From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Centers of Democratic Power

In the previous post in this series, we looked briefly at the mechanism by which the power of an oppressive regime is destroyed: the mass application of defiance and noncooperation by the citizens or subjects of the regime.  This was illustrated by the 14th century Chinese fable titled, Rule By Tricks (renamed "The Monkey Master fable" by Gene Sharp in his book From Dictatorship to Democracy which I have shortened to From D to D in my posts), which described how an old man fed himself by enslaving a troop of monkeys, and how the monkeys killed the old man - not by a violent physical attack, but by escaping from him.  For in enslaving the monkeys to serve him, the old man had become dependent on them - thus granting them a certain power over him, a power which they applied in refusing to serve him any longer.

We then moved on to a discussion of the institutions and groups which comprise an oppressor's institutional base of power, as well as those institutions and groups which comprise the base of power of those who resist oppression.  Obviously, these two bases of power are in opposition to each other.  And each of these is engaged in a contest to strengthen itself and to dissolve its opponent.  In the oppressor's base of power, there are three groups of people.  The first group consists of those who are so ideologically, socially or psychically wedded to the oppressor's cause that they are unreconstructable - they will never repent of their desire to oppress and dominate, and they will never abandon the oppressor.  The second group consists of those who may side with the oppressor as long as the oppression is personally beneficial to them and their associates - yet who can be persuaded to abandon the oppressor when their allegiance to the oppressor begins to seriously cost them.  As an example of this second group, many "Red" state Republicans in the U.S. who have decided to vote for Biden did so because their allegiance to Trump began to seriously cost them - especially as a result of the trade war with China and the spread of COVID-19 into Trump country.  The third group consists of those supporters of the oppressor who are sincerely deluded, yet who can be persuaded by moral arguments to withdraw their support.

Similarly, the society ruled by an oppressor is composed of three groups of people.  The first consists of the oppressor's base of support.  The second consists of those who are neutral as far as their actions are concerned - who, regardless of how they feel about the oppressor, continue to obey him due to social inertia or unquestioned, unexamined submission to the oppressor's authority, the long-standing subconscious conditioning by psychological and ideological factors which produces that submission.  The third consists of those who have been activized to resist the oppressor and to disintegrate his regime in order to replace it with something better.  These activized people comprise what is known as the struggle group.  In order to disintegrate the oppressor's regime by nonviolent means, the struggle group must work through the society's independent institutions and groups to persuade a critical mass of people to withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor's regime.  That noncooperation can be social, political, or economic, yet when it reaches a certain critical mass (and is accompanied by a compelling "vision of the future" articulated by the struggle group), it causes members of the formerly neutral population to take notice and to begin to join the movement of noncooperation.  As the noncooperation movement begins to gather strength, it causes the pragmatists and the sincerely deluded who are members of the oppressor's pillars of support to begin to question their allegiance.  This is especially true as the support provided by members of the oppressor's base begins to get costly for the supporters.  It is by this means that the psychological and ideological factors which cause people to grant authority to the oppressor are neutralized.

Let me repeat: it is through the society's independent social groups and institutions that mass noncooperation must be applied.  (Note: the word "independent" means free from dependence on or control by the oppressor's regime or its agents.)  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 3 of From D to D, "Isolated individuals, not members of such groups, usually are unable to make a significant impact on the rest of the society, much less a government, and certainly not a dictatorship."  So let's examine these independent institutions and groups in more detail.  In addition to such obviously political organizations as political parties, trade unions, and human rights organizations, Sharp mentions a number of other types of such groups, including those which are not obvious change agents such as families, sports clubs, religious organizations, gardening clubs, and musical groups.  Yet the existence of such groups and institutions - even when they are independent of the oppressor - does not automatically guarantee the emergence of a successful movement for liberation.  In other words, the existence of these groups is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

To see what more is needed, we need to turn to another social movement scholar, namely, feminist scholar Jo Freeman, who wrote two essays that describe additional necessary ingredients.  The name of one of these essays is "On the Origins of Social Movements," and the other is "The Origins of the Women's Liberation Movement."  In these two essays, Freeman delves more deeply into the subject of how a movement is constructed from pre-existing conditions.  For a movement to emerge from pre-existing independent groups and institutions which are not necessarily "movement" organizations as far as their origins, three things must be present:

• A preexisting communications network or infrastructure within the social base of the organizations.  If such a network does not exist or only partially exists, then an organizer or team of organizers must create that network.  
• The network must be "co-optable to the new ideas of the incipient movement."  To co-opt a group is to turn that group from its original purpose and agenda to the agenda of the co-opters.  As Freeman says, "To be co-optable, [the network] must be compsed of like-minded people whose background, experiences, or location in the social structure make them receptive to the ideas of a specific new movement."  These like-minded people must also be able to imagine channels for social action which can realize movement goals.  Or, as Freeman says, "A co-optable network, therefore, is one whose members have had common experiences which predispose them to be receptive to the particular ideas of the incipient movement and who are not faced with [or, my note, who know how to overcome] structural or ideological barriers to action.  If the new movement as an 'innovation' can interpret these experiences and perceptions in ways that point out channels for social action, then participation in social movement becomes the logical thing to do."
  
• This network must find itself in a situation of strain in which action can be precipitated - either by a crisis or by an organizer or organizers who "begin organizing... or disseminating a new idea."  The organizers' job is easiest when they have "a fertile field in which to work".  This fertile field is characterized by emerging spontaneous groups who are acutely aware of the issue around which the organizer seeks to organize.  If these spontaneous groups do not exist, the organizer's first job is to create them by bringing together the people most affected by oppression, to begin to talk about their common experience, or, in other words, to "raise the consciousness" of the people most affected.

A few closing remarks are in order.  First, for the co-optation of a co-optable network to take place, there must obviously be one or more "co-opters."  These are the activized members of the struggle group for whom continued passive existence under oppression is an intolerable and unacceptable option, and who therefore engage in the work of co-opting preexisting organizational networks to a new purpose.  For it must be recognized that many of the sorts of independent organizations listed by Gene Sharp in Chapter 3 of From D to D do not start out as social movement organizations.  For the leaders of such organizations, the idea of working together to radically re-imagine and re-structure society is a radical new idea.  Not all independent institutions and organizations will be receptive to such an idea - especially when the implementation of that radical idea involves risk.  That is, not all of these groups will be co-optable - even when they are formed by the oppressed for the oppressed.  Jo Freeman cites the example of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs which refused to become a movement organization even though it shared many of the same grievances as the members of the more activist organizations in the American women's movement.  And in the biography America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century, author Gabriel Thompson notes how Fred Ross was suspicious of organizations composed of the middle and upper-class members of oppressed communities of color, as these were dependent on "both sides of the tracks.  They could talk a good game, but many advocated 'gradualism, patience, endless conciliation and discussion; in short, anything but direct, purposeful action.'"  Ross was talking of the Latino community, but I can say the same thing most emphatically about many of the long-standing and now moribund organizations of the African-American community.

Yet there have been social groups which have seemingly been in the hip pocket of the oppressor, but which were successfully co-opted by savvy and skillful organizers.  Two examples come to mind.  The first is case of the State-sponsored Communist trade unions in Poland during the 1970's and 1980's, several of which were actually taken over by the Solidarity (Solidarnosc) trade union movement against the wishes of the government, as cited by Gene Sharp in From D to D.  The second example is the case of the Nashi (Наши) youth movement which was created in 2005 by the government of Vladimir Putin in order to co-opt burgeoning Russian opposition movements.  The trouble for Putin is that Nashi began to take on a life of its own, and the youth who were its members began to attack the practices of the most privileged members of Russian society, as these practices caused suffering for average Russians.  Thus they began to bite the hand that was feeding them, leading to the cutting of government support for Nashi and the er, ah, "complication" of relations between Putin's government and Russian youth.

Lastly, as Jo Freeman states, "The role of the organizer in movement formation is another neglected aspect of the theoretical literature" - a statement which was true at the time she wrote her essays, but which by now is somewhat out of date.  At this time we have a somewhat larger body of knowledge about the role of the organizer in constructing a social movement.  We will explore this topic in more detail in the next post in this series, God willing.  The organizer is such an important topic because as Freeman says in her essay, "The art of 'constructing' a social movement is something that requires considerable skill and experience."  The organizer's skills can overcome structural barriers to movement formation.

From D to D, Chapter 3: Whence Comes The Power?

This is the third installment of my commentary and "study guide" on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp.  (In my series, I am shortening the title of the book to "From D to D.")  In the last post of this series I made the following statement:

The goal of the organizers of effective resistance against a dictator is to turn a large number of their fellow sufferers into a coherent, focused source of effective non-cooperation, and to focus that non-cooperation on one or more of the dictator's pillars of support until the pillars start to shatter.

The key to effective resistance against a dictator is therefore a strategy of focused, coherent non-cooperation and defiance by a large number of the citizens of a country against its ruling dictator and the dictator's institutions of power.  The question therefore that arises from this realization is how to persuade that large number of oppressed citizens to withdraw their cooperation from the dictator.  Chapter 3 of From D to D begins to answer that question.  But the chapter starts first with showing the reader what that noncooperation might look like - and the devastating effect that such noncooperation would have on the power and survival of anyone who might wish to live by oppressing others.

Sharp presents a fourteenth-century Chinese fable titled, Rule By Tricks, about an old man who made his livelihood by enslaving a group (pack? tribe? barrel?  Ah, it is a troop!) of monkeys.  Without spoiling the fable for you, let me just say that in exchange for his exploitation of the monkeys, the old man became dependent on the service they provided.  Therefore, the monkeys were able to kill the old man - not by a violent attack against him, but simply by withdrawal of their service.  This illustrates a principle stated by community organizing scholar and teacher Dr. Marshall Ganz - namely, that systems of oppression always depend on those whom they exploit.  The Monkey Master fable (as Sharp calls it), has become very popular among those who study and seek to bring about the disintegration of dictatorships, as can be seen here, here, and here, for instance.

Every state or polity has institutional bases of power which enable its leaders to foster the cooperation of the citizens or subjects of that polity.  In addition, in free societies, the citizens or subjects have  bases of power which are separate from the leaders of the polity and which can potentially act as a curb or brake on excesses committed against the subjects or citizens by the leaders of the polity.  To quote Dr. Sharp, the ruler's bases of power include the following:

• Authority, the belief among the people that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it;
• Human resources, the number and importance of the persons and groups which are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the rulers.  (Not: these obedient persons and groups cannot exist at all unless there is a base of the population who believe that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it.)
• Skills and knowledge, needed by the regime to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons and groups;
• Intangible factors, psychological and ideological factors that may induce people to obey and assist the rulers.  (Note: it is vital to understand the psychological and ideological factors which underlie the loyalty of the dictator's human resources noted above.  These may vary from regime to regime.  This is why opponents of the dictator's regime must learn to study their opponent.  Or, as a character in a mildly interesting 1990's action movie once said, "Полезно знать что думает противник, не правда ли?")
• Material resources, the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; and
• Sanctions, punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and non-cooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation that are needed for the regime to exist and carry out its policies.

Note the interdependencies of these bases of power.  Without authority, the ruler has no human resources.  Without the requisite psychological and ideological factors, the ruler has no authority.  Without skills and knowledge, the dictator's human resources are useless.  Without human resources, the dictator has no access to material resources.  Without human resources or material resources, the dictator cannot apply sanctions.  The members of the dictator's regime who are committed to him comprise his human resources and are known institutionally as his pillars of support.

On the other side of the equation are the bases of power that are independent of the government and are held by the subjects or citizens of a free society or of a group of oppressed people who seek to liberate themselves.  These consist of the groups and institutions that have been founded by citizens or subjects and that are not under government control or dependent on government support.  When these groups become weak or begin to disappear from a democratic society, that society becomes increasingly vulnerable to democratic backsliding and authoritarian takeover.  In Chapter 3 of From D to D, Sharp notes that dictatorships frequently target these independent groups for co-optation or destruction, but such groups can die by means other than deliberate destruction at the hand of a dictator.  Thus it is that in the United States, independent groups such as strong trade unions have been deliberately weakened or disintegrated by the application of State power and the power of the filthy rich.  But American social life has also been disintegrated by a culture that is addicted to electronic entertainment, excess mobility fostered by the automobile, and other factors which were not necessarily deliberate, but rather emergent properties of certain technologies.  

The first task of democratic resisters against dictatorship is therefore to re-build independent groups and institutions in the oppressed society.  Let me repeat: this is the FIRST resistance task, the prerequisite to all that follows of successful strategic nonviolent resistance, just as bread is the prerequisite before you can have a sandwich.  As Gene Sharp says, "Their continued independence and growth [that is, the independence and growth of these independent groups] is often a prerequisite for the success of the liberation struggle."  Note also that Mohandas Gandhi said much the same thing in outlining his program for nonviolent liberation of India from British rule.  Gandhi started his organizing by organizing Indians to come together to meet their needs collectively without reliance on the British.   He called this approach the "constructive program," and said that "... my handling of Civil Disobedience without the constructive programme will be like a paralyzed hand attempting to lift a spoon."  

This is why basing a liberation struggle solely around mass protest marches and rallies is such a losing idea.  It lacks the prerequisite strength for long-lasting success.  Even when it seems to succeed, as in Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011, the "victory" is fragile and thus easily taken over by a new round of would-be dictators as the Muslim Brotherhood and later, the Egyptian military, did in the aftermath of Tahrir Square.  (For a couple of commentaries on the failure, see this and this.  Note that I do not endorse everything these authors say.  Take them with a few grains of salt.  YMMV.)  (Second note: I am a great fan of the OTPOR! nonviolent revolution that deposed Slobodan Milosevic.  However, I would say that one potential weakness of the OTPOR! strategy and of the CANVAS Core Curriculum is perhaps a failure to look at the prerequisite of building or re-building independent groups and institutions by the democratic nonviolent resisters.)

The building (or re-building as the need may be) of these independent groups and institutions is such an important topic that my next post in this series will focus on this subject.  And I will refer to some additional sources that will shed light on the subject of institution-building from multiple angles.

From D to D, Chapter 2: The Dangers of Negotiations

This post is the second installment of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book titled, From Dictatorship to Democracy.  For the sake of these posts, I will shorten the title to "From D to D."  Chapter 1 of Gene Sharp's book discusses the most common options to which people look when they find themselves living under a dictatorship.  Among these common options are resorting to violence in order to try to achieve liberation, hoping for liberation through military coups, hoping for liberation through elections, and hoping that foreign "saviors" will intervene to free the oppressed population from the dictator.  The point of Chapter 1 is to convince us of the inadequacy and risks of pursuing these options.

Chapter 2 explores another common option to which people resort when they find themselves suffering under dictatorship.  That option is to try to pursue negotiations with the dictator.  And here again Dr. Sharp seeks to cure us of romantic notions of what negotiations can actually accomplish in dealing with evil holders of concentrated wealth and power.

If you have read the chapter, you will note that Dr. Sharp does not say that negotiations are always useless.  Rather, he says that negotiations work best when one understands these things:

1. The magnitude and nature of the issues being negotiated, and
2. The relative balance of power between the negotiators.

And so we come back to the psychodynamics of the various sides in a conflict.  In some labor disputes in which a strike is deployed by workers, one side consists of greedy, money-grubbing slave drivers, and the other side consists of people who don't want to be worked like dogs for nothing more than dog food.  Yet if the money-grubbers look at their money-grubbing simply as a certain kind of business philosophy, they will be most willing to alter that philosophy once their employees show them that their philosophy will drive them out of business due to the withholding of employee labor.  In this case, the business philosophy of the business owners is not such a core element of their identity that they are willing to hold onto it at all costs.  Therefore, the amount of non-cooperating pressure which employees must apply tends to be limited, and negotiations are therefore frequently the end-game of labor disputes.

But it must also be noted that the outcome of such negotiations will not be settled by the rightness or wrongness of each side's claims.  Rather, the outcome of negotiations in this case is determined by how powerful the union is relative to the management - that is, the magnitude of resources that can be withheld for a long enough time by one side from the other side.  (The reason why the labor movement in the United States is so weak just now is due to the fact that many labor leaders have been co-opted by management, which has succeeded in the creation of a robust "business unionism" that can accomplish nothing.  That is why the results of labor negotiations nowadays are frequently very disappointing.  The unions of the early 20th century were much more powerful.)

There is also a category of struggle in which negotiations are practically useless, because the core interests of one or both sides in the struggle are at stake.  In such cases, at least one of the two sides will not be willing to engage in truthful, fair negotiations.  In fact, they may not even be willing to give the appearance of trying to negotiate.  This is especially true of a DSM-IV malignant narcissist dictator of the ethno-nationalist kind who refuses to share the world equitably with other people, but seeks to make his chosen people great at the expense of all the other people on earth.  This, for instance, was the reason why the imperialist Winston Churchill steadfastly refused to relate to Mohandas Gandhi as a fellow human being.

The most dangerous situation of all for people resisting dictatorship comes when they are dealing with a dictator who truly has no intention or desire to submit to any will other than his own, yet who knows how to psychologically "play" people.  For then, the negotiations will be subject to gaslighting and all kinds of other psychological tricks.  In the words of Dr. Sharp, "The offer of 'peace' through negotiations with the democratic opposition is, of course, rather disingenuous."  Those who resist dictatorship are therefore likely to be very disappointed by the outcome of negotiations with the dictator.  

One observation therefore that must be made about people's ideas of strategic nonviolent resistance is that such resistance is not, and does not depend on, negotiation.  This is a key point which is frequently missed.  People who hear the term "nonviolent resistance" frequently conjure up images of M. K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King as "spiritual" people and assume that the call to such resistance is a call to try to win your oppressor to your side by showing how "spiritual" you are.  They equate a call to such resistance with a call to the kind of "spirituality" that can "melt the hearts" of oppressors.  In other words, they see strategic nonviolent resistance as a form of negotiation.  (BTW, I am all for spirituality as long as it is the right kind.  See 1 Corinthians 2.)

It is much more accurate to view strategic nonviolent resistance (called "political defiance" in From D to D) as a means by which those under tyranny shatter the power of the tyrant without violence - and without negotiations.  For this to happen, the mass of oppressed people must become unified around a small number of extremely concrete goals, and must withdraw cooperation from the tyrant in specific, coherent, coordinated ways - ways that are determined by, and that follow, a wise grand strategy.  In this respect, strategic nonviolent resistance is very much like laser light.  Consider for a moment a typical suburban house of the 1950's.  In each room of the house, there would have been light fixtures with one or more incandescent bulbs rated from 60 to 100 watts apiece.  Thus, the total amount of power drawn by the house for the purpose of lighting might be as high as 1 kilowatt if all the lights were turned on.

Now 1 kilowatt of power devoted to lighting up such a house might make the house bright, but it would not accomplish anything else except maybe driving up the electric bill of the homeowner.  This is because the light is emitted over a wide range of frequencies and in all directions.  But the light of a laser is coherent, focused, monochromatic, and unidirectional.  This is why a 1 kW laser can cut through steel plate, whereas ten 100-watt light bulbs can only make your house bright.  The goal of the organizers of effective resistance against a dictator is to turn a large number of their fellow sufferers into a coherent, focused source of effective non-cooperation, and to focus that non-cooperation on one or more of the dictator's pillars of support until the pillars start to shatter.  How this is done will be discussed in my next installment in this series, God willing.  If you want to read ahead, read Chapter 3 of From D to D.

A 5 kW handheld laser cutter

Being Positively Disruptive

As many readers may have noticed, I haven't spent much time in writing essays for this blog over the last three or four months.  You might also have guessed from this that I've been very, very busy.  While many people I know have been glued to their TV's, computers, and smartphones, addicted to the torrent of toxic drama, crazy-making and bad news being generated by a certain doofus with orange hair who now claims to be the President of the United States, I've been occupied with making some good news of my own.  Let me fill you in on the details.

First, the tutoring initiative in which I am involved, which I mentioned in this post and this one, is now expanding from one location to three. Our roster of teachers has both changed and grown.  I believe there are now thirteen of us, and more may be joining in the next few months.  While two of our groups are continuing to focus on basic mathematics, one group is developing a science curriculum aimed at teaching appropriate technology and self-sufficiency/sustainability in the context of developing alternative institutions.  That group is being led by a woman from an African-American/Asian background and a Native American woman, and they are writing a series of science experiments and activity packets aimed at youth from 10 to 20 years of age.  

And we have a fourth group composed of writers, who are developing and editing a math curriculum to be used by all of our groups, complete with workbooks and worksheets.  (As soon as I am done with this post, I will be working on addition and subtraction worksheets.  If idleness is the devil's workshop, I won't have to worry about getting into trouble for a long time!)

On another front, a group of us at work are planning to launch a campaign to collect donations for the Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Irma.  I am thinking we will present the campaign as an opportunity to spend money for a good cause instead of spending money on holiday shopping.  We will also promote news sources that are providing accurate coverage of the situation in Puerto Rico, as opposed to many American news sources and the White House.  My goal is to provide a positive disruption in three ways:

• By providing concrete relief to people whom our current regime would like to starve,
• By shunting money away from the usual recipients in our consumer economy during this holiday season,
• And by providing ongoing evidence that our current regime and its President are illegitimate.

There are a lot of people where I work.  Let's see where this takes us...

Lastly, it looks like I may have a few opportunities over the next couple of months to talk about resistance and related topics in front of a few audiences.  It looks like my part in the resistance being mounted by oppressed people is likely to get quite a bit larger.

Catch-Up - September 2017

Here's a quick update on things.  I still have a few posts I need to write to finish my series on "The Revanchism of the Third Rome," but other things have lately been keeping me too busy to write.  Here's what is occupying my time:

• Tutoring and teaching math and language arts to families from marginalized populations.  Our group of tutors has expanded greatly within the last two months, and we are planning to go to at least two, and possibly three apartment complexes this fall.  We may even get to teach in people's homes, which would give a nice retro, counter-cultural feel to what we are doing - rather like this.
• Nonviolent resistance.  There are now well over fifty people with whom I have been in frequent contact over the last two or three weeks, and we are discussing the start of a boycott of holiday shopping (both for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever else), along with a general push for frugality among those now targeted by the current regime.  We want to serve up a steaming, heaping helping of economic non-cooperation this holiday season.  Stay tuned...

The Non Co-Op News - June 2017

As I hinted in my last post, when it comes to opposing oppressive regimes, I have a certain preferred style of fighting.  A couple of prominent features of that style consist of non-cooperation - both economic and political - and building of parallel institutions.  So I tend to get really happy when I see other people adopting a similar style.

I think that's what I (and several perceptive others) have begun to see over the last six months.  Consider the following items:

• Retail sales have been declining steadily over the last six months throughout the United States.  (See this also.)
• New car sales have been steadily declining since late last year.
• Applications for new credit have begun to fall within the last three months.  (See this and this also regarding the drop in May applications.)
• Ever since the first outbreaks of the most recent wave of police violence against unarmed people of color (from 2014 onward), the number of recruits and applicants for police work have been declining.  There is now a severe shortage of applicants for jobs as police officers in the U.S.
• The U.S. military is now beginning to experience personnel shortages in key areas of expertise.  (See this also.)

The mainstream media all have various explanations for these phenomena.  But what if, among the various explanations, someone were to hypothesize that not a few Americans are deciding to stop feeding a predatory system?  I am thinking of a conversation I had with a co-worker who told me about a Keurig coffee maker she had been eyeing as a possible new addition to her home, and how she decided not to buy it in order to deny support to the Trump regime.  I have been in similar conversations with others lately who are coming to the same conclusion.  According to Gene Sharp's book The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Power and Struggle, economic non-cooperation was one of the key elements that brought down the Tsarist regime in Russia during the nonviolent struggle that lasted from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to 1917 (before the Bolsheviks, by the way).  What can be done to help accelerate the trends that I have listed in this post?

The Recovery of Subversive Virtue

About eight or nine years ago, a social movement came into existence in the United States.  It was not a particularly political movement, nor was it strategically planned, or even intentional.  Its birth was simply the result of the economic conditions which prevailed at that time, namely, very disruptive energy prices, a real estate bubble, and an overload of personal debt, especially among recent college graduates and other young people.  One word characterized that movement, namely, frugality.  This movement spread, not only by word of mouth, but by many websites and blogs, such as the Festival of Frugality blog ring, "How to Survive on $12,000 a Year," and "How I Live on Just $12,000 a Year," along with news articles such as "The Secret to Living Well on $11,000 a Year," "Living on $10,000 a Year Requires A Certain Ingenuity," and "How to Live on $10,000 A Year."

Evidently this movement grew to such an extent that it attracted the serious attention of the holders of concentrated wealth and economic power at the top of the economic heap.  For a number of op-ed pieces started coming out in major media outlets which warned Americans that frugality was a "threat to the economy" and a "threat to recovery."  I won't give you an exhaustive list, but there were such pieces as, "Frugal Americans Hurt Economic Recovery" (courtesy of Fox News, of course!), "How Shopping Is Good for The Economy - And Your Soul" (I kid you not!), "Frugality Is Bad For The Economy," and "Consumers Turn Frugal, But Economy Could Wither." There was also another, sideways attempt to derail the frugality movement by re-defining what frugality actually means.  Namely, it was an attempt to change the definition of frugality from "living only on that which you need" to "saving as much money as possible in your purchases - by taking advantage of coupons, promotions, sales, etc."  Many supposed promoters of frugality thus switched from warning people to stop buying stuff they didn't need, to trying to get as much stuff as possible via coupons and other means.  (For a present-day example of re-defining "simple living," you might try looking here.)

The fact that the owners of major media outlets felt the need to spend print space and air time trying to discourage frugality says something about the power of frugality as a threat to the current established economic order.  And as I have recently been thinking over the details of this movement, I have been struck by certain observations.  Firstly, that frugality, along with other social virtues, has been a particular threat to Western societies from the time of the Roman Empire.  I think of the Christian Church from the first century to the third, and I see how the peaceful, nonviolent obedience to the commandments of Christ must have threatened such a cruel military empire as that which the Romans had built.  Indeed, in his book Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority In the Second-Century Pagan World, author James Francis lays out this threat, and describes how the leaders and academics in charge of defending Roman values ridiculed such Christian virtues as asceticism, voluntary poverty, and communalism.  (They also attacked non-Christian ascetics.)  Of course, even a casual reading of the New Testament would reveal the roots of the radical values embodied by the proto-Church - as seen especially in the Lord's encounter with the rich young ruler, the Lord's denunciation of the Pharisees, the radicalism of Luke 14 and Luke 16, and the denunciation of the rich in James 5.

However, the Roman Empire succeeded in co-opting key elements of the Christian community, and one of the casualties of that co-opting was frugality and the rejection of materialism.  (For a look into how this happened, you might try looking here.)  Other virtues that died by the way were pacifism (the outright rejection of violence) and communalism.  I don't have time to describe the entire arc of the ensuing battle between materialism and voluntary simplicity since those times, but I do want to focus on another period in the history of the Church in which the recovery of New Testament virtues threatened to shake an existing social order.

That period began with the conversion of Peter Waldo to Christianity during the mid to late 12th century.  He founded a group within the Catholic Church who came to be known as the Waldenses or Waldensians, and they took the Scriptures seriously enough to actually try to live by the New Testament.  Among the elements of their fundamentalism were the following:

• The priesthood of all believers
• The need to give the Scriptures to people in their common language instead of a language (Latin) which most people could not understand
• The need to live a life of voluntary simplicity, also known as voluntary poverty.

Just about all of the Waldensian doctrine and practices got them into hot water with the Catholic Church.  But the voluntary poverty of their preachers was a particularly troubling thing to deal with, because it made the wealth of the Catholic clerics look very bad by comparison.  The Catholic Church met the nonviolent threat of the Waldensians with violent repression.

What has been described above is not confined only to societies that have been exposed to Christianity nor to people who act solely from Christian values.  Frugality continues to be regarded as a terrifying threat to those who hold concentrated economic power in a society based on buying and selling.  It is only fitting that in these days, frugality should be revived as a subversive virtue.  I am glad to see that there are Christians who have been in the forefront of this revival, as seen in "Toward The Revival and Reform of The Subversive Virtue: Frugality," by James Nash.  (One of the subsections of his paper is titled, "Frugality As Economic Subversion."  (I like that!)  There is also "Voluntary Simplicity and Voluntary Poverty: Alternatives To Consumer Culture" by Malgorzata Poks. 


Frugality, or voluntary simplicity, or voluntary poverty - no matter what you call it, the widespread practice of such a way of living can shake a murderous, materialist society to its core.  (See this, this, and this, for instance.)  Therefore, it is an especially relevant way of living just now - in a world in which the majority of the world's people are now being ruled by greedy strongmen, including the regime of our 45th President.  The mass adoption of frugality by a society can bring down dictators who rule that society and the wealthy corporations that put those dictators in power.  And here's the good news: you don't have to sell everything and move to a gold-plated off-grid doomstead in Montana to live a frugal life.  It can be done right where you are, if you know how to think strategically about your situation.  In fact, the chances are good that over the next months and years, you will be forced to live such a life whether you want to or not.

The Vulnerability of Oil

During the last century, Western culture imported from Asia a number of Oriental concepts of physiology which have influenced our understanding of medicine, analgesia and hand-to-hand combat.  One of these is the concept of "pressure points."  These points, identified by Asian medical practitioners and martial artists over several hundred years, have been held to be points on a human body where the skillful application of pressure or force could produce widespread bodily effects - for good or for ill - even over organs which did not seem to have a direct connection to the point on the body where external pressure or force was being applied.  The efficacy of the use of these pressure points has been debated between Eastern and Western practitioners of medicine and martial arts, as well as the mechanisms by which such points are supposed to work.  (For an interesting take on the subject, please see this.)  Nevertheless, it can no longer be disputed that there are localized regions of the human body where the application of external pressure or force can produce dramatic effects throughout the entire body.

The body is an integrated whole made of many, many individual cells.  And in the same way, human societies function as integrated wholes made of many, many people.  It is therefore not surprising to discover that entire societies have points where the application of force or pressure can produce widespread effects for good or for ill.  Moreover, as time passes, one or more of those pressure points may become especially sensitive to pressure.

Take a society's energy supplies for instance.  (And here I am getting back to the roots of this blog.)  When those supplies of energy (or other limiting natural resources) are abundant and easy to extract, it is possible for a society's economy to grow, and for its wealthiest members to grow ever richer as long as the rate at which they increase their riches is not so great that they impoverish everyone else in the society.  But suppose the supplies of energy become scarce or the cost of extracting those supplies grows to such an extent that it becomes a significant fraction of the total amount of energy contained in the supplies that are extracted.  Then there is the possibility of significant - er, ahem, drama - depending on how dysfunctional the wealthiest members of the society are.

For instance, the holders of concentrated wealth (and hence, of economic and political power) at the top of the society might be reasonable, moral, decent people.  In that case, they might choose to inform their society of the change in conditions, and to consciously lead their society toward a healthy, righteous, realistic adaptation to the changed conditions - an adaptation which was designed to be as healthy as possible for as many people as possible.

But suppose the people at the top of this society were disturbed and dysfunctional.  Then they might try to play a zero-sum game on everyone else in their society by continuing to try to increase their wealth and power at everyone else's expense.  And they might try to cover up the root cause of their society's impoverishment by scapegoating segments of their population in order to divide the lower rungs of their population against each other.  They might also try to mislead their population into believing that there was some magical formula which could make the good times of consumption and material excess last forever.  But while they continued to waste valuable time on these maladjustments to reality, that reality would continue to take ever-bigger bites out of their daily life.  In the end, they might wind up like the Norse who tried to colonize Greenland several hundred years ago.  (For a couple of perspectives on those Norse, you can refer to this and this.)

That seems to be the society we live in right now in the U.S.  We have a President who heads a regime of asset-strippers, most of whom also are enthusiastic in their support of our President's trashing of the environment and scapegoating, stereotyping and threatening of various nonwhite ethnic groups in the U.S. and abroad while they strip the assets of an entire nation right under our noses.  And among them are voices insisting that they have a magical formula that will return us to the good times of consumerism and material excess if only we follow their formula.  Some of those voices belong to the biggest players in the market of Big Oil, who have insisted that the U.S. can achieve "energy independence" if only this nation removes all environmental restrictions that stand in the way of maximum profits for Big Oil.

But is this claim reasonable?  Even as far back as 2013, the German Energy Watch Group had stated that the worldwide peak of conventional oil production had already happened by 2008, and this agency predicted that the global peak in total petroleum liquids production would have passed by 2016.  (What they say about the picture for coal production in the U.S. is also not very comforting.)  Moreover, a curious thing has happened throughout the world, and especially in the U.S.  Because of the huge amount of debt overloading the global financial system - especially in the U.S. - the ability of increasing numbers of the population to afford high-priced petroleum products has decreased, even as the costs of extracting petroleum have risen.  Some analysts indeed say that the costs which oil companies must pay to extract oil have risen above the level at which most consumers can afford to buy the products made from oil.  One such analyst used some rather colorful language last year to describe what was happening to oil producers when oil prices were between $20 and $30 a barrel.

Now we live in a time in which oil prices have recovered to the range of $53 to $55 per barrel, due primarily to OPEC announcements of production cuts.  However, oil inventories remain very high, and U.S. production has increased, moderating the effect of OPEC cuts.  In addition, there are signs that Russia is not complying with the OPEC agreements to cut production to prop up prices.  The factors which have been causing oil producers (including nations that depend on resource extraction for their revenue) to start bleeding to death in a time of low oil prices are still present.  (See this also.)  And there are signs that the current oil price rally will not last.  The problem is that oil producers cannot meet their obligations to stockholders (for private oil companies) or citizens (for resource extraction-dependent nations), or pay down the principal and interest on their debts, or cover their extraction costs, for anything under $45 to $50 per barrel.  This is why the oil producers cannot cut their production by very much even at low prices, for production cuts mean revenue cuts for these producers.

Which leads to a bit of a problem for these producers, many of whom were instrumental in bringing about a Trump presidency.  They might despise the economic status, environmental policy, language, or skin color of a great many people in the U.S., but there is one color they do like:

Many of us who are among scapegoated groups or who are on the lower rungs of American society or who don't want our environment destroyed have pieces of paper that look like this.  We may not have as many as the asset strippers at the upper rungs of society - but they need our pieces of paper in order to prop up their claims to wealth.  We can withhold this paper if we choose, and if we are willing to do the work needed to live without certain things.  How would things be if U.S. petroleum demand were to continue to decline in 2017 - not only because of the factors listed above, but also because the people at the top of American society had made the rest of us angry enough to engage in massive economic non-cooperation?  Let's say that the majority of us traded tire rubber for shoe leather for the majority of our trips, and that we worked out our anger by striding energetically down sidewalks instead of driving.  The oil majors were among the entities who helped to transform the United States from a one person, one vote society into a one dollar, one vote society.  How much pressure could we exert on these people by taking away a few of their dollars in order to sway some of their votes?

The Road Between Before And After

Most people in America have been exposed to Before and After ads - ads designed to make you dissatisfied with the "You" of the present moment.  These ads usually contain Before and After pictures - the "You" before your desired change, before you send away money to get the thing (exercise equipment, exercise plan, financial advice book, space in an addiction treatment center, prayer cloth, etc.) that will transport you effortlessly from Before to After; and the "You" all glamorous and happy after your "change."  But there's one small catch.  Because most of these Before and After solutions don't force you to  fundamentally change yourself, your stay in the land of After is usually short.  It doesn't take long before you wind up back in "Before."

The lesson in this example is that a permanent relocation from Before to After requires a personal change - often a deep and permanent change - in the way you live your life.  Usually that change is costly.  So is the change of an oppressed people from a condition of oppression to a condition of freedom, the change of a dictatorially run society to a society free of oppression.  That change requires some necessary first steps, such as:

• Strengthening oneself and one's people to be self-reliant
• Creating your own, personally owned alternatives to the oppressive system that is destroying you
• Withdrawing your support from the oppressive system by ceasing to rely on it

These steps are exactly the same sort of steps that a battered woman must take to free herself of her batterer.  For as long as she relies on him in any way, she makes herself vulnerable to further battering.  As the steps listed above constitute the necessary first steps of "going No Contact" with an abusive intimate partner, they are also the necessary first steps an oppressed people must take in destroying the hold exercised over them by a dictatorial government.  To quote Gene Sharp:

"Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak, and the government too strong. Without a change in this imbalance, a new set of rulers can, if they wish, be just as dictatorial as the old ones."  

And,

"Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. [Emphasis added.]  Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors."

That second quote accurately describes what has happened, not only in the United States, but throughout the developed world.  Those who have power over the global industrial economy revised the rules of predatory capitalism to such an extent that they were able to concentrate an overwhelming percentage of that economy's wealth wealth in too few hands.  Then they started buying governments and began changing those governments into tools for lining their own pockets even further.  And they bought most of the world's media and turned it into a pulpit for preaching the propaganda that the government as a guardian and promoter of the common good was an evil thing.  The results of this include such things as the Citizens United verdict by the Supreme Court, which was the last step in turning the United States from a "one person, one vote" society into a "one dollar, one vote" society.  The results also include the presidency of Donald Trump.

What then does it look like for ordinary people to start the first steps of breaking free from a dictatorship?  Let's examine each of these steps in turn.

Strengthening yourself and your people to be self-reliant first requires the willingness to look long and hard at your situation.  It requires the willingness to do a thorough strategic assessment of your situation and the threats that you face.  You must put as much effort into this assessment as a wise general would put into the assessment of battlefield conditions before he send his troops into the fight.  Then you must have the willingness to make yourself as smart and as capable as possible in order to deal with the challenges you face.  The future does not belong to the stupid!  You've got to hit the books and learn such things as math, basic sciences (including biology), principles of engineering, and techniques of crafts and skilled labor.  You must also learn the history, strategies and tactics of nonviolent struggle - a method of struggle which is both much more complex than armed warfare and much more effective when skillfully executed.  Even the great Chinese general Sun Tzu recognized the value of being able to win without fighting.

Part of your initial assessment of your situation should consist of figuring out how much of the oppressive system you can do without, and learning to need as little as possible from that system.  Then you will be able to create alternatives to that system that are within the means of yourself and your people.  If you now believe you need as much bling as your money can buy, you may want to re-think that.  Do you really have to drive everywhere by yourself?  Do you really need a big-screen TV that can play movies and be turned into a gaming console?  Do you really have to eat out all the time?  Would it not be more sensible, rather, to live as frugally as possible so you can pay down your debts as fast as possible?

Having strengthened yourself and your people thus, you are now prepared to create your own, personally owned alternatives to the oppressive system that is destroying you.  Here I must warn you that those alternatives will require more personal time and work from you than the current system seems to require.  And they will require you to physically work with other human beings.  But they will cost you less in actual terms.  One of the attractive parts of the current system is that it is so convenient to use, and you can use it without having to interact with other people.  Indeed, one of the ways the current system induces you to depend on it is by making you addicted to "convenience."  But what if, say, instead of driving everywhere by yourself, you took public transit? Or, say that you lived in a place which did not have a good public transit system or was not easily walkable, and yet you made friends with your neighbors so that you could carpool and combine errands that required driving?  Or, say, instead of driving several miles to take your kids to basketball camp, you started a basketball league in your own neighborhood?

And these things are but baby steps compared to some of the things you could do - especially if you were willing to rub shoulders with neighbors and with people you would not normally associate with, if you were willing to reduce the atomization and social distance that separates you from your fellow humans.  (I saw a good example of social distance and atomization recently - a sign next to the front door of a not-quite-McMansion which read,

"DO NOT KNOCK OR RING DOORBELL UNLESS -

YOU HAVE  BEEN INVITED,

YOU ARE JESUS RETURNING

OR YOU HAVE A WARRANT.

DO NOT DISTURB!"

Nice neighbor, eh?!  I wonder if he's ever threatened to shoot anybody.)

Creating alternative systems which reduce social distance between diverse participants is one of the required steps in building a successful movement of nonviolent struggle.

By taking the first two steps, you are automatically taking the third step, which is withdrawing your support from the current system by ceasing to rely on it.  What might this look like?  Maybe like a group of neighbors, each of whose households has devised a strategy for living on $1000 a month or less, who rely on each other to meet as many of their collective needs as possible without relying on money, and who decide that they like such an arrangement so much that they are willing to live this way for the long haul.  (And there are a number of resources available, both on line and in many communities, for people who want to learn to live cheaply.  But be warned - cheap living will require a permanent attitude adjustment.) Groups of such people who had extra funds left over each month would be in an ideal position to help groups of people who are struggling, thus strengthening the resilience of their entire community.  They would also be in an ideal position to to begin applying what Gene Sharp calls the methods of nonviolent noncooperation and nonviolent intervention - methods which are much more powerful than nonviolent protest in waging nonviolent struggle.