The More Violence, the Less Revolution

If power is to be restored to the people away from the corporate fascist oligarchs who control the US, it must be done so without any violence by the people. It worked for Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and it can work toward the overthrow of corporate fascism. Peaceful civil disobedience: it only means lying down and going limp in protest. The corporate govt has the pepper spray and the weapons and all sorts of laws recently passed to restrict our first amendment rights, but power is for the people. The people will control the govt, and corporate personhood will become just another blotch on our history. We can be the model for a democratic republic once again--especially once we get rid of all the democrats and republicans in office.--jef


Tuesday, March 6, 2012 by Waging Nonviolence
by George Lakey


In the discussion within the Occupy movement on whether violence is necessary for making change in the United States, the debate has so far conflated three of the movement’s possible goals. Are we talking about using violence to produce regime change? Or do we really mean “regime change with democratic institutions following the change”? Or is what we really mean “regime change followed by democracy in which the 1 percent lose their grip on power”?

"The Storming of the Bastille,"
Jean-Pierre Houël (1735-1813).

Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge. The American Revolution did that: King George was booted out and the resulting government, to its credit highly innovative, was still not a democracy for women, the enslaved, and working class people. A couple of centuries later, the 1 percent are still running the United States. A number of other anti-colonial struggles had a similar result.

Many regimes are so oppressive that people will give their lives to change them, even without guarantees that the new regime will be a whole lot better. But as we consider what we want out of our sacrifices to the cause, we should ask: What’s the track record of movements that depend on violence to overthrow their regimes?

Political scientists (and Waging Nonviolence contributors) Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed 323 attempts at regime change between 1900 and 2006. They were curious about the comparative success of violent and nonviolent campaigns, among other things. They found that violent campaigns succeeded 26 percent of the time, and that nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 percent of the time.

The good news is that regimes can be overthrown, even though dictators bring out the police and army to try to stay in power. The bad news is that the people didn’t always win; when they used violence they won only one time in four. They did, however, double their chances of success when they used a nonviolent strategy.

In our research for the Global Nonviolent Action Database, my students and I found a number of cases in which movements first tried violence, found it didn’t work, and then switched over to nonviolent struggle and won.

Researcher Anthony Phalen tells us, for example, that the Latvians tried guerrilla war against domination by the Soviet Union for years without success, then switched to a nonviolent strategy and succeeded.

In El Salvador, the military dictatorship of Hernandez Martinez had been in power for ten years and in 1944 was still strong enough to defeat a military revolt. Researcher Aden Tedla writes that university students then decided to try nonviolent struggle, even making a special point of the nonviolence, calling their campaign huelga de brazos caídos (strike with arms at your sides). The students catalyzed a massive insurgency, and won.

In the early 1970s, the United States got worried about Chile’s democratically-elected government led by left-leaning Salvador Allende. By 1973 the CIA joined the Chilean military to throw Allende out and install General Augusto Pinochet in his place. An armed struggle then developed against Pinochet’s military dictatorship, but it was expel him. ResearchersShandra Bernath-Plaistad and Max Rennebohm describe what worked: a nonviolent people’s struggle succeeded in ousting Pinochet in 1988. The movement succeeded even though Pinochet used the existence of the Chilean armed struggle as a justification to use violence against the nonviolent campaign.

It says a lot about people’s flexibility that, even after losing lives in a violent struggle for change, they can be pragmatic and switch to something that works better. There is more and more evidence that, other things being equal, nonviolent action is more powerful than violent action.

In Serbia in 2000, the young people of Otpor! overthrew dictator Milosevic nonviolently, but failed to establish a solid democracy. Egyptians are working on that same problem right now, tackling a military that seems to want to be the new Mubarak.

Perhaps this problem can be solved with violence. Maybe movements forcing regime change using violent means are only half as effective as nonviolent ones, but what if they make up for their deficiencies by increasing the likelihood that, when violent movements win, democracy more often follows the change? In fact, Chenoweth and Stephan found the opposite.

They found it much more likely that nonviolent campaigns would lead to democratic societies after the regime was forced out. They also found that those societies where movements used nonviolent action were less likely to end up in civil war.

I interviewed South Koreans about their 1986–87 nonviolent campaign to overthrow the dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, who was one of a series of dictators backed by the U.S. government. For the first three years of that decade, the government tried to “cleanse” the society of activists, purging or arresting thousands of professors, teachers, pastors, journalists and students. That wave of repression so aroused public hostility that Chun Doo Hwan felt forced to remove military police from campuses and pardon political prisoners.

Instead of restricting themselves to complaints that the government was making only small changes, the movement took advantage of its opportunity. Labor unions created a pro-democracy alliance and students organized themselves nationally. Action built on action, bringing in churches, farmers and civil society groups. Participation in mass rallies rose to 700,000.

The threatened government once again tried a wave of repression, including torture. When word got out that a student was tortured to death, ordinary Koreans joined the radical opposition and momentum increased. Hunger strikes followed and even more massive demonstrations. After a student hit by tear gas bomb fragments died, a million people marched—including middle-class elements who had held back before then.

People power put South Korea solidly on the road to democracy, reflected in 1997 when an opposition candidate, Kim Dae Jung, became president for the first time in Korean history.

South Korea, however, is one of the many examples of regime change in which democratic institutions replaced dictatorship but the same 1 percent continued to hold power. Decades of experiences like that in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which countries liberalized their governance under the pressure of largely nonviolent social movements while the 1 percent hung on to dominance, encouraged communist vanguards to assert that they had the solution to the problem of the super-rich.

A number of the movements that followed the Leninist path of armed struggle in the Soviet Union did indeed eliminate the power of the 1 percent in their countries. However, they didn’t establish democracy. In fact, their improved efficiency as authoritarians over the previous regimes often shrank the already-small space for individual freedom. There were sexual minorities, for example, who under the new regime looked back with nostalgia to the “good old days” of dictatorships that largely left them alone.

Actually, I can’t think of any countries where movements successfully

• used violence to get regime change
• and established democracy afterward
• and curbed the dominant power of the 1 percent.

The only movements that established democracy and curbed the dominant power of the 1 percent were those that used nonviolent revolution to overthrow the governing power. I’ve so far written about two: Norway and Sweden. Both countries are works in progress; there are visionary Norwegians and Swedes who would like them to go farther in refining democracy and reducing the power of their economic elites, though to a U.S. activist they have already gone a long way beyond us. (Free higher education, anyone?)

Bottom line: for those around the world who are committed to change and are considering violence as the way to get it, a track record is still a track record. Movements relying on violence were only half as likely as nonviolent movements to win a new regime, and even then didn’t do as well as their nonviolent cousins in establishing democracy in the new society. There’s no reason to link “violence” with that fine word “radical”—especially if by radical you mean democratic and egalitarian. Yes, violence has accomplished a lot of change in the world, but its track record is mediocre when it comes to the goals of the Occupy movement.

When he wrote The Conquest of Violence in the 1930s, Bart de Ligt didn’t have the data amassed by Chenoweth and Stephan, or the GNAD’s student researchers at Swarthmore, Georgetown and Tufts. But that Dutch revolutionary still got it right when we wrote, “The more violence, the less revolution.”

Dissent and the Politics of Control

Creating Your Own Context

by ROB URIE


Political strategy in the West operates on contrived dualisms where an “in” group argues of the dangers that an out group poses and the “out” group argues that life under the in group is an ongoing disaster that will only end when the out group replaces the in group in the seat of political power (“change you can believe in”). That this storyline, to the extent that it reflects reality, has correlated with the multi-decade consolidation of power among an economic elite and the related impoverishment of the masses may offer insight helpful for effective dissent.

In response to disillusion over the perceived failure of the worldwide rebellions of 1968, and more broadly with state socialism in Europe following WWII, European philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s developed the idea of the “totalizing narrative,” the all-encompassing explanation of some aspect of the world that subsumes others. The totalizing narrative doesn’t reference an invariant fact of the world argue the philosophers, but is rather a delimited worldview that functions as an instrument of social domination, either hegemonic or explicit.

While originally put forward as broadly anti-ideological, some leading proponents of European postmodernism (Jacques Derrida) back-pedaled in their critique of the left when it became apparent that philosophical deference to small narratives helped feed the Reagan / Thatcher claim that atomistic capitalism avoided grand narratives by providing for individually derived wants. That it took the advertising industry nearly a century to produce these individually derived wants was not entirely unknown in academia.

Capitalism, atomistic or otherwise, is one example of a totalizing narrative in that it posits a human nature in which all actions derive from economic self-interest. In a capitalist economy dissent is put forward as a market failure, a complaint from the losers of a supposed fair game that they (the losers) simply lacked the skill to win. And should the dissenters have a point argue the theorists of capitalism, it would be recognized in the marketplace of ideas and justly rewarded if deemed to have merit.*

By subsuming criticism, totalizing narratives close off the possibility of dissent from outside of the closed system. Dissent either plays by the given rules or it is irrelevant in that there is no discursive context within which it can be understood. An example from recent decades is the charge of “class warfare” made by right-wing politicians that relies on the perception (totalizing narrative) that capitalism is a fair system in which class, to the extent that it might exist, derives from differentiated skills rather than social struggle. The idea of class inferred by the right is extrinsic to the discussion of capitalism because it reflects supposed facts of nature (differentiated skills) rather than the intrinsic facts of capitalism.

The question then is: does dissenting within a context controlled by others, the totalizing narrative (1) grant authority to the idea of control and to those particular people doing the controlling and (2) does doing so undermine the content of the dissent when the content includes a rejection of the politics of hierarchical control, of contrived dualisms? (Is the rejection of hierarchy limited to the complaint of those on the bottom of the existing hierarchy or is rejection from outside of the hierarchical system possible?)

The follow on question for would be dissenters is: do you dissent within the context controlled by those from whom you are dissenting or do you create your own context, even though doing so leaves you outside of the dominant conversation, and therefore outside of the technologies of accepted public discourse (television, mainstream newspapers)?

And so it is with this set of questions that some in the Occupy movement have refused to reduce dissent to the terms provided—to producing a list of demands, to making a set of concrete proposals, to creating a “leadership” structure that resembles hierarchical systems and to modes of action that confine dissent to a set of rules imposed by an external system of social control designed to shut effective dissent down. Is effective dissent even possible within a discursive / political system designed to exclude effective dissent?

What is inferred by recent essays on Occupy, some supportive, others less so, is that dissent is here and always a struggle for political / economic / social control. The absurdly violent and heavy-handed police response to the Occupy movement nationwide is evidence that the plutocrat-state sees only its hierarchical, violent, oppressive, controlling image in dissent. In that view the struggle is always for power and never against power.

With no intended irony, the Western discourse around political violence is that large-scale state violence targeting civilians is morally and politically acceptable but that small-scale non-state violence isn’t. (Should the lie that civilian deaths are accidental in state violence have resonance, please see “war of attrition” with respect to America in Vietnam and Central America). My point here is that the accepted discourse on political violence is self-serving nonsense. To argue within that discourse is to give credence to self-serving nonsense. Any real challenge to the idea of the use of political violence, either pro or con, might be better served by prying the discourse open rather than playing by the existing rules.

With history as a guide, ordinary Americans love unconscionable violence (example: Falluja) when it is committed against “others” and is favorably framed in terms of a cultural / political / economic / religious dualism, an opposition that places them on the inside and that finds its mirror in the very terms of totalizing discourses. Granting sincere aversion to violence on the parts of those advising the Occupy movement, it is primarily the fear of being politically marginalized that leads to the argument that the movement will be harmed by protester violence.

The inference behind this fear is that there exists a large group of people (ordinary Americans) who will both blindly accept the framing of political violence handed them by those they are one day expected to rebel against and who can also be swayed toward supporting the cause of dissent if the dissenters comport themselves according to the rules that place them on the “right” side of a political narrative defined by the plutocrat-state. Life is no doubt difficult, but forgive me if that seems like an impossible balancing act.

The only reason why so-called ordinary Americans might join a rebellion is if they see themselves on the outside of a social order designed for the benefit of others. And creating the conditions of would-be rebellion is the plutocrat-state, not would-be dissenters. Furthermore, while discourse certainly plays a role in how circumstances are perceived, it is the material conditions alone that make an existing order intolerable.

If the long-term unemployed, the outsourced, the imprisoned, the impoverished, the newly homeless, the long term homeless, those who have had their homes stolen by the banks, the discriminated against, the poor, the marginalized, the indebted, those who had their pensions stolen, those who are seeing the social programs that they paid for cut to fund military adventures abroad, those who did the bailing out, those without access to medical care, the polluted, the fracked, the invaded, the economic refugees and so on—if these people don’t perceive a problem then who are we to tell them that there is a problem? And if they do see a problem, are they not potential allies and not mindless pawns to be managed?

Either the material conditions exist for a broad-based rebellion or no rebellion will take place. The plutocrat-state and the institutions of power can be counted on to behave badly whether or not they feel threatened. There is no storyline too implausible for the mainstream media to put forward as fact. So why worry about what they are going to say?

Being clever and being complicit are different things. Again, the question is: how can we be different if we are the same? Only by stepping outside of the totalizing narratives of the plutocrat-state is true dissent possible. And the risk there is of an absence of control. If the goal is simply to exchange chairs, to take power rather than to destroy the very idea of power, then mainstream politics already has a role for you.

With neither romance nor naiveté, the opening that Occupy has provided is to try something different. The moment is likely fleeting. But take it from someone who was there (although a little kid) in 1968—the regrets for not taking it far enough far outweigh any others in my life. The way to fight the death and despair of the plutocrat state is with life, not with competing death and despair.