Taking it to the streets

Tim Blair links to a meditation by Melbourne's Rosa Luxembourg, Jill Sparrow, on the waning effectiveness of street demonstrations. Even Jill gets it now: she realizes that 'demos' are so patently ineffectual that they actually function as a badge of failure on whatever cause they espouse.

As should be apparent to anyone, street demonstrations in a modern, western capitalist democracy have about as much to do with any kind of authentic political will, or mass movement, as a Civil War re-enactment has to do the Civil War. Rather less, in fact.

As the political philosopher Guy Debord observed some decades ago (in the high summer of street protest, as it happened), supposedly spontaneous, revolutionary gestures such as the street protest suffer an almost immediate petrifaction by repetition. The first time, it's a gesture - the second time, it's a piece of theatre, a re-enactment, a spectacle.