Let’s be honest about this: the world has been coming apart at the seams, and we’ve been far too complacent about it. Sure, many of us are well aware of the apocalyptic risks of climate change, the social/environmental ravages of perpetual warfare, and the harsh realities of the rise of global corporate fascism. The era in which we live is defined by an incessant news cycle that chronicles the “end of days” trope in real time. And yet, despite occasional outbreaks of resistance, we’ve mostly been content to watch it play out through the lens of detached denial.

While we may laugh at climate change deniers — including the slate of potential incoming congressional chairs who will be tasked with overseeing this issue — we might also recognize a grain of personal truth in these jocular reflections. How many of us really have taken all the steps at our disposal to forestall the drivers of climate change, from zeroing our carbon emissions to refraining from the consumption of products responsible for deforestation and mounting waste? Who among us has truly stood resolute against the war machine at every turn, from open and organized tax resistance to educating tirelessly against the fallacies of recruitment? And who has completely disavowed any connection whatsoever with the corporate conglomerate that impose their will on the world?

This isn’t an indictment, but more so a statement about the nature of the challenge before us. The array of nonviolent tactics for change at our disposal is vast and always growing, as Gene Sharp has documented. But there is a deeper problem at hand that works against the accrual of these tactics into an effective overall strategy, namely our incontrovertible reliance upon the very forces that we are seeking to alter or abolish. We might attend a protest but eat fast food on the way home. Perhaps we’ve changed our light bulbs yet still utilize fossil fuel electricity. Maybe we work with anti-war groups even as we fund war through multiple means. And so on.

We are all so thoroughly implicated in the patterns and practices of conflict and degradation that it is by now nearly impossible to extricate oneself altogether. Our utter dependency on the very system that we aim to alter necessarily imposes limits on how far we might be willing to go in order to dismantle the machinery of destruction. Metaphorically, we can liken our situation to that of being on a rapidly sinking ship and having to somehow construct a new ship out of the old materials without drowning in the process. And to make matters worse, it further appears that we are constrained to use the “master’s tools” in this already long-shot rebuilding process.

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The history of nonviolent social change is filled with injunctions to refuse compliance with unjust laws and policies. As Gandhi once famously said, “non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.” Reflecting on the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. observed that “what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system. … We were simply saying to the white community: We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system. From that moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation.” In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau mapped out the terrain in ways that would later influence both Gandhi and King:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? … It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. … Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

These teachings were alive and well during the demonstrations in Arizona against SB 1070, the state’s anti-immigrant law that was partially struck down by a federal judge two days before it took effect. In recognition of the larger issues raised by the bill, as well as the realization that open persecution of “illegals” would remain official state policy going forward, hundreds of people took to the streets on July 29th under the banner of the movement’s mantra, “We Will Not Comply.” Almost 100 people were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience during these protests, and a clear message of the refusal to cooperate with injustice was communicated to both local officials and an international audience alike.

While many of the events of that day have been well-reported, the opening salvo that set the tone of noncompliance and civil resistance seemed to slip by almost without notice. It was, however, a poignant and powerful action that reflected the best qualities of the nonviolence paradigm. Here is my recollection of what transpired that night as SB 1070 was to take effect: Read the rest of this article »

With the conclusion of the G20 protests in Canada, the inevitable post-mortem dissection has begun in earnest. Activists prepare to file lawsuits, organizers vow to do things differently next time, police pledge to investigate further, the media highlight the purported “destruction” before moving on to the next big story, and world leaders promise to continue their efforts unhampered by the misguided protesters. And, as is by now par for the post-protest course, pretty much everyone seems to cast blame on “the anarchists.”

More recently, in the aftermath of the Oscar Grant verdict in Oakland, the media fan the flames by blaming the few stray acts of window-breaking and looting on “self-described anarchists,” while police officials emphasize that this de facto terrorist segment justifies their conduct vis-à-vis protesters in general. More rifts develop in the streets, and although a tenuous solidarity is at times expressed as well, the lasting images once again are of anarchists acting in seemingly unproductive ways that put the interests and safety of larger movement contingents in jeopardy.

These are but two recent examples of a phenomenon that has been regularly played out in North America since at least the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Antipathy toward anarchists seems to have increased steadily since then, not only from corporate elites and law enforcement officials, but from a number of fellow movement participants as well. Ironically, this comes at a time when interest in anarchism among activists has greatly expanded, and likewise when its impact upon American activism in general has seen a strong resurgence in recent years.

Critical voices regularly chastise anarchists without indicating that they fully understand what anarchism actually is. But anarchists as well oftentimes seem to act in contravention of both historical and political senses of what anarchism represents. This is further made problematic by the basic fact that anarchists generally eschew doctrinaire definitions and ideological litmus tests, suggesting that people ought to be free to define their own actions and ideas in the manner of their own choosing. And yet, a kind of orthodoxy that increasingly seems like “fundamentalist anarchism” may be taking hold among some sectors that posture as “real revolutionaries,” who denigrate as “pathological” those who would seek to deploy their version of anarchism in less spectacular ways than overtly “smashing the state” by striking at some of its symbolic targets.

Interestingly, this plays right into the hands of the caricature of anarchism as violent, bomb-throwing, chaotic behavior that seems to be the first question one gets asked when their anarchism is presented in mixed company. Indeed, I always enjoy getting that inevitable query: “Isn’t anarchism just violence and destruction?” To which I usually reply: “How many people would you estimate have been killed by anarchists in the last hundred years? Now, how many would you say have been killed by liberals, or conservatives, in that time frame? If a lawyer or corporate manager were here before you now, would you ask about the blood on their hands or just let it slide as part of business as usual? The state didn’t save us from the violence of anarchy — it simply monopolized it, institutionalized it, and expanded its role in our lives.”

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a series of workshops on “Anarchism and Nonviolence” in the U.S. and Canada. As one might expect, spirited conversations ensued in which many powerful young voices felt challenged by the notion of being nonviolent in a world that in their lifetimes has appeared as inherently violent. Indeed, these issues get at the heart of matters of ethics, tactics, and visions for the future, comprising some of the most basic concerns for social movements and individual consciences alike. One of the exercises we did in these workshops was to create a working definition of anarchism, and then one of nonviolence. Comparing the two lists, many overlapping values emerged: self-governance, rejection of domination, respect and mutual aid, antiwar and anti-oppression practices, solidarity, a radical egalitarianism, and the politics of “prefiguring” the future society. Further, it was pointed out that both notions, (an)archism and (non)violence, trace their linguistic origins to the negation of something — yet have developed proactive self-definitions despite an initial reactive framing.

And the synergies don’t end there. Among the anarchist milieu, we find figures such as Emma Goldman, who dabbled in the use of revolutionary violence in her younger days but came to reject it in her later years. She once told her comrade and coconspirator Alexander Berkman that “violence in whatever form never has and probably never will bring constructive results,” and further elucidated her position that “methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose.” In the end, Goldman saw nonviolence and revolution as intertwined:

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A number of commentators have questioned the accepted logic that disasters bring out the worst in people, directly challenging the pervasive “looters run amok” imagery often perpetuated by the media and held out by lawmakers as a rationale for military occupation. Having done relief work following Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina, I have found that people are more likely to work together – even if only out of necessity – when severe hardship strikes. In fact, it is precisely the isolation and individualism of ordinary daily life that tap into our worst instincts, while the removal of these impediments can actually liberate our better qualities.

As Dustin Howes recently observed, “the vast majority of people in Haiti responded to the earthquake with the apparently just as natural of an impulse to help one another.” The New York Times has uncovered a widespread ethic of “communal rationing” in Haiti, in which “no matter what is found, or how hungry the forager, everything must be shared.” As the article explains, many Haitians “are finding ways to share. In several neighborhoods of Carrefour, a poor area closer to the epicenter, small soup kitchens have sprung up with discounted meals, subsidized by Haitians with a little extra money…. [Three women there] started cooking for their neighbors the day after the earthquake. On many mornings, they serve 100 people before 10 a.m. Smiling and proud, the women said they did not have the luxury of waiting for aid groups to reach them in their hilly neighborhood.”

This is the untold and largely unreported state of the crisis in Haiti. Amy Goodman filed a series of reports for Democracy Now! from places where relief had yet to be delivered. In Leogane, the epicenter of the quake where perhaps 90% of the city had been destroyed, Mayor Santos Alexis noted that aside from people occasionally taking food from destroyed stores, “there’s no violence really in Leogane.” Still, the mainstream relief agencies remain obsessed with security concerns, to the extent that they will drop small amounts of food from above rather than land and talk with the people on the ground. As Mayor Alexis lamented, the people “feel humiliated, because of the airplane flying and dropping some bread to them. They feel very embarrassed by that.” Haitian expatriate blogger Wadner Pierre likewise reflects on these unfortunate realities, and how they stand in contrast to baseline Haitian values:

My beloved country is one where people know how to do ‘konbit’ (put their hands together) to help their brothers and sisters. But because so many of the organizations now involved in the relief effort do not know Haiti well and do not have Haitian employees who speak the local languages, the situation may worsen… Why are American relief organizations… humiliating people by dropping food and water to them by helicopters? Would they treat American citizens in this manner?

When we consider the practice of nonviolence, one of the foundational premises is humanization, of both self and other. In Haiti, the chasm between survivors and most of the aiders prevents the discovery of a mutual humanity from which empathy may spring, making truly “humanitarian” relief efforts problematic if not impossible. A key aspect of grassroots work in the region has been to reclaim this basic humanity, providing a voice to the Haitian people themselves so that we can see, across the chasms of distance and status, that they are people with the same complexities and desires as ourselves. (A 2008 grassroots video project called “Looking Through Their Eyes” effectively captures this sense of commonality.)

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