Peaceful protests provide an entry point for more placid and naive activists to gather and organize. Because these events are often over-policed, despite their peaceful nature, and because they can host radical speakers who would not otherwise have an opportunity to reach a large crowd, they can be a radicalizing experience.

People who are more eager to engage radically can then find and organize into more aggressive activist groups, which can work to reach out to larger communities and provide real material benefits (civil protection, poverty relief, disruption of predatory institutions). Then they can advertise the peaceful groups as an opportunity for the beneficiaries of these actions to join the movement without exposing themselves to a high degree of risk or liability.

[–] rbos@lemmy.ca 17 points 2 weeks ago

Non violence is a tactic to be deployed alongside other tactics. It needs to be made abundantly clear to authorities that they can do it the easy way, or the hard way. A credible threat is a necessary part of any meaningful push for change.

[–] notabot@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago

Non-violent protests are good ways to bring people together, but they don't achieve much because whoever's planning them sticks to the same tried, tested, and minimally effective playbook each time.

Instead, imagine instead of a protest of, say, 1000 people, have 10 simultaneous protests of 100 people at key, public, locations. Now people who aren't involved, instead of seeing one big, noisy, "scary" protest, see you everywhere but in more approachable numbers. You also spread the inevitable police response very thin, and make it easier to disperse and reassemble should things get risky.

If you don't mind being a little more confrontational, gum up key businesses in creative ways. Have 100 people go into, say, a Walmart in small groups and rearrange the good on the shelves so noone can find anything, but the staff can't fix it because new groups keep messing things up more. Have each person send a particular business a letter telling them how much the business is on the wrong side of history, oh and, P.S. at least one of the letters you're receiving contains a request you must legally respond to (a GDPR or FOIA request maybe). Yes, sorting these sorts of things out falls on the staff of the business, who probably don't personally deserve it, but it means they can't carry out their normal job of making the company money.

It's late, but I feel sure that there are plenty of other "non-violent" ways to harass and degrade the systems that support "the system", and that seems the surest way to make it change.

The nice thing about capitalism is that the persuit of profit makes for an understandable, and manipulable, opponent. Change the equasion so that the current course isn't as profitable as another, and businesses will pivot towards the highest (typically short term) return strategy. We've already seen that with businesses changing from pretending to be progressive to groveling to the orange one because it was expedient. Actually threaten their profits and you have leverage.