost of doing awful things gets high enough capitalists will tend to not do the specific awful things that cost too much. This can also be useful when the state is acting on the behalf of capitalists, but is not useful for resisting fascism because the awful things is the goal in and of itself.
Massive protests didn’t do anything to stop Trump’s ICE raids, but one guy attacking vehicles completely stopped ICE for months and derailed their entire plans. This is the difference between protest and direct action. Protest seeks to cause those in power to change their decisions. Direct action seeks to make their decisions irrelevant by making their course of action impossible. Direct action takes far fewer people to be effective, but those fewer people take much more risk. Today forest defenders resisting cop city are another example. Both Willem and Tortuga died taking direct action, and both had a huge impact.
An example with less risk was when SPD asked for pictures of houseless encampments and people flooded them with pictures of tents from REI. That was direct action in that it made the data impossible to process and while also being relatively low risk.
Direct action may be illegal, but it doesn’t have to be. Strikes are another example of direct action, as are boycotts.
Taking action to directly effect the thing rather than convince others is called “direct action.” Liberals tend to conflate this with protests.
Causing capitalists financial stress is valid and can be a form of direct action. You’re making the economic incentives of doing awful things weaker relative to not doing awful things, and if the cost of doing awful things gets high enough capitalists will tend to not do the specific awful things that cost too much. This can also be useful when the state is acting on the behalf of capitalists, but is not useful for resisting fascism because the awful things is the goal in and of itself.
Massive protests didn’t do anything to stop Trump’s ICE raids, but one guy attacking vehicles completely stopped ICE for months and derailed their entire plans. This is the difference between protest and direct action. Protest seeks to cause those in power to change their decisions. Direct action seeks to make their decisions irrelevant by making their course of action impossible. Direct action takes far fewer people to be effective, but those fewer people take much more risk. Today forest defenders resisting cop city are another example. Both Willem and Tortuga died taking direct action, and both had a huge impact.
An example with less risk was when SPD asked for pictures of houseless encampments and people flooded them with pictures of tents from REI. That was direct action in that it made the data impossible to process and while also being relatively low risk.
Direct action may be illegal, but it doesn’t have to be. Strikes are another example of direct action, as are boycotts.