Rob Ford and the Efficacy of Mass Protest

Toronto's new mayor took the oath of office yesterday. I was originally going to attend some inaugural anti-Ford protests, but in the end decided not to. The main reason was likely going to bed too late the night before and opting to sleep in. But the deeper reason was that my reading of Death of the Liberal Class had left me feeling momentarily skeptical about the effectiveness of mass protest as a means of fighting bourgeois policies.

40-50 years ago, the protest as a form of mass resistance was still able to send a chill down the spine of the elite. They remembered the agitation of workers in the 1930s and feared the power of a mobilized working class. We saw the effect of mass protest in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the eventual American withdrawal from Vietnam. But the elites learned from their experience during the counterculture, and in the decades that followed, as media ownership was concentrated more and more in the hands of a few vast conglomerates, the corporate interests that owned the press learned that it was relatively easy to ignore or ridicule popular movements if they interfered with elite goals. The worldwide 2002 protests against the impending invasion of Iraq were the largest organized protest in human history, yet failed to prevent the Bush administration's rush to war. The election of Barack Obama largely neutralized the American anti-war movement, although as casualties continue to mount in Afghanistan a more concerted push from below may take shape again.

Chris Hedges' pessimistic take on protest should not be mistaken for a disinclination to use it. Rather, his glass half-empty view is predicated on a sober, honest assessment of working class strength today and is part of a larger argument advocating resistance for its own sake. Nevertheless, it was the more superficial version of this lesson that I used to justify my decision to sleep through Rob Ford's inauguration.

Ultimately, this protest in particular was a great example of protest for its own sake, because there was literally no chance it was going to affect anything on this day - other than, of course, further raising public awareness of Ford's reactionary nature. But it was never as if the new mayor was going to see people protesting what for him was the high point of his career and immediately decide to renounce the new office.

I'm all for new subway lines, and while critics of his idea to literally sweep the homeless off the street in winter have some merit in describing the tactic as "fascistic", preventing Toronto's homeless from freezing to death on sewer grates does have its merits, no? But in my view, the main danger from Ford has always been severe cuts to social services under the guise of Stopping The Gravy Train - that, and the assumption that as a right-wing faux-populist he would more ruthlessly execute the agenda of Big Business than any of his competitors. Right now Ford is still a lively, bubbling novelty, a living caricature as good for entertainment value as anything. Time will tell exactly how concerned we should be, but regardless of who holds the mayor's seat, our immediate task and central focus is organizing the workers, the poor and unemployed of Toronto to fight for their own interests.