It is a time-honored tradition [...] to present demands that they know will never be granted: don’t invade Iraq, stop defunding education, bail out people not banks, make the police stop killing black people. In return for brief audiences with bureaucrats who answer to much shrewder players, they water down their politics and try to get their less complaisant colleagues to behave themselves."
"[...] Such efforts may not achieve their express purpose, but they do accomplish something: they frame a narrative in which the existing institutions are the only conceivable protagonists of change."
"Real self-determination is not something that any authority can grant us. We have to develop it by acting on our own strength, centering ourselves in the narrative as the protagonists of history.
(from here: https://mastodon.social/deck/@tty@sunbeam.city/112536757323272313 which fae got from here: https://crimethinc.com/zines/why-we-dont-make-demands)
This is a critically important thing to understand during a time when we all feel an urgent need to take action. It is not only outwardly strategic, as noted above and described throughout the text, but inwardly as well: Your movement and you yourself will be wrecked by this. It goes on:
Making demands establishes some people as representatives of the movement, establishing an internal hierarchy and giving them an incentive to control the other participants.