Hi, I'm here to announce that everyone pushing the standard Hexbear party line on the protest movement is a loser and wrong. I already know the weak-ass arguments you're gonna make and every single one of them reveals your disconnection from any actual organizing. Let's go through them one by one. If you have another that you think Marx Failed to Consider, please bring it up and I will explain how you are wrong in that way as well.
This was funded by the Waltons
No, one Walton bought an ad in the NYT. Who fucking cares? It has no material bearing on the movement whatsoever. There's no organization money is being funneled to other than the Democratic Party and Indivisble, which is not different in any way. The on-the-ground organizers in most cities and towns are not receiving a penny from the left's George Soros conspiracy. They're just normal people (and, to the next point, lots of leftists).
The Democrats are using this to steal the leftist energy of the masses
The Democrats certainly want to do that, but on the ground reports indicate they are losing all over the country. That's because leftists (especially 
) are not leaving this space uncontested. I have spent an enormous amount of time putting in the work to earn the trust and legitimacy necessary to place a bunch of literal revolutionary communists in the leadership of the local movement. Not in some sneaky, behind the scenes way, but out in the open, succeeding specifically because we are literal revolutionary communists who never shut up about it. The Democrats, by my accounting, are losing the struggle in more places than not. If you refuse to engage because you're afraid the Dems will suck your leftist soul, you're just conceding the struggle and granting them victory. They don't co-opt by pressing a button, they co-opt because they have the resources to take leadership and then defuse. So far they have failed to do so specifically because the space is not empty and the communists are fighting harder to reach the masses (since we actually have an appealing program).
The attendees are all Kamala-loving liberals who just want to go back to brunch
If you had ever bothered to go to one of these events and talk politics to people, you'll discover a very broad array of political perspectives, including a strong trend towards explicit support for socialism. Yes, of course, the PMC bug-eating libs are there - who cares? They are by no means the only attendees. Maybe you're just Too Cool to be around someone who reminds you of your mom, but the rest of us are finding deep political discontent and activating it. When one of my comrades gets on the mic and says "we need to break from the democrats and do a literal socialist revolution", the crowd response, by and large, is incredibly positive. The retired dentists and accountants in the crowd grumble and whine, but they are a minority - and they don't leave. They stay and listen to the arguments we make. They say things like "you're right, I just don't think it's possible". They very, very rarely say "you're going too far".
This is a disorganized mess that's going to fizzle out
50501 and other decentralized spontaneous protest movements never last, but they do give an opportunity for dedicated political organizers to intervene on a stage where thousands of disaffected liberals and Democrat voters are asking "what is to be done?". If you decide not to show up and answer that question, the Democrat machine will coordinate the demobilization of this movement. If you do show up and you deliver the political argument you believe in. If you show up with the AV equipment, safety marshalls, march route, signs, and speaker list - the bare minimum for a halfway serious organizer - then you don't just hand out flyers and talk at a table but set the entire political line of the event. And in doing so, you demonstrate the leadership of the socialist movement and win a lot of those attendees to your side. If you can plug them into actual organizing work, you can bring them into permanent political motion. Does it matter if 95% of these people just go home and never bother to do anything besides another protest? If those 5% join the movement in a meaningful way, that's half a million new comrades.
Mao says: "All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail."
Stop thinking about what you want to do and achieve and start thinking about the fact that we needs tens of millions of people to support revolutionary socialism in the US in order to get anything done. They are out in the streets begging for you to explain this to them.
These are just peaceful protests that won't achieve anything because they aren't revolutionary.
Lenin says: "What grounds are there for assuming that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must employ only revolutionary methods? There are none at all. The assumption is a pure fallacy; this can be proved by purely theoretical propositions if we stick to Marxism. The experience of our revolution also shows that it is a fallacy. From the theoretical point of view—foolish things are done in time of revolution just as at any other time, said Engels, and he was right. We must try to do as few foolish things as possible, and rectify those that are done as quickly as possible, and we must, as soberly as we can, estimate which problems can be solved by revolutionary methods at any given time and which cannot."
You're doing the ultra-leftism of conflating tactics with strategy. Our tactic in this moment is to intervene in these protests to convince people of the necessity of a revolutionary socialist political organization as the only solution to our sick society. Right now, mass revolutionary socialist consciousness and organization does not exist in the USA. Therefore, it is impossible to carry out open revolutionary militancy. If the current crop of people who are in some way directly involved in revolutionary socialist organizing (certainly a lower bar than revolutionary guerrilla warfare or sabotage) turned today to armed struggle, all ~100,000 of them would lose. The broader periphery of people who semi-passively support that objective through attendance at events and monetary contribution is probably a few million. The masses who would passively support probably number in the tens of millions, but that passive support is not particularly useful. And the number of people who would simply sit by and watch it happen is probably over 100 million. Every one of those groups needs to be elevated to the next stage - observer to passive supporter, passive supporter to semi-passive periphery, semi-passive periphery to revolutionary organizer, revolutionary organizer to doing the literal revolution. Each of these layers of the movement have a symbiotic relationship with the others that strengthen the entire struggle.
Here's the key lesson: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE TO WIN VIOLENT STRUGGLE AND YOU NEED TO GO WHERE THE MASSES ARE TO RALLY THEM TO OUR CAUSE.
Amerikkkans will never do a revolution because they are labor aristokkkrauts
Ok, thank you for you contribution, you can resume sitting in a hole since your prescription is inactivity.
Please tell me your other weak-ass reasons why you're correct to sit on your ass.
These protests are liberal-led exercises in false catharsis that people go to to feel good. Imperialists feeling good is not a valuable thing. Feel free to use them to agitate, but the protests themselves are mostly downside, they're about sheepdogging for Dems (hence no demands or longitudinal point to them except being anti-Trump). Just like the Dobbs protests that had no point other than going, "vote Democrat" and feeling false catharsis.
The average person thinks this is the height of political activity. This will literally be the most they have ever done, politically. Getting a taste of something non-electoral is good, but set expectations for follow-up low, like in the basement. Positive views of socialism? They think Bernie Sanders and Norway are socialism. They like imperialist social democrats and finding Democratic ghouls to praise. They are liberals, albeit with disorganized and confused ideas.
"Sit on your ass" is not the only alternative to attending a liberal cop-friendly march. There are often simultaneous protests that do direct action and plenty of other work to be done in developing organizations. If there isn't a simultaneous protest, you can organize one. The people sick of performative liberalism aren't at the "No Kings" protest, but they will go to your action if you develop relationships.
Re: the masses, you go to them where they are, not simply attending a liberal protest. Embedding with the masses means you live in community, develop relationships, and understand what they care about. A good job of this becomes dialectical. As a consequence, you can identify what will motivate your community, which is not something you will learn from a survey, let alone talking to a few peopls at a pro-cop liberal march. There, you will only learn the surface-level regurgitation of reasoning handed out by media personalities and memes. Embedding takes months to years, not a day. It requires learning the deeper issues and motivations, ones that the masses may not be aware of or may not think of as, "political".
Finally, you do need to contend with the reality of "the masses"' social relations to production and imperialism. As socialists in small organizations, we cannot try to organize every community, practically speaking. If you're not thinking about who you are trying to reach, you will make serious mistakes. Like thinking the white boomers that will be dead in a decade are how you will understand the masses and build from there. Because they are overrepresented at these things. Our organizations are so small, we need to focus on building where we think there is most opportunity, and to do experiments in organizing there, and evaluating how correct we were. Can you organize and educate (and learn from) your local lumpens working service jobs? Wouldn't it be silly to ignore them to focus on the opinions of a soon retiring middle manager at a non-profit? Again, we are so small, the idea of even organizing one community will raise capacity issues immediately.
I am very confused by this post. It is not a real thing to convince a considerable number of people of the necessity of revolution by walking around a liberal march and talking to them. You have to get them to attend an event that you organize, where they can observe and participate for an hour and then possibly go to the next thing and the next thing, funneling into the org(s) involved, education sessions, actions, etc. You get commitments and build lists. The people who attend your event were already sympathetic, you just give them the tools for thinking about the issues. You didn't teach them anything at the protest itself. At the protest you are basically doing sales but for socialist-organized events, sometimes agitation (zines etc) that you hope pushes people a tiny bit in the right direction.
Maybe I'm not making this clear enough. Communists organized many of these protests. That's what we did locally. The No Kings/50501 branding is open for anyone to use, and we utilize it to get people to our events that we run and set the political tenor of.
Goddamn they flocked here to prove your points huh