What historical lessons from successful anti-authoritarian movements in democratic contexts can activists today apply immediately?
Some days I watch the activists who take to the streets. They carry signs, chant loudly, and spill themselves onto roads and highways in search of change. But I keep thinking of those lessons lurking beneath history—as if history were a deep, still pool we only skim the surface of. Sometimes, the biggest confusion comes from mistaking the great crowd for success. Alain Badiou reminds us how power might look large but is born small—how revolutions, he says, are minoritarian, local, and intense. This makes silence necessary sometimes, because numbers don’t matter nearly as much as the bearing witness, the resonance, the moral clarity.
Occupy taught these lessons, too. They rejected charisma; they had no kings. Leadership floated upward like smoke from scattered fires. It was horizontal; it was resistant to corruption or ego. Ideas rose quietly, naturally—a new gravity. Watching this happen was like discovering a map we always suspected might exist, one in which hierarchy is no longer the only direction we can navigate. Everyone saw them, sitting indefinitely in parks and squares, before they were moved off and their small canvas tents collapsed. But we were wrong when we thought it ended there; the real movement lingered—an image, a memory, something that transformed the inner architectures we carried around quietly, unnoticed.
Baldwin saw this transformation better than anyone. He understood that what stifles us most deeply isn’t barricades or handcuffs. What oppresses most acutely is the poisonous narrative we carry within us, the story that says suffering is proof of our inferiority. How liberating, then, to hear that the cruelty we face doesn't testify to our unworthiness, but rather to the oppressor’s fear, their inhumanity. It follows, therefore, that this internal liberation—the shaking off of deeply held myths—must always accompany external action. A revolution, then, not just in streets or squares but also in our selves, our most private and hidden corners.
Perhaps what fails most persistently is our assumption that protests are spectacles, loud rituals performed for power standing distant. But if power is good at anything, it knows how to stonewall, to hold its own gaze steady while thousands pass beneath its window. So part of the work, then, is reinventing protest. Not the familiar march, but small rebellions from predictable forms—acts that blur the boundaries between protest and everyday living, that disrupt the scripts so embedded we hardly see them.
But how exactly do we do this? It isn't enough simply to occupy parks; we must occupy new ways of thinking and speaking. Activists must learn horizontalism again and again—a structure without any single head, consensus-based, constantly shifting responsibilities. Memes become tools that pierce through apathy. Short, clear, viral thoughts, perfectly distilled. So many movements rose from minorities committed fiercely, perfectly, rather than simply numbers seeking poll results. Varying tactics ruthlessly, keeping power off balance, rejecting the comforting illusion that large demonstrations alone will bring about lasting change.
Realizing this deeper vision, activists transform their internal structures alongside their external ones. Workshops and small groups break up oppressive internal narratives; mutual aid steps into gaps left by structures of neglect. Temporary occupations transform purposefully into lasting institutions—cooperatives, platforms, parallel assemblies becoming stable systems grown organically from temporary chaos. Technology connects us in unforeseen patterns—where Italy once utilized Rousseau software, other visions may spring forth, more resembling dreams than elections, more like whispered conversation than shouting matches.
These efforts—the resistant small minoritarian revolutions, the horizontal connections, the re-wiring of inner beliefs—merge political action into a form of psychological liberation. History taught us that lasting change never arose merely from spectacle. Many marches and demonstrations failed, flickering out like sparks. But lasting impact, real longevity, lay always within these quieter revolutions, persistently internal: in ideas, visions, stories we exchanged, the subtle daily subversions kept alive through whispered rebellions. The future, as it always has been, is in the gesture toward possibility—in both protest and silence—in refusing mightily, imaginatively, the boundaries set by another’s fear.
• • •
A compelling historical case study that exemplifies the intersection of anti-authoritarian protest tactics, horizontalism, and direct action is the "Reclaim the Streets" (RTS) movement from the mid-1990s in the United Kingdom. Initially arising from anti-road activism, RTS evolved into a direct-action group explicitly embodying an anti-capitalist stance that sought the radical reclamation of urban spaces from commercial interests and private automobile culture. On July 23, 1995, the group organized an innovative protest on Upper Street in Islington, London, where 3,000 people occupied a thoroughfare with playful disruptions like sandpits for children and barricades designed to obstruct traffic while still permitting pedestrian movement. This creative and audacious form of urban reclamation reached a zenith during the large-scale street party on London's M41 motorway in July 1996, drawing over 8,000 activists who symbolically dismantled the motorway infrastructure by drilling into the tarmac and planting trees—action intended not just as a protest against road construction, but as an imaginative repudiation of private-capitalist enclosure. The success of these strategies fueled a broader alliance between ecological activists and working-class groups such as the Liverpool dockers. Together, they articulated a politically innovative space uniting ecological and labor struggles, along with anarchism and rave culture. This intersection culminated in globally coordinated actions, such as the People's Global Action (PGA) network's Global Day of Action Against Capitalism, explicitly targeted against multilateral institutions and financial centers worldwide. RTS's sophisticated blend of non-hierarchical organization, festive disruption, and strategic symbolic direct action highlights the transformative capacity of horizontally organized protest movements to challenge both physical and ideological enclosures resulting from capitalist globalization.