This is a great interview with Prof. Chomsky that I want to share and use for future reference. (video is below)
Transcript:
At its best what can activism be?
At its best it achieves results it's trying to attain. You have a goal, you want to do something about it, you pick various techniques that emerge, you refine the ones that seem to be working, improve them, try to get somewhere. One of Occupy's biggest achievement was to create communities of mutual solidarity and support, attract participation. That's a very important achievement, specially in a society that is designed to divide people and isolate them from one another, which is a great technique of control, of course. Solidarity is very important and in fact is one of the main reasons the Labor movement was concerned from its origins. Solidarity was one of its main slogans: "we ought to be working together, we have to help one another, that's the only way we can confront concentrated power. You find out what you think and what the main values are by participation and interchange.
As far as action, what actions are most effective?
There is no general answer to that. It depends what your ends are, what you're trying to achieve. If you want to create an enterprise, a workforce, that is run and controlled by the community, choosing tactics is a very tricky operation. You have to take into account what kind of reactions are you going to get from other people.
What about protests? Isn't that a pretty important tactic?
Sometimes.