If blocking traffic, burning tyres, mass protests, and sporadic acts of violence against security forces were sufficient to topple a government, there would be no government left in the Western world. These kinds of things can occur regularly over the most trivial matters. Even a football match can lead to a riot.
Furthermore, places like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia see huge demonstrations, burning of cars, street clashes with the police, and so one; and no one is naive enough to call this “revolution”.
In the US and Europe, “Black Bloc” anarchists will often break windows and damage corporate property during street protests, and this has very little impact on derailing the capitalist system.
I am not saying that these tactics do not have the potential to overthrow an illegitimate system of authority; of course they do. But the difference between random acts of defiance and mayhem and genuine revolutionary action is persistence.
Revolution is not a spontaneous event, it is a sustained process; just as oppression and exploitation are not events, they are daily processes that go on year after year.
It may seem ironic, but system disruption can only be effective if it is undertaken systematically. You cannot give the system time to recover.
It always struck me as a peculiar method of the opposition that they would announce a particular date for mobilization; trying to rally people for action on this or that anniversary of this or that revolutionary event.
I understand the usefulness for the party leaders to take this approach; the turnout for such events is a way to gauge their influence, and possibly to pump up the morale of their party members. But such an approach is all but worthless in terms of revolutionary effectiveness.
Revolutionary action must be undertaken daily, or nightly; it must be continuous, not sporadic. If undertaken with this kind of persistence, even the smallest acts of disruption can become unbearable for the power structure.
If you break a widow today, break its replacement tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. If you block a commercial road in or out of a warehouse or distribution center this week, do it again next week.
This is why revolutionary tactics need to be tactics which can, in fact, be sustained. Mass protests can’t be. Armed attacks on the police and army can’t be. Low-scale disruption by small teams of revolutionaries can be; and by their choice of targets and by their persistence, they can multiply their impact tremendously.
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