Strategic Nonviolent Resistance - What's It To Me?

Those who have read this blog over the last five years have been exposed to a large number of posts which deal with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance by oppressed people against an oppressive power.  Those who have followed this blog for the last twelve months have been exposed to a rather detailed, in-depth analysis of a particular book on strategic nonviolent resistance, namely, From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) by the late Dr. Gene Sharp.  Each one of the posts in that analysis has involved a fair bit of weekly research - in some cases several hours for a single post.  That research was all performed on my own personal time, during a period in which I had many other responsibilities.  (In my last post I mentioned how good it feels to finally take time to clean and fix certain things around the house.  Those things got some serious neglect during the last year!)

Readers might well then ask, "Why did you take all this time to do this research?  Why did you embark on such an exhaustive analysis?"  Some of these readers (including a certain Aunt Tammy I know) may think they already have the answer from the general subject matter of my blog, and may tell themselves, "Oh, he's just a geek - he likes reading lots of books, and this particular subject just happened to catch his interest."  But that would leave unanswered the question of why I spent over $2,000 and 15 weeks of my life in 2019 to take a distance course in community organizing from Harvard University.  Upon finding out that I had taken such a step, some might say, "Oh, he's just an idealist - he's naturally drawn to activism.  Let's see if we can figure out his Myers-Briggs personality type..."  

But if you learned that I am an African-American, you might gain a few clues to the actual motivation for my study of strategic nonviolent resistance, and my attempts to organize it over the last few years among my people.  You might also gain a few clues as to why I have chosen to try to be an organizer in the first place.  In learning community organizing from the Harvard course, I learned that one of the first things an organizer needs to do is to tell his "story of self" to his audience, so that they might know what called the organizer to become an organizer.  I haven't yet told you the full version of my story of self.  Today you'll get to read it.  However, according to the Harvard course, telling my story of self is supposed to take no more than two minutes, and the version I am about to give you will take slightly longer than that.  (If you are a member of the Leading Change Network and you are reading this, please don't tell on me...!)  One other note: on my blog is a request that commentary contain only clean, family-friendly language.  For today's post and today's post only, I'm going to relax that policy just a bit.

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I still remember when my mom told me to go into the front yard and fight a kid who was bigger than me.  It was on a summer afternoon between my 6th and 7th grade.  Our family had moved into our house the year before, and the house was located in a very white part of Southern California, and that was in the days when blatant racism was the norm in American society, and we were a Black family.  My dad – a military officer – had been stopped by the city police because he was walking through the neighborhood shortly after we moved into that house.  At the school I attended, I was regularly hit or slapped by other kids whenever I dared to speak up.  These kids openly called me a nigger to my face.  I felt powerless because my attackers were many and in many cases bigger than me, and I was only one person.  And most of the teachers were not helpful.  

During that summer, some of the more aggressive bullies used to play baseball in the vacant lot next to our house, and they would come right into our front yard and freely drink from our water hose without asking.  My mom knew who these kids were from my frequent complaints to my teachers and parents about them.  On this particular afternoon, my mom heard these kids insulting me after she sent me out to put the water hose away. What she heard pushed her over the edge, and she told me to go outside and fight the biggest bully.  “If you don’t fight him,” she said, “then I will whip you!”

I beat the kid twice – both the first time, and then after he had gotten his parents and his parents had gathered a mob of neighbors and they had come back to my house and my mom had come outside and hit his mom with a stick because she dared to put her hand on me.  The incident became for me a snapshot of the United States – a narcissistic, thuggish nation that trashed (and still trashes) other people in order to “make America great!”  And the fight showed me what I was capable of when I got really, really angry.  I discovered just how tired I was of being treated like a punching bag.

When I became an adult, I thought those unpleasant days were behind me, because I was able to put myself through college and start a career as a technical professional.  So it took me a long time – too long – to realize that the racism of American society had never really gone away.  It had just gone underground.  But six years ago the murders of unarmed Black victims by White cops exploded into the news.  When I read of Michael Brown lying dead in the sun for three hours – and that Darren Wilson was not punished – I saw how little Black lives actually matter to the people who run present-day American society.  I saw that there were worthless white supremacist bastards who had worked hard for decades to bring back the days when they could openly treat people of color as punching bags or as garbage, and who wanted us once again to accept being treated like garbage.

That has made me really, really angry – angry as hell.  Once again, I am being pushed to fight.  But this time I intend to both fight and win by building a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance among my people.  [Note: I did not say "nonviolence"!  Nor am I trying to be spiritual!  Rather, I read some books that taught me that this is the best way to win.]  Oppressed people begin to resist by building a new identity for ourselves based on our own self-determination.  This is is why I have chosen to start organizing my people for our own self-reliance.

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So there you have it - my story of self.  And there you have the reason why every time I've read of some pig cop or group of pig cops shooting yet another unarmed African-American and getting away with it, I am taken in my mind back to that grade school fight.  Because that grade-school fight was typical of much of my childhood in this piece-of-garbage country known as the United States of America, this country which became great for a certain select group of people by trashing all the other peoples of earth.  You might well say that the incidents of the last several years have been rather triggering for me.  Those who suffer from PTSD will know what I mean.  And there you have the reason why the study of strategic nonviolent resistance - especially as presented in the writings of Gene Sharp - has held such appeal for me.  For Sharp's writings show how the power of oppressors can be disintegrated without the use of physical weapons.  Indeed, strategic nonviolent resistance - skillfully applied - is capable of regime change, as seen in Chapters 5 and 9 of From D to D.  I want to take strategic nonviolent resistance as far as I can possibly take it.

You may ask, Why?  Why go to such a radical extreme?  Because the events of the last decade have caused some irreversible tectonic shifts in the thinking of some of us who are members of communities of the oppressed.  We learned in our grade-school histories that the United States has been guilty of some really evil things in its bid to make itself great - yet we also learned that from time to time, there were seeming moves toward repentance.  The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation were such a move, the gains of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960's were another.  But the last ten years or so have shown us that there is an irreducible, unrepentant core of ugly people within the United States who cling to their dreams of supremacy at all costs, people who will never be converted and with whom it is impossible to build "beloved communities" according to "Kingian nonviolence."  Instead, our policy must be informed by the most up-to-date best practices for dealing with personality-disordered people.  We know that those with malignant personality disorders will never change, so why build a strategy for coping with these people based on trying to change them?  Rather, as blogger Anna Valerious once wrote, we need to "distance ourselves from those who won't distance themselves from evil deeds."  

You may say, "How do you know these people can't be changed?"  My answer: because they haven't repented.  For true repentance, it's not enough to just shed a few tears.   There's something the offender must also pay.  When Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, the murderer of Eric Garner, the murderers of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, of Breonna Taylor, of Elijah McClain, of Philando Castile, of Stephon Clark and of other victims like them are all taken off the street, rounded up and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, then it might become possible to say that the masters of our present society have changed.  When the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE agents who tore Latino migrant children from the arms of their parents and threw them into cages during the Trump years are themselves thrown into prison with no way out, we might begin to say that American society has begun to repent.  When the red-state Republican governments restore voting rights which they illegally took from people of color, then we might begin to believe that they are "bringing forth fruits in keeping with repentance."

Some last things.  There are those from the dominant culture who have studied strategic nonviolent resistance and have seen how devastatingly effective it has been in toppling hard-core repressive regimes in the past.  Some of the "scholars" from this group are now busily trying to screw up the teaching of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to cause the liberation struggles of the present and future to fail.  Their strategy depends on a belief that we who are among the oppressed are stupid and gullible.  They might wind up very disappointed.  For there will emerge a world - sooner or later - which is shared equitably by all the earth's people, regardless of race, skin color or national origin, a world in which there is no one group of people which enjoys ungodly privileges compared to everyone else.  You who are of the dominant culture can fight against the emergence of that world, and for a while it may even look like you've won - but the price you will pay is that you will go to hell.  Read Luke 16:19-31.

From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The "Sin" Of Not Needing You

This is another short post.  I wrote in my last post that I need to read a book in order to write a critique of it, and that that critique might become a post on this blog, as part of my continuing series of posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  However, this week I have been busy fixing things at my house.  And I must say that fixing things feels really good - especially when those things have been either broken or messy for years.  The fixing is by no means done yet...

But I haven't stopped thinking about the depiction of the process of liberation-in-action described in Chapters 8 and 9 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Those who have read my last few posts on his book know that I have been particularly focused on how the building of parallel institutions and a parallel society by and for communities of the oppressed is a necessary part of a successful liberation struggle by the oppressed.  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  (Emphasis added.)  And in Chapter 9, he writes, "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..."  (Emphasis added.)

Groups and communities of historically oppressed people who choose to build their own internal power and self-sufficiency will therefore go a long way toward achieving their liberation from a dominant oppressive society.  However, it is also true that groups and communities of historically oppressed people have often been "trained" to look to one or more of the dominant societies of the Global North for their salvation instead of learning to rely on themselves.  This has become the basis of the "soft power" sought by some of those dominant societies in their bid to establish global rule for themselves, for the leaders of some of these dominant societies have gladly dressed themselves up as "saviors" and "benefactors" ready to supply guns and other arms, military training, investment money, trucks and heavy machinery, sketchy Russian vaccines, etc, to the poor dark-skinned unwashed masses who seemingly "can't save ourselves."  I am thinking of one Global North nation in particular whose leadership looks at the entire earth as if it were already the special possession of this nation, a world which this nation's leaders have already carved up in their minds into zones with such names as "the near abroad" and "the far abroad" and on which they have drawn the "red lines" of their national narcissism.

But what if the oppressed societies (or even those societies which are categorized as "developing countries") choose to begin to build their own structures of self-reliance?  What if, moreover, oppressed groups within the societies dominated by the Global North begin to build their own structures of self-reliance?  What if these structures begin to provide for the needs of the people of these societies in a way that is better and stronger than anything the dominant cultures can offer?  I am thinking right now of the investment of Nigeria in the mathematics education of its population, as seen in such enterprises as the Cowbellpedia math competition.  One result of this investment: this year, 2021, saw a Nigerian teen named Faith Odunsi win first place in an international mathematics competition which featured students from many nations of the Global North. 

When communities of the oppressed build their own structures of self-reliance, they achieve the following results:

• They strengthen their own self-confidence and motivation as they begin to see the successes they are able to achieve with their own hands.
• They destroy the basis for the "soft power" sought by the dominant societies of the Global North.
• They manage to cross a few "red lines" as they prove that they do not need their wanna-be-Great-Power "saviors" from the dominant culture.  This causes those supposed "saviors" to choke a little.  Now that's fun!

P.S. I mentioned vaccines in this post.  The original version of the post read "worthless vaccines," but I have altered that phrase in order to make my meaning crystal-clear.  I most definitely believe in vaccination as long as the vaccines offered have undergone a rigorous three-stage series of clinical trials to prove both their safety and efficacy.  The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson COVID-19 vaccines have all undergone this process, which is why I chose to receive the Pfizer vaccine in March of this year.  I have received both doses of the two-dose regimen.  I also appreciate the ongoing efforts to monitor the efficacy of these vaccines over time, among various populations, and in their response to the COVID-19 variants which have arisen during the last year.  The efforts to be honest and transparent - even when the news is not always good - have gone a long way in establishing the credibility of these vaccines.  The same cannot be said of the Russian Sputnik "vaccine", whose developers have been neither honest nor transparent.  Even the article published by Russian spokespersons in the British medical journal Lancet has relied on sketchy and unverifiable data.  Moreover, the publishing of that article has revealed the emergence of problems in the Lancet's peer-review process.  Yet the government of Vladimir Putin has embarked on a massive campaign of trying to make its Sputnik "vaccine" look really, really good by tearing down the vaccines developed in the West.  Which is to me yet another proof that Putin really is a thieving little man in a bunker, a Potemkin Village head-fake of a man.  Not even a majority of his own people believe in his "vaccine."  And now, rant off - secure from red alert.  Have a good night.

Research Week - Fall 2021

My summer "Backyard Office"

I don't have a lengthy post this week.  This is partly because I need to catch up on some things I didn't get to finish over the last few weeks.  But it is also partly because a book came to my attention within the last week, and I need to read that book so that I can write an intelligent and accurate critique of it.  That critique may well become next week's blog post.  

In the meantime, interested readers can view my "backyard office" setup shown above, which I half-jokingly promised in an earlier post to show in a YouTube "Study With Me" video.  As you can see, I never got to the "video" stage, so people will just have to content themselves with a still picture.  I'm mildly saddened by the fact that I'm about to lose this "office" for much of the next six to nine months, as it is supposed to rain this upcoming week where I live, and the weather will get colder.  I guess it's back to the spare bedroom as an office...

Speaking of YouTube, in the course of my paying work I discovered a couple of YouTube recommendation blocker browser plugins.  The plugins came in handy for me about three months ago when I needed to watch an instructional video in order to use a certain piece of electronic test and measurement equipment.  In fact, the plugins were so handy that I tried them on a couple of fingerstyle guitar videos.  I have therefore been experimenting with allowing YouTube once again to be an electronic presence in my life - this time, though, on a very tight leash.  If I start seeing weird neo-Nazi commercials, or if I find myself wasting time watching other people play guitar instead of practicing on my own ax, then I will have to ax YouTube for good.  If that happens, I'll make a YouTube video describing how I quit watching YouTube!  Or maybe not...

Parallel Institution-Building As The Answer To The Anti-Vaxx/Anti-Mask Crowd

I've been thinking over the last few days about the ongoing menace posed to American public health by the anti-vaxx/anti-mask arm of the American right wing.  This has been provoked by my encounter with staff at a couple of chain stores who informed me that their corporate offices have instructed store staff not to enforce state-imposed mask mandates.  Other things of notice have been the stories - both in the news and from other bloggers - of anti-vaxx/anti-mask agitators infiltrating churches and disrupting the opening of public schools.  This is noteworthy because the Delta variant of COVID-19 is especially damaging to young people.

So what if you actually believe in science and would like to be guided by evidence-based scientific recommendations for keeping safe from the pandemic?  What if, moreover, you are bloody sick and tired of the tantrums of the American right wing?  I have the following suggestions.

First, understand the motivation by that right-wing tantrum-throwing.  The tantrum is motivated by the frustrated desire for white supremacy and total domination.  This desire was frustrated on account of the 2020 Presidential election, which the chosen emblem and embodiment of supremacy lost by over six million votes.  Therefore, the deluded followers of this orange-haired emblem are busy throwing the most destructive tantrum they can legally (or semi-legally) get away with.  The Capitol insurrection went over the line, so they are playing it safe by merely trying to hold the health of the rest of us hostage.

Second, understand that these people are able to pose a medical threat only because we and they share many of the same physical spaces as part of our daily routine.  If you choose, you can join with like-minded citizens to change that fact.

Third, start changing that fact!  Are you concerned that the anti-vaxx/anti-mask crowd will threaten the health of your kids at school?  Then find like-minded parents and pull your kids out of school - at least for a while, and maybe permanently.  You can start homeschooling clubs.  In fact, in all 50 states, parents have a legal right to homeschool their kids.  Are you worried about going to the store?  Then organize a buyers' co-op and only invite people whom you can trust, who are willing to show proof of vaccination and are willing to wear a mask at all times when they are around you.  In other words, reduce the points of contact between you and the right-wing nutcases as much as possible.  

I must warn you, though, that if you do this, it will involve some elbow grease and some sweat equity on your part.  I must also warn you that if you do this, you can expect the agents of the American right to try to stop you - especially if you live in a red state.  For as Marshall Ganz has said, systems of oppression always depend on those whom they exploit.  But if you're not afraid of a fight (a fight which you fight by means of strategic nonviolent resistance!), then you can cause a major disruption and have a blast in the process.  For if enough people do this, we can stop this anti-vaxx/anti-mask foolishness dead in its tracks.  Because those who allow or promote anti-vaxx/anti-mask nonsense will start losing some serious folding money.

From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The Plight of the Little Red Hen

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). As we have moved into Chapters 8 and 9, the focus of these posts has turned to way in which oppressed communities use strategic nonviolent resistance to achieve long-term shifts in the balance of power between themselves and those who oppress them.  I have argued that the key to the winning strategies of successful nonviolent liberation struggles of the past has been the achievement of those shifts 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 return to a quote from Chapter 9, "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, emphasis added.

How then does the building of parallel institutions by the oppressed fit into the general schema of strategic nonviolent resistance?  I'd like to suggest the following progression:

• A group of poor or oppressed people come together to discuss their common grievances.
• These people manage to move beyond the stage of mere griping or kvetching and start asking, "Okay - so things are bad and we're being mistreated.  What do we want to do about it?"
• In pondering the answer to that question, this group begins to discover the ways in which they themselves can collectively meet needs that are being deliberately unmet by the oppressors.
• They begin to act on this knowledge to create their own structures under their own control for meeting their needs.
• This communal self-reliance produces the following effects:
• It starts to create a new shared collective identity among the participants
• It starts to show them that they do indeed have power over their own affairs
• It begins to give them experience and practice in functioning and making decisions as a collective unit
• It begins to produce a collective cause-consciousness which arises out of a new experience of citizenship
• This cause-consciousness becomes the motivator for the group to start thinking about how to strategically use collective action to oppose the power of their oppressors.

One illustrative case study of this process in action is the Montgomery bus boycott, an action of coercive strategic nonviolent resistance that took place from December 1955 to December 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama.  The boycott was initiated by the African-American community in Montgomery due to the racist policies of dehumanizing segregation which were being enforced by the white supremacist political leaders in that city.  The grievance which was specific to the public transit system was that African-Americans were forced by law to give up their seats on a bus to any white passengers who demanded the seats, and that African-Americans were forced at all times to ride in the back of the bus.  The boycott is commonly portrayed in American mainstream media as an action that just "spontaneously" happened on a day when an African-American woman named Rosa Parks was arrested while returning home from work because she refused to give up her seat to a white man.  

In truth, there was nothing spontaneous about the boycott.  The African-American community already had a pre-existing social network of communal support, namely the network of Black churches in Montgomery.  There had already been organizers who were looking for a suitable occasion to challenge the evil law which humiliated Black bus riders on a daily basis.  Rosa Parks' arrest was merely the spark that kindled a confrontation that had already been largely planned by activists within the Black community.  And the boycott itself was sustained by the simultaneous emergence of a parallel institution which consisted of a network of African-American ride-sharing that allowed boycotters to continue to go to work each day.  

Other examples of parallel institution-building within the American context include the formation of the United Farm Workers union by Cesar Chavez.  The UFW had initially been conceived, in part, as an organization dedicated to meeting the needs of its members through such things as medical clinics and a funeral/burial fund.  Note that these things were funded by member dues, which were collected from poor migrant farm workers!  These member dues also built the strike fund which enabled the UFW to take care of its members who were put out of work by participating in strikes and boycotts.  But I want to point out that within the American context, such examples as these come largely from the fertile movement-forming middle decades of the 20th century which influenced American politics to enable communities of color to win significant rights - at least, on paper.  

Fast forward to today, a day in which it often seems that the only sort of mobilizing that comes easy is mobilizing people to participate in mass marches or rallies that take no more than a few hours of time or a few dollars of expense from those who participate.  A day, moreover, in which the most well-known members of the oppressed (as well as some of their more well-to-do self-appointed "spokespersons" from the dominant culture) busily excuse the oppressed from having to do anything for themselves at a collective level, saying instead that "these people have been downtrodden for so long that they are not mentally or psychologically capable of organizing for their own liberation."  Where does such a statement come from - especially when uttered by so-called "saviors" from the dominant culture?

To answer that question, I turn to some of the lessons I learned during the 2019 "Leadership, Organizing and Action" course that I took through Harvard University.  Module 1 of that course contains a relevant reading from the book No Shortcuts: Organizing For Power In The New Gilded Age, by Jane F. McAlevey.  McAlevey describes how movement generation has degenerated from the mid 20th-century recruitment of masses of disenfranchised people for collective long-term disruptive action.  Instead, nowadays, "...Attempts to generate movements are directed by professional, highly educated staff who rely on an elite, top-down theory of power that treats the masses as audiences of, rather than active participants in, their own liberation...", and, "Aiming to speak for - and influence - masses of citizens, droves of new national advocacy groups have set up shop..."  

These "activists" - many of whom are professional "activists" - have created activities which looks like movement-building, but in fact are nothing of the sort.  Among those activities are advocacy - in which a small, well-manicured, photogenic, upper-middle-class, and usually white cadre uses its access to media to speak "on behalf of" marginalized groups of people.  So we have people who wear buttons that say "Black Lives matter to me!"  (Thanks, but I may as well be a specimen of wildlife based on the way you are advocating for me, as if you were saying something like "Save the polar bears!")  The other ersatz activity that falls under this heading of ersatz activism is mobilizing, in which a small, well-manicured, photogenic, upper-middle-class, and usually white cadre gets together to draft a "theory of change" and a "plan of action" for a movement, and afterward recruits all the rest of us to help them implement their "plan".  So we are "mobilized" to implement a plan which may not represent our interests, since we had no say in drafting the plan in the first place.  

Let me tell you straight up that organizing - genuine, pure-D, 100 percent organizing - is harder than any kind of advocacy or mobilizing.  For organizing involves at every step - both in leadership, strategy, and execution - the ordinary people who comprise communities of the oppressed.  To quote McAlevey again: "In workplace strikes, at the ballot box, or in nonviolent civil disobedience, strategically deployed masses have long been the unique weapon of ordinary people...", and, "Organizing places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people...the primary goal [of organizing] is to transfer power from the elite to the majority..."  In my experience, the hardest organizing of all is trying to organize present-day, 21st-century communities of the oppressed to begin to pool their resources to meet their own needs themselves, apart from any false charity offered by the dominant society.  

I have wondered often why this is so.  But first a little clarification.  I took the Harvard 2019 Leadership, Organizing and Action course after I had already tried - and completely rejected as useless - the so-called online civil resistance course offered by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2018.  The ICNC course was free, while the Harvard course cost over $2,000 and worked me like a dog for fifteen weeks.  Yet I don't regret spending a cent of that money.  The Harvard course was like a refreshing drink of cold, clean water in a desert after the swill of the ICNC course, and it most definitely was not a waste of time.  However, I must say that many of the examples we discussed in the Harvard course focused on organizing as a tool for building electoral power in order to prevail in the American electoral political process.  To me, it has seemed far, far easier to organize people to participate in a political campaign than it is to try to organize them for their own long-term collective self-sufficiency.  

Perhaps this is because of the sense of powerlessness that is far too frequently instilled in communities of the oppressed by those dominant power-holders who wear the "third face of power" described by Steven Lukes.  This third face of power dictates to the members of a society what the members can and cannot believe to be possible.  This is why it is so easy to find activists (including "saviors") from the upper-middle-class, college-educated strata of society and why it is relatively harder - significantly harder at times - to find people with the same activist zeal among those who inhabit the lower economic strata.

But perhaps this difficulty in organizing for collective self-sufficiency comes down to the innate laziness of so many of us (a sin shared by all of humanity at large), amplified by addiction to social media and the mind-numbing entertainment we receive through our glowing screens.  This has a corollary: namely the fact that so many of us have been conditioned to be freeloaders because of the "programs" of false charity which have bought off members of our communities in the past.  For an explanation of the deleterious effect of these programs, see "Services Are Bad For People" by John McKnight.  And note that I'm not saying that the dominant culture has no reparations that they need to make.  The fact is, they do - serious reparations indeed, lest they be damned!  But unless the reparations are so sweeping that they leave the dominant culture with no more power to dominate, they will function merely as a tool of control by which an oppressed population continues to be pacified.  Study the practice of euergetism in the ancient Greco-Roman world.  That euergetism has turned too many of us into the cat, the dog, and the duck in our attitude toward the frequently frustrated Little Red Hen organizer.  

I want to close with a final observation and a request.  The observation is that perhaps the framework of the story of self/story of us/story of now which has been taught by Marshall Ganz and the Leading Change Network may need to be revisited - at least a little bit.  (By the way, the Leading Change Network rocks!)  I can see how in the organizer's initial call to others to join him, his story of self needs to be brief and evocative, highlighting that pivotal moment which called the organizer to organize.  But I think the story of us necessarily takes some time, since it is a story which must be written in collaboration with other members of communities of the oppressed.  The same applies to the story of now.  And if the cost of the commitment which the organizer is asking of people is high, the amount of time required to craft a collective story of us and story of now will also increase.  A short story of us/story of now is good for nothing more than recruiting people into an electoral political campaign.  In order to organize our own parallel institutions, I think we need something deeper.  (Or maybe I just need to go back and study my notes from the Harvard course...?)

So perhaps practitioners of community organizing need to step up and tell their stories of how they succeeded in getting people to do the hard collective work of building communal self-sufficiency.  In other words, how did you successfully organize a long-term potluck among people who could only afford the ingredients for stone soup?

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.