From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: Where Are The Carpenters?

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 recent posts, 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 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.

As I mentioned in the most recent post in this series, this building of a righteous parallel society with parallel institutions that meet the needs of the oppressed was conspicuously absent from the so-called "resistance" against the Trump administration from 2017 to 2020.  And it seems to have been painfully absent from the resistance by the African-American community to renewed racist oppression over the last decade.  This absence has not escaped the notice of honest and trustworthy scholars of nonviolent civil resistance.  For instance, Erica Chenoweth commented repeatedly in YouTube interviews from 2018 onward that the "resistance" against Trump seemed to be too one-dimensional, too much of a one-trick pony whose participants spent too much time shouting loudly in the streets against the world they saw coming into being and too little time articulating - in word and action - the vision of the world they actually wanted to see.  The articulation of this vision - a "vision of tomorrow" as described by Srdja Popovic - is much easier for bystanders to see and to embrace when it is embodied in deep, strong organizing of righteous parallel institutions for meeting social needs.  (See "Protests in Perspective: Civil Disobedience & Activism Today, with Erica Chenoweth & Deva Woodly", and "Social Movements in the Age of Fake News with Erica Chenoweth."  Note especially that second citation.  In it, Chenoweth discusses the pivotal role played those who built parallel institutions in the Polish struggle against the Russian-backed Jaruselski regime.)  As I have also mentioned repeatedly in this series, the combination of over-reliance on hasty mass mobilization and hastily thrown-together mass protest, combined with the lack of deep, long-term organizing, has allowed the holders of concentrated wealth and economic and political power to frequently inject violent agents provocateurs into many of the mass protests and mobilizations that have taken place in the U.S. over the last five years.

It may well therefore be asked why this parallel institution-building, this parallel society-building, has been so frequently neglected over the last decade or so by those who call themselves activists and who consider themselves to be leaders of struggles for liberation.  The answer lies in part in the endemic laziness of us humans who tend to "demand" change rather than creating that change ourselves - both as individuals and as self-conscious, self-organized collectives.  (Organizing is hard work, lemme tell ya!  I speak from experience.)  But I would argue that part of the answer lies in the bad advice many of us have received in answer to our questions about how to create liberating change.  

Some of that bad advice was discussed in my post titled, "The Poverty of Pivenism."  In particular, I took aim at the teachings and intellectual legacy of Frances Fox Piven and highlighted the spectacular failures of many of the mobilizations of recent years which embodied a Pivenist strategy.  I also took aim at a book by Mark Engler and Paul Engler titled, This Is An Uprising, a book which claims to teach the principles of successful strategic nonviolent resistance.  The Englers' praise of Pivenism combined with their disdain for long-term deep organizing leads me to believe that they are, at best, rank amateurs.  And yet not all bad advice is given by the ignorant rank amateur.  Some bad advice is given by those who deliberately seek to mislead.

I am thinking just now of June of 2020, in which there were massive protests over the police murder of George Floyd, and in which agents provocateurs had already begun to make sizable inroads into these protests for the purpose of looting and vandalism.  During that month an article was published in a weekly magazine called the Nation, and the title of the article was "In Defense of Destroying Property."  The article was written by R. H. Lossin, a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes.    (At the beginning of this year, she also taught a course with an even more provocative title, namely, "Sabotage: Violence, Theory, and Protest.")  Her White privilege insulates her almost completely from the consequences of saying such things, as well as the consequences that people of color would surely have suffered for following her advice last year.  Yet from her position of privileged safety she was advocating that we who belong to communities of the oppressed should engage in violence.  And yes, my definition of violence includes sabotage and property destruction, for these activities have the same effect of weakening movements for liberation that would occur if movement activists physically attacked their opponents.

But I am also thinking of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), and the difference between my first discovery of this group and my attitude at the final parting of our ways.  I go back now to the horrible and frightening days of the close of 2016, when many Americans discovered that our democracy had been broken and that we were getting a genocidal tyrant as the 45th President.  The discovery of the fact that Trump would be our next President combined with my anger and my commitment to Christian ethics moved me to seriously research what strategic nonviolent resistance had to offer.  So I discovered Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, and I eagerly read How Nonviolent Struggle Works.  I watched a ton of YouTube videos which featured Gene Sharp.  I downloaded the audio of From Dictatorship to Democracy and listened to it over and over again while washing dishes, mowing the lawn, and doing whatever other mindless work was conducive to listening to audiobooks.  I discovered Jamila Raqib and her special emphasis on parallel institution-building and the constructive program as part of a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

And I discovered the ICNC and the many YouTube videos produced by them.  These videos, produced between 2010 and 2016, were a source of fascinating information, deep insight, and hope.  I am thinking especially of the videos from the yearly Fletcher Summer Institutes which were hosted by the ICNC, particularly the videos from the 2013 Fletcher Summer Institute.  That summer seminar featured seasoned veteran activists and leaders of liberation struggles from South Africa to Bolivia and beyond.  In watching those videos I got to (virtually) know such people as Oscar Olivera of Bolivia, who led the successful struggle of the citizens of Cochabamba against the Bechtel corporation in the Cochabamba water war.  And Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa, who played an integral role in the initial victorious anti-apartheid struggle there.  And the Reverend James Lawson, who played an integral role in some of the more coercive nonviolent boycotts which ended de facto segregation in the American South.  And Shaazka Beyerle, who has done extensive research into the use of civil resistance against state corruption.

Unfortunately, the ICNC stopped hosting its Fletcher Summer Institutes from 2017 onward.  (A rather interesting coincidence, given the start of the Trump presidency in 2017, no?)  But I was pleasantly surprised (or so I thought) when in 2018, I read on their website that they were hosting a free online course on civil resistance during the fall of that year.  I eagerly signed up, and was glad to be accepted.  What I thought I was getting into (even though at this time I had never heard of Zoom and did not know the role that videoconferencing would play in online instruction especially in the present moment) was an engaging, instructive, live series of videoconferences with renowned experts and practitioners.  In other words, I thought I had signed up for a chance to converse with and ask questions of people such as James Lawson, Mary Elizabeth King, Hardy Merriman, Jack DuVall, Peter Ackerman, Erica Chenoweth, Maciej Bartkowski, Shaazka Beyerle, and others who had become something of a constellation of guiding lights to me from 2017 onward.

Instead, I merely got to participate in a series of online forums which were moderated by people I had never heard of, so-called "activists" and academics who, it seems, had never led a successful movement in their lives.  One of the main moderators was a guy named Steve Chase, and another was a guy named Daniel Dixon.  Mr. Dixon is the gentleman I mentioned in an earlier post who suggested that sometimes violent and nonviolent movements can combine in ways which increase the synergistic effects of both.  As I mentioned in that post, all the available research strongly suggests otherwise!  When I mentioned that I disagreed, and that I wanted to learn how parallel institution-building works to strengthen a nonviolent movement, both Dixon and others kept mentioning the Zapatistas as an example of a struggle group which combined violence with parallel institution-building, and they suggested that I had much to learn from the Zapatistas.  They were right.  I learned that the Zapatistas lost to the Mexican army and had chosen to renounce violence.  End of discussion.

But the ICNC staffers kept throwing up the suggestion that there was some sort of room for violent actors in a successful strategic nonviolent liberation struggle.  An academic named Veronique Dudouet kept citing an article by some guy named Ben Case which suggested that "'...ignoring civilian violence or assuming that it is always and necessarily harmful to movements limits the analytical reach of civil resistance research'. He then uses the case of the Egyptian revolution to prove that sometimes the use of limited 'protestor violence' might prove beneficial to civil resistance..."  Not only this, but the focus of much of the discussion on these online forums was solely on protest as a resistance tactic.  (This was not surprising, since many of the forum participants who were Americans identified themselves with "Antifa.")  I expressed frustration at this, noting that relying solely on protests was leading to incidents of violence occurring every time people came together, and asking why this online "course" wasn't exploring some of the other 197 of Gene Sharp's 198 methods.  Steve Chase responded by suggesting that other tactics were not as "disruptive" as mass protest.  (I guess he never heard of the Montgomery bus boycott!)  And he held up himself as a good example of movement organizing in that he organized an anti-fascist rally which included some organizations that use violent protest tactics, but which were persuaded by him to not engage in violence during his rally.  As I wrote to him later, that move of his was like playing with matches in a paper house, since if the government had instituted a crackdown on protest groups, they could have arrested him because of his association with the violent group he worked with.

To make a long story short, I dropped out of this online "course" after about six weeks or so.  They had nothing to offer.  And later, in 2020, when I saw that ICNC staffers were teaching that there were situations in which property destruction could actually help a civil resistance movement, I was completely turned off to them (though not surprised).  (See also, "Civil Resistance Tactics In The 21st Century", pages 66-67.)  In short, if the ICNC staffers are genuine and sincere, they have to me become like a minor league baseball team run by toddlers.  Where are the heavy hitters of successful movement building whose faces I saw in those Fletcher Summer Institute videos?  Why is the advice of the ICNC so lame now?  Why does much of their most recent advice contradict the research, scholarship and guidance of successful practitioners of nonviolent liberation struggles over the years - including the advice which the ICNC used to give back when I regarded them with respect?

But perhaps the ICNC contains people who are not sincere.  Erica Chenoweth hugely popularized the application of scholarship to the study of civil resistance.  I still have great respect for her because her advice is most definitely not lame.  But in her wake, I am afraid that there are "scholars" who have arisen to study civil resistance not for the sake of helping the oppressed to liberate themselves, but rather to derail the liberation of the oppressed by misleading them.  In this, they are like many people nowadays who go to school in order to obtain advanced degrees in psychology and behavioral sciences - not to help those who are hurting, but to land lucrative jobs with tobacco companies, the Republican Party and other outfits whose success depends on misleading people and turning them into addicts.  Meanwhile, where are the builders who will construct a righteous parallel society in today's oppressive world?

The Jewel And The Dragon

I need to keep my promises, and one of those promises is to finish writing a concluding series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, a book which deals with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance.  But this past week I began to try to build new habits around time management, and the long-range goals I am trying to accomplish with my new time-management scheme include being in bed by 10 PM every night and getting really good on the guitar.  I have about an hour and a half of practice time scheduled for tonight...

Next week, God willing, I will have another post ready.  One thing I do want to mention in the meantime is that I have recently commented several times on this blog about how well the nations of the East (and I mean the Asian nations, not Russia!) have done in navigating global crises which have shown the weaknesses and fault lines of the nations of the West, including the United States.  One particular crisis which the Asian nations have navigated particularly well is the COVID-19 pandemic.

But now it seems that agents of the Global Far Right have infiltrated Asian societies in an attempt to sow division and discord.  This is especially true of the proponents of anti-vaxx (that is, anti-vaccine) propaganda who have made their voices heard in realspace and in cyberspace over the last few months.  One doofus who comes to mind is Brad Bowyer, who was born a British citizen but who managed to insinuate himself into a leadership role in a political party in Singapore - until he made a remark comparing Singapore's efforts to ensure vaccination compliance to the efforts of Hitler to round up Jews for extermination.  That remark has recently cost him his political position.  Let's see if he manages to bounce back.  And let's see if he is successful in his attempted cultural poisoning of Singapore.  Lee Kuan Yew would never have tolerated him.

Mr. Bowyer himself.  Image taken from the Straits Times

Singapore is not the only Asian nation suffering from the attack of the lunatic fringe, as seen in the following articles: "Anti-Vaxxer Propaganda Spreads in Asia, Endangering Millions," "Coronavirus vaccine: anti-vax movement threatens Asian recovery," and "The Inherent Racism of Anti-Vaxx Movements."  Note that last article, and note the murderously genocidal motives of the promoters of anti-vaxx propaganda.  Note also that one of the chief sources of this propaganda is Russia.  Perhaps the common people of Russia are distressed by the fact that Putin can't seem to organize a successful effort to put out the wildfires which are destroying their homeland.  They can take comfort in the fact that their taxes are being used instead to try to destabilize the rest of the world.

The Scorching of the 45th And Beyond

 This is another quick post.  In view of the record-breaking heat across much of the Global North this summer, I thought it might be instructive to document the effect which that heat has had in my particular locale.  So here are a few pictures from my garden and backyard, along with some comments.  These pictures were taken about ten days ago, and they document the damage which was caused by the Pacific Northwest heat wave of late June.

Heat stress suffered by a shade tree in the backyard.  Note the yellow, dead leaves.

Another view of the same tree.

Damaged leaves and fruit on the apple tree.

Heat damage suffered by a hazelnut tree.  Again, note the discolored leaves.

Heat injury to a conifer.  Note the dead branches and withered needles.

What the heat did to the kale.  The scorched leaves are discolored.

About two weeks before the heat wave of late June, I planted onion seeds.  The heat killed most of them.  Not all news is bad, however.  Some of the hardier and more well-established plants in the garden continue to produce, as seen below:

The artichoke plant turned into a space alien!

The summer squash did well.  The zucchini (not shown) - not so much.

Whoa!  Vashka!  How'd you get into this picture?!

And now for some comments.  I live just a bit north of the 45th parallel of latitude in the United States.  Temperatures this summer have been at least ten degrees above historical averages for much of the last two months.  This is true of nighttime temperatures as well.  The fact that nighttime temperatures have been so high is an undeniable proof of the effect of increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since carbon dioxide blocks longwave infrared radiation (IR), but is transparent to shortwave IR.  This means that as the earth warms during the daytime because of absorbed shortwave IR, it is increasingly unable to release the heat thus stored when the sun goes down, because the heat released from the ground (and from hardscapes in urban heat islands) is radiated as longwave IR.  That is why such low-tech adaptations as opening windows at night are less effective now than they used to be.

The fact of anthropogenic - that is, manmade - climate change is undeniable.  However, as we have seen during the last year and a half, there are two potential responses to the undeniable.  The first response is to make peace with reality and to try under that peace to live gracefully with reality.  So we have nations such as China.  China is actively researching collective, intelligently-planned ways to adapt its society to mitigate the local effects of a warming climate.  The Chinese are especially interested in using natural, low-tech means of lowering ground-level temperatures in urban areas, as documented in a BBC report titled, "Can You Cool A House Without Air Conditioning?"  

Then there are nations such as the United States, in which a distressingly large percentage of the population have given themselves to national narcissism.  For the sake of their damnable goal of white supremacy they are willing to sacrifice reality on the altar of their narcissism.  Their last, best chance of achieving their goal of total domination of the world was embodied in the presidency of Donald Trump.  But Trump made a serious (even though willful) mistake in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, so we got a bunch of doofuses who refused to acknowledge the mistake and refused therefore to treat the coronavirus pandemic with the seriousness it deserved.  These doofuses showed up mask-less and armed to the teeth at the state capitols of states with Democratic governors in order to "liberate" their states from mask mandates and other public health directives which these governors put into place to attempt to deal with the pandemic.  These idiots have also by and large refused to get vaccinated in 2021, as documented by a news story titled, "No, We Didn't Get The Vaccine...We're Republicans" and another story titled, "GOP Legislators in Missouri Oppose Vaccine Efforts as State Becomes COVID Hotspot."  You see, to admit the reality and seriousness of COVID-19 would be to admit that their chosen hero majorly dropped the ball.  And as good, textbook cases of narcissism, they cannot admit any mistake whatsoever.

This is why I believe that it will be very difficult for the United States to mount a coordinated, collective, realistic response to the climate crisis which has now begun to severely bite us.  For the Republican/white supremacist/evangelical devotion to predatory capitalism and unrestrained economic growth at any cost represents a mistake of much longer standing than the mistake of backing a doofus who dropped the ball in dealing with a pandemic.  If the MAGA crowd were not willing to wear masks, they sure won't be willing to deal intelligently with a climate crisis which is beginning to destroy their livelihoods.  They are a textbook case not only of narcissism but of cultic thinking.

(One note: I am almost finished with my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I want to do another series of posts which are coordinated around a central theme, but I can't decide which theme I want to tackle next.  One theme that appeals to me is the theme of how cults - both religious and secular - establish themselves in a society.  It seems to me that this would be especially applicable to the United States, which seems to form cults as easily as some bodies form tumors...)

Lastly, I want to talk a bit about the use of natural mitigation strategies for local climate change effects.  From the pictures above, one can clearly see that just planting trees may not be enough to guard against urban heat island effects.  Rather, the trees must be managed so that they themselves can survive heat stress.  And it may be that trees that are historical natives to many northern climates will have to be augmented with trees that are not natives to the far North, but are native to historically hot and dry climates, trees such as the fig tree, which is able to establish a deep root system and to mitigate heat islands by efficient evapotranspiration.  This will require further research.

P.S. Not only has much of the United States dropped the ball on climate change mitigation, but Russia has hugely dropped the ball.  The wildfires in Siberia are now bigger than all other wildfires on the earth combined.  Putin's flying monkeys tout his so-called intelligence and wisdom, but Putin's Russia isn't doing very well right now.

Competence Amidst An Age of Decline

Today's post will be short, as I've already spent more time than I'd like in the doing of necessary work.  But I'd like to briefly share something I've been thinking about during the last several weeks, namely the challenge of how one can demonstrate their competence during an age in which the value of most certificates of competence is tending toward zero.  This post can therefore be considered a sort of follow-up to the post I wrote a few weeks ago about the search for good work.  

Within the most recent decade of my existence as a working stiff, I have held a position as an adjunct instructor in a degreed technical education program at a university.  The experience has been eye-opening in many ways - rather like the opening of eyes one might experience if one had been raised in a household of strict parenting until one's fifteenth birthday, and then had been granted extremely grudging, reluctant permission to attend a sleepover at the house of a friend across town.  (Imagine a wide-eyed kid exclaiming, "They let you do that over here?!")  For when I was an undergraduate many years ago, I was regularly beaten up (metaphorically, of course!) by professors whenever my work did not meet minimum academic expectations.  I took a lot of lumps - especially because, at the time, I was also involved in an abusive evangelical fringe church which demanded of me a lot of good time that would have been better spent studying, so my grades suffered.  Yet I hardly remember complaining against the feedback I got from my professors, or believing that my university was treating me unfairly.

Fast forward to the present time, in which anyone who has had to deal with the current crop of college students has probably been motivated to Google the term "grade inflation".  Students have become conditioned to believing that all they have to do is "show effort" in order to receive a certificate of competence in a field of study.  Many of these have gone so far as to believe that guessing the answer or writing freshly-cooked gibberish in answer to a homework question is the same as "showing effort."  One dare not say anything accurately evaluative about their performance, lest one risk getting negative student evaluations from them.  (And no, the major culprits in declining academic performance are not students of color from disadvantaged backgrounds!)

This inflation of credentials of competence is particularly acute in many of the universities of the Global North.  But this inflation goes beyond colleges and universities.  For instance, this year I have chosen not to watch the Summer Olympics.  My reason is simple.  The Tokyo Summer Olympics include a number of athletes from a group of nations which regularly cheat by doping - that is, by using performance-enhancing drugs.  It should be obvious that what an athlete can do when juiced does not represent his actual talent and biological potential.  However, I am looking forward to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.  At least there, how far one can ski-jump and how long one can remain in the air while doing so are not dependent on anabolic steroids.

The inflation of credentials can become a national obsession, as is the case with the Russian "Sputnik" COVID-19 vaccine.  In order to boost its air of respectability, Russia had members of its Gamaleya Institute write a defense of the vaccine and of its efficacy for the British medical journal Lancet.  At the time the study was published, I am sure that there were many people like me whose doubts about Sputnik began to wane.  For we reasoned, "Hey - the Lancet is a very respectable peer-review jury.  If they were willing to publish an article backing the claims of over 90 percent efficacy, perhaps it's true..."  Except that an actual "jury-of-peers" from other nations showed up in the aftermath of the publication of that article, and has begun to ask extremely probing and inconvenient questions about its data and sources of data.  (See this, this and this for instance.)

A recently "defrocked" former contemporary Christian musician once wrote that "the lie is always cheaper than the truth."  The lie concerning competence sooner or later gets found out.  So why do we lie so often about what we're actually capable of?  Why do we tolerate those who lie about what they can actually do?  And how are our most long-lived measures and certifications of competence now being cheapened by false proclamations of competence?  Lastly, what new venues or means of certification or demonstration can those who are actually competent create so that they can be found by those who are desperate to find people who know how to do necessary things?  In other words, in an era in which an increasing number of things falsely glitter, how can searchers find the true gold?

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?

In her article "The Future of Nonviolent Resistance," Chenoweth posits a number of reasons for the decline in effectiveness of nonviolent resistance, including the following:

• 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)

It is this last factor which I want to bring into sharper focus today, as I believe that it is the decisive factor in the decline of the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance movements.  What changes have taken place in grassroots movements over the last ten years?  According to Chenoweth, the first change is that these movements at their peaks tend actually to be smaller than the successful movements of decades past, both in total numbers and in percentage of the population which participates in them.  This is because the organizers of present-day movements tend to neglect the long-term relationship-building and building of organizational capacity required for a movement to achieve real staying power.  Instead, they do what comes easiest to them: putting together large mass demonstrations and protest marches which can easily be organized by digital social media and which throw a large number of total strangers together in the same place on short notice.  Because these total strangers have not had time to develop a shared story, much less a shared strategy, it is easy for governments and other wealthy power-holders to throw a few violent agents provocateurs into the mix.  And when protest organizers tolerate violent actors or at least are not willing to exercise the discipline needed to separate their movements from the violent actors, the likelihood of increased mass participation in the protests decreases.  (As I have said in recent posts, this comes down to the lack of education and training of the would-be leaders of protest movements.  They need to read some books!)

These weaknesses are characteristic of all the recent "leaderless", "structureless", supposedly "cutting-edge" protest movements of the last decade.  This is why I tend to gag and retch every time I read some article or opinion piece put forth by a media outlet which praises these "leaderless", "structureless" movements as some smart wave of the future.  They're not!  Their weaknesses have not only been abundantly documented by Erica Chenoweth, but also by Zeynep Tufekci, both in her book Twitter and Tear Gas and in a TED talk she gave a few years after the rise and fall of the Occupy protests.  Yet these sorts of leaderless, hastily thrown-together movements which focus almost exclusively on mass protest seem to be the darlings of many a wanna-be movement leader today - especially if that "leader" or those "leaders" identify as "Millennials" or younger who supposedly "don't like structure."

One thing to note is that almost all widely-held popular ideas have a history, a lineage of development.  That includes widely-held bad ideas.  So what is the history of this particularly bad idea, and of the ineffective and incompetent "movements" which have resulted from it?  To answer that question, I want to refer to a book that came out in 2016, and whose paperback edition came out in 2017.  (2017 seems to have been a good year to write books on resistance.  I wonder why...)  The book is This Is An Uprising by Mark Engler and Paul Engler.  And in case the Englers are reading this post, let me warn you in advance that I'm going to throw a few (metaphorical) rocks at your book.  To quote Jimmy Wong, "Please do not find offensive!"

Chapter Two of their book is titled, "Structure and Movement," and its opening sentences read thus: "Two schools stand at opposite poles of thinking about how grassroots forces can promote social change.  Each has a champion."  The chapter then sets forth these two champions, namely Saul Alinsky versus Frances Fox Piven.  The chapter begins to describe Alinsky thus: "Alinsky was a guru in the art of the slow, incremental building of community groups.  Like organizers in the labor movement, his approach focused on person-by-person recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that could leverage the power of their members over time...this approach can be described as one based on 'structure.'"  The chapter begins to describe Piven thus: "Piven, in contrast, has become a leading defender of unruly broad-based disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization.  She emphasizes the disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly...In contrast to the structure-based approach of labor unions and Alinskyite groups, her tradition can be dubbed 'mass protest.'"

While Chapter Two does try to present a balanced comparison of the two approaches, it is guilty of a bit of distortion of the concept of a movement and of the role of a social movement organization as a catalyst for social movement.  (The social movement organization is a topic which I covered in this post.)  For it seems to paint those who follow the Alinskyite tradition as people who value organization over movement, and thus fails to recognize that it is organizations which give birth to movements.  Chapter Two quotes an Alinskyite organizer who accurately saw Martin Luther King as a "one-trick pony" who relied too much on dramatic mass marches and not on slow, patient capacity-building via sustained organization.

Chapter Two seems to treat Frances Fox Piven more favorably than Saul Alinsky, citing, for instance, a book titled Poor People's Movements by Piven and by Richard Cloward which analyzed some of the disruptive social movements of the 1930's, 1950's, and 1960's.  These movements are cited as proof that poor people who are willing to be disruptive can achieve far more in a short time than those who seek to build organizational structures among the poor.  It's time for a full disclosure statement: I must admit that I haven't yet read Piven's book.  However, what the Englers say about her matches what other sources have said about her teachings and writings.  And if she really holds such a position, I would like to gently suggest that she is glossing over the role that social movement organizations such as the CIO or SNCC had in the movements she cited.  

The "Pivenist" approach (at least, as I understand it) certainly has led to some impressive mobilizations, from the Gezi Park protests in Turkey to the Occupy protests and occupations in the United States to the mass protests of the Arab Spring.  Yet the failures of these mobilizations have also been impressive - perhaps even breathtaking.  One particularly poignant and tragic failure is the failure of the Egyptian revolution to bring about a democratic government, and the loss of all which that mobilization initially achieved.  A sign both ironic and hopeful is the fact that in the aftermath, movement organizers have begun to return to the need for sustained organizing as the means of building power for lasting change.  The Englers note that leaders of the original April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt have begun to focus on building alternative institutions, and that "the 2011 uprising has unleashed a spirit of communal self-determination that cannot easily be subdued."  A further irony is that in connection with the ultimate failure of the Egyptian revolution, the Englers first mention the term "alternative institutions" in their book.  Alternative institutions are one of the most disruptive long-term tools of an oppressed people in a nonviolent liberation struggle - yet the Englers mention them only once.  And their book never defines or discusses them further.  Alternative - or "parallel" institutions - are a pillar of the Gandhian strategy of swaraj, which is why they are a prominent part of his constructive program.  The fact that the Englers mention them only once without explaining their significance is a real shame.  

And so we come back to what I consider to be an accurate and viable roadmap of nonviolent revolution, namely 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 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.  Sounds a lot better than Pivenism to me - especially when I see the successful track record of the approach outlined by Sharp.  The approach of Sharp was the approach used by Gandhi and his associates in organizing a successful liberation struggle among dirt-poor Indians.  If they could liberate themselves, none of the rest of us have any excuses for our continued oppression.  This includes those of us in the African-American community!

Yet there are those who know the weaknesses and failures of Pivenism, but who still promote her approach as a valid strategy of collective nonviolent resistance.  I will examine who some of these people are and what I believe to be some of their motives in the next post in this series.

Connecting Moral Dots

I check my blog stats from time to time, and I noticed that there are people who are actively exploring my back catalog.  Thanks much for your readership!  One note: my favorite posts are the ones I have written over the last four years.  If you go really far back, you may stumble across posts which are a bit cringe-worthy, as my writing style was a bit more convoluted back then (I was trying to imitate a couple of bloggers whose writings I have since abandoned), and my worldview was not as fully developed.

I am happy to see that people are re-reading my post "Nihil Nixed".  That post is actually the first in a series of three connected posts, the other two being "The Go To Jail Truth" and "Whadja Do With The Money?!"  I am no prophet, yet note that I wrote "The Go to Jail Truth" about six months before the massive protests in Russia over the arrest of Alexei Navalny.  Anyway, if you have time and you have enjoyed "Nihil Nixed," feel free to check out the other two posts.  And as for this upcoming weekend, I will try to have a fresh post ready, a post that will continue to deal with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance.

From D to D, Chapters 8 and 9: How The Straight Subverts The Crooked

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. Although these who wish to dominate suffered a serious electoral setback in the United States in 2020, they have not given up their dreams of supremacy.  Therefore we are still in a state of conflict, and those of us who are not rich and not white are still under threat.  The threat we face can be most effectively neutralized by strategic nonviolent resistance.  Because of the strategic element of strategic nonviolent resistance, the last several posts have focused on the need for struggle groups to understand and develop wise strategy.  Of those posts, the last few have discussed the consequences of bad strategy.  Today's post will attempt to explain what happens when strategy is done right.

So what should be the ultimate aim of an oppressed people?  Some would say that it is to convert oppressors so that the oppressed can live in peace within a society that is still owned by the oppressors.  But a much more radical goal is the creation of a society which is no longer under the control of oppressors at all.  This occurs through campaigns both of selective resistance and of collective self-reliance which create and progressively expand the social and political space within which oppressed people can manage their own affairs.  The staged, incremental expansion of this space shrinks the control of the oppressors.  To quote Gene Sharp, "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...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

To illustrate this process and its strategy, I'm going to quote a few verses from the Good Book.  In particular, 1 Peter 2:13 says the following: "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent through him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right."  Now what is interesting is the word translated "institution."  In the original Greek, that word is κτίσις ("ktisis"), which literally means, "founding", "settling", "creation", "created thing", or "created authority."  Now here's the thing.  First, we are commanded to submit to every human created authority.  That includes the structures of authority which oppressed people create to govern themselves.   

Second, note the purpose of our submission, which is to do right, as noted in the next two verses: "For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.  Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but as bondslaves of God."  This brings up an interesting question, namely, how to respond when any one or more of the manmade structures of authority to which we are to submit commands us to do wrong.  The answer to that question is given in 1 Peter 2:18-20: "Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are crooked.  (Note that the original Greek word here is σκολιός, or "skolios", and it means curved, bent, or crooked.)  For this finds grace, if for the sake of conscience toward God a man bears up under sorrows when suffering unjustly.  For what credit is there if, when you sin and are slapped or punched, you endure it with patience?  But if when you do what is right and suffer you patiently endure it, this finds grace with God."

Two things should be mentioned about this passage: first, that those Bible translators who translate "skolios" merely as "unreasonable" or "harsh" or "cruel" are missing the point of this passage.  For it is entirely possible for employees, subjects, or servants to get along famously with a boss whom the Bible would describe as "crooked."  All they have to do is to twist their souls, their morals, and their ethics to conform to the boss's crookedness.  Those who have worked in abusive workplaces or who have served in abusive churches or who have been part of crooked governments know this well.  Just look at the staff (especially the senior, most highly-placed staff) of Enron, of Goldman Sachs, of British Petroleum, of Hillsong Church, of Mars Hill Church, of the Assemblies of George Geftakys, of the Honor Academy, of the Republican Party, of the administration of former President Trump, of the corrupt government of Vladimir Putin.  If the devil wears Prada, then the best way to avoid suffering is to make sure that you dress likewise!

But if you're not a sycophant and you don't want to wear hellish clothing, then you will suffer - that is, you will get into trouble for doing the right thing - and you need to prepare yourself for it.  For the Good Book commands us to continue to go straight even when those in authority over us tell us to go crooked.  This means that our commitment to the straight will lead to civil disobedience.  Note that Simon Peter, the author of the passages I've been quoting in this post, was himself a jailbird on a number of occasions - as seen in Acts 4 and 5, (where he was beaten for his civil disobedience) as well as 2 Peter 1:13-14 in which Peter wrote of his impending martyrdom.  And civil disobedience for the sake of doing right becomes disruptively powerful when it is done collectively.  

The key then to creating a collective movement of civil disobedience is for the oppressed to create for themselves structures of authority, of collective self-reliance, and of collective expressions of the common good which are more righteous than those of the oppressor.  By doing so, those who are part of such collectives will be pledging themselves to go straight in ways that run completely counter to the crookedness of the oppressor's society.  And in a contest between the crookedness of the oppressor and the straightness to which the collective of the oppressed aspires, the winner of our submission will then be our collective straightness.  It is this creation and progressive expansion of these "spheres of straightness" which leads to long-term shifts in the balance of power in a society.  And when the oppressor reacts to this society-building with violent oppression, the oppressed are to deprive that oppression of its power by a response of nonviolence and non-retaliation (1 Peter 2:18-25).  It is this non-retaliation which aids the process of backfire or political jiu-jitsu.  

This sort of institution-building - this creation of a righteous parallel society - is much more effective than merely getting a bunch of people together to do a mass protest march.  And it is much harder to hijack.  Moreover, it can start very small.  A completely secular example of this is the permaculture movement, especially as articulated by David Holmgren.  I am thinking especially of an interview Holmgren granted to Scott Mann of the Permaculture Podcast in 2013, in which he stated his view that the best way to start a revolution (in a positive sense!) is to create working, replicable small-scale models of the attractiveness, viability and success of a revolutionary lifestyle.  However, he believed it is a waste of time simply to get a large group of people together to "shout more loudly" at the holders of power in order to pressure them to pull the levers of power in the ways demanded by the shouters.  In other words, it is a better use of our time to build local expressions of the world we do want than to agitate in mass protest to try to stop the world we don't want.  This mindset can also be seen in the insistence by Mohandas Gandhi on the importance of the "constructive program" and the development of swaraj (that is, "self-rule") as an essential part of strategic nonviolent resistance.  And this mindset was a prominent part of the Polish nonviolent resistance against the Russian-backed Jaruselski dictatorship in the 1980's.

Let's conclude by mentioning some possible hindrances to the creation of this kind of liberated space.  First, there is the hindrance of ignorance.  This is why it is essential for those in a struggle group to read books!  Read the history, theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance!  Second, there is the hindrance of passivity - a passivity of victims who refuse to acknowledge that the continuance of their victimhood is their own fault, and who therefore refuse to take it upon themselves to begin their liberation.  An outgrowth of this passivity is "Uncle Tom-ism," the motive behind the continued selling out of struggle leaders by members of oppressed groups who refuse to take responsibility for their own lives and who look to their masters for a little extra spending money.  (Do thirty pieces of silver sound about right?)  Remember that the Good Book commands us to come out of Babylon, not to sell ourselves or each other to Babylon or to "try to get ahead in an oppressive system" as someone said to me a few years back.  Those who continue to lean on Babylon for support can best be described as "shiftless", a word which Charles Payne used in his book I've Got The Light of Freedom to describe the Uncle Toms and Aunt Tammys whose actions threatened to undermine the work of SNCC in the Mississippi voter registration struggles of the late 1950's and early 1960's.

But some would say, "Well, our people have been oppressed so long that we can't create spaces of self-determination for ourselves!"  As an African-American, I am mindful of African-Americans who say this about our people.  My answer is this: the Indians prior to Gandhi were at least as bad off as many of us, and yet under Gandhi's leadership, they won the freedom to rule themselves.  Let us not be shiftless.