but the point is to protest actual, concrete things.
Well yeah, but not only or always. Sometimes there's an instinctive reaching, sometimes it's art. Different contexts as well, I'm sorry your experience seems to have been so unremittingly tawdry.
The road protests were/are about defined environmental and social issues but an awful lot more emerged from that.
I wasn't at Twyford Down or Newbury but friends were. Naturally I was behind the actions but I had my questions about the complexities and whether they knew exactly what they were doing or why, which they didn't, not entirely. For good or bad it did feel to an extent like something I wasn't very well placed to understand properly; I didn't live in those places, I didn't know why they were so interested or where they were getting their information from. But it wasn't about ideology or even strategy at that point.
In some ways of course these may be said have 'failed' but in my experience things like the Claremont Road protest (...spontaneous community, urban experiment, social support system, living art project, training ground, big ole party...), and the early London Reclaim The Streets parties (and yes, less visibly branded gatherings) continue to be inspiring and energising. Thousands of people attended and caught a view of something, even lived it for a time, right there in the city.
Reclaim the streets was initially about critiquing the privilege of motor vehicles and through-ways in city centres and assumptions about the way public space can be used. Reclaiming the streets for people and communities from noisy, polluting, dangerous levels of traffic. And the 'revolution of everyday' life, I won't denigrate the importance of that, of saying we can party here today if we want to. Ooh, a little inconvenience? (
oh spare me the situationism, lol).