Protest Theatre for the Ruling Class
Why 50501 Protests Fail the Working Class
50501 protestors gathered outside of the Washington capitol building.
Recent actions by liberal groups like 50501 have put an impressive number of people into American streets over the past few weeks. While Cincinnati Socialists encourages all people to militantly and unstintingly voice their opposition to the semi-fascist Trump régime, we are skeptical about the goals and class character of the organizers of these events. The unequivocal lesson of history is that real resistance to state violence, state oppression, and state corruption can only come from the broad masses themselves, and not from the ruling classes, who—no matter how well-intentioned—will never jeopardize their own unity in the name of the people’s liberation.
50501 organizers have a commendable record of mobilizing demonstrators, but their methods amplify the ideas and goals of the rulers, not those of the people. For example, here in Cincinnati, 50501’s rally featured Mayor Aftab Pureval as a key speaker. However, as we have argued, Aftab’s own response to Trump’s Executive tyranny has been largely tepid, symbolic, and inconsequential. Even by the standards of bourgeois democracy, Pureval’s stance on civil rights for immigrants is lackluster. We can, for example, contrast Pureval’s temporizing with the more full-throated and vigorous approach of Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, that of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, or that of Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell. The goal of any people’s movement should be to hold the operatives of the ruling class accountable, not to give them an uncritical platform.
Alongside their cozy relationship with the ruling class, the 50501 “movement” itself is notoriously poorly organized. It brags about its “decentralized” approach, an approach which can seem democratic and open. But as Jo Freeman pointed out in her justly famous essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” informal and loose forms of organization tend to cultivate unaccountable cliques and élites within movements. She writes that
such vested interests will be sustained by the informal structures which exist, and the movement will have no way of determining who shall exercise power within it. If the movement continues deliberately to not select who shall exercise power, it does not thereby abolish power. All it does is abdicate the right to demand that those who do exercise power and influence be responsible for it.
Far from being a means for democratic power, a decentralized organization is usually a stalking horse for lack of accountability and consistency. We agree with the authors of the blog The Luddite, who argue that much of 50501 is constructed on a platform of so-called hashtag activism, which values novelty and excitement over political principle. They write,
In the age of hyperpersonalized algorithmic advertising, the ideal brand is the one that means the right thing to each person. 50501, on its own, means nothing. It is a non-ideological container of inoffensive logistical information. This allows each user to see themselves in it without having to deliberate the issues. What little logistical information it does convey contains artificially-constructed urgency, a classic advertising trick.
The working people of Cincinnati and of the world need a fighting movement, not an advertising campaign. We are all in favor of fun, but a political struggle cannot be conceived of as something like a trip to King’s Island. 50501 could answer some of these critiques by saying what they are for, and not just what they are against. If they are for a new kind of society in which a figure like Trump can never again emerge, we can support them; if they are simply shilling for the Democratic Party, we cannot.
Nor can we approve of the 50501’s fetishistic attachment to pacifism. We do not condemn those who physically defend themselves against state violence. We assert that the people have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary. Again, even bourgeois mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles has correctly said that the Federal state—not the people—is the origin and purveyor of the most egregiously violent acts. Should the people merely stand by and peacefully resist as even more agents of the state are deployed against them? What good is peaceful response to someone breaking into your home and kidnapping your loved ones? What good is a crowd of onlookers if, in broad daylight, they don't act to defend their fellow workers and community members from being disappeared to who knows where? We must move beyond spontaneous, tame, ideologically incoherent movements and predominantly middle-class leadership. We cannot wait as this movement repeats the same mistakes of BLM, Occupy, and so many other co-opted, defanged, and disorganized reactions to state oppression.
As protests erupt in LA and beyond, as ICE and the ruling class apparatus escalates their terror campaign against popular outrage at state oppression, we ask again what solutions 50501 proposes? Will they and their supporters, actually show up? Will they work to mobilize people towards fundamental, systemic change, or merely support returns to (and defenses of) the very structures which have led us here in the first place? What vision does 50501, its organizers, the Democratic Party especially, and countless other ruling class cliques and groupings provide to address the scale of the current crisis and its myriad interconnected atrocities? The Democrats can't even properly grapple with their loss in 2024 and the basic realities of working people, let alone the true nature of Trump, his rise, and how to oppose him.
We say that ICE must be abolished and that the structures which support it must be dismantled. The resources spent on enforcement must be entirely relocated to the people (from whom these resources have been plundered) on a universally free basis to address the true issues destroying working class peoples—all underpinned by the capitalist system baked into the very foundation of this country. We must reclaim power structures and completely refound them on the basic of a workers’ power.
Again, we are pleased with 50501’s mobilization prowess, but we remain doubtful about their goals. 50501 calls to “uphold the Constitution and end Executive overreach” But how can that be done by upholding the very Constitution which enabled, step by step, decade after decade, the consolidation of power in the hands of fewer and fewer people among the ruling class? Shall we uphold the Constitution of Biden or Harris, who continued and expanded the genocide in Palestine? Or go back to Obama, whose régime also facilitated the growth of slaughter in the Middle East and beyond, and who deported millions and killed thousands abroad? Shall we go back to Clinton, and NATO's purposely complete destruction of Yugoslavia and its people? How far back must we go in “defense?” To Jim Crow? To Manifest Destiny? When has this Constitution and Executive actually functioned, consistently and absolutely, on behalf of all working people? How much more ground should we yield, and what of the ground we must claim?
Cincinnati Socialists has no quarrel with individual liberals, and we even accept that individual members of the ruling class can and do often break with their narrow class interests and take the side of the people. However, periodic outbursts organized by the ruling-class opposition cannot on their own lead to freedom. Although the 50501 movement offers us a convenient and politic way to vent our frustrations, and even perhaps a basis for a more vigorous and militant opposition to the Trump régime, sporadic and purely personal self-expression runs the risk of quickly degenerating into apolitical theatrics. At worst, it cultivates a feeling of moral superiority without laying the groundwork for authentic people’s movement. We urge everyone who has attended a 50501 action to continue the fight by joining an independent working-class socialist or Marxist organization, to read and carefully study revolutionary history and theory, and to join with the poor and working class right here in Cincinnati to win a permanent victory against all forms of oppression.