First, it's critical to distinguish a protest movement from a revolutionary movement. These are two different things and must have different sets of demands. The two can coexist at the same time. One can turn into the other based on political conditions. But they are not the same.

The goal of a protest movement is incremental change. The goal of a revolutionary movement is radical/total change.

#Occupy failed because its goals were revolutionary but its means and strategies were incrementalist. It thought like a revolutionary movement, but it *acted* like a protest movement.

If you know me, you probably have a good guess where I stand on incrementalism, but I will save that critique to the end. If people are aligned behind incrementalism, then even an insurrectionist (which I also am not) would be better to push to transition protest to revolution than to escalate directly to insurrection and break momentum.

One could argue that insurrectionary escalation during the 70's helped usher in the reactionaries who laid the path to our current crisis. We can also look to the "urban guerilla" movements of this era as examples of the opposite: thinking like a protest movement but acting like a revolutionary movement. They kidnapped and assassinated political leaders and CEOs, then demanded things of those with political power. In some ways #J6 was a similar thing, but I digress in my digression.

A revolutionary movement does not need to articulate demands at all. It demands nothing of the dominant system because its goal is the complete annihilation of that system. Its methods are direct action that creates the new world and destroys the old.

A protest movement does not build a new world, but reshapes the existing one. It demands things from those in power. But in order to do that, it must maintain at least some of the existing power structure. It must play a non-zero sum game where both sides have a chance of not losing. Either side can lose a bit, or even a lot, but both sides must exist in the end. If the demands of a protest movement are "cease to exist or we will destroy you" then the system will fight because it's going to die anyway.

So a protest movement is necessarily limited in scope as to what it can do and what demands it can make. These demands must be possible within the framework of the dominant legal system. These demands must leave the power structure mostly intact.