A key to the winning strategies of successful nonviolent liberation struggles of the past has been the achievement of shifts in the power balance between the oppressor and the oppressed which come about by the oppressed building the sort of righteous parallel society of self-government, communal self-determination and of communal self-reliance that displaces the society ruled by the oppressor. To quote Gene Sharp, "Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural and political institutions progressively expands the 'democratic space' of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship. As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control..." - From D to D, Chapter 9. This was, for instance, a key element of the strategy of swaraj employed by Mohandas Gandhi in the struggle to liberate India from the British empire.
Sunday, August 29, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: Where Are The Carpenters?
A key to the winning strategies of successful nonviolent liberation struggles of the past has been the achievement of shifts in the power balance between the oppressor and the oppressed which come about by the oppressed building the sort of righteous parallel society of self-government, communal self-determination and of communal self-reliance that displaces the society ruled by the oppressor. To quote Gene Sharp, "Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural and political institutions progressively expands the 'democratic space' of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship. As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control..." - From D to D, Chapter 9. This was, for instance, a key element of the strategy of swaraj employed by Mohandas Gandhi in the struggle to liberate India from the British empire.
Sunday, August 1, 2021
The Poverty of Pivenism
This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D.) Recent posts in this series have dealt with the important subject of the strategy of nonviolent struggle. As I said in a recent post, strategic nonviolent resistance does not rely on the weapons and resources of the holders of oppressive power, and one big reason why is that those who are oppressed do not have access to the weapons and resources of the powerful. This is why strategy and strategic thinking is so important. If the strategy of a struggle group is solid, the struggle group can achieve great shifts in the balance of power between the powerful and those without power. If the strategy of a struggle group is weak, foolish or nonexistent, then that group will lose.
The success rate of nonviolent liberation struggles from 1900 to 2006 was over 50 percent, according to the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Indeed, during this period, "campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as successful as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals," according to the book's website. Yet from 2010 onward the success rate of nonviolent struggle movements began to decline, as documented by articles such as "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance" by Erica Chenoweth, and "Nonviolent protest defined the decade. But is civil resistance losing its impact?" by Rupa Shenoy. I would like to suggest that the decline continues to this day, in which the success rate has dropped to less than 34 percent - a distressing decline of 16 to 18 percent. (Violent liberation struggles have shown an even worse decline in effectiveness, by the way. Don't take out a loan to buy an assault rifle!) The question then becomes, Why? What is causing the decline in the success rate of nonviolent resistance campaigns?
- Savvier responses by governments and other wealthy power-holders
- More entrenched oppressive power-holders who have proven to be resilient in the face of grassroots challenges to their power
- Increased use of brutal repression by these entrenched power-holders
- A change in the structure and capabilities of grassroots movements themselves (Emphasis added)
Sunday, July 18, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 8 and 9: How The Straight Subverts The Crooked
Sunday, July 11, 2021
The Tactical and Strategic Failures of Summer 2020
This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D.) Those who have read previous posts on this subject know that the most recent posts discussed Chapters 6 and 7 of the book. Those chapters deal with the important subject of the strategy of a nonviolent liberation struggle. Strategic nonviolent resistance does not rely on the weapons and resources of the holders of oppressive power, and one big reason why is that those who are oppressed do not have access to the weapons and resources of the powerful. This is why strategy and strategic thinking is so important. If the strategy of a struggle group is solid, the struggle group can achieve great shifts in the balance of power between the powerful and those without power. If the strategy of a struggle group is weak, foolish or nonexistent, then that group will lose.
- A failure by the Black community to appropriately define our collective identity and the strategy of our struggle. For at least four decades, we have been unconsciously following a rather limited "strategy" of the sort first articulated by Martin Luther King, namely, the strategy of trying to build a supposedly colorblind society in which our individual or historical identities are all dissolved in a "melting pot" to produce a so-called all-American alloy. Thus we have tried to build "beloved communities" with people who ought not to be trusted because they have no good intentions, people who refuse to give up their dreams of total domination. It is way past time for us to come together as Black people (NOT as part of some "rainbow coalition" alloy!) to decide who we are as a people and how we will struggle as a people. In other words, it is way past time for us to self-consciously organize ourselves. When white people who supposedly stand for "diversity" try to bring us as individuals into their "coalition", we need to say, "Not so fast. We will decide as a group what we choose to support. We will NOT allow ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda! Maybe we're not better together!" Of course, to say such things might provoke the sort of reaction from certain white supposed "allies" that would show their true colors.
- A failure by the Black community to understand the methods by which unarmed people shift the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless. In short, this is a failure to understand the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, which has also become known as people power. We have for too long allowed ourselves stupidly to believe that strategic nonviolent resistance consists of trying to love your enemy or to "rise above" the oppression dealt to you by your enemy (that is, to smile when your enemy serves you a sandwich made of excrement!), or to show how "spiritual" you are in the face of oppression. Therefore, too many of us have understandably written off strategic nonviolent resistance. It's time for some of us to start reading some books.
- This ignorance played out in 2020 in a failure to understand the impact of violence on a protest movement. When violence began to erupt during the protests, I saw it as a clear indication of a lack of organization on our part, as well as a lack of training. I saw it moreover as a clear sign of tactical and strategic misunderstanding and failure. But in conversations I had with BLM organizers, both during the 2020 CANVAS Summer Academy and in 2021 with BLM organizers who were part of the Leading Change Network, whenever I pointed out these failures, the BLM organizers got really defensive. Their response to my criticism was, "We were not the violent ones! And you can't believe everything the media tells you! Most of the protests were peaceful!" In making such criticisms, they missed the point altogether. That point being this: that if you engage in mass protests, and violent things happen during your protests, your protest movement will suffer, no matter who started the violence. Erica Chenoweth explains this beautifully as follows: When a mass protest is peaceful, everyone who is an ally or potential ally is likely to show up. This includes young families with small children and elderly grandmas with nothing better to do. In such circumstances, it is very hard for the government to justify using violence to shut down your protest. But as soon as the government is able to provoke or inject violence into the protests, the vulnerable - young families with small children and elderly grandmas - start to disappear until you are left only with athletic young men facing heavily armed cops. In those circumstances it becomes very easy for the government to justify the use of violent oppression to shut down the protest!
- Having said that, I wonder why the BLM organizers did not shift from tactics of concentration to tactics of dispersion as soon as the violence began to appear! (Pardon me - I shouldn't wonder. It's because these fools did not read any books!) For instance, why didn't one or more leaders immediately issue a statement saying, "We see that evil actors have shown up to inject violence and vandalism into our protests. Therefore, we are switching to protest tactics that don't involve large groups of people coming together in the streets. These new tactics will be legal, and will not be able to be hijacked by those who want to cause violence or to paint us as criminals." It shows a fatal lack of brains that not one of these leaders took such a step. I remember reading the news reports of protest after protest in which a small group of agents provocateurs broke away from a protest march to go off and vandalize while the police "declared a riot", and I was shouting in my living room, "Please, wake up and shift tactics!" (It felt to me very much like my experience as a kid watching Saturday Night wrestling and screaming at the TV whenever the "hero" made an obvious mistake. Lot of good that did.) I agree with BLM that there should have been protests. Yet there are both smart and stupid tactics of protest, and BLM failed to understand the difference. (Oh, look! It's happening again.)
- A failure to see the limitations of mass protest. Protest is not a viable single strategy of liberation. At best, it's a single tactic. A tactic is not a strategy. And as we have considered strategy in the context of strategic nonviolent resistance, we have learned that the best strategy is a strategy which your opponent is not ready to meet, and for which he has no defenses. Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D have drawn heavily from the writings of a British man named Basil Henry Liddell-Hart, who in the aftermath of World War 1 advocated heavily that armies should adopt a strategy of indirect approach as the best means of meeting one's enemy in a place where he is not prepared to meet you. I suggest that among the tactics of nonviolent action, mass street protest is now the tactic which most governments are most prepared to meet, and that these governments can short-circuit mass protest most effectively simply by injecting violence into the protests. Once they do that, they can justify raising the cost which ordinary people must pay to participate in protest by using tactics of violent police repression of protest. Mass protest is therefore not an example of the strategy of indirect approach. And mass protest carries certain unavoidable costs even when the protestors do not have to face police repression. I think of some of the BLM websites I saw last year in which organizers vowed to protest every day until their demands were met. I guess they never heard of "protest fatigue"! Moreover, as pointed out by Jamila Raqib, protest by itself does not alter the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.
In their insistence on the same tactic of mass protest day after day, the BLM protest organizers reminded me very much of a Briton who never considered the strategy of indirect approach, namely Sir Douglas Haig. I hope the man has no partisans, fans, or groupies who are still alive - otherwise, they might come to the USA to hunt me down and slash my tires - er, I mean, "tyres" - or threaten to give me "a bunch of fives." But Haig is a man worthy of much criticism. I think of his insistence on costly daily frontal assaults for three months during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, and how the Germans played rope-a-dope with him there. I fear that here in the USA, should another outrage against African-Americans be perpetrated, and should that outrage spark mass protest, our enemies may play rope-a-dope again with us as they did in 2020.
Sunday, June 13, 2021
In Search of Good Work, Or, A Right Autarky
- The change in the occupational landscape wrought by the deployment of artificial intelligence and task automation. AI is an interesting subject in that there are two camps of human opinion regarding its use. One camp consists of those who look critically at AI in order to determine and define its limits and adverse effects (such as the sometimes disastrous effects of automation-induced complacency). The other camp is enthusiastic about the ability of AI to transform the workplace by automating repetitive tasks or tasks that require a lot of brute force calculation, thus freeing humans to focus on tasks which require "creativity." A barely noticed corollary to this assertion is the fact that software and hardware development teams are trying hard to push AI into realms of human "creativity" as well. (Case in point: if you use AutoCAD for engineering design, you will have known for a long time that Autodesk has automated many design tasks which used to take a fair amount of skill on the part of a designer!) This push is being driven by owners of capital who would much rather use AI to continue their concentration of capital by paying an upfront capital cost for a piece of machinery in order to do more with fewer people. As the push for task automation progresses, people will need to engage in a constant re-skilling in order to keep from being run over by the robot juggernaut of "progress".
- The impact of resource depletion on the kinds of economic activity which a society can sustain. I will not say much tonight about this subject, since much has already been written on this subject. (Some of what has been written actually makes sense. On the other hand, I removed from my bookshelf all books by Dmitri Orlov or James Howard Kunstler and threw them into the compost bin. Those books have better uses as fertilizer than as guidance.) But I will say that there are forward-looking societies run by leaders who know how to play a long game, which have begun to respond to resource depletion by investing in progressive responses such as circular economy principles. On the other hand, there are nations like the United States. If you live in the USA, you may find yourself needing to navigate situations and invent solutions which Asian nations (and I don't mean Russia!) have long since collectively figured out.
Saturday, May 1, 2021
The Strongest Nonviolent Weapons
“[The] tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions. They can deny him most of what he wants — they can, that is, if they have the disciplined organization to refuse collaboration….They can deny him the satisfaction of ruling a disciplined country, he can deny them the satisfaction of ruling themselves….It is a bargaining situation in which either side, if adequately disciplined and organized, can deny most of what the other wants, and it remains to see who wins.”
In denying the oppressor what he wants, the oppressed must of necessity bear some costs themselves. However, the oppressed can win only by bearing those costs in a disciplined manner, from a position of mutually helping one another so as not to provide any support to the economic structures of the oppressor. Each member of an oppressed population must ask whether he or she is willing for the "disciplined organization to refuse collaboration" with the oppressor. Those who are not willing become Uncle Toms (UT's) and Aunt Tammys (AT's). Given enough of these UT's and AT's, a nonviolent liberation struggle collapses. Bleeding-heart conservatives such as former President Reagan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher cry great crocodile tears at the sufferings which oppressed people take on themselves in their struggle to liberate themselves. Yet those tears will turn to laughter if the oppressed are persuaded to sabotage themselves. We who are of the oppressed must remember that some things are non-negotiable. It was for the purpose of learning to organize exactly the kind of strong, coercive nonviolent action described by Schelling that I spent over two thousand dollars of my own money a couple of years ago to take a series of community organizing classes. I mean business.
As for me, I have a four-pronged hoe that I've been using for several years. A few weeks ago, the wooden handle broke. The next hoe I buy will not be from Home Cheapo. Let's boycott!
Sunday, April 18, 2021
From D to D, Chapters 6 and 7: A Rut By Any Other Name
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.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Link - Arab Tyrant Manual podcast with Jamila Raqib
Kawaakibi Foundation is an accelerator for thinkers and doers, with a focus on the future of liberty in Muslim communities and in the Arab world. Our work causes headaches and sleepless nights for tyrants and terrorists.
We envision a world free from tyranny, terrorism, and foreign intervention; one in which society trumps the state, extremism and illiberalism have no appeal, and individual rights are sacrosanct.
We don't do traditional activism - our projects are innovative and radical. We develop cutting-edge research and apply new methodologies and a rigorous theory of change to the root causes of problems. That's why our small team have caused headaches to the world's worst tyrants.
Sunday, March 21, 2021
From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): Grand Strategy
Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict. Grand strategy, by focusing primary attention on the group’s objectives and resources in the conflict, determines the most appropriate technique of action (such as conventional military warfare or nonviolent struggle) to be employed in the conflict. In planning a grand strategy resistance leaders must evaluate and plan which pressures and influences are to be brought to bear upon the opponents. Further, grand strategy will include decisions on the appropriate conditions and timing under which initial and subsequent resistance campaigns will be launched.
As tactics is an application of strategy on a lower plane, so strategy is an application on a lower plane of 'grand strategy'. If practically synonymous with the policy which governs the conduct of war, as distinct from the permanent policy which formulates its object, the term 'grand strategy' serves to bring out the sense of 'policy in execution'. For the role of grand strategy is to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation towards the attainment of the political object of the war - the goal defined by national policy.
All states have a grand strategy, whether they know it or not. That is inevitable because grand strategy is simply the level at which knowledge and persuasion, or in modern terms intelligence and diplomacy, interact with military strength to determine outcomes in a world of other states with their own “grand strategies.
- First, it must be a high-level description which lays out general goals and methods, and does not descend too deeply into specifics (avoiding "getting down into the weeds", as they say). As Guy Kawasaki says, a mission statement with a couple of dozen points is very unwieldy!
- Second, it must be open to revision at first as the organizers engage in dialogue with the people whom they seek to organize. For instance, the organizer may discover during the listening and asking questions phase of his or her work that there are things that are very important to the people being organized which were missed by the organizer in the first conception of the vision of tomorrow.
- Third, the vision of tomorrow must serve to motivate people to give of themselves and their resources to a cause which involves their entire people and not just the wishes of the organizers.
- Self-sufficient, both individually and collectively (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12);
- Fully equipped to fulfill our ontogeny;
- Expert in producing beautifully good work to meet necessary needs (Titus 3:14);
- A people who can no longer be oppressed.
- We will organize our own mutual aid networks. (A potluck, NOT a free lunch!)
- We will organize our own education.
- We will organize our own training to create experts in community organizing and strategic nonviolent resistance.
- We will begin to use our collective power strategically to deny our oppressors any payoff from their oppression.
- "Defining and Teaching Grand Strategy - Foreign Policy Research Institute", Timothy Andrews Sayle
- "Defining Grand Strategy," Peter Layton
- "Grand Strategy," Wikipedia
- "It Was Grand, But Was it Strategy? Revisiting the Origins Story of Grand Strategy", David Morgan-Owen
- "Strategy and Grand Strategy: What Students and Practitioners Need to Know", Tami Davis Biddle
- "What Is Grand Strategy? Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield", Rebecca Friedman Lissner