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.

So we come to the events of the late spring and summer of 2020, those events connected with the police murder of George Floyd.  As an African-American, I stand with my brothers and sisters who are involved in the Black Lives Matter organizations, yet I feel the duty to point out some of the serious ways in which they dropped the ball last summer, as well as pointing out some of the political consequences of their failure.  (One consequence of that failure: their mistakes helped re-elect a certain two-faced gentrifying mayor of a supposedly progressive city on the West Coast.)  So here goes.  And I'm going to tell the story from the point of view of an observer who was only rarely near the center of any action.  If any readers have more expert knowledge or analysis, feel free to chime in with corrections as appropriate.

First, let's begin with the immediate consequences of the murder.  The first response seen by myself and most observers was the almost immediate arising of a wave of spontaneous mass protest, both in Minnesota (where George Floyd used to live) and elsewhere.  I would like to suggest that much of that protest originated outside of the Black community and outside any other communities of color in the United States.  I would also like to suggest, based on what I saw in the Pacific Northwest, that much of that protest originated outside of any Black Lives Matter (abbreviated in this post to BLM) organization.  However, the emergence of this protest thrust BLM movement organizations into the limelight, as many protestors who were not officially part of BLM chose to identify their actions as taken in support of BLM.  Thus BLM was offered a unique moment in which to take a leadership role, and BLM organizers initiated their own protests as a result.

But at almost the same time as the emergence of spontaneous mass protest came the almost immediate emergence of "spontaneous" violence.  I know of one white blogger who characterized it as "the emergence of the worst race riots this country has seen in decades."  However, he is exaggerating greatly what actually happened, and his reasons are dishonest.  For he does not want to face the fact that the incidents of violence were perpetrated almost entirely by white people.  (See this  and this also.)  An early case in point is the "Umbrella Man."  There is also Matthew Lee Rupert, as well as members of the Boogaloo Boys and other white groups who vandalized and looted minority businesses and attacked CNN journalism crews.  Moreover, this violence spread in ways that seemed designed to provoke outrage and strengthen the societal "pillars of support" of the police and of the regime of Donald Trump.  For the vandals and the violent targeted iconic statues and other monuments to the cultural heritage of the United States.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  And in attacking minority businesses, the vandals sought to send a clear message that this is what happens whenever there is mass protest against established authority.

Other ways in which violent infiltrators sought to convey images of dis-order included the setting up of so-called "temporary autonomous zones" in city capitals by people who did not own property or have jobs in these so-called zones.  In essence, the people who set up these zones became squatters of the same sort that emerged in city parks throughout the United States during the "Occupy" protests.  And those who occupied these zones in 2020 were mostly white, just as those who "occupied" various public spaces in 2011.  The 2020 occupations ended just as badly as those in 2011 had, for the occupiers were rightfully seen as squatters.  But these squatters, along with the looters and the vandals of businesses and statues, served a useful purpose for the right-wing fascists running the Federal Government during Trump's last year - namely, that they gave him a convenient platform to portray himself as the sole upholder and defender of "law and order" against a crazed opposition movement who simply wanted to plunge American society into "chaos" and "anarchy."  In other words, they were the convenient foil in the continued re-telling of the myth of redemptive violence - the favorite myth of fascists and oppressors, by the way, and a myth that became part of Donald Trump's re-election campaign strategy.

I would like to suggest that in the violence, vandalism and squatting that took place, people who had no sympathy for the Black struggle in America managed to hijack the protests over the murder of George Floyd and to twist the message of these protests in a direction which has nothing at all to do with the Black struggle.  (As Marshall Ganz has repeatedly said, if you don't intentionally tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you - in ways that you won't like.)  That this could happen is due to the following failures of many in the Black community:

• 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.  

Random Sunday Ramblings

I owe longtime readers a series of concluding posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I will try to write another post in the series within the next week or so.  But today I'm feeling a bit lazy and I have the challenge of trying to rein in a schedule that has recently become less manageable than it ought to be.  So I'm chillin' in my backyard right now.  (My cat Koshka is chillin' also next to my right foot.)

I normally shop for groceries twice a week, although I hope to cut that down to once a week as soon as the veggies in my garden start producing.  However, last Thursday I forgot to catch up on some items that had run out, so this morning I made a run to a supermarket.  Along the way I passed three churches and noted the cars in the parking lots.  Those parking lots have had Sunday cars for the last few months, and whenever I've thought of people going to church during a pandemic like that caused by COVID-19, I have wondered at the craziness of some humans.  I haven't been to church (or coffee shops, libraries,  restaurants, etc.) for over a year.

The percentage of people who have received at least one vaccine shot in my state is high enough that a few days ago, the governor's office removed the requirement for people to wear masks in most public places.  That means that one of my biggest excuses for not attending church may go away.  Yet I still feel a curious reluctance to resume my churchgoing.  Part of the reason is that I have become used to taking what I consider to be lifesaving precautions.  In this I am not alone.  Today, for instance, I noticed that perhaps a majority of people in the supermarket I visited were still wearing masks, including store staff.  I feel a bit like the Willie Keith character in The Caine Mutiny after WWII has ended and he's steaming back to the United States - still observing personal blackout practices at night aboard his ship and unable to get used to steaming with the sonar turned off or having his ship's lights brightly blazing.

But another part of my reluctance stems from the fact that the pastors and members of many churches in the United States have shown themselves to be thoroughly, nauseatingly disgusting during the Trump era and especially during the last year and a half.  That stinking disgust burst into my consciousness again just a few minutes ago, as I was reading the Gospel of Luke, particularly Luke 3:15-17:

Now while the people were in a state of expectation 

and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he might be the Christ,

John answered and said to them all, "As for me, I baptize you with water; 

but One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals; 

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  

And His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, 

and to gather the wheat into His barn; 

but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

This passage struck me precisely because John describes Christ as a coming Judge.  It must be noted that Christ, when He came, did not refute or alter anything that John had said about him.  Nor did Christ alter any of John's exhortations to people to prepare for the coming of Christ by repenting - and by bringing forth fruit in keeping with repentance.  This is seen clearly in Luke 19:1-10, when after meeting Zaccheus the tax collector, Zaccheus announces to the Lord that he is giving back to people everything he stole or cheated out of them.  The Lord responds by saying, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he [Zaccheus] too, is a son of Abraham."  In other words, if a person has really repented, it will show in the way they treat others - especially in the way they treat the powerless, the poor and the oppressed.

Now the white American evangelical/Protestant church (and those Stockholm Syndrome-affected pastors of certain nonwhite churches) will enthusiastically preach Christ as a coming Judge - especially as a Judge who is coming to destroy all dark-skinned infidels.  Thus the white American evangelical/Protestant church continues to insist that "Blue lives matter!" and that we need to pray for our men in uniform who continue to use State-sanctioned violence in order to maintain both white privilege and white supremacy.  And their pastors continue to try to validate both themselves and the politicians who are backed by them by appealing to a "culture war" which is being waged to "purify" our society from deviant elements.  Never mind that these "culture warriors" continually prove themselves to be as deviant as the sins they condemn, or that the appeal to "culture warfare" is itself simply a ploy to garner more political and economic power for a privileged minority.

A funny thing happens, however, when anyone dares hold up a truth-telling mirror to the eyes of these people.  When they are forced to look at their own sins, they are suddenly all, "Well Jesus is full of grace!  The wonderful thing about Christ is that He died for our sins!  You're being judgmental for pointing my sins out to me!"  It gets even better if you dare to point out to them the Biblical mandate for social justice and the practical love of one's neighbor.  In Luke 16, for instance, the story of the rich man and Lazarus is routinely misinterpreted by these evangelicals to mean that the rich man went to hell simply because he refused to accept a 90-second catechism from a "Gospel tract."  (Somebody forgot to give that rich dude a leaflet explaining the Four Spiritual Laws!  After all, we're justified by faith apart from works of the Law, aren't we?!)  Many of these evangelical/Protestant types now going so far as to say that anyone who says that Christians are mandated by the Gospel to practice social justice is guilty of "legalism."  (See this, this, this, and this for instance.  And when you say "legalism", say it with the same sinister hiss that you would use when you say the word ssssocialissssmmmm...)

But the best of all whoppers I have ever heard were the assertions by evangelicals during the Trump years that Trump was somehow a Christian.  In order to say such a thing, these evangelicals had to deny almost all of the Biblical teaching on Christian character.  And when it was pointed out that Trump was not even a good example of sexual purity (almost the only purity that evangelicals seem to care about), we heard drivel like "Well, Trump is just a baby Christian" and "If God could use a wicked king like Nebuchadnezzar or Cyrus to accomplish His will, we can be sure that God is using Trump!  So we must support him!"

But what if Christ, when He returns, turns out to be what many evangelicals would call "legalistic"?  What if, moreover, many evangelicals wind up getting incinerated by unquenchable fire?  What if, when the Judge comes, He's coming for you?  Lemme tell ya, it makes me a bit uncomfortable to write this, knowing that for every finger I point outward, there are three pointing back at me!

Tying Two to Two

I have been thinking today about a Greek word I encountered a few weeks ago during my daily Bible reading.  It is found in Matthew 13 and Mark 4, shortly after the Parable of the Sower, and it is the word συνίημι ("syniemi"), which means literally "to send, bring, or set together."  In a metaphorical sense it also means to "put two and two together," that is, to understand the meaning and implications of a thing.  The passage in which this word appears reads thus:

For the heart of this people has become dull,

and with their ears they scarcely hear, 

and they have closed their eyes, 

lest they should see with their eyes, 

and hear with their ears,

and understand (σῠνῑ́ημῐ) with their heart and return,

and I should heal them.

Here we have a picture of a people who were diseased - and who indeed were suffering from their diseased condition - yet who were doomed to remain in their suffering because of their refusal to put two and two together.  Consider the many forms of suffering that arise from this willful refusal to put two and two together - a refusal that is one of the hallmarks of addiction or of cultic thinking.

And consider those nations which have historically identified themselves as the Global North.  Note how the cultures and political discourse of so many of these nations has been hijacked by the ideology of predatory laissez-faire free-market capitalism, the worship of wealth, white supremacy, and the selfishness of "libertarianism" and "conservatism."  Those who promoted this hijacking have loudly and insistently preached the message that there should be no limits or restrictions placed on the "liberty" of individuals for any reason whatsoever.  They failed to mention that they are most concerned about preserving the liberty of those individuals in a society who have the greatest economic and political power, who are thus free to indulge their selfishness by stepping on the toes (and any other convenient body parts) of all the rest of us.  Yet what is both noteworthy and tragic is that so many of the rest of us have bought the same message and drunk the same Kool-Aid which is sold to us by the wealthiest and most powerful members of our society.

But in recent decades, a number of crises have emerged as a result of this thinking.  I will consider only two of these today.  Let me mention that both crises could have been mitigated or avoided entirely had our society held a more collectivist mindset - that is, had we been the sort of people who value the common good above the unrestrained exercise of individual "liberty".  The first crisis is that of manmade climate change.  Yes, I said "manmade."  Other accurate phrases or terms would include "anthropogenic" or "human-caused."  We have known for decades that industrial activity was altering the earth's atmosphere in ways that would alter the climate - yet the defenders of "liberty" have loudly and insistently denied such knowledge.  Why?  Because to admit the impact of human industrial activity would have forced these people to confront a moral choice.  They would have been faced with the choice of "understanding with their hearts."  And that choice would have cost either a numbed conscience or possibly lots of money.  The Global North does like its money, doesn't it?  (The white American Evangelical/Protestant church really loves its money!  Must be why so many of its members and leaders can't seem to put two and two together...)  And in addition to the numbing of conscience, these nations chose to continue the destructive chasing of economic gain because many of their citizens told themselves that the consequences of their choices would never fall on them.  They said, "What do we care about polar bears?  Or about poor island people drowning in rising seas?  That's so far from us!"

Except that now it isn't far away at all.  Last year was the first year of my life in which I lived in the midst of a widespread, potentially lethal climate event.  It was an event for which to escape, many of us would have had to travel up to a thousand miles to the east.  It was an event during which the amount of free oxygen in the local atmosphere dropped to such levels that dangerous levels of carbon monoxide were produced.  And it was caused by wildfires that raged from Southern California to southern Canada.  We are about to experience another potentially lethal climate event, as daytime temperatures over much of the American West will exceed 100 degrees for several days, and nighttime temperatures will not drop below 70 degrees.  (See this also.)  Moreover, there will be few places to which to escape, because much of the rest of the United States is also experiencing climate crises including severe weather.  And both the heat and the severe weather are likely to recur several times this summer.  Would you like a little fire with that order?  Or maybe you have enough money to escape to Europe for a while.  Except that Europe is enduring its own heatwave (especially Eastern Europe), and parts of Russia have turned into a bit of Hell.  (See this also.)

There is also the ongoing crisis of the coronavirus pandemic.  What is noteworthy about the United States is the large number of people who have not yet been vaccinated - especially in southern "red" states - as well as the number of people who continue to refuse to wear masks in public.  I ran into one such gentleman this morning when I made a quick dash to buy some groceries.  I pointed him out to one of the store clerks, who told the man to put on a mask.  He protested, saying that he had been vaccinated.  Then the man looked at me and announced that he had been to Afghanistan.  I don't exactly know what reaction he hoped to get out of me - he was fat and had gray hair, and if he was really a vet, it was obvious that it had been a long time since he had graduated from the college of violent knowledge.  I just looked at him.  Had he caused trouble, he would have been able afterward to boast that not only had he been to Afghanistan, but he had also been to jail.  He did put on a mask.  People like him are the reason why the United States is so slow in returning to any semblance of a pre-pandemic "normal."  

The United States ignored for a while the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result, the American economy was badly damaged even as our leaders prioritized profits above dealing with the crisis.  The United States is now no longer the strongest nation on earth.  The Global North has ignored the implications of climate change until now, and as a result, the differential in power and wealth which the Global North has built with respect to the rest of the world is eroding.  Could it be perhaps way past time for some of us to start putting two and two together?

In Search of Good Work, Or, A Right Autarky

I'm glad to report that the work I've had over the last few months is winding down to a more manageable level.  (Not that I want it to disappear entirely - I still like eating and having some spending money!)  So today I thought I'd write a post that continues to develop some of the thoughts I've tried to expound in my series of comments on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  One thing that Gene Sharp says in his book is that "a liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  (Emphasis added.)  This notion of self-reliance and internal strengthening reminds me of a Bible verse which has struck me repeatedly ever since I noticed its occupational context over ten years ago.  The verse reads as follows: "And let our people also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs, that they may not be unfruitful."  (Titus 3:14)  In the margin of my Bible, the word rendered "deeds" has an alternate rendering of "occupations."  It is the rendering of that word as "occupations" which first arrested my interest.

Now if you Google "Titus 3:14", you will encounter a huge number of emotive commentaries by people who tell us that the "good works" mentioned in Titus are primarily deeds of church-style charity to those who are in need, such as picking up elderly Sister Gladys from her house in the country so she can come with you to church on Sunday, or helping Deacon Weatherly pull weeds in his front yard on Saturday so he can have more time to be a servant to the church.  Carried still further, those who interpret the verse in this way begin to talk eloquently about the huge amount of work that is needed to run a church with multiple services - from running the sound system to making the coffee to mowing the church grounds to cleaning the bathrooms, etc., etc.  (Not to pick on anybody, but here and here are a couple of examples of what I'm talking about.)

But to interpret that verse in an occupational sense opens up an entirely different window - a window through which many people have never attentively looked.  For this interpretation begins to illuminate the spiritual dimension of the work, and of the kinds of work, which we choose to do for a living.  So let us consider this dimension as we read the words "good deeds," or in the King James version and other versions, "good works." Those words in the original Greek are "καλός ἔργον," which can be translated literally as "beautifully good work".  And the purpose of the work is to provide for "necessary, urgent, indispensable needs, necessities or uses" (ἀναγκαῖος χρεία).  If we take Titus 3:14 as part of a body of New Testament teaching on the spirituality of work, we are drawn to other Scriptures such as 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, which says "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may walk properly toward outsiders and have need of nothing."  

The quiet working with our own hands is a key pillar of the Biblical definition of righteous autarky.  The other element of righteous autarky is contentment with what one has, as described in 1 Timothy 6:6.  But there are many in the world who seek autarky in a perverted way because they insist on living in a world that places no limits on them, and because they are addicted to consumer culture, national narcissism, and the love of money.  For them autarky means going to war against those who are both content and self-sufficient in order to knock them over the head and take their stuff.  The wealthy of most nations fit into this category - including много вороватых русских человечков в бункерах as well as many rich American thieves in their own bunkers.  This evil kind of autarky is a hallmark of earthly empires.

Righteous autarky is a hallmark of those who are escaping from the global system of predatory capitalist domination and exploitation which in Revelation 18 is called "Babylon", for those who practice this kind of autarky depend on their own beautifully good work and their own ability to live simply as a means of breaking their reliance on their oppressor, that is, Babylon (and providing themselves with a clear conscience as part of the bargain - Revelation 18:4).  I submit to you that engaging occupationally in "beautifully good work to meet indispensable needs" is a key part of righteous autarky.  Ain't bad work if you can get it, but ya gotta know where to look!

So let us consider the search for occupations that are beautifully good and that meet necessary needs.  And here we must consider the things which make this search difficult.  First of all, there is the distraction of the worthless - that is, the distractions served up by a society that exalts the worthless.  By this I mean particularly celebrity culture, the culture which exalts the best and brightest performers in those fields which are crowded precisely because they are fun, they don't require much effort, and they are entirely optional.  Here we have those who want to follow in the steps of rich as YouTubers and lottery winners, those who want to become famous podcasters like Joe Rogan, those who are wanna-be actors and other celebrities, and those who would like to become members of the British royal family - in short, people who seek to be like those individuals who have managed to get a lot of something for nothing.  We are told to imitate celebrity because celebrities are held up as a model which the rest of us can and should imitate.

An acute example of the distraction of the worthless is the celebration of worthless business.  By this I mean the rise and excessive valuation of many "tech" companies whose chief executives (like Mark Zuckerberg) are celebrated as inventors of engines of "wealth creation."  But to credit these people with "wealth creation" is actually false, for what they have actually achieved by means of tech platforms such as Facebook is parasitic wealth transfer - a transfer of the last remaining distributed wealth of the non-wealthy into the pockets of the wealthy.  In other words, men such as Zuckerberg (and, I would suggest, Elon Musk) are merely really good examples of efficient parasites.  The same could be said for the CEO's of many major retail chains such as Walmart and Home Cheapo which have driven smaller retail operations out of business.

The activities of these parasites has given rise to a third difficulty, namely the impacts of a changing society on our ability to find meaningful, beautifully good work.  This change has two causes:

• 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.  

To close, then, let us look at the characteristics of the kind of work we should be looking to do.  It should be beautiful - that is, it should have an element of craftsmanship, of mastery, and of increasing rewards for the acquisition of increasingly rare and valuable skills.  It should be good - that is, genuinely beneficial to humankind.  And it should be necessary - that is, indispensable.  As Asef Bayat says, "An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world-class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry.  Excellence is power; it is identity."  This is how the church of the New Testament - composed largely of poor people and slaves - began to liberate itself from Rome.  This is how we of the African-American diaspora will liberate ourselves.  To  borrow some language from the study of artificial intelligence, let these characteristics define the "objective function" you seek to optimize in your search for paying work.

On Fleeing The Glowing Glass

I have every intention of continuing my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  However, as I have said in a recent post, I've been working like a dog.  This has deprived me of bandwidth needed to write research-heavy posts.  In a few weeks, hopefully, I won't be so busy.  

This week, I thought it would be good to re-visit a post I wrote a few months ago titled, "Farewell to YouTube."  I wrote that post to announce my decision to quit watching YouTube videos.  I made the decision to quit because YouTube had chosen to make itself the haunt of racist, far-Right thugs (and of extremists in general).  (See this also.)  The reason for YouTube's decision was that the executives who run this service were told by marketers and cognitive psychologists that the way to drive up viewership was to recommend and promote videos that provoke outrage and extremism.  The reason why these doofuses thought that this was a good idea was that increased viewership meant increased advertising revenue for YouTube (and hence for Google).  I just got nauseatingly tired of recommendations to videos by Sky News, Fox News, or any other media outlet owned by the family of Rupert Murdoch.  I got "projectile emesis" tired of seeing recommendations for any videos with Donald Chump as the main character - especially after the attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol by Trump-head white supremacists in January and after YouTube's foot-dragging in removing former President Chump's access to YouTube.  

So I quit YouTube this past January.  But a funny thing happened.  I discovered that I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms of a sort.  Not that I missed being constantly insulted and threatened.  But it was because of my original reasons for starting to watch YouTube in the first place - reasons which roughly paralleled my original fascination with the Internet in the first place.  For the Internet (and YouTube in particular) started out as a source of inspiration and information to guide me in my pursuit of the mastery of hard things.  Later, they became an unfortunate escape to an unfortunate extent, as I found myself stuck in the drudgery of everyday life while compensating for the drudgery by sneaking looks at people whose lives truly seemed to be a happy adventure. This was especially true of the fascination I developed for the Philippines, for Indonesia, for South Korea, and for Gambia last year.  For in watching YouTube videos of life (and music) in these places, I was struck by the difference between the happy, sane cultures and the polite, pleasant people I was seeing versus the derangement of life in the United States under Donald Thump.

In quitting YouTube, I found that I was missing the dopamine rush of vicarious living - that is, of living through the experience of watching other people's happiness.  So I fell off the wagon a bit in February.  I thought I could tame the YouTube beast by switching browsers and search engines.  And I discovered YouTube channels hosted by people who made videos of themselves studying.  This was during our rainy winter season, and I had not yet been vaccinated, so I was stuck working from home.  The study videos did indeed provide inspiration, but I noticed that some of them also seemed to be designed to sell furniture, music players, computer monitors, and other gear so that the viewer could replicate the perfect study setup he or she was watching on his or her glowing screen.  As I watched these videos while doing some difficult reading of my own, I was struck by the silly banality of thinking I needed to watch a video of someone else studying in order to help me do my own work.  

And I was again confronted by the fact that for too many people (myself included), YouTube had become a means of vicarious enjoyment of other people' successes rather that a help for us in doing our own difficult yet worthwhile tasks.  It is much easier to watch mentally healthy, non-radicalized, non-European people socializing in developing countries than it is to try to repair the poisoned culture of one's own country.  It is much easier to watch an accomplished fingerstyle guitarist play music than it is to pull one's own ax out of the closet and engage in an hour of deliberate practice.  It is much easier to watch someone study to the sound of background music in the perfectly decked out living room of a fifth or sixth floor condominium whose window looks out over a city skyline than it is to read technical journals in silence at a desk in a spare bedroom during a rainstorm.  (Although now the weather is quite warm and dry.  My backyard has become the perfect place for me to do some deep work, accompanied by the ASMR sound of the freeway several blocks away and the more intermittent sound of the wind in the trees. My backyard beats the condo dude's living room - even though he has thousands of YouTube "followers"!  Maybe I should make videos of myself reading in my backyard.  Or maybe not...)  

So I am back on the wagon.  And one thing that has helped me stay on this time is a podcast I heard in March or April, titled, "Close Enough: The Lure of Living Through Others."  Fascinating stuff.  What are we missing by living vicariously through social media rather than doing the hard work needed to accomplish worthwhile things ourselves?  What kind of miserable life do you have if you spend all your time on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube?  And even if YouTube should clean up its act and cease to be a tool of white radicalism, would it be worth it for me to go back?  Didn't I waste enough time as a kid watching hours of TV?  What if by boycotting a thing, you discover that you really don't need it anymore?

The Strongest Nonviolent Weapons

When an oppressed people faces an oppressing power, there are certain limits on what the oppressed can reasonably expect.  One thing the oppressed usually cannot expect (at least, not by itself) is to end their oppression simply by appealing to the better angels of their oppressors.  For the whole point of oppression is to create an economic and political system which grants all the benefits of a society to a small group of privileged people while externalizing all of the costs of that society onto the oppressed.  This was the goal and chief characteristic of the antebellum American South and of South Africa under apartheid.  Anyone who would want to create such a system therefore has no better angels to appeal to.  The soul of such a person is a piece of garbage.

The Republican Party in the United States has sought to revive such a system.  From the Tea Party to Trump, we all can see the poisonous fruits of their labors.  The Republicans know that they can never win elections in a nation that is composed of many peoples who have been designated by the Republican party as meat to be chewed in a cannibal feast.  Therefore one of their strategies has been to try as hard as possible to restrict the right to vote in the United States by disenfranchising as many of their intended victims as possible.

So we come to Georgia in 2021, where the Republican-controlled state government has recently passed the most restrictive voting law in the United States.  But here we have a beautiful response by some of the people most affected by that law.  For over 1,000 pastors of African-American churches have joined together to urge a boycott of corporations such as Home Depot (also known as Home Cheapo) that refuse to oppose the Georgia law.  The boycott as a tactic is straight out of Gene Sharp's 198 methods.  Note also that these pastors have not called for street protests, thus showing a level of tactical and strategic maturity far beyond that shown by the Black Lives Matter organizers last year.

To be sure, there are some who say that calls for boycotts are "controversial."  Among these is Stacey Abrams, who asserts that a boycott is the wrong move because it would hurt poor Georgians.  She conveniently forgets that the same criticism was made against Black South African liberation leaders in the 1980's when they called for boycotts and international economic sanctions against South African businesses.  She also forgets that most Black South Africans living under apartheid supported the boycotts and calls for economic sanctions.  For they knew that when dealing with corrupt, proud, evil pieces of garbage, the only language that would carry weight was the language of power - the power to impose real costs.  Finally, Ms. Abrams seems to forget that it was the sanctions and boycotts - not merely trying to work through institutional means - that forced the de Klerk regime to renounce apartheid.  In her opposition to an economic boycott of Georgia, Stacey Abrams sounds suspiciously like the leaders of many modern-day "business unions" who dissuade their members from striking.  (Perhaps Stacey Abrams might better be named "Aunt Tammy"?)

To those "bleeding-heart conservatives" who oppose the organizing of economic non-cooperation against oppressors, I have some words.  Over fifty years ago, Thomas Schelling wrote the following:

“[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!

On The Relative Poverty of Money vs Time

Last year was truly horrible in many respects, as the world in general and the United States in particular were subjected to the criminally incompetent leadership of malignant leaders aligned with the Global Far Right.  The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the fruits of this leadership.  COVID-19 sidelined many economies, including the economy of the United States.  The sidelining we endured was protracted by the refusal of our former Prez Donald Trump and the Rethuglican Party to take effective measures to deal with the pandemic.

As a result, for several months I found myself with very little to do, and hence no real income.  This was not a terrible hardship, as I had some money saved up.  So I spent way too much time traveling the world via YouTube (and falling in love with countries like the Philippines!).  I also spent time sharpening my occupational skills, developing marketing plans, and writing proposals.  During the summer (at least up until last year's terrible wildfires) I spent evenings taking walks through the neighborhood and playing guitar in my backyard as the sun went down.  

This year I find myself suddenly working like a dog.  This is exciting on a certain level, as my line of business is beginning to revive.  On the other hand, there is a certain stress.  I sometimes envy the lives led by my "associates":

Koshka and Vashka, doing what cats do best!

Someday I'll get to do that again ...

When The Wicked Perish, There Is Joyful Shouting

I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all counts in the murder of George Floyd.  I had my doubts as to whether the American so-called "justice" system which has been used so devastatingly against unarmed people of color would actually be willing and able to dispense justice to some of the perpetrators of that devastation.  Derek Chauvin is to me a throwaway person - a worthless pile of used toilet paper like so many cops in America's police forces, a piece of garbage thug, a worthless junkyard of a human being.

Yet the news of Chauvin's conviction has also unleashed a great, shaking anger in me.  For there are many just like him who have gone unpunished.  These include Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, the murderers of Philando Castille and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Breonna Taylor, and the murderers of Stephon Clark.  The anger I feel right now is never very far from the surface of my consciousness.  Yet that anger is what drives me to the study of strategic nonviolent resistance.  For that resistance is not about trying to be "spiritual" or trying to build "beloved communities" with unrepentant racist white supremacist piles of garbage.  I'm not trying to melt their hearts.  Their souls are their problem.  My conception of strategic nonviolent resistance is about using indirect means to put myself and my people into a position in which we can no longer be assailed by such thugs.  In other words, it is the most radical example of the strategy of indirect approach.  

One salve for my anger is the thought that these unrepentant murderers haven't really gotten away with anything.  For a day will come in which they leave this earthly life - even though it be from old age - and then they will stand before a Judge who cannot be corrupted.  The smoke of their torment - literally, the smoke of their torture - will rise forever and ever.

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. 

 

From D to D, Chapters 6 & 7: What You Do With What You Have

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.

The previous post in this series explored the role of grand strategy in the exercise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  We noted that the concept of grand strategy is part of the strategic framework which nations use in order to achieve their highest and most important goals.  Specifically, grand strategy is the art of arranging all the resources of a state or polity to achieve its goals.  We also noted that national governments have the ability to compel their citizens or subjects to give their resources for the support of the nation's grand strategy.  This compulsion can come in the form of taxes or compulsory national service such as being drafted into the military.  However, this ability to compel is not available to those who live under oppression and who seek to liberate their people from that oppression through strategic nonviolent resistance.  You may be part of an oppressed group of people and you may be moved to try to organize a nonviolent liberation struggle.  Yet you cannot force your brothers and sisters to join your movement or to give their resources to support your grand strategy.  What you can do, however, is to craft a compelling "vision of tomorrow" to set in front of your people - a vision that concretely describes where we should all want to go and how we will try to get there.

And there is a second thing you can do.  Let's repeat Gene Sharp's definition of grand strategy here:

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. (Emphasis added.)

Here's the thing.  As Gene Sharp pointed out in Part 3 of his work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, "Rarely, if ever, does either the nonviolent or the opponent group include the whole 'population,' or group of people, whom they purport to represent or serve.  In a given nonviolent campaign the active participants are usually a relatively small percentage of the whole population in whose interests the nonviolent group claims to be acting." (Emphasis added.)  This "relatively small percentage" needs to develop its own grand strategy, its own plan that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all the resources at its own disposal in order to attain its objectives in its struggle.  In other words, the struggle group itself needs to develop a plan for how it will coordinate and use its own resources in building a successful long-range liberation struggle.

There are two things to note in considering the grand strategy of a struggle group.  First, it is a well-known historical fact that many successful movements have been created by small groups of people with few resources.  The fact that these movements were successful in bringing about large changes in societies shows the skill of these small groups in developing a wise grand strategy for the use of their own resources in bringing about these large changes.  One example of this is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose members went into Mississippi to desegregate centers of white power and to win the right of African-Americans to vote and participate in electoral politics without fear of violence.  The story of SNCC is told in books such as I've Got The Light Of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne, PhD.  The story of SNCC also partly refutes Doug McAdam's assertion that political movements emerge only where the dominant power structures allow "political opportunities."  For the white supremacists who controlled Mississippi at that time fought very hard (and violently!) to thwart the efforts of the SNCC organizers.  Yet SNCC won.

From this observation comes the corollary observation that the long-range outcomes produced by a social movement organization are a reflection and embodiment of its grand strategy.  Some groups have access to many resources, yet they produce meager or worthless results.  Other groups are small and have few resources, and they work under extremely threatening circumstances - yet they change their societies.  And sometimes they change the world.  I argue that the difference in outcomes comes down to a difference in grand strategy.

What then is this difference?  I would argue that it may just be possible that the difference comes down to a basic difference in motivation, a difference in desire.  And I'd like to suggest that in so-called social movement organizations that have existed for a long time, we can see in many cases a certain corruption of desire.  The reasons for this are found in the third chapter of Doug McAdam's book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930 - 1970, in which he lists three dangers which are faced by a social movement organization: oligarchization, co-optation, and dissolution of indigenous support.  

Oligarchization refers to the way in which the leaders of social movement organizations can tend to forget over time that the reason why their organization exists in the first place is to make a needed change.  They then start to think that the only reason why their organization exists is to exist, and that the leaders' job is simply to make sure that the organization keeps existing.  Co-optation is what happens when a social movement organization forgets that a key to the liberation of an oppressed people is the building of self-reliance among the oppressed.  Once the organization's leaders forget this, they start begging for funding (or applying for nonprofit status) from resource-rich members of the members of the dominant culture.  But they forget (or willfully blind themselves to the fact) that he who pays the piper gets to call the tune.  Therefore in receiving or asking for funding, the leaders of an indigenous social movement organization tend quickly to abandon the disruptive original goals of the social movement.  By being bought off, they cease to be a threat to an unjust status quo.  Dissolution of indigenous support is what then happens when a social movement organization has allowed itself to be oligarchized and co-opted.  For the people most affected by injustice - the people on whose behalf the social movement organization originally came into existence - will now look at that organization and correctly conclude that it has become a bunch of worthless Uncle Toms (and Auntie Tammys).

This is why I'm not terribly impressed with the NAACP anymore or with many other historic Black social movement organizations which have survived to this day.  For when Aiyana Stanley Jones was shot in her own bedroom - and when Trayvon Martin's murderer was acquitted - and when the long spate of publicly witnessed and recorded police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans ensued - and when the Trump presidency was busy committing its own atrocities - I would have expected that these organizations should have been able to mount a nonviolent, yet extremely coercive response that could have stopped this garbage in its tracks.  Instead, I was reading news articles that described the NAACP as "moribund".  (This is not a new criticism, by the way!)  At the same time, it was revealed that a White woman had risen to the leadership of a chapter of an organization that existed supposedly to solve problems faced by the Black community, namely, the NAACP!

I would suggest therefore that many historically Black social movement organizations have become moribund, and thus worthless.  In this, they mirror a broader phenomenon which has taken place in the American labor movement, in which certain unions which had come into existence decades ago as extremely scrappy and coercively powerful organizations were transformed over time into toothless "business unions."  But I would also like to suggest that social movement organizations that become worthless in this way face a danger.  This danger comes because their "grand strategy" has degenerated into a strategy of merely trying to continue existing and to keep obtaining funding in order to pretend to fight for the people they claim to represent.  This is then their way of "making the best of a bad situation" by profiting from that situation.  But what if the bad situation suddenly disappears?

I am thinking now of the Cold War and of the thriving and wealthy American defense industry which resulted from it.  If you talked with many employees of defense plants of that era, they would have told you that "war is good for the economy."  Clearly their career plans had been built on a strategy of "making the best" of a long-term bad situation.  Yet there were people in the Soviet Empire who were tired of this bad situation.  Among these were the Solidarnosc organizers in Poland, and the organizers of pro-democracy and liberation movements in other satellite countries.  They did not want to "make the best" of a bad situation.  Instead, they wanted to end that situation.  

And they succeeded.  This caused a massive disruption of the American defense industry.  I suggest that it was a contributing cause of the recession of the early 1990's which took place in the United States.  One of the casualties of the collapse of the Cold War was the Hughes Aircraft Company plant in Fullerton, California.  That plant (called the "Huge Aircrash Company" by some employees) occupied several acres of land in the Sunny Hills part of Fullerton, and employed thousands of people.  In 1990, it lost its raison d'etre.  It is now a bunch of supermarkets and big box stores.

Working Like A Dog

Those who follow this blog will have noticed that I was unable to write a post for last weekend.  The title of today's post explains why.  I suddenly find my occupational skills to be in very high demand - which is a good thing as it helps me to buy groceries!  However, I will try to have a post for this coming weekend.  In the meantime, here is a link to a fascinating article exposing the actual basis of the 2020 profits of the Tesla corporation.  The linked source, along with others, points out that Elon Musk's company has been unable to this day to be profitable on its own by selling its own cars.  The only thing that has helped the company post profits recently is the selling of carbon credits.  This is interesting, because Musk has built a PR campaign over the last year to portray himself as a smart, cutting-edge businessman and intellectual.  (See this also.)  Beware of celebrity culture; you know the old warning about all that glitters...

Link - Arab Tyrant Manual podcast with Jamila Raqib

Here is a link to a podcast interview of Jamila Raqib of the Albert Einstein Institution.  Jamila is the executive director of the Institution, which was originally founded by Dr. Gene Sharp to study the development and application of strategic nonviolent resistance.  The interview was conducted by Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash of the Kawaakibi Foundation, an organization which describes itself thus:

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.

The Kawaakibi Foundation is also very active in training movement organizers in effective nonviolent change.  To quote them again,

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.

Their Arab Tyrant Manual is an initiative designed to fight the spread of illiberal and authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab world.   

The interview with Jamila covers ground that will be familiar to long-time students of strategic nonviolent resistance.  But it breaks some new ground as well in discussing how a successful nonviolent movement depends less on changing the heart of the oppressor and more on changing the hearts of the oppressed so that they begin to discover their own power.  The podcast also discusses questions of how to carry on the legacy of Dr. Gene Sharp.  Enjoy!

From D to D, Chapter 6 (Continued): Grand Strategy

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our minds

Have no fear for atomic energy

'Cause none of them can stop the time

How long shall they kill our prophets,

while we stand aside and look?

Some say it's just a part of it, 

We've got to fulfill the book ...

Won't you help to sing

These songs of freedom?

'Cause all I ever have:

Redemption songs

Redemption songs

- Bob Marley, Redemption Song

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.

A key word in the phrase "strategic nonviolent resistance" is the word "strategic."  The success of this kind of resistance therefore depends heavily on the formulation of a wise collective strategy of liberation by the oppressed group.  What then makes for good strategy?  In Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D, Gene Sharp seeks to answer this question.  In Chapter 6 therefore, Sharp starts by laying out the skeleton of strategic planning.  To do this, he defines the following four terms: grand strategy, strategy, tactic, and method.  Today's post will discuss what is meant by grand strategy.

What then is grand strategy?  In Chapter 6 of From D to D, Sharp defines it thus: 

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.

This definition draws heavily from the definition contained in B.H. Liddell-Hart's book The Strategy of Indirect Approach, in which Liddell-Hart says that

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.

These definitions serve to describe what grand strategy does; yet they may seem to fall short of describing what it actually is.  Liddell-Hart comes closer to the mark in saying that grand strategy is simply a higher plane of strategy in general.  And he offers a very concise definition of strategy as "the art of distributing military means to fulfill the ends of policy."

Since Liddell-Hart, others within the realms of governments have tried to create a concise and stable definition of "grand strategy."  Among these are Dr. Tami Davis Biddle, who quotes John Lewis Gaddis in describing grand strategy as “the calculated relationship of means to large ends. It’s about how one uses whatever one has to get to wherever it is one wants to go.”  Timothy Andrew Sayle quotes Jeremi Suri in writing that "grand strategy is the wisdom to make power serve useful purposes."  Peter Layton says that "Grand strategy is the art of developing and applying diverse forms of power in an effective and efficient way to try to purposefully change the relationship existing between two or more intelligent and adaptive entities."  Andrew Monaghan wrote that grand strategy is the art of “using all of the nation’s resources to promote the interests of the state, including securing it against enemies perceived and real.”

From these and other sources, we can conclude therefore that grand strategy is the art of arranging all the resources of a state or polity in order to achieve its goals.  (That's the TH in SoC definition!) Therefore, the ultimate goals of a nation direct its grand strategy.  And while sometimes those goals are rationally chosen and planned, it is also true that often the goals of a nation are an emergent product of the nation's culture, and thus not always consciously obvious even to the nation's leaders, as pointed out by Sayle, who provides the following quote from Edward Luttwak:

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.

Here's the thing.  The only polities that can get away without an explicit, consciously planned grand strategy are those centers of empire that are at the height of their power.  And they can get away with this only for so long before there are consequences.  Most of the world's oppressed peoples are those whose oppression is a consequence of their own lack of a grand strategy.  If you don't make good plans for yourself and your people, be sure that other people - most of whom are very powerful and not very nice - will make plans for you.  Often those plans will involve things like roasting you over a slow fire and sticking you between two pieces of bread.

Careful readers will note that I pulled most of the definitions of grand strategy quoted above from thinkers and writers who are paid by governments to think and write.  And the relationship between governments of nations and grand strategy is that these governments usually employ people whose job in life is to carefully document the state's resources, both military and otherwise.  These record-keepers include census workers, tax collectors, and paid researchers.  A second characteristic of this relationship is that strong governments are usually able during emergencies to use their authority (backed by State force) to compel their citizens to give their resources for the support of the nation's grand strategy.  How does this compare to members of an oppressed people who are planning the nonviolent liberation of their people?

The first difference to note is that often those who are activized to start organizing their people won't have access to some detailed, nicely curated database of their people's resources, capabilities and weaknesses.  Nor will they have the wherewithal to create such a database - at least, not at first.  Therefore their knowledge of their people and of their collective situation will have to be gained during a long period of observation, of meeting people, of listening to their stories, of asking questions.  In other words, developing a grand strategy may well have to start with an extensive fact-finding phase.  Nor can this fact-finding be limited solely to learning about one's own people.  One must also learn to identify the strengths, weaknesses and resources of one's allies, potential competitors, and opponents.

There is a second difference between grand strategy as applied by a national government and grand strategy as applied by the organizers of a liberation struggle among an oppressed people.  That difference is that unlike the heads of a state, the organizers of a nonviolent liberation struggle can't compel or force people to give themselves and their resources to the organizers in order to fulfill the grand strategy of the organizers.  These leaders and organizers can't create draft boards to seize young men and put them into the organizers' services.  They can't condemn real estate or use eminent domain or levy taxes to seize the assets of their brothers and sisters.  Instead, they must ask and persuade; they must accept that resources will only be given voluntarily.  The question for the organizers then becomes how to persuade this voluntary giving.  This difficulty is real, yet not often as obvious as it should be to people like Derek Sivers who talk of movement-building as if it was as easy as a shirtless dancing guy on a beach getting everyone else on the beach to start dancing.

I therefore suggest that a process of creating a grand strategy of liberation for an oppressed people begins with crafting a "vision of tomorrow" - that is, by setting before one's people a concrete description of where we should all want to go and how we will try to get there.  Some necessary aspects of this vision of tomorrow:

• 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.

A few weeks ago I sketched out my own tentative version of a "Vision of Tomorrow" for the African-American people.  Here it is:

The goal: To organize the African-American people into a people who are:

• 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.

How we will get there: 

• 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.

This is what I intend to work for and how I intend to spend my time when I engage in organizing.  But it's only a start.  In order to get buy-in for this sort of vision, I need to hear what my brothers and sisters think about it and how and where they think it should be changed.  It may also need to be shortened and condensed to make it more punchy and memorable.

I will close by suggesting that readers study some of the more well-known successful nonviolent liberation struggles in recent history to see how grand strategy was conceived and evolved, and who did the strategizing.  Particularly, how did Gandhi do it?  Or how about the Reverend James Lawson or OTPOR! or Solidarnosc?  How did these craft a compelling "Vision of Tomorrow"?

A SUGGESTED READING LIST

• "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