The Politics of Protest: Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence

 By Jerome Skolnick
(New York University Press, 2010)
Reviewed by Ernesto Aguilar

So the story goes, the original edition of The Politics of Protest was in fact a report commissioned by the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration in 1968. That year, Johnson created the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Its purpose was to explore the reasons for insurrectionary activism in the United States and ways of reducing it. Students of history will recall the United States was embroiled in a war, internal crises on issues of race, voting rights and equality.

Compiled in seven months of studying various social justice struggles, The Politics of Protest as a report became a guide of sorts for law enforcement. During this period of rebellions happening across the United States, police and lawmakers were seeking, frankly, to get the same answers they got from the Harlem and Kerner Commissions years before. Publishers contextualize a reissue of the report in this book as a means of understanding anti-globalization organizing, resurgent Black liberation activism and radical environmentalism. Skolnick goes so far as to state such explicitly in the new introduction. For those who are the ostensible targets of such field research by police, The Politics of Protest is nevertheless instructive in terms of messaging and political strategy.

Beyond their politics, India’s Naxalites receive a fair bit of criticism for wholesale rejection of construction and other development projects in poor communities. The Naxals, more than their North American counterparts it seems, long understood that when one’s struggle becomes about prosperity and opportunity, a state need only pitch a few sacks of money at people to extinguish the revolutionary fires within. The Politics of Protest artfully deconstructs community rage, outlining reasons people participated in rebellions during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era. The damage to the public trust done by law enforcement groups, some founded as hybrid unions and lobbying groups for benefits, as carrying forward the political sentiments of cops, is also described. But, most tellingly, The Politics of Protest examines why people gravitate to radical activism and, indirectly for interested radical organizers in particular, what sorts of things can states do to turn aspiring revolutionaries into more reform-minded political advocates.

States shockingly have to do very little to win over large numbers of people, either in terms of capital, political or ethical investments. A jobs program. Social welfare initiatives. National planning that assumes the superiority of a particular political system that should remain, in spite of generations of failures. For organizers, Skolnick’s findings — redress of social grievances, de-emphasis of control mechanisms, rebellions are not simply expressions of rage but intrinsically political expressions of collective protest — are a primer on political ideology and approach. Even the most radical of movements demanded base needs be met. Most implicitly focused calls on changes to a system in favor of administration in a different fashion, but in character left in its current form. While The Politics of Protest concerns itself largely with protest phenomena such as riots, Skolnick acknowledges something that comes as no surprise to activists: uprisings are not isolated or simply the work of ruffians. They are, to quote the Last Poets, “a dress rehearsal for things yet to come.” (“Black Soldier”). How to respond when the state responds not with the iron fist but the velvet glove, however, remains a tantalizing question left to be resolved.