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:
- The magnitude and nature of the issues being negotiated, and
- 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
