Easing the Liberal Conscious

[BIXX]

I have seen a lot of people who consider themselves "revolutionary" in my town, who consistently say that they want a revolution, etc... However, most of them seem to have very little interest in actually furthering that. They like to organize a protest, and often times it is deemed a success. In fact, I've never seen one that was deemed "unsuccessful". But whenever I look at the actual effect of these protests, all I can find is people talking about how they raised awareness to a problem, which, in many cases already had enough awareness drawn to it. Or in the case that police became violent, how heroic the people who were pepper sprayed/beaten/any awful shit the cops do, and the original purpose of the protest is forgotten. These people just seem to be a lot of what could potentially be seen as "weekend warriors", who are just trying to ease their liberal conscious. Going to a protest, saying that they made some sort of change, and essentially just trying to brag themselves up.
I do believe protesting (among other things) is important, however, I just see these situations as a waste of time in most cases. Especially when the point of the protest is lost due to police violence, and rather than staying on point, the people who attended the protest only talk about the cops.
Also, I'm not really trying to point any fingers, cause I realize that at times I've been like this when the cops acted violently against me at a protest, and I've used the "we raised awareness" excuse for an ineffective protests, but I am trying to avoid ever doing that again, because I should be the change I wanna see in the world.
One thing my dad said to me is "Liberals are very good at raising awareness and patting themselves on the back." Which seems to be exactly what I'm witnessing.
All of this leads me to wonder if these people actually want change, or do they just wanna feel like they're making change? Or, am I just expecting too much and being too pessimistic?
Not trying to troll or start a flame wars or anything, I'm just wondering if I'm missing something.

(Also, if this doesn't belong in the learning section, feel free to move it.)

[Jimmie Higgins]

What you are describing could be called "moralism". This is always a tendency in movements, but it's worse when the political level of movements is low (and the political level of all US movements are pretty low right now and so this can be pretty common). So if a movement, or even just a group of activists/organizers like in this case, is unclear about it's larger aims or underconfident and uncertain about how to achieve their aims, then often the activism becomes an end in of itself.

Lack of clarity, doesn't mean the people involved aren't politically sophisticated, it could mean that a movement is broad and unfocused and so people fear making political arguments because it might break apart the coalition. I saw this in Occupy, for example, where the lack of a clear sense of where and how to continue the movement after the camp was evicted led to people just repeatedly challenging the cops for the sake of showing their opposition to cops - but it then, like you said, it becomes like cheerleading: those who got arrested are more "down" and more political even if it dosn't accomplish anything; having an anti-war demo that makes it on the news is "sucess" even if the demo didn't actually help people organize their own resistance any better.

This is not to say that either of these examples are always useless, just that if they are not seen in connection with larger poltical goals both for the general movement and for us as revolutionaries, then we are kind of spinning our wheels. In a union where workers are afriad to strike, maybe a sysmbolic work action is actually "accomplishing something" even without material results because the workers involved gained confidence they could pull something off and so now they aren't as afraid to organize and fight as they were before. The same action in a different context might actually be a step back because if workers are confidennt, too many timid actions might cause people to doubt themselves or become frustrated or passive.