Is There Any Point to Protesting?
... In âInventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Workâ (Verso), a book published in 2015, then updated and reissued this past year for reasons likely to be clear to anyone who has opened a newspaper, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams question the power of marches, protests, and other acts of what they call âfolk politics.â These methods, they say, are more habit than solution. Protest is too fleeting. It ignores the structural nature of problems in a modern world. âThe folk-political injunction is to reduce complexity down to a human scale,â they write. This impulse promotes authenticity-mongering, reasoning through individual stories (also a journalistic tic), and a general inability to think systemically about change. In the immediate sense, a movement such as Occupy wilted because police in riot gear chased protesters out of their spaces. But, really, the authors insist, its methods sank it from the start by channelling the righteous sentiments of those involved over the mechanisms of real progress....
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/is-there-any-point-to-protesting
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