Where is your CVC code?
In a recent piece for TomDispatch, Rebecca Solnit made a simple observation about the nature of revolution that I hadn’t ever really considered:
At its best, revolution is an urban phenomenon. Suburbia is counterrevolutionary by design. For revolution, you need to converge, to live in public, to become the public, and that’s a geographical as well as a political phenomenon. The history of revolution is the history of great public spaces: the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution; the Ramblas in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War; Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 (a splendid rebellion that was crushed); the great surge that turned the divide of the Berlin Wall into a gathering place in that same year; the insurrectionary occupation of the Zocalo of Mexico City after corrupt presidential elections and of the space in Buenos Aires that gave the Dirty War’s most open opposition its name: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of the Plaza of May.
It’s all very well to organize on Facebook and update on Twitter, but these are only preludes. You also need to rise up, to pour out into the streets. You need to be together in body, for only then are you truly the public with the full power that a public can possess.
One factor that perhaps makes revolution less likely in the United States, she argues, is the sheer size of the country and that a “majority seems to live in places that are themselves decentered.”
Over at Yes! Magazine, Jay Walljasper defines our problem slightly different:
…the exercise of democracy depends upon having a literal commons where people can gather as citizens—a square, Main Street, park, or other public space that is open to all. An alarming trend in American life is the privatization of our public realm. As corporate-run shopping malls replaced downtowns and main streets as the center of action, we lost some of our public voice. You can’t organize a rally, hand out flyers, or circulate a petition in a shopping mall without the permission of the management, which will almost certainly say no because they don’t want to distract shoppers’ attention from the merchandise. That’s why you see few benches or other gathering spots inside malls. The result is that our ability to even discuss the issues of the day (or any other subject) with our fellow citizens is limited.
What do you think? How does where someone live (urban vs. rural) or the presence or lack of public spaces affect the likelihood or ultimate effectiveness of nonviolent struggle?
I think the notion that suburbs are counterrevolutionary spaces is a great insight. It reminds me of my father, a real estate agent, who always would remind me how home ownership inclines people toward conservatism, because they’ve invested so enormously in the status quo. And, of course, home ownership is much higher in suburbs than cities.
Thanks for this!
Thanks for this great post. It brought a couple thoughts to mind. (1) The exercise of democracy is most certainly enhanced when we have a “literal commons” – a place for people to organizer, gather, and engage one another in political, social, and cultural issues. That being said, I don’t think revolution (very different from democracy), as it mentioned in Solnit’s article, is the story of public spaces where hundreds of thousands gather. There are certainly several examples where public squares served as the arenas for mass demonstrations. However, highly concentrated actions are not always the most effective or decisive in a nonviolent struggle. Oftentimes, the highly dispersed actions are the most impactful – such as in Chile when people began flicking on and off their lights during the night to show their opposition to Pinochet, or in Poland when people turned off their television during the government’s propoganda hour and instead decided to “take a walk in the streets” or mass boycotts where entire portions of a society choose not buy. None of these actions really require gathering in a public space. Mass demonstration make for great pictures and video to captivate readers and viewers, but they aren’t always the most important or powerful act of the resistance movement.
(2) On the topic of malls replacing public spaces, and state and national parks becoming privatized, I agree that this is a potential problem, not so much because they deter mass gatherings (after all, at the end of the day, breaking the law in order to gather peacefully on private property, is sometimes more powerful) but rather because they further make people confuse community time with consumption time. When everything if commoditized and spaces to gather are either surrounded by opportunities to consume or at the very least require people to pay, it can further erode our concept of public goods and spaces – places that should be accesible to all for free. Wangari Maathai – the founder of the Greenbelt Movement and the first African women and environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize fought for just this in Kenya during the early 90’s. Check out this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MG5LO9zZmXg
You make a lot of great points Daryn. Thanks for sharing. I definitely agree with you, especially regarding the importance of tactics of dispersion. My first thought was that the argument for public spaces was more convincing than Solnit’s argument, even though I initially liked the sound of it.
I think it also depends on which issue is being fought over. For example, in a pro-democracy struggle perhaps more of the large actions will occur in cities, but there are other issues, like food justice, which have more of a direct connection to rural areas. That’s just a thought.
There is certainly some truth to this. As my friends in Cambodia attempt nonviolent change one of the biggest barriers is the disembodied nature of the emergent movement. People are simply too far away from each other, by geography and communications. It costs a lot of money and time (which is probably more important to an agrarian economy) to get from one place to another. Roads are poor, and often impassable during the wet season.
But the idea that this would block revolution or mass people-based change from occurring is concerning to me. I need to reflect on this. As Daryn mentions there are many examples of diffuse revolutionary actions. My thought for now is that perhaps the best known revolutionary actions are in the main public square (think of the mass gathering to oust Slobodan Milosevic in “Bringing Down A Dictator”) but rested on the enormous build-up of the people’s involvement in the public, but local, arenas (again thinking of BDAD and the many local actions that occurred).
Is this a problem of perception rather than reality?
A nonviolent movement entails the use of political, social or economic resistance for the purpose of limiting or ending the hold on power of those who are committing abuses against those who’ve organized and are supporting the movement. Despite the media’s repetitive visual meme of the physical protest as representing resistance, we know that strikes, stay-aways, boycotts and other methods of withdrawing cooperation from power-holders and imposing costs on their system of wielding power don’t necessarily require physical, public action.
Physical protest was not the decisive nonviolent tactic in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Instead, it was strikes and boycotts by black South Africans and international economic sanctions that forced the South African business sector to recognize that their operations had no viable future in a society that continued to be made “ungovernable” by such tactics. Their realization of that, shared by many non-racist moderates in the Pretoria regime, produced a kind of general defection in place that led to negotiations which paved to the way to genuine democracy in South Africa.
The first act of nonviolent resistance in an open society is often a protest. But the latter is rarely the first act of resistance in a closed or repressive society. Yet in either kind of society, the conflict that it initiates is not primarily a physical, material contest. It’s a political, social and economic conflict, and the public physical space is only one of many arenas in which it can be waged. So I don’t believe that, if we’re discussing nonviolent struggle at the generic level, that it won’t work unless it can use the urban commons.
For an example of this, one need only look at the first largely nonviolent struggle of the 20th century, the broad popular uprising against the Tsar in the first Russian revolution, in 1905. There was a march in St. Petersburg which triggered a year of upheaval, but what rocked the Russian empire was the remarkable geographic dispersion of resistance, in villages and rural areas as well as Russia’s few major cities.
I’m tempted to say: The revolution may or may not be tweeted. But it may also not need to be crowd-sourced.