What the hell is a protest if it does not disrupt?

A parade

Maybe I phrased it badly but that’s the point I was trying to make the Indian resistance movement that Ghandi was the face of (both the sections he directly lead and the movement as a whole) was far more confrontational and active than the image canonised later by imperial powers of the hunger striking saint reaching freedom for India through moral appeals. Just like Mandela, MLK etc. the real movement was sanitised and laundered to curb future protests.

Demands are the concrete expression of class interest. A movement that refuses to articulate specific objectives is not a political force. It is a cultural festival. Material conditions do not shift because people gather in large numbers. They shift when production halts and when power is directly challenged. To say the citizenry is not in charge of fixing the country is defeatist idealism (a blatantly ridiculous fiction). It surrenders agency to the bourgeoisie. The masses create history but only when they are organized to seize it.

You claim these gatherings are the largest in history yet business continues as usual. Capital flows uninterrupted. The stock market does not tremble at a parade. Where is the general strike? Where is the material cost to the ruling class? Without economic leverage, visibility is meaningless. Western liberal protest culture trains people to believe that moral visibility equals victory. This is a deliberate falsehood designed to protect property relations. History shows that concessions are never granted out of goodwill. They are extracted through force and disruption.

Look at the historical record without the imperialist filter. Gandhi is presented as the saint of nonviolence who shamed the British Empire into leaving. This erases the material reality of the struggle. The British did not leave because of salt marches. They left because the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in 1946 and violent uprisings made the colony too expensive to maintain. The nonviolent narrative is a tool to disarm future movements. The same sanitization happened to Nelson Mandela and the ANC. He is remembered as a peacemaker but he led Umkhonto we Sizwe. The apartheid regime negotiated because they were being bled by armed struggle and mass disruption. They did not negotiate because of moral appeals.

Martin Luther King Jr is held up as the sole face of Black liberation who won through peace. This ignores the material pressure that actually forced legislation. King himself called riots the language of the unheard. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act were passed while American cities were burning. The ruling class conceded rights to pacify the unrest and protect property. The radical elements who advocated for self defense and disruption created the pressure that made the moderates successful. To ignore this is to ignore how power actually works.

These current gatherings are different because they are safe for capital. Police allow them. Businesses prepare for them like weather events. There is no risk to the state. This is why they are parades and not protests. They function as a pressure valve to dissipate revolutionary sentiment. People feel they have acted because they showed up. Their energy is funneled into spectacle rather than organization. This serves the state by preventing the formation of actual revolutionary capacity.

Chairman Mao taught that revolution is not a dinner party. It is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. These events are dinner parties. They may serve as recruiting grounds but calling them protests lies about the nature of struggle. Real action requires risking comfort. It requires disrupting the flow of capital. If there is no cost to the oppressor there is no victory for the oppressed.

Edit: Oh there’s another possible one day “strike” wow. You really should stop being such a pretentious ass and actually try engage with what’s being said.

They are many things fascist isn’t one of them currently. But if they were to be killed by leftwing/communist revolutionaries I would support it yes (if it was planned out well enough to not aid imperialist forces). Nice gotcha attempt though.

Not to mind it’s a ridiculous analogy comparing majorly flawed yet still currently antimperialist leaders to a healthcare CEO (the most predatory kind of private insurance).

Killing someone who put profits before humans to the point they doomed thousands to excruciating slow agonizing death is good actually. In the same way that killing fascists is good.

That totally justifies you coming to rape and pillage the periphery. (Sarcastic)

Death to amerikkka.

The fact that you can’t process a basic argument about institutional continuity yet feel confident calling someone else stupid is wild. Kids were already in cages, detention capacity was already expanded, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security were getting pumped with funding year after year under Obama, you think that had zero relationship to what came after? Infrastructure doesn’t materialize out of thin air just because you discovered the word “fascism” in 2017. Pretending the machinery was harmless until someone you dislike used it more aggressively just makes you look like you have the memory of a goldfish and no object permanence. Or does it only count when white people get hurt?

Certainly an interesting character but one best kept in their village as entertainment as opposed to holding any serious position

Didn’t she tell the Irish they don’t know what it’s like to have their country partitioned?

You are stupid and you are wrong. Just to preempt it because I know it’s coming: this is not an ad hominem. You’re not wrong because you’re stupid, you just happen to be both.

Who do you think laid the foundations for the ICE Gestapo? Was it perhaps the “Deporter-in-Chief” and his party, who repeatedly approved massive funding increases, expanded detention capacity, normalized local–federal cooperation, and stifled every serious attempt to dismantle the apparatus once it existed?

Hillary bragging about deportation numbers isn’t some abstract endorsement of “targeted and humane” enforcement. She’s boasting about participation in a system that already relied on mass detention, racial profiling, family separation through removal, and routine due-process abuse. The only difference is that under Obama and Clinton it was wrapped in technocratic language and better PR.

Your chauvinist ass is treating racially targeted state violence as acceptable so long as it’s quiet, bureaucratic, and doesn’t visibly impact white citizens or comfortable middle-class communities. Obama-era deportations didn’t feel like “Gestapo tactics” to you because they were overwhelmingly inflicted on undocumented and non-white migrants, out of sight and off camera. Raids, cages, deportation flights, and shattered families were already happening. You just didn’t care, because it wasn’t framed as a crisis for white Americans.

It’s peak liberal chauvinism. Migrant lives are disposable, but the moment enforcement becomes louder or uglier, suddenly it’s a problem.

Also it is objectively, morally and in every other conceivable way correct to hate the Clinton’s, Obama, the Bushes and Reagan alongside basically every high level American politician. They are a cabal of pedophiles who have immiserated the world on an industrial scale for decades.

No capital isn’t a ghost with a name tag, it’s a material social relation: ownership of production, control of investment, wage labor, and the institutions built to defend them. That’s why elected officials who threaten profits immediately face capital flight, media attacks, legal sabotage, and economic strangulation, among other attacks, regardless of their intentions. You keep reducing structural power to personalities because liberalism can’t think past individuals.

Again I beg read Lenin and Chairman Mao, looks into what was done to Aellende Sankara and Lumumba. Until you understand that class power determines the state (not vibes and ballots) you’re just repeating liberal talking points and it’s not worth continuing this.

Of course the state is made up of people, but those people operate inside a pre-existing system of property, law, coercion, and institutions. That system doesn’t change just because you swap officeholders. Under capitalism, the courts defend private property, the police protect capital, the media belongs to capital, and the economy is owned by capital. Anyone entering that structure is forced to govern within those limits. That’s why workers can vote forever and still remain exploited.

You keep saying “just put different people in charge,” but history shows what happens when elected governments seriously threaten capitalist ownership: capital flees, investment stops, media turns hostile, courts obstruct, and imperialist pressure mounts until the project is neutralized or overthrown. That’s not theory, that’s how bourgeois power has observably functioned from its inception . Liberal democracy allows rotation of managers, not transfer of class power.

You’re also reversing cause and effect. Democracy doesn’t shape class relations, class relations shape democracy. As long as private ownership of production exists, the state exists to defend it. That’s why bourgeois democracy always resolves crises in favor of capital. It’s structurally designed to.

Real change only begins when exploitative property relations are abolished and the old coercive apparatus is broken and rebuilt to serve the working masses. That’s when democracy stops being a shell and becomes material, because the people control production, not just ballots.

I beg you to please read Lenin, and Chairman Mao you don’t understand what you’re talking about and they have far more extensive writing on this than I can fit into a debate with you on a message board.

You’re still wrong. “Democracy” is not some floating, neutral mechanism that anyone can simply take over. It exists inside a state, and every state has a class character. Under capitalism, democracy operates through bourgeois property relations, bourgeois courts, bourgeois media, and bourgeois control of production. That means capital rules no matter who you vote for. Workers cannot vote away private ownership of the means of production. That’s why Marxists call it the dictatorship of capital.

Saying “just put someone else in charge” ignores how power actually works. The bourgeoisie doesn’t politely surrender its property because a ballot box asked nicely. Socialist democracy only becomes possible after that class power is broken, after bourgeois ownership is abolished and exploiters are politically suppressed. That’s not “using the same tool differently.” That’s a different state, serving a different class.

And no, democracy doesn’t magically “free” you by itself. Liberation comes from class struggle. When new bourgeois elements emerge under socialism, they are suppressed, because socialism is an ongoing process of preventing capitalist restoration, not a one-time electoral event. You’re treating democracy as primary and class power as secondary. The opposite is true.

You’re treating democracy as class-neutral. That’s wrong. There is no abstract “democracy” floating above society, every democracy expresses class power. Liberal democracy is the dictatorship of capital: private ownership, capital controls media and institutions, and workers can vote forever without ever voting away exploitation. Socialist democracy is the dictatorship of the proletariat: bourgeois property is abolished, exploiters are politically suppressed, and the working class holds state power. Same word, different class rule. Not “the same hammer used differently,” but qualitatively different systems.

And your “what if someone exploits it again?” question just proves the point. Yes, class struggle continues under socialism. When new bourgeois elements emerge, you suppress them. That’s exactly what proletarian dictatorship exists for. Socialism isn’t a one-time constitutional tweak; it’s an ongoing process of fighting capitalist restoration.

You should really read Chairman Mao and Lenin.

A wrought iron sledge hammer and a plastic toy hammer are both hammers yet they are qualitatively different. Liberal democracy and Socialist democracy are both a democracy yet are qualitatively different.