The title of Todd Gitlin’s new essay for The Nation—“Will Occupy Embrace Nonviolence?”—is enough to fill activists both young and old with worry. In addition to the fear that Gitlin may be providing simplistic prescriptions to the complicated contemporary movement, it is also true that Gitlin has some ahistorical blind spots regarding the false dichotomy of violence and nonviolence which render him a less-than-reliable source on some issues relating to intensified tactics.
In the Academy-Award nominated documentary The Weather Underground, Gitlin compared that controversial organization (which engaged in many high profile bombings but took great care never to cause more than destruction of property) to the murderous dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Never a pacifist himself, Gitlin’s strategic perspective has been more than a little bit compromised. The lessons of the 1960s and 1970s are portrayed in far more nuanced and complex fashion by former pacifist, former Weather Underground member and current U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert, jailed for his participation in an armed robbery with members of the Black Liberation Army, in which two police officers and a guard were killed. In his new book Love and Struggle, Gilbert makes clear that while there is much remorse over grievous errors made, the youth of a previous radical upsurge were more than just a grouping of militarized crazies.
So it was with great relief that I read through Gitlin’s essay, which is filled with useful insights and important reflections about concrete issues which the movement is now facing. His trouncing of the new Chicago protest law is nothing short of classic (calling it a “full frontal abuse of the First Amendment”). Gitlin rightly suggests that indignation and mockery of these new statutes are “eminently called for.” This essay, therefore, is not only to applaud Gitlin, but also to note for us the one portion of his article which calls for greater scrutiny.
Gitlin writes:
I was on the streets of Chicago in August 1968 when provocative disrupters among overwhelmingly nonviolent protesters were infiltrated by provocateurs and beset by rampaging police, producing a televised spectacle that had the perverse effect of encouraging a disengaged public to side with the police against what they thought were dangerous and frivolous revolutionaries—even as the Vietnam War declined in popularity. Let there be no romanticizing of those who “upped the ante” toward militancy, indifferent to the fact that 95 percent of America was politically on their right—or of the few hundreds whose stagy vandalism (“Days of Rage”) a year later sounded the death knell for a mass student movement.
Two points here are worth both further reflection and study.
The first, his claim that the public sided with the police following the Chicago 1968 Democratic National Convention, is a controversial perspective at best. The vast majority of commentary on the subject suggests that the mainstream of America was shocked and angered at what was clearly a “police riot,” which Norman Mailer called “the siege of Chicago.”
The second, that the Days of Rage and the fervor which surrounded them sounded the demise of the 1960s student movement, is much more widely accepted as fact within progressive academic and activist quarters. Many of those directly involved in the Days of Rage actions themselves register regret at the affects and failures of that “campaign.” But I believe that it is necessary to at least examine—in a clear and dispassionate way—the underlying features that led to the diminishing of mass student protest post-1969. One wrong-headed protest or one sectarian organization may certainly have had a negative effect (and hindsight is always 20/20), but an explanation for the entire “death knell” necessitates a clearer and deeper analysis to determine its full causes.
Any thorough analysis of the end of “the Sixties” must at least also look carefully at: the role of the illegal FBI Counter-Intelligence Program; the effects of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and the general turn towards more self-consciously “revolutionary” approaches to social change; the shifts in the way the war in South East Asia was being waged—militarily and otherwise; and the changing nature of a student-specific movement post-1970 Kent and Jackson State massacres.
These points are important not only for the sake of telling an accurate history, but also because we are entering a period where—with the G8 and NATO summits in Chicago in mid-May (including the oft-celebrated date of Malcolm X’s birth), and presidential conventions coming up in Florida and North Carolina this summer—we will need to work carefully to break free from the scripts that are all too common for both “nonviolent” and “diversity of tactics”-type actions. If the Occupy movement has taught us anything, it is that people are tired of choreographed, pre-scripted actions which lack any sense of small-group autonomy or real-life empowerment. Progressive organizers have not made gains by underestimating the risks people are willing to take for the possibility of meaningful change.
Embrace nonviolence? Surely yes! But a creative, constructive, militant nonviolence is needed to inspire a greater percentage of the 99% than we’ve yet impressed or mobilized.
Good response to Gitlin, I think.
I was there in 1968, working with the Church Federation of Greater Chicago while a seminarian. My task during the protests was to monitor the police radio transmissions and attempt to get help where it was needed.
The “public” siding with the police may be somewhat true for the white residential areas of greater Chicago, but the impact, thanks to Walter Cronkite especially, was felt far beyond and the Chicago police did not come off well.
There may have been “provocateurs” but there were also “peacekeepers” who planned for months in advance of the convention to be on the streets inside the protests doing whatever they could to mitigate damage and violence.
As for the “death knell of the student movement” I think that had more to do with the greater historical context: assassinations, for example, of some of the heroes of the new consciousness, than much else. And Nixon’s ending of the US combat role in Vietnam, which was a major focus at the time, when the draft was still in effect. Most of the young ones today have no memory whatsoever of the military draft. It’s a different time, and a far different challenge. At the time, the anti Vietnam war effort seemed huge, but in contrast to what’s happening now, it seems almost a fleabite in comparison!
One of the best ways to understand that time is the movie “The Deerhunter.” I remember watching it in a theater in Canada, where I was doing a workshop. The audience was deeply silent, and I realized that many of them were so-called “draft dodgers” who had moved to Canada rather than participate in that imperialist and very dirty war.
Thank you for writing this piece, this is exactly what I thought about Gitlin’s essay in the Nation. In 1968, I was one of those people – a young kid in high school – “politically to the right”. The assassination of JFK and MLK had raised some questions, but as white middle class kid who had grown up in conservative Western PA, it was another assassination that really got me thinking. I can still remember that morning, listening to the car radio as we drove to school on the last day of classes my senior year — Bobby Kennedy had been murdered. That summer watching the Chicago police riots on TV was another big step toward radicalizing my consciousness. My first reaction was to just give up on main-stream politics and ignore the 1968 elections. There was something going on however, that I didn’t fully understand. Although I was in ROTC my first two years at William & Mary by 1971 I was a long-haired hippy at the May Day 1971 direct action. “Death of the student movement” what crap! Does anyone remember May Day? One-hundred thousand people in what as far as I know was the largest civil resistance direct action in U.S. history. Well over 12,000 people arrested as the state had to resort to using elite airborne troops to “defend” the city.
Today I’m involved with Occupy DC and was at a pot luck meeting of the DC Learning Collective. A few of the young people were talking about the plans to train 100,000 people for direct action. Surely, some one said this must be for all over the country. None of the young people even knew about May Day. If it wasn’t for a few old-hippy anarchists they would never have dreamed that something like that has and can happen again. But they are learning and diversity of tactics is a key part of that process. I was very moved by the empathy and solidarity they exhibited when the police brutally attacked the DC McPherson Square encampment. Gitlin’s piece reminded me of the internet furor over Chris Hedge’s attack on the black bloc tactics. There was a lot of stuff written about the black bloc by people who didn’t know what they were talking about. We need to be just as careful about the people who are writing the current history of Occupy as those like Gitlin who are trying to re-write history to serve their own personal agenda, whatever that may be.
P.S. In regard to the “diminishing of mass student protest post-1969.” it was only because the student movement leadership realized that protests no matter how large were not going to end the Vietnam War. It was necessary to adopt a diversity of tactics. And one of those diverse tactics, May Day 1971, had a major impact in ending the war. Many in the Occupy movement, like myself, believe that simply “protesting” won’t be enough – we need a diversity of nonviolent tactics.
The so called “diversity of tactics” is really a ruse and a cover for violent, property destruction and “fighting back” against the police.
This won’t work. It is counter productive. History has shown this over and over again. The state uses this to suppress any movement for change. The state places “agent provocateur” to discredit the movement and justify the violent crackdown. The solution is nonviolent discipline, training and the forming of affinity support groups to isolate the “agent provocateurs” using nonviolent peacekeepers. We need sustained campaigns at strategic targets disrupting the business as usual while developing alternative, parallel businesses and government structures to remove the power and money from the corporations and the government that they bought and control for them, the 1%. To learn more on how to do this, check out the Global Nonviolence Database at:
http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/ based on Gene Sharps 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action. Sharp is the author of “From Dictatorship to Democracy” which helped inspire the Arab Spring.
For strategies to get there, check out George Lakey’s “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” at:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lakeylivrev.html
and Bill Moyer (Not the PBS guy) “Movement Action Plan or MAP Model for conducting nonviolent direct action campaigns and movements” at: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/moyermap.html Both Gandhi and Dr, Martin Luther King knew that their would be causalities. What revolution doesn’t have death and injury. There are no guarantee either violent or nonviolent revolution will be successful. Just look at Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. But which one is the least violent and least destructive? Which one has a minimum of suffering?
Thank you Kathleen, Ed, and Paul for these comments. Though the last two may seem contradictory, I truly appreciate them both (and think that we all must). “Diversity”–tactically and otherwise–must, after all, be understood as a good thing, and my piece urges creative thinking about the ways in which we envision tactics and strategy. It asserts that the conventional methods of mass demonstrations and negotiated civil disobedience may not be as inspiring as they once were, and should not be relied upon as the only means (aside from petitions) available to mass movements. That said, the phrase we have come to know as “diversity of tactics” has, since Seattle 1999, been used too often as a cover for “condoning acts of violence.” (See Nathan Schneider’s WNV October 19, 2011 column). I strongly agree that what the movement needs now is an understanding of revolutionary nonviolence which requires great discipline, and an understanding that risks (including casualties) must be prepared for as in any major confrontation. The intensity of violence which is part of modern life makes it almost impossible to imagine fundamental social change without violence; if we minimize or eliminate the violent acts used by those of us working for a progressive future then we greatly increase our chances for effective change, lasting peace, and justice for all.