The End of Protest

You are needed

You may long for the protest to end all protests, a final revolution that eradicates injustice and transforms society. You dream of a better world in which protest is no longer necessary. You wish to make protest effective so that the ideals you hold become manifest. For you the end of protest is a consummation of activism, the completion of your work and objective of your struggle. You understand that the end of protest is in itself revolution.
 
This book will offer you tools for hastening social transformation. Recognizing that protest is one tool among many for creating social change, grab what works and discard the rest.
 
And if you are threatened by revolution, fearing or disdaining movements like Occupy, and you ve come to this book from a desire to end protest to foreclose dissent know that this book is for you, too. Uprisings always need people who convert to the cause from positions of power: police who switch sides, insiders who become whistleblowers, and politicians who heed the people s demands. You may oppose us today but you will join us tomorrow. Our movement is even stronger when it includes the converted, who understand the errors of the old world because they embodied them.
 
You may be skeptical of those who take to the streets, considering them reckless. They seem to have nothing to lose, and you have worked so hard to achieve your position, wealth and prestige. You may not sympathize with their anger. You may believe that good society ought to have few disruptions. True, many aspects of upheaval are unpleasant. Revolutions are sometimes violent and always have unintended consequences. In a society such as ours, writes Herbert Marcuse, a leading twentieth-century social theorist and philosopher, in which pacification has been achieved up to a certain point, it appears crazy at first to want revolution. For we have whatever we want. He continues with a prescription: [T]he aim hereis to transform the will itself,