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i'm not going to defend the permitting thing---that they should not be necessary is one of the few areas in which we are entirely in agreement, dk...and even for the same basic reasons.
but the reality is that if you want to organize a demo of any size, the permitting process is a way to deal with police and other city regulations, almost all of which are geared around managing questions of circulation within the city of often very dense, overlapping types of movement.
but in principle, it is a problem---and there is little doubt that political protest should override these other management functions because, at bottom, these functions are part of the normal course of things that presupposes political consent--so it follows that political action, which effects or reflects (one way or another, to one extent or another) should supercede the regulations that presuppose consent.
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on the "logical" progression of protest to civil war/insurrection: have you been reading engels? this is his basic line.
EXCEPT that you leave out the central motor of this progression, which is that the movement that the state confronts is understood as posing a basic challenge to the legitimacy, if not the material existence, of the state itself.
protesting the wiretapping business--that is protesting the continuation of a conservative policy, undertaken by a conservative administration--is not a threat to the legitimacy of the state.
unless a hamfisted response from the police etc. makes it into one.
there's alot to be said about the changes in police approaches to public protest since the vietnam period, but that's another matter, maybe for another thread.
the point is that absent a significant threat to the state itself, there is no logical or normal progression from demo to anything else.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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