In this article Roos discusses the apparent decline in protests and finds wanting the explanations of two other intellectual activists. Then he proceeds to offer his own explanation.
I think that activists in Europe and the US have previously protested from a view of social-economic change that lies within the framework of acceptable social change actions permitted by the Western capitalist rule. This form of mass participation in protest on the streets has been met time after time with brutal and subversive actions (infiltration of activist groups with informers, spying on their political meetings, use of agent provocateurs, etc.) which have succeeded in discouraging such actions. These responses by capitalist ruling classes are, I think, partly a result of a great concentration of wealth and power: they no longer fear this type of activism.
Also, I think that their system which requires constant growth is running up against the limits of a finite planet. Thus, they can only formulate policies that impose harsh austerity actions that destroy the social fabric that has produced their wealth and power. Such policies require oppression and control of their resisting populations: the use of violent and subversive actions by their police and armies.
Andre Damon and Barry Grey write in their article "Police killings in America" at the World Socialist Web Site:
The ruling class has nothing to offer a population that faces permanent economic insecurity, declining living standards and growing poverty, hunger and homelessness. It lives in mortal fear of the emergence of mass social opposition to its economic and political system.I think that in time most people will reach the conclusion that nothing short of a revolution is required, and to start building revolutionary organizations with the avowed purpose of overthrowing the capitalist organization of society and the rule of capitalists. After this consciousness develops, I think then the first order of business is to construct an organized alternative media.
Its response—in the US and internationally—is to attack democratic rights, throw off the restrictions on its actions bound up with constitutional and democratic processes, and prepare to meet social opposition by means of mass repression and dictatorship.
The “counterinsurgency” methods of mass violence employed in America’s dirty neocolonial wars abroad—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—are being adapted for use at home.
As Damon and Grey conclude in their article:
The class war has to this point been one-sided. The American working class has not yet responded in a mass way. But that will come, sooner than many think.