Reply #43: Right, but think about that.

[LoZoccolo]

The post you made before this one actually didn't mention civil disobedience, but protests, which I think are working, and have drawn the support of bigger groups such as unions; I would say that that is working.

However, when you are a group that is 99%, protesting against the 1%, I don't see how stopping traffic is going to win you the consensus of people you claim to support. If this were a group of people who were 10% trying to win fair treatment from 90%, you could say "well, they don't have an incentive to treat us fairly now, so we'll give them a disincentive to treating us unfairly" and I could see how that would work. But here you have people disrupting a group of people who should overwhelmingly be on their side, and - this is important - are coming over to their side more and more. If the movement represents 99% of people, you'll likely be disrupting more of the 99% than the 1% by doing this.

P.S. I was in the March 2003 march on Lake Shore Drive against the second Iraq War that disrupted traffic.

Honestly, I look at this and think:

1. This could be COINTELPRO-style disruption of a movement that is now effectively gaining consensus with the current strategy or...
2. A more radical group, perhaps from the authoritarian left or vanguardist left, which doesn't have that consensus for it's own strategies, and is perhaps giving up on getting it, or maybe never cared much for getting widespread consensus anyways.

These two things have also historically happened to protest movements. It may be different this time, but you might want to convince the people who know about these other two tendencies that it is different this time.