As I have written about protests, the ones that we have heard about were the successful ones. This is not the most common outcome for a protest, depending on how large a resistance gets before something is defined as a protest, 80 to 99 percent of protests fail. Now depending on your personal political ideologies, this can be a good or bad thing. However, sometimes when protests fail, they do much more damage to a movement that any could possibly dream of.

In any modern economics class, one phenomenon that most likely will be discussed is the rapidly increasing wage divide between the highest and lowest learners. Additionally, most of these classes will be accompanied by a graph like this:

Or this:

Who caused this problem, where the blame lies, and whether it is a real issue or not can all be argued but one of the major cause of this wealth divide is the decline of union membership that started in 1968. The power unions give workers are inarguable, as we can see in modern day auto manufacturers, where aggressive unions are found, higher wages come with them. The US decline in union membership was mainly because of one failed strike by the air traffic controllers union. Public opinion is the biggest control that the public as a whole has on politicians, whatever the general populace lets politicians get away with, they will, and in 1968 public opinion for union membership had fallen. This wasn’t because the public suddenly started hating collective organization for no reason, it was also the result of a calculated information campaign. This didn’t change the outcome of what happened however.

The PATCO or Pacific Air Traffic Controllers Organization, was the official union of air traffic controllers. They controlled the labor forces of several major airports across the seaboard, and in 1980 they ordered a strike in order to increase their pay and to demand safer working conditions. Sadly that didn’t happen, instead it resulted in the most severe crackdown on union membership in US history. The strike lasted for 2 weeks before Ronald Reagan and his administration harshly stepped in. In union culture, the act of walking over the picket line or going back to work during a strike is referred too as scabbing. When Reagan broke the strike he went much further than just hiring scabs, he used a section of federal code that stated that federal employees are forbidden from striking to fire the entire 11,000 striking workforce and hire replacements. This destabilized union cultures across the united states, as the lack of public blow back from his action, accompanied by the implicit statement that this was allowed, incentivized corporations across the the US to bring in scabs to break strikes. From a companies standpoint, this is the best option, as the non-unionized workers can often be paid less and work more than unionized workers. The story of the PATCO strike and the subsequent lack of public resentment for the actions, permanently harmed the rates of union membership in the US.

Mutual aid may not be the form of protest that first comes to mind when the ideas of protest are invoked. In the US especially, protest tends to evoke ideas of riots or marches, typically consisting of chants and signs that most people have become numb too at this point. However, that is not the only form of protest that exists. Mutual aid was first laid out in principle by sociobiologist Perter Kropotkin, who argued that social cooperation was the first major evolution that allowed for the human race to experience the success that it has had today. His influential book “Mutual Aid” was highly influential in challenging the common ideas of social Darwinism, a mostly British political movement that argued for gutting welfare in order to have those who were the most “genetically superior” rise to the top of society. The radical idea of Mutual Aid was that humanity is strongest not when we are the most independently successful, but when we are willingly dependent upon each other. Independent of any other social ideals or movements this is not a particularity inherently radical idea, however, as modern liberalism has arisen within the United Sates, the highly individualistic politics and philosophy have been massively challenged by Mutual Aid movements around the United States.

The movement for Mutual Aid groups first arose within the United States through a pro Black organization called the Black Panthers. This group included many noted activists such as Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, and Angela Davis. This groups focus was on creating pro Black sentiment within the Black community, first within Califorina but then slowly throughout the entirety of the US. One of the large organizational components that allowed for the sweeping success of the movement was the free breakfast program, where the Panthers would serve free meals for the community. This created a community of people that made friends and found family around the meals the Panthers served. This challenged the US government and acted as a protest by adressing a failure that the US government has made. The community forming effects of these meals were what powered the Balck Panthers as all the other actions they took, such as more formal protests, reading programs, and other community work were made more efficient by the members of the community having built relationships with each other in a more informal manner before hand. After all, the main purposes of a protest are to intimidate legislators into enacting change, and this program worked just as well. It is why schools today have free breakfast programs across the country, a legacy that the Panthers have left even today. Modern movements have followed the Panthers blueprint, such as food not bombs and many other less famous organizations throughout the world. Mutual Aid protests run counter to many peoples preconception of a protest, and that is precisely what allows them to be as powerful as they are. In the modern day, Mutual aid is a large portion of how anti-war and anti-policing movements originate, given that they are much lower risk for those who may participate.

The Occupy movement was a socio-political movement modeled after the Arab Spring that existed in some form another form 2009 to to today. The first heartbeats of the movement came from the success of the Arab Spring, a movement I have already touched upon but in short was the first effective protest that was mostly organized through the internet. This protest first made its was to the US through students at the University of California. They occupied multiple campus buildings in order to protest the budget cuts, staff cutbacks, and tuition hikes that were severely impacting on campus activity. Little would these initial organizations know the impact this would have. The basic model of making administrative functions impossible by occupying the buildings that the functions occurred was a powerful method of resistance. The protestors drew some inspiration from the sitins of the 1960 Civil rights movements as well, as the protests were famous not only for their ability to affect movement but also for the ability of movements to last for extended periods of time. Additionally the occupy movements saw success through the sponsorship of different online anti-authoritarian movements such as Anonymous, a group of masked hackers, who benefited form being the only really known hacktivist group of the time. The different Occupy movements all had different demands of the administrations they rallied against, but it was a worldwide movement, especially across countries such as the UK, Austrialia, and mostly the US.

The Occupy movements were held together in structure mostly through the shared anti- 1% ideologies, the majority of Occupy protests were placed at the feet of banking or governmental systems. It was through this shared collective consciousness that the slogan “we are the 99%” grew to represent the movements main demands. Now what those specific demands were, really varied.

Small protests in rural areas such as Bennington Vermont pressed for things like the removal of certain banks or change of certain political institutions, while larger protests such as the most famous “Occupy Wall Street” argued for more sweeping changes, such as the destruction of the federal banking system, or the restitution of large amounts of money from the 1% back to the 99%. It may seem from an outside perspective that this protest was not that organized. You would be correct. The occupy movement became so successful and failed in equal parts from its lack of central organization. As police around the country began to crack down on the Occupy protests, many protests folded quickly. With people dispersing quickly. However to call the Occupy protests a complete failure could not be further from the truth. The protests assisted in the larger class consciousness that some people have today where the phrase “the 1%” immediately is recognizable. Additionally, almost every protest movement since occupy can trace its organizational structures to the failures that were learned from the Occupy movement.

Upfront I would like to address the traumatic nature of the topic I will be covering this week, in light of the two self immolation’s that have occurred this week in reference to the siege upon Gaza, I really wanted to dive further into the history and modern context that surrounds the act of setting ones body on fire for the sake of protest. (For obvious reasons I am not going to attach an image to this weeks blog. I hope you can understand why)

Aaron Bushnell was a 25 year old air force airmen who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. on February 25th 2024, who died while screaming Free Palestine. He is not the first person to have set himself on fire in protest of the violent acts that Israel is committing in Gaza, nor is he the first person to have set himself on fire in Washington. Self immolation has a history going back over 500 years, as many people, especially monks have used this a method of protest against regimes but a more modern history of this act begins around the inception of TV and the war in Vietnam. There are two self immolation’s that are arguably the most famous in history. The burning of Thich Quang Duc in a crowded public street to protest the unfair treatment of Buddhists in south Vietnam was the first act that gained mainstream notoriety, additionally it received a second resurgence in notoriety after after it became the album art for the Left leaning band “Rage Against the Machine.” This first act of self immolation was effectively used to convey to western audiences the true brutality of the discrimination and was the moment many protesters cite as when they began to disagree with the war in Vietnam.

The usage of immolation to provoke sentiment and awareness for the harsh realities of a war or situation also become clear when looking at the other infamous self immolation. The suicide by fire of Mohamed Bouazizi is often cited as the genesis for the 2010 Arab Spring, where his immolation set of protests for political liberation across Tunisia and the majority of Egypt and other countries around them. The images of his death acted as a mobilizing call where many Arab workers identified with his struggle and through the use of existing community support networks mobilized to not let his death be in vein. What is important to note however, is that not all immolation’s change the world. They are really only politically effective when accompanied by effective community organization that occurs as a precursor to the event. As an example of one that was less effective, Colorado climate protestor Wynn Alan Bruce, set himself on fire on the steps of the supreme court to protest the weakening of the EPA by the court. His death had much less of an effect than that of Mohamed Bouazizi  because he was not connected with other political organizations that could use his death as a motivating factor. What kind of death will Aaron Bushnell’s be, we can only wait to see.