Resisting the Hegemony NonViolence Part 1
The Celebrating Nonviolence conference has recently be brought to my attention, and as a critic of the hegemony of nonviolence, I’ve decided to attempt to elucidate my concerns with the idea. So for the first installment I’ve take a few key points from The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict’s (one of the sponsors of the Celebrating Nonviolence conference FAQ and responded to them:
What is nonviolent conflict?
In a nonviolent conflict, disruptive actions such as strikes and boycotts are used by civilians, who are part of a movement struggling for rights or justice, to constrain and defeat their opponents. Protests such as petitions, parades, walkouts and mass demonstrations mobilize and intensify the people’s participation. Acts of noncooperation such as resignations, refusal to pay fees and taxes, and civil disobedience help subvert the operations of government. And direct intervention such as sit-ins, targeted acts of economic sabotage and blockades can diminish an arbitrary ruler’s ability to frighten and subjugate his people. These are the weapons of nonviolent conflict.
To really understand what “nonviolent conflict”, or even non-violence is, we must first define the concept of violence. Merriam-Webster says that violence is “exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse” this definition leaves much to be desired. The most glaring flaw is its lack of a target, we must be clear in our understanding of weather or not an attack on an inanimate object is violence (Wikipedia’s page on violence recognizes this issue). The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict’s list of nonviolent tactics also leaves this point open to debate. They conspicuously leave out the term “property damage” as is probably bester understood in the black bloc context, and “sabotage” as in the ELF context, but they include “economic sabotage”. One is only left to assume that “economic sabotage” includes things that have the goal of inflicting financial damage on a target. I, for one, am hard pressed to see a real difference between throwing a brick through a store window and blockading the entrance to that store.
We are left to also assume that in the ICNC’s view self-defense by physical means is “violence” of the condemnable sort. Rather they suggest that the nonviolent tactics listed can “diminish an arbitrary ruler’s ability to frighten and subjugate his people”. If we can agree that a “ruler” is anyone who uses coercion or physical force to impose his domination on another party, we can begin to see the absurdity of the idea that a sit-in will diminish a stalker or rapist’s ability to frighten and subjugate his or her victims. A ruler in the greater socio-political understanding of the term is merely a macrocosm of the same characters as the aforementioned examples.
How is nonviolent conflict different from “nonviolence” or passive resistance?
Most of those who have used nonviolent action have not been primarily motivated by a desire to be nonviolent for its own sake or to make peace. They wanted to fight for their rights or interests but chose means other than guns or bombs – either because they saw that violence had been ineffectual or because they had no violent weapons at their disposal. Gandhi called nonviolent action “the greatest and most activist force in the world.” When a nonviolent movement follows a strategy aimed at rousing the people and undermining their opponents’ pillars of support – especially the loyalty of the police and military – it has the potential to wield decisive power and achieve victory. There is nothing passive about marshalling that kind of power.
Here the ICNC identifies the factors that drive a person or a movement to nonviolent action. Rather than expressing moral disagreement with violence, they conclude that in the majority of cases it is pragmatic tactical concerns that demand nonviolence, either the “ineffectuality” of violence, or a lack of weapons. History is replete with examples of effective armed struggles for libratory causes, the decolonization struggles of peoples around the world are perhaps the best known cases, and there is very little argument that can be made that nonviolent struggle has been less “ineffectual” than armed struggle. In fact the opposite argument can be made with little effort. The problem of lack of weapons is a slightly more complex issue, but again the history of decolonization shows us that creativity and motivation are more important than brute force in armed conflicts. Just as there are many different kinds of nonviolent actions, there are many kinds of armed and so-called “violent” actions.
How often has nonviolent conflict happened in history?
More frequently than is commonly realized. The British gave up their occupation of India after a decades-long nonviolent struggle led by Gandhi. The Nazis were resisted nonviolently by Danes and other occupied nations of Europe in World War II, raising the costs to Germany of its control of these nations and helping to strengthen the spirit and cohesion of their people. African Americans opted for nonviolent action to dissolve segregation in the United States in the 1960’s. Polish workers used strikes in 1980 to win the right to organize a free trade union, a historic first in communist countries. Filipinos and Chileans resorted to nonviolent campaigns to bring down dictators in the 1980’s. The nonviolent civic movement in South Africa employed boycotts and other sanctions to weaken the apartheid regime, forcing it to negotiate a different political future for the country. At the end of the 1980’s, East Europeans and Mongolians rapidly mounted civilian-based protests to put unbearable pressure on communist governments, crumbling their hold on power. And Serbs ousted Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 after a nonviolent student-sparked movement helped co-opt the police and military and divide his base of support.
The ICNC then begins to show us historical examples of successful nonviolent campaigns, starting with the anti-imperial struggles of India as led by Ghandi. This first example is interesting however on a semantic level, it brings to light the fact that for most nonviolent struggles to be effective, the ruling power has to “give up” or decide or its own admonition to end the imposition of oppression, but more on that later. While the real reasons the British abandoned its colonial claims in India are hardly as simplistic as this sentence would make it seem, it is obvious that the Salt March actions did play a role in threatening the financial structure of the colonial rule. By picking up salt grains from the flats and encouraging other to do so, Ghandi was advocating an action that is called shoplifting in this culture, and again I’m hard pressed to see much difference between stealing a corporation’s commodities and breaking its windows in the context of violence vs non-violence. The example of WWII and nonviolent resistance to Nazi rule and genocide is self-defeating for the ICNC, unarguably if the people under Hitler’s thumb had engaged in armed struggle the cost of Germany’s control and the cost of the holocaust would have been immeasurably greater, both in economic terms and in man-power. It is more important to note that the absence of armed struggle probably made the Nazi’s mission quite a bit easier. The American civil rights movement was arguably given its force by the decidedly non-violent elements in it, and those parts were viewed as the biggest threat to the racist status quo (as evidence by the government’s own documents on “neutralizing” black nationalist leaders). The labor movement in general and in Poland in specific is another case of this ambiguous “economic sabotage” problem that I’ve outlined above and will explore later. I’m not trying to assert that non-violence never works, but I am trying to show that victories commonly associated with non-violence are much more complex than that, and often include some either ambiguous or not-so-ambiguously violent elements.
Does nonviolent power work only against humane opponents or only in a society that allows some degree of political space for organizing?
Not at all. Some of the 20th century’s harshest oppressors were removed through nonviolent conflicts. There was little that was humane about General Pinochet’s practice of torturing and killing dissidents, but a nonviolent strategy toppled him. The apartheid regime in South Africa forbade public assemblies in black townships and tried to silence or even assassinate nonviolent organizers, but those who resisted were still able to drain away its internal and international support. And Solidarity opened up political space in Poland where little existed before, both before and after the communist regime imposed martial law. Those who do not understand nonviolent conflict tend to dismiss its achievements, but millions — who no longer live under communism, under military dictators, or under other oppressive systems destroyed by nonviolent strategies — would not agree.
As the famous maxim goes “power concedes nothing without a struggle”, and this has certainly been proven by history. In the absence of a real threat to its existence a ruling class will continue to oppress and will defend itself by any means it deems necessary. Again, I recognize that nonviolent tactics can, and have worked, but to foreclose on the right to self-defense by any means necessary is nothing short of masochism. The opposition to Augusto Pinochet can hardly be classified as purely nonviolent and his eventual arrest was definitely a case of the use of physical force. The case of South Africa can easily be balanced by the examination of the decolonization of Algeria.
Is the anti-globalization movement that has taken to the streets of Seattle, Goteborg, Genoa and other cities likely to achieve its goals?
Not unless it unites behind a few clear objectives, which are explained in terms of the everyday concerns of ordinary people, because they choose the rulers who underwrite the global institutions which the movement opposes. But to do that, the movement must first dissociate itself unambiguously from the violent fringe that its street actions attract. Nothing weakens a nonviolent movement more than the sporadic use of violence by people on its side of the barriers, because that discourages civilians from joining the ranks, justifies repression, and distracts the media and the public from the injustices that the movement wants corrected.
Here the ICNC presents its most offensive, if slightly ambiguous point. They condemn a “violent fringe” without defining or describing it, and they demand a hegemony of nonviolence, insisting that those who do not agree with their superior viewpoint must be disassociated with or the entire “movement” is doomed to failure. Earlier the ICNC admits that a movement is not nonviolent for the sake of nonviolence, and there for the nomenclature of a “nonviolent movement” seems a bit absurd. This is an anti-globalization movement; this is a movement against forms of oppression by whatever terms they are labeled, colonialism, imperialism or globalization. To define a movement by limiting its tactics serves only to do a great disservice to the victims of the oppression. To utilize a turn of the ICNC’s own wording, nothing weakens a liberatory struggle more than foreclosing on tactical options, especially when those engaged in that struggle are facing opponents with much deeper pockets and much more powerful influences. We can only assume that this paragraph refers to the window breakers in Seattle at the 1999 WTO protests, or the saboteurs of the labor movement, or the direct action proponents of the ELF/ALF movements, but we are at a loss to find any systematic examples of violence against life perpetrated by these forces. The ICNC must then be condemning property destruction and sabotage, an argument which enters the quagmire of distinguishing acceptable “economic sabotage” and unacceptable property destruction. The ICNC goes even further and blames the victims of police repression for “justifying repression”, and blames this “violent fringe” for the negative media representation of the greater “movement”. We can be assured that a movement that is struggling against the very forces that own and control the media is not going to receive positive attention from that media, regardless of its tactics.