enshittified paradise

Foreword: This is a critique and analysis of the political substance of the “No Kings” protests. The organization behind them, their funders, and those funders’ billions of dollars is a whole other animal.

I have never been able to shut the fuck up about my political views. So, a month into my new job, in April 2025, a coworker attempted to make conversation about something that might be relevant to me. “Hey, are you going to that protest coming up?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. In the previous year, I had been to several actions in support of Palestine, but I didn’t know of any coming up. She said it was called No Kings. I looked it up and apparently it was popular with liberals – so much so that many of my friends’ friends (I had weeded out all of my liberal friends already) were broadcasting their attendance and contributing to the festivities with quirky signs (“Clean up in aisle 47”, “if Kamala won we would be at brunch right now”, “rebel like it’s 1776”) while civilly standing on the sidewalks or sometimes, if you’re feeling rebellious, even parading down the street in a government-permitted “protest”.

To my disappointment, but not yet my surprise, many of my friends who would consider themselves socialists went to the No Kings protests – not in a strategic attempt to understand the situation and glean any useful information for organizing, but in a genuine attempt at protest. When speaking to some of these friends, they told me that while it’s not all the way, it’s some of the way, and that this is a way of meeting people where they’re at. Maybe, they say, we can even convince attendees to become socialists.

Before analyzing any of that, consider the “other side” of the No Kings crowd. I’ve seen several videos, both from content creators involved in the protests as well as videos directly of attendees at protests saying that attendees should only wave the American flag (clearly targeting activists against Israeli genocide and ICE specifically), that activists for Palestine at No Kings protests are “at the wrong event”, etc. You get the point. This isn’t a group of unwitting workers waiting for you to revolutionize them. You cannot pretend there is no political or class character to the thought process that justifies attendance of this kind of event in good faith. That character is one of continued faith in the existing United States (and bourgeois democracy) in general, and the feel-good myth of peaceful reform in particular. It is all built on the foundational idea that the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad could realistically happen.

Of course, it is easy to recognize the fault in this logic. Take, for example, the liberals’ romanticization and fetishization of the Civil Rights struggle as an era of peaceful protest. They imagine that by marching across the South and by MLK saying he had a dream, the government felt really fucking bad and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Of course, I am not providing a charitable representation of the liberal perspective, because it does not deserve to be treated as valid.) They forget the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in September 1963 when the KKK bombed a church and killed four Black children. They forget the murder of countless activists, some socialists and others liberals advocating for equal representation and treatment for Black Americans. They forget the countless mass uprisings that scared the white ruling class into giving them some concessions. Marx was fucking cooking. The history of all human society is the history of class struggle.

Okay, now I want to return back to the argument that socialists embedding themselves in the No Kings protests is a viable method at recruiting and growing the socialist movement in the US. I want to clarify that mass work – going to certain communities, inquiring about needs/complaints, and agitating to advance class struggle – is good and important for revolutionary organizing. But going to No Kings is not mass work, just like going to the DNC and convincing people there to be socialists is not mass work, either. Basically, I’m saying that the foundational ideology behind No Kings (faith in the bourgeois state) is antithetical to revolutionary work. Additionally, No Kings is not a “mass” event in the sense that the June 2025 LA uprising against ICE state terrorism had a mass character to it. The former is organized by Zionist billionaires (the Walmart family, lol) and was attended mostly by petty-bourgeois postmodern liberals, confused semi-proletarian youth, and insufferable white retirees. The latter had no formal organization and was participated in by outraged proletarian youth and huge swaths of Black and Latino proletarians, semi-proletarians, and petty-bourgeois Angelenos of all ages. The difference is stark.

But the difference in appearance isn’t all. Compare the attitude of No Kings, focused acutely on critique of Trump, with the attitude of anti-ICE uprisings, which have recognized the need to go past protesting on the sidelines and have taken action to impede ICE activities in their communities. Compare the ethos of No Kings, shrouded in caution and civility politics, constantly worrying about how they’ll be perceived and trying to silence the inconvenient attendants speaking up against genocide or ethnic cleansing, with the ethos of the anti-ICE protests – getting fascist criminals the fuck out of the community. That’s not to say the anti-ICE uprisings were perfect communist uprisings that ensured the arrival of the revolution. I hate to do this, but there’s a Lenin quote from What Is To Be Done? that fits perfectly here:

“The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began… I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.” (V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Ch. 2, “The Beginning of the Spontaneous Upsurge”)

I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot more like anti-ICE uprisings, the (earlier, more spontaneous) BLM uprisings, etc., not a group of geriatric liberals standing on a sidewalk. I want to emphasize what Lenin says, because I think it can be helpful in determining when a mass movement is ripe for agitation and communist leadership. Notice Lenin’s focus on the workers’ loss of “their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them”, and their realization of “the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities”. To me, that sounds like in LA, when masses of people were throwing scooters at cop cars, de-arresting their comrades, and set fire to numerous Waymo cars (lol). Though I could be wrong. Maybe when Lenin referred to the workers abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities, he meant that they were holding signs that said “No Tsars” and “Dump Nicholas II” on the sidewalk and attacking attendants with non-Russian flags. I think that’s what he meant.

If you’re one of my IRL friends who read this out of pity and did not have your mind changed, sorry to waste your time, I guess. Hit me up and maybe I’ll write a follow-up with things I missed. Or not. Make your own damn blog.