What must we do to succeed?

CHESTERTOWN, MD -- Tufekci’s analysis in Twitter and teargas that the repression of protests is a paradoxical dynamic that can at some points in time allow for the flourishing of the given social movement and can also lead to the government’s assumedly desired result of the social movement dying out quickly (or quicker than it would’ve without repression).

The question of whether "social movements should risk it? Why or why not?" asks a necessary question when thinking about how to organize social movements in the future and what strategies in the repertoire should be utilized in future organizing. In the opinion of this writer, it is not only a good thing but in fact necessary for social movements and would-be revolutions to antagonize the police forces and provoke them into repression. In fact, this author cannot think of a significantly successful social movement that has not (whether intentionally or not) provoked the police forces into brutalizing them. 

On some level, this fact is only true because for a social movement to be sufficiently challenging to the status quo it will always provoke violent retribution by the police forces charged with maintaining that order and status quo by any means necessary.

There are a great and wide variety of successful social movements that have provoked the violence of the state, some of the most notable American social movements are the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, which infamously engaged in a strategy of forcing Americans to reckon with the sheer brutality of police forces in the south when faced with non-violent challenges to their white supremacy and privilege.

Similarly, the South African anti-apartheid movement implemented strategies similar to these to get the international community to heavily sympathize with the plight of the black South African majority. Without the violent repression of the state, and the organizer's intentional provocation of it, there very well may still be an apartheid system in South Africa to this very day, and there may still be some forms of legal segregation within the American south (Meyer, 2021). It must be reckoned with and understood that the violence of the state is only apparent when the state is visibly and physically violent in its repression. While it’s true that this will scare off some few with lesser convictions, the outrageous use of force by the state is almost universally one of the strongest galvanizing forces in regards to the growth of a social movement. 

On a further level the necessity of showing the violence of the system in which protestors and revolutionaries live is necessary in showing the legitimacy of their grievances and their movement’s cause. For example, in El Salvador it came to be that “ to express rage at the arbitrary and brutal violence of authorities was perceived by some campesinos as a necessary expression of being human.” which shows the power that violence gives social movements (Wood). Resistance against unlawful, unnecessary, and illegitimate violence gives movements not only a sense of purpose but the moral superiority necessary to succeed. 

Furthermore, while leaders of these movements may struggle with the real duty of care they have for their activists and the promotion of their goals, which at times involves revealing the brutality of the repressive states that they live under. Without the repression and brutality of the Selma protests, it is doubtful that we would have garnered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or that the bill would be as extensive as it is.

Leaders will neccesarily struggle with the choice, but as we should know as sociaists, there is a real idea that we must (or perhaps, should) draw upon of revolutionary suicide. That idea that you will fight for the revolution even if it means dying at the hands of a uneccesarily even if 'legitmately' violent state. Fred Hampton is a great example of this, imprisoned for feeding the poor and having the 'wrong' kind of ideas around civil rights, his sacrifice and his reovlutionary suicide at the hands of cops shows us that we must be able to sacrifice it all, or a lot of us, if we want our causes to succeed.

While Hampton may no longer have a beating heart due to the machinations of the Hoover FBI and the Chicago Police Department, his words and teachings inspire us to this very day, and in that way he very much lives on in all of us and our hearts.