From D to D, Chapters 6 and 7: A Rut By Any Other Name

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. The poor of the earth experience this exploitation as enslavement, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, and the threat of genocide. Many live as refugees. Theirs is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power. Yet the poor of the earth do have at their disposal a "weapons system" and a strategic method which holds the promise to liberate them from their oppression if they dare to use it. That means of liberation is strategic nonviolent resistance.

This topic is timely even today, even though Donald Trump is no longer the President of the United States.  For the structures of inequality which he amplified are not yet dismantled.  Thus the need of the hour for communities of the oppressed is to organize ourselves for our collective liberation.  For organizers, this involves learning to persuade significant numbers of people to do things that are hard, that involve cost, that involve risk.  My interest in studying the art of community organizing has therefore been to learn to do just that: to learn to persuade my brothers and sisters to engage in effective liberating collective action.  To me it seems that the study of community organizing is a natural outgrowth and next step in the study of strategic nonviolent resistance, since this resistance is most effective when it is practiced by organized collectives of people instead of isolated individuals.

But the act of liberating oneself and one's people from long-term oppression is unavoidably disruptive to those who benefit from the present oppressive status quo.  This is especially true when the oppressed follow a strategy which their oppressors are not ready to meet, and which these oppressors therefore cannot counter.  Therefore, the masters of the present oppressive systems will do all they can to prevent the rise of this kind of effective, disruptive resistance.  In this pursuit, these masters have developed their own strategy.  That strategy has been to condition society in such a way that any expressions of collective discontent emerge within certain channels for which the masters have already prepared effective countermeasures, and which these masters are therefore quite ready to meet.

One example of the strategy of the oppressors has been the ways in which collective labor action has been tamed over the decades to the extent that officially recognized unions in their dealings with organized business are forced to follow rules of engagement which effectively de-fang and de-claw these unions so that they are no longer a threat to big business.  Therefore these unions have become worthless, because their most powerful weapon - the strike - has been declared unlawful (or "unprotected") in the vast majority of cases.  Also, most officially recognized unions have by now become "business unions," whose leadership actively discourages their members from the kind of disruptive collective action that could actually threaten economic inequality.  Collective bargaining and organized labor have therefore become the kind of challenge that holders of concentrated wealth and power are quite ready to meet.

I'd like to suggest that another strategy of the oppressors has been to define nonviolent resistance solely as mass protest.  Leaders of oppressive regimes (and of oppressive systems in supposedly democratic countries) have known for a fairly long time that the most disruptive change-making movements are nonviolent.  Therefore they have known for a long time that the best way to neutralize such movements is to inject violence into them.  While there are well-documented cases of this injection of violence into Russian anti-tsar protests and American labor strikes in the 19th century and early 20th century, it is important to note the history of the injection of violence into protests from the 1990s to the present day.  This was especially apparent during the clashes between the "Antifa" and various right-wing white supremacist groups before the 2018 U.S. elections and the infiltration of Black Lives Matter protests by various white supremacist groups in 2020.  (For documented proof of white supremacist infiltration in the protests of 2020, see "Riots, White Supremacy, and Accelerationism" by the Brookings Institution, "Far-right extremists keep showing up at BLM protests. Are they behind the violence?" by the Kansas City Star, "Small But Vocal Array of Right Wing Extremists Appearing at Protests" by the Anti-Defamation League, and "Far-Right Infiltrators and Agitators in George Floyd Protests:Indicators of White Supremacists," by Mia Bloom of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.)  As these events have shown, it is childishly easy for an oppressor to inject violence into a supposedly nonviolent protest.  After this injection occurs, it then becomes childishly easy for the oppressor to justify the use of lethal force to crush the protest.  To base a "movement" solely on the tactic of mass protest is therefore to mount a challenge that the holders of concentrated privilege are again quite ready to meet.

(One note about that last paragraph.  The advice given by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict during the "Antifa" clashes of 2018 and the BLM protests of 2020 is yet another reason why I have largely stopped listening to the ICNC - as I think at least some of their members have gotten into the business of deliberately giving bad advice to victims of American oppression who are trying to free themselves from that oppression.  Otherwise, how can one explain Tom Hastings' criminally stupid suggestion that there are cases where destroying other people's property can help a nonviolent movement?  And to think that the ICNC let him say that under their masthead!  Or Steve Chase's suggestion that we who seek to prevail by means of strategic nonviolent resistance must sometimes be willing to work with the kind of "protestors" who embrace "diversity of tactics" and follow the "St. Paul's principles" as he suggested during a 2018 online civil resistance course hosted by the ICNC?  He failed to mention that nonviolent organizations which attempt to partner with or dialogue with groups who embrace violence can themselves also become legitimate targets of police action!  Or take Daniel Dixon's suggestion during that same online course that movements that combine both violent and nonviolent tactics can achieve greater synergies than movements that remain strictly nonviolent.  What an idiotic thing to say - especially since history shows that movements that combine violent and nonviolent tactics are more easily crushed by their opponents!)

But there is yet another strategy of the oppressors which should be pointed out.  And that is to define the goal of community organizing as the building of power by a constituency in order to prevail in a political contest and a political system whose rules of engagement have actually been set up by people who dominate and exploit that constituency.  In other words, we are told that the main reason why we organize should be in order to help us prevail in electoral politics according to the rules of the present political system.  To say such a thing, however, is to ignore the fact that the rules of that system were set up by rich, powerful oppressors in order to maintain and preserve the power and positions of those oppressors.  To play the game by these rules is therefore to lose unless you are one of the privileged people for whose benefit the game was originally created and rigged.  To me therefore, the goal of learning to organize is not to try to build power to win at a game that was actually rigged to make me a loser.  The goal of learning to organize is to teach myself and my people to start playing a different game altogether in order to make the first game irrelevant.  Here it must be remembered that nonviolent civil resistance is a means of seeking change by means that lie outside of existing institutions.  That is the goal of my organizing and of my study of the art of organizing.

Let me close by re-quoting Basil Henry Liddel-Hart:

The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move so that, as in jiu-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow.

And from Gene Sharp, 

Even in military conflicts, argued Liddell Hart, generally effective results have followed when the plan of action has had "such indirectness as to ensure the opponents' non-readiness to meet it."  It is important "to nullify opposition by paralyzing the power to oppose"...

In other words, don't get stuck in ruts that someone else has dug for you.