On the first day of a recent nonviolence training for a mix of scholars, students, journalists, and religious and tribal leaders in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, I asked what they knew about nonviolent civic mobilization. A number of them responded “women’s rights,” while some said “democracy,” and others “pacifying people.” They were all familiar with the term “nonviolence” and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — also known as “Badshah Khan” and the “Frontier Gandhi” — whose nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar (“Servants of God”) movement against the British Raj is well known in Afghanistan. But participants had no real knowledge of the details of this movement, nor of the underlying ideas or practical implementation of nonviolent action.

Most participants had never felt the need to study Badshah Khan’s works and philosophy before because they only knew of violent means to address and react to problems faced by their communities: either fight and join the insurgency, or sit silently as passive spectators. In fact, the majority of Afghans believe that as ordinary civilians, it is not in their power to create change. Many only wish to focus on the present and not on the future. This mindset is the result of three decades of violent conflict, which has affected every single family in Afghanistan.

But as the events in the Middle East unfolded during the Arab Spring, Afghan intellectuals and youth groups came to recognize the potential force of nonviolent civic mobilization. They have since begun to adopt these strategies and tactics to organize and tackle widespread government corruption, which particularly affects the justice system and fosters rampant unemployment and insecurity.

With this process still being in its infancy, proponents of nonviolent action are facing many challenges. Due to insufficient knowledge, demonstrations start out peacefully, but most quickly turn violent as they are easily hijacked by violent insurgents. During demonstrations in Mazar Sharif on April 1, 2011, five international U.N. personnel were killed as demonstrators stormed the regional office of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan (UNAMA). In the summer of 2011, gatherings in the cities of Mazar and Kandahar turned violent and claimed several lives as well.

Additionally, participants in nonviolent protests often receive threats, both from violent insurgents (who believe that nonviolent civic mobilization prevents the population from waging jihad against the government) and from corrupt government officials (who fear that such campaigns will threaten their authority in the future). Furthermore, Afghan security forces rarely respect the right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression. Many believe that demonstrations, even nonviolent ones, are against Afghanistan and the interests of Afghans — so they deal with protests and gatherings with an iron fist. In the future, it will therefore be important to include members of the security forces in trainings on civic nonviolent mobilization, so that they too have a better understanding of the demands made and the methods used by civic organizers. In some cases security forces may constitute important allies.

As for the women of Afghanistan, they strongly believe that they can play the same central role the women in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries of the Arab world played, and are still playing, at the heart of the Arab Spring movements. Women represent over half of Afghanistan’s population and are an important pillar in the family, yet their role in the country’s political, cultural and economic life was ignored and suppressed for almost two decades. Torpikai Rasoli, a member of the Kunar Provincial Council and participant in the nonviolent civic mobilization in the Kunar training said: “We, women, have the potential to bring changes in our society.”

Since the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001, women are increasingly taking on important roles, such as voting and running for the parliament, presidency and other important offices. Although they are now represented in most sectors, including business and media, they still face a number of important issues and challenges, which vary between provinces. For example, security conditions and fear of repercussions deterred female participants from joining the workshop in Kunduz, while nine women were able to attend the one in Kunar.

Although these were not the first workshops on nonviolent civic mobilization that were held in Afghanistan, the local and national media gave greater attention to the trainings this time. In their interviews, participants spoke of the Arab Spring, Gandhi’s salt march, Otpor in Serbia and the use of nonviolence by Badshah Khan as they outlined their own vision for Afghanistan’s future and how it could be achieved.

While some participants, fearing for their safety — especially the tribal chiefs and religious scholars — did not want to be photographed during the trainings, the younger participants were eager to speak with the media. This was significant, as it sent an important message to the community that there are citizens who are ready to speak up and take bold steps.

Participants also made two Facebook groups and began sharing their take on nonviolent civic mobilization with their friends and contacts. They hope to use the social media site to reach and connect with Afghan youths in other parts of the country and to organize future nonviolent civic mobilization activities.

In spite of this initial success, participants and trainers alike still face important challenges.

In addition to fearing for their safety, those teaching about nonviolent civic mobilization must combat the persistent perception that this way of struggle is weak. Most Afghans associate strategic nonviolent action with foreign cultures — even though Afghanistan has a rich history of nonviolent movements. Trainers must be sensitive to the cultural and social environment and contextualize their curricula accordingly, reassuring participants that the philosophy of nonviolence is consistent with Islam and Afghan culture.

As the trainings came to a close, the experience strengthened my belief that Afghans throughout the country are seeking alternatives to address their problems and express their grievances. The workshops were conducted in two parts of the country under very different conditions. However, participants responded with equal interest and enthusiasm to this unique opportunity to learn about a new way — consistent with their beliefs and culture — for mobilizing and demanding their political, social and economic rights.

This article was co-authored by Nicola Barrach.

Original headline about Operation Spectrum.

On May 21, 1987, 16 Singaporeans were arrested and detained in a crackdown called Operation Spectrum. About a month later, four of the original 16 were released, and another six arrested. They were branded as Marxist conspirators out to “subvert Singapore’s political and social order using communist united front tactics” and detained without trial. Most of the detainees were lawyers, community workers or entrepreneurs. As the 25th anniversary of the crackdown approaches, activists are using the opportunity to raise questions anew about the repression of dissent in the country.

In Singapore, the Internal Security Act (ISA) allows the government to arrest and preventively detain individuals deemed to be threats to national security. A person can be detained for up to 30 days, after which a detention order must be issued. Although the ISA’s original purpose was for the protection of Singapore’s security, the government has long been criticized for using it as a tool to stifle activism and political opposition.

Unable to defend themselves in a court of law, those arrested in Operation Spectrum were made to appear on national television to give apparent confessions, admitting to plots to overthrow the government and establish a classless society. When nine of the detainees published a press statement upon their release recanting their confessions and accusing the government of ill treatment, they were swiftly re-arrested. Francis Seow, a former solicitor general, stepped in to represent one of the detainees. He, too, was arrested upon arrival at the detention center and held for over two months.

No public evidence – apart from the confessions – was ever produced to prove that any of the detainees were really threats to national security.

A similar spate of arrests and detentions — codenamed Operation Coldstore – occurred about two decades before Spectrum. Both events are rarely covered in Singapore’s primary and secondary school syllabi. But as Singaporeans begin to seek out alternative sources of information to the traditional media, ex-detainees are finding new platforms on which to tell their side of the story, raising awareness of the darker moments in Singapore’s history.

Several books have been written on the events of Operation Coldstore and Operation Spectrum, such as a collection of accounts published in 2009 under the title That We May Dream Again and Teo Soh Lung’s memoirs, Beyond The Blue Gate. When Ms. Teo stood as a candidate in the 2011 general election, fellow ex-detainee Vincent Cheng spoke in support of her at rallies and gave an account of his time in custody.

Whereas Singaporeans once only had access to the perspective of the government in the media — regarding Operation Spectrum, the national broadsheet The Straits Times simply carried the press release from the Ministry of Home Affairs — the stories coming from the detainees have revealed troubling abuses of power. Now, more and more Singaporeans support the abolishment of the ISA.

Calls for abolishment were further strengthened when Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced last fall that he would repeal Malaysia’s ISA. Since Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had said in 1991 (when he was deputy prime minister) that Singapore would consider abolishing the ISA should Malaysia do so, many Singaporeans looked forward to the continued existence of the ISA being debated both in public and in the parliament.

However, a day after Malaysia’s announcement, the Ministry of Home Affairs put out a press release stating that “the ISA continues to be relevant and crucial as a measure of last resort for the preservation of our national security.” With that, the government signaled that there would be no talk of abolishing the ISA in Singapore.

Still, the campaign to abolish the ISA continues to press forward, hoping to slowly chip away at its public support until the government is left with no choice but to act. Emphasis is now being placed on educating Singaporeans and filling in the gaps left by schoolchildren’s history textbooks.

With the 25th anniversary of Operation Spectrum coming up, the anti-ISA initiative Function 8 and the human rights NGO Maruah are jointly organizing an event called “That We May Dream Again: Remembering the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy’” on May 19. It will be held at Speakers’ Corner — the only outdoor place in Singapore were cause-related activities can be held without a permit — and will feature exhibitions, performances, speeches and testimonies from ex-detainees.

In a statement released by the organizing committee, four main objectives were identified:

1. Raise awareness on the misuse of the ISA in the past;
2. raise awareness of the danger of the continued existence of the ISA which may lead to complacency of the authorities in dealing with real security threats to our country;
3. work towards the abolition of the ISA; and
4. press the government to welcome the return of those who have been forced into exile because of the ISA, such a move being the first step towards national reconciliation and healing for all parties.

As of right now, the campaign against the ISA progresses in fits and starts — the topic comes up from time to time, events are organized and then the issue once again fades to the background. To have a greater, lasting impact on Singaporean society, the campaign requires much more participation, but is often confined to the same group of passionately supportive activists. This group of people usually finds it difficult to sustain the campaign as they are more often than not also involved in other causes such as the death penalty, migrant workers’ rights, LGBT rights and more.

Perhaps the ISA itself makes other Singaporeans hesitate to join the struggle; one only needs to speak to the ex-detainees to be reminded of the price activists in Singapore have had to pay.

UPDATE 5/17/12: 

On May 17, 2012, Function 8 and Maruah posted a note on Facebook saying that their May 19 event had been postponed. They had been informed by the police that due to a by-election being held in one of Singapore’s constituencies, Hougang, “the exemption granted under the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act to Speakers’ Corner, Hong Lim Park has been revoked with effect from 16 May to 26 May 2012.” This means that anyone who wants to hold an event at Speakers’ Corner in that period will be required to apply for a police permit. In their statement, the organizers wrote:

Owing to the short notice and uncertainties in obtaining a police permit, as well as the prospect of inconvenience to our guests and contractors should the permit be refused, we are sorry that our event at Speakers’ Corner, Hong Lim Park, has to be postponed. We deeply regret that a by-election in the single-member constituency of Hougang, has disrupted and inconvenienced Singaporeans from enjoying activities at Hong Lim Park which is not part of Hougang.

That We May Dream Again: Remembering the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy will now be held on 2 June 2012.

Do a Google image search for protest symbols and your first page will show a range of raised fists, Guy Fawkes masks and possibly even a few giant inflatable rats. But by far the single most represented image you’ll see is the peace sign. It is probably the most famous protest symbol in the world and has its origins in the British anti-nuclear movement of the 1950s. The sign represents the semaphore signals for two letters: ‘N’ (the two diagonals pointing down) and ‘D’ (the vertical line that divides the circle), which together represent nuclear disarmament. It has become the symbol of anti-war and social justice movements across the globe.

The aim of a symbol is to communicate as immediately and directly as possible the core of what you represent. It is the shorthand for your values, your aspirations and sometimes your political agenda, if you’ve managed to put one together. Which brings us to an important question: Is it time to consider a new symbol for a new era?

I was at a conference recently with pro-democracy activists from the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. They expressed a strong feeling that their aspirations and values were linked despite working in dramatically different contexts and against ostensibly different adversaries. They felt united in their commitment to nonviolence, to sharing strategies, to building and putting up as much as to removing and pulling down — all in an attempt to construct a different vision of the future. They also emphasized the importance of being connected in order to find strength greater than the sum of their individual powers. Near the end of the conference, someone observed that there really is no political symbol that represents that list of values and goals.

The peace sign has a lot of significance, but its origin is very specifically nuclear disarmament, and even its broader connotation is narrowly that of peace. Another symbol handed down from previous generations is that of the clenched upright fist. It immediately conveys an expression of defiance, resistance and solidarity, but is agnostic in what it might resist. Therefore it has been used by a disparate number of groups and movements including the Black Panthers, white supremacists, the Serbian revolutionaries Otpor, Egypt’s April 6th Movement and the Socialist International, to name but a few. And although some of those groups were strategic, networked and nonviolent, some were not.

A more recent symbol is the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask often seen at Indignado and Occupy protests that alludes to a “vendetta” against the 1 percent. It doesn’t quite fit with what much of these movements seem to be about, at least not in terms of the method intimated.

So I approached a long time collaborator, Carl Le Blond, who has created some of the most powerful visual content on issues from Burma to HIV/AIDS to climate change, to see if he could help. We had some lengthy discussions about what a symbol needed to do and represent, as well as the importance of investing it with meaning — which often comes from who’s using it and how.

The existing symbols seemed to emphasize a particular dimension of struggle: nonviolence, defined by not using violence (though it is much more than that), or resistance, defined by what you are against and often neglecting what you are for. Few gave a sense of building something new. If many in the Arab Spring, Occupy movement and Indignados believe they are all connected, what would their symbol look like?

Despite being in the middle of a number of massive deadlines, Carl eventually put pen to café serviette — an old-school medium for great ideas and images. A few days later he had worked up his initial idea and the people’s cube was born.

Carl’s aim was to emphasize that when people come together in an organized way they can build something much stronger and longer lasting than they could on their own. As he put it:

The people’s cube is on first sight solid and immovable from every way that you look at it. It has the simplicity and latent strength of a perfect molecular structure. Though in this case the molecules bonding together are symbolic of people standing together with their arms locked to form a symbol of strength and unity.

It seemed to represent much of what the activists I met had been talking about: being connected, constructive, strategic and networked. I sent it around to them and was glad that it got an enthusiastic reception. It will be interesting to see if and where it might pop up first. Now it may not do it for you. And that’s cool. But it’s worth thinking about, as these are new times and they are worthy of new symbols. Grab your stencils now!

London student protest, via Bowalley Road.

For the better part of a century, some visionaries have been trying to break out of the dominant belief that there are only two means of forcing change: reform through elections and revolution through violence. The rigidity of that binary choice still strangles thinking today.

A Norwegian, for instance, once wrote to me that there simply wasn’t enough direct conflict in the country to use the word “revolution”; as I have described in detail before, the Labor Party got enough votes in the 1930s so it could finally create a coalition government. An election seems to have made the change. But that view focuses on politicians and electoral forms and overlooks the main scene of the conflict, which was mass direct action in the economic arena. To say that the change happened through elections is to mistake the effect for the cause.

The Norwegian owning class fought for decades to maintain domination against the rising militancy of workers’ strikes and other forms of direct action. The 1 percent — through its instrument, the Conservative Party government — called out troops repeatedly to keep workers in line. My Norwegian father-in-law refused military service as a young man because he personally might have to shoot fellow workers rather than a national enemy. The owning class also recruited tens of thousands of people into an organization devoted to violent strike-breaking.

The Labor Party was not the polite, consensus-seeking party of today’s Norway; it was the electoral representative of — and controlled by — the workers. One couldn’t even be a member of the Labor Party in the old days if one wasn’t a worker. The action that counted for Norway’s future was not in the Storting (the parliament) but in the deadly fight between the 1 percent and the trade unions. And the stakes were very high: Who would lead Norway, the super-rich and their bourgeois allies or the working class?

The stakes were so high, in fact, that a young Vidkun Quisling tried to put together a military coup against the government that was run by the Conservative Party in an attempt to suspend parliamentary forms and create an efficient dictatorship. After all, the German and Italian 1 percent supported a fascist solution to “labor unrest,” so why not the Norwegian?

One reason, I believe, is that the Norwegian working class, although inspired by Marxism and even Leninism, was not inspired by violence. “Yes” to a workers’ (and farmers’) state, but “no” to armed struggle.

Here’s where we need to open the space to think freshly when we think about power and revolution. Smart nonviolent strategy influences the choices available to ruling class. Nonviolent struggle constrains the options of the opponent.

In Norway, the largely nonviolent struggle of the 1920s and 1930s made it impossible for the 1 percent to go “all the way” with violent repression. In Norway, 1 percenters ruled out — as far as I have found — even considering the option of asking the British 1 percent to intervene in the Norwegian struggle, as it might have had there been an armed conflict. (The British empire was highly experienced in meddling in the affairs of other countries and had sent troops to Russia after its violent revolution. Norway was considered to be in Britain’s backyard.)

The lack of a fascist response by the Norwegian 1 percent in the 1930s to the workers’ prolonged nonviolent direct action doesn’t tell us there was not a revolution. What the workers (and farmers, in their own dimension of the struggle) did was show the 1 percent that it could no longer run the country. If the owners did not make a giant compromise, they might end up without any ownership stake in the country at all.

In light of what happened later, it is to the credit of the owning class and the workers that they made their historic compromise of 1936. But their decision not to go over the brink doesn’t give us reason to paper over the conflict. Labor decided it would not escalate further but instead take the reins of government (postponing the issue of ownership of the means of production) in order to alleviate the worst depression in Europe and set the ship of state onto a new — and fundamentally different — course.

Now we come to the heart of the matter: What defines revolution? The Norwegian Labor Party and its farmer and middle class allies could fundamentally change the country’s course because they forced a power shift. The super-rich no longer ruled, as they had for centuries (sometimes in collaboration with the Danes and Swedes).

That power shift is what didn’t happen in the 20th century in the U.K., in France and in Germany, although the working class in those countries gained more concessions than were gained in the U.S.

How significant was the power shift? The crisis in the financial sector that is still wrecking Europe reveals the difference dramatically. When, in the 1980s, Norway took a temporary detour by flirting with neoliberalism, the economy headed toward the cliff: speculation on housing, a bubble, a crash. But the fundamental power arrangement re-asserted itself: The government seized the three biggest banks, fired the senior management, made sure the shareholders didn’t get a krone and told the other private banks that they could either recapitalize on their own or go bankrupt. No bailouts — period.

The Norwegian bottom line: When the capitalists act out, they must pay for their spree, not the people.

It couldn’t be more different from what we now see in most of Europe (and the U.S.). The 1 percent rule, and the people pay. As the European giants began to totter in 2008, the Norwegian (and Swedish) financial sectors remained secure because they had won their fight with the 1 percent previously. If the Norwegians and Swedes had not fought their nonviolent revolution, they also would have been at the mercy of their 1 percent and in just as big a mess as the rest of Europe.

It thus seems especially wise that Norwegians successfully resisted their own internationalist sentiments when asked to join the European Union. Twice voting “no” for a variety of reasons in national referenda, many realized decades ago that international capital uses the EU for its own agenda. The class struggle continues in Norway, as it must everywhere because it is a fundamental historical reality. But the playing field inside Norway is different because they won their most important battle in the 1920s and 30s — nonviolently.

Labor’s strategy was this: to use widespread direct action, accept compromise, change the union/management rulebook, lead the government, massively regulate capital, redistribute wealth, and take controlling shares of major corporations. It has unmistakably shifted the entire society. In Norway’s political spectrum, a leading Norwegian Conservative told me, Barack Obama would be considered right-wing.

I’ll share two of the more light-hearted signs of the continued hegemony of working class values like solidarity and equality. Poverty has been largely wiped out in Norway, but a bit stubbornly remains; during a recent election the Labor government found that fact being used as an attack by, of all groups, the Conservative Party, under whose rule an estimated majority of Norwegians had once been poor!

The brand-new national opera house in Oslo, an architectural gem built by the government for a traditionally elite art form, has been such a success that seats are often sold out months in advance. Nevertheless, the opera house refuses to put a price premium on its best seats because that “just wouldn’t be the Norwegian way.”

Norway is not a utopia, and in my forthcoming book I’ll share ideas from radical Norwegians as they continue to envision a more carbon-neutral, egalitarian, decentralized and liberated society than the one they have. Whether or not they break new ground in coming decades, Norwegians have already shown us that people power can overcome money power, that the dominance of the super-rich can be overcome through nonviolent direct action and that democracy can flourish. I’m willing to call that a nonviolent revolution.

Violeta Parra.

For Mother’s Day, I’ve been thinking about some of the powerful and provocative creative nonviolent activist work that mothers have done through the ages — and there is a lot of it. So much of popular history tells the stories of the men who “led” the charge in struggles, but my thoughts went to South America, and Chile in particular, because of the richness of the cultural methods used, and the leadership of mothers in the face of brutal and patriarchal regimes.

“You can’t have a revolution without songs,” read the banner behind Salvador Allende when he became president of Chile in 1970, highlighting the role of Nueva Canción (New Song) in the emergent resistance movements in South America. This style of musical resistance didn’t just include the voices of women, though one of its early proponents was Violeta Parra, a mother, who wrote the song “Gracias a la Vida.” Nueva Canción was intentionally used to unite and identify concerns of oppressed peoples, as it integrated native and rural musical instrumentation with urban and European styles to speak to ever larger communities. Only three years later, when Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile, his regime outlawed several instruments identified with Nueva Canción, recognizing and attempting to stop the powerful spread of political ideas, courage and resistance through music.

Still, the music lived on. Today, the tradition continues thanks to, among others, the son and daughter of Violeta, who instilled a love of this music in her children. What an amazing gift.

Even as music served functions of education, empowerment, community-building and the putting forward of alternate visions for society, it was not the only cultural work that significantly contributed to the effectiveness of the movement for justice. During the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet, mothers spent hours stitching stories of resistance and suffering in the 1980s into a traditional tapestry form, arpilleras. Disregarded as inconsequential women’s work, it was possible to smuggle and sell these beautiful quilts both into and out of jails, and outside of Chile — moving information to sons and husbands, and spreading news beyond the borders even when a suppressed press corps could not. This galvanized anti-Pinochet sympathizers globally and resulted in both financial and political support for the resistance.

Arpillera, via the Royal Alberta Museum.

As the arpilleraistas gathered, often in church sanctuaries, the threads of their handiwork not only provided income to support their families, but also sewed together a growing consciousness of their own power. The craft provided a very accessible and low-risk entry point to the movement for many, while preserving collective memory and building capacity to go public with their demands, both on the political and home fronts — confronting the dictatorship and later the culture of machismo itself.

Another protest against Pinochet evolved from Chile’s national dance, the cueca. As thousands were “disappeared” by the regime, a symbol of resistance became “la cueca sola.” Originally done with partners, it was now being performed solo by women, clutching photographs of their missing loved ones, to confront the denial of the death squads.

Chilean women’s integration of cultural resistance into movement strategies seems to have contributed greatly to the outreach, education, accessibility, endurance and, therefore, effectiveness of their protracted struggle. The mothers’ motivation to better their children’s lives and future living conditions inspired many to take action, however risky. Day to day concerns of finding food for empty bellies moved mothers to stitch together rags to not only fill wallets but also to make change.

Thank you, arpilleraistas, singers and dancers for giving us more reasons to celebrate mothers today.

Bhutan's Prime Minister Jigme Thinley (left) and Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla at the UN, via AFP.

The monks of South Asia have been chanting on behalf of the happiness and well-being of all creatures for 2,500 years. Now, the spirit of those mantras has marched out of the monastery and into the streets, even into the halls of the United Nations.

Calling for nothing less than nonviolent resistance against the failed global economic system, the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan, sandwiched between India and China, took to the world stage last month by leading a “High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-Being.” Its recommendation: Replace the Bretton Woods economic paradigm, imposed on the world by the United States in the wake of World War II, with an entirely new and inherently more just system.

The prime minister of Bhutan, Jigme Thinley, called on the people of the world to demand a change. Scholars, Nobel laureates, political actors, U.N. officials and staff, and spiritual and civil society leaders, many from the Global South, affirmed that the current system serves neither the human community nor other creatures on the planet.

“The GDP-led development model,” Thinley told the gathering, “compels boundless growth on a planet with limited resources.” Moreover, “it no longer makes economic sense. It is the cause of our irresponsible, immoral and self-destructive actions.” Finally, the prime minister concluded, “The purpose of development must be to create enabling conditions through public policy for the pursuit of the ultimate goal of happiness by all citizens.”

Most of the 600 in attendance shared Bhutan’s vision. Indian activist Vandana Shiva emphasized the importance of such a basic human need as food, the source of profit for a few and misery for many. As she has noted before, “The poor are not those who have been ‘left behind’; they are the ones who have been robbed.” The current paradigm creates a flow of financial, social, human and natural capital to the United States and other rich nations at the expense of everyone else.

Although Bhutan has faced criticism in the past for its treatment of Nepalese immigrants and the jailing of smokers, it has made considerable progress in recent years by establishing a new democracy and implementing creative efforts to measure its citizens’ well-being and happiness. The concept of Gross National Happiness was coined by the former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who abdicated in 2006 and set the democratization process in motion. To its credit, Bhutan is setting high standards for itself that may be difficult to reach, but the country is not alone in this endeavor.

Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla gave the keynote address, sharing the experience of her country, noting, “In 1948 we decided to consolidate the best of our civic values, and abolished the army. We chose to solve our disputes through the ballots, not the bullets; we decided to invest in schools and teachers, not garrisons and soldiers.” Rather than decreasing the national security, “This uninterrupted path turned Costa Rica into the most stable and longest living democracy in Latin America.”

Interfaith spiritual leaders at the meeting, including the moderator of the Church of Canada and the Buddhist supreme patriarch of Thailand, as well as representatives from major religious traditions, issued their own statement calling for a new economic paradigm “based upon compassion, altruism, balance, and peace, dedicated to the well-being, happiness, dignity and sacredness of all forms of life.”

Meanwhile, economists John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs distributed copies of the World Happiness Report. They argue, “We live in an age of stark contradictions. The world enjoys technologies of unimaginable sophistication; yet has at least one billion people without enough to eat each day.”

The official statement that came out of the meeting calls for a new paradigm with four pillars: ecological sustainability, happiness and well-being for all, fair distribution, and efficient use of resources. An unexpected 200 participants remained at the U.N. for two additional days to clarify what the new paradigm would look like, to propose new solutions, and to strategize how to mobilize a global movement in civil society to resist the current one and implement the change. Relevant civil society, educational, spiritual and activist organizations worldwide are being informed about the process, with an eye toward a 2014 convention that would replace Bretton Woods.

Widespread civil resistance movements would be a vital component in bringing about a shift toward so radically different a paradigm as this. Yet the meeting suggests that insufficient use has been made of the United Nations as a venue by change activists. Despite the U.N.’s obvious shortcomings — for instance, OWS recently protested the influence of corporations on environmental proceedings — it is nonetheless an infrastructure where every nation has a voice, at least in theory. Paradoxically, Global South elites who are also victims of the current economic paradigm provide an entrée into the system for grassroots activists, and this meeting demonstrates that the U.N. can offer a venue for radical critique. But the U.N. will only work on behalf of the people if the people insist that it does and begin to explore the possibilities that it might offer as a space for challenging injustice at a global level.

Dutch Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, a long-time veteran of international meetings, observed that this one had “a different spirit” and that the time was ripe for unprecedented change. His call for a 0.01 percent donation of everyone’s income, especially from the rich nations, was received with enthusiasm by the civil society working group, which is creating a World Happiness Bank (a tentative name) that would promote and model the new economic paradigm.

This change will not happen, of course, without the mobilization of a nonviolent resistance movement. That’s where we come in; we have a new opportunity to act against a system that is robbing humanity and its fellow creatures through what the meeting’s statement calls the “private capture of the common wealth.” And we can do so by following the lead of the marginalized.

Have the Haymarket Martyrs gotten their due?

May Day has now come and gone. The big marches and the spontaneous protests and the insurrections of “Real Labor Day” are more than a week old now. But that does not mean that the struggles of working people are over… not in the least.

What began as a day to remember an American tragedy and travesty morphed into an international day of action largely ignored in the United States. Until recently, May Day was marked mostly by old Marxists. Latino immigrant rights groups took it up in recent years, turning May Day into a rallying day for the Dream Act, an end to repression and deportations, equal treatment under the law, labor rights and recognition, and other causes. This year, Latinos were joined by the Occupy movement and organized labor in a major way around the country. It looks like May Day is back in a real and powerful way.

During my first year at Hampshire College, Professor Eqbal Ahmad told his story of coming from Pakistan to the United States as a young man and searching all over Chicago for the memorial to the people killed at Haymarket Square in 1886.

As activist-historian Lawrence Wittner describes what happened in May of that year: “Protests erupted all across the United States, with some 340,000 workers taking part. An estimated 190,000 went out on strike.” The issue was the eight-hour work day, or as the workers sang, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

In Chicago 80,000 workers stayed off the job, joining massive (and peaceful) marches that wound their way through the Windy City. But, a few days later, with thousands of Chicagoans still on strike and still in pen revolt, locked out workers at the McCormick Harvester plant were fired on by police and workers were killed. Another protest was called for the next day — May 4 — at Haymarket Square. Three thousand people gathered, and into their midst someone threw a bomb. The police blamed anarchists. The protesters pointed at agents provocateur. To this day, the culprit is not known. What is known is what happened next: Into the middle of this chaos, terror and throng, the police opened fire. Police and protesters alike were killed and wounded.

When the smoke cleared, prominent radical labor activists were arrested for the killings. Most were not even at the rally. Four were eventually executed.

Until my Pakistani professor told me, I had never heard of any of this. My parents were activists, but not labor activists. In fact, they were both happily, radically, revolutionarily under-employed throughout my lifetime. They admired Mother Jones, Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, and they knew their labor history, but somehow I missed the rocking-chair lectures on Haymarket and the eight-hour day. Professor Ahmad had not. He grew up going to massive May Day marches and demonstrations in his native Lahore and wanted to see the monument to the workers who died in the bombing, to those framed and unjustly executed. He wandered all over Chicago with a bouquet of flowers, looking for the monument, only to eventually find a bronze statue of a Chicago policeman erected in the middle of Haymarket Square in 1889 by the Union League of Chicago.

Eqbal Ahmad told this story at a 1968 demonstration in Chicago. A few days later, he was questioned by the FBI on his own doorstep. The Weathermen had blown up the statue.

Since then, new monuments to the workers have been erected, but it is emblematic of how little labor history is taught in U.S. public schools that I first learned of this sad and shameful episode in American history from a Pakistani college professor, not my sixth grade history teacher.

This just reminds me how ignorant we often are of the struggles of working people in different parts of the globe, even parts of the globe where our country is intimately involved. War Resisters League organizer Ali Issa, for instance, has published a groundbreaking interview with one of the most prominent union organizers in Iraq, Hashmeya Muhsin al–Saadawi. She is the president of the Electrical Utility Workers Union in Iraq, and the first woman vice-president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers in Basra. The interview offers us an all-too-rare opportunity to hear an Iraqi voice speaking on the impact of U.S. war and occupation and now (partial) withdrawal on Iraqi culture, society and politics.

Ms. Al-Saadawi describes the rule of Saddam Hussein as a “repressive, all-encompassing” dictatorship that went on for three decades bringing “great suffering to Iraq and the entire region.” She continues, “We wanted to get rid of this regime, but not through war and occupation. Because all the occupation did was bring new pain.”

Few people in the United States know that before the 1987 imposition of harsh anti-union laws, Iraq had a vibrant and powerful organized labor movement. That labor movement is now rebuilding and reasserting itself in Iraq as it tries to put decades of war and occupation behind it.

Ms. Al-Saadawi relates in the interview how the union suffered under Saddam and under U.S. occupation. “After [the Saddam Hussein] regime fell,” she says, “the workers quickly put together unions in the public sector, worked very hard, but faced many agendas the U.S. occupation brought with it. The occupation launched several consecutive attacks against the union movement.” Not only were union headquarters destroyed by U.S. bombs, but the “occupied” parliament froze union bank accounts and declared that anyone organizing in the public sector could be charged under anti-terrorism laws. Not exactly the so oft and loftily promised Western-style democracy.

In the wake of the withdrawal of most combat forces, the Iraqi labor movement is churning ahead. “The General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq launched a campaign to pass a labor law that is fair for workers and that matches work standards and international agreements,” says Ms. Al-Saadawi. “Most recently, the electrical worker unions in Basra launched a campaign called ‘Social Security is the Right of Every Iraqi’ relying on constitutional rights, which is supported by some international friends, the Federation of Unions in Holland being one of them.”

The interview goes on from there, and I highly recommend a close reading of it.

In the meantime, let us all consider how we can live in deeper and more meaningful solidarity across national borders, language barriers, religious divisions, class caste systems and the other things that keep us from working together for fundamental rights. And let us sing, as the workers in Chicago sang 126 years ago:

We mean to make things over; we’re tired of toil for naught. 
But bare enough to live on: never an hour for thought. 
We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; 
We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. 
We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill; 
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!

As we evaluate the successes and errors of past organizations in order to shape more effective movements today, it is vital to be careful and precise about what lessons remain relevant. Certain organizations, such as the Black Panthers, have amassed so much interest and subsequent mythology that it is often particularly difficult to sort through the hype. White nonviolent activists, furthermore, have an added burden; if we are to be valued participants in building successful mass movements for social change we must be extremely careful to provide as much principled solidarity as we do criticism.

George Lakey’s recent essay, “The Black Panthers’ ‘Militarist Error,’” spotlights an important fact, delivered by a person with many years of anti-racist experience: Many leading former Panthers recognize a strategic error in their glorification of the gun. Even amongst those Occupy Cleveland supporters who were recently accused of plotting to blow up an Ohio bridge, the message is clear: If a movement is going to be built for the long haul, “those kinds of tactics just don’t cut it.”

There are other vital insights, however, which must be brought to light if peace advocates are to further engage in drawing lessons from the Panther legacy.

For starters, the Black Panther Party (BPP), though centered in Oakland, Ca., beginning in 1966, always understood their Southern roots, taking their name from a Lowndes County, Ga., electoral organization which had been supported by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC Chairman Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael) had campaigned in Lowndes and worked with Revolutionary Action Movement leader Max Stanford to form the first Northern Panther chapter in New York City, some months before the Oakland branch got its start. They evolved from black nationalism only insofar as they admired the later teachings of Malcolm X, who — in his last years — was much more of an internationalist and pan-Africanist than a narrow nationalist.

The Panthers were always aware of the need for revolutionary coalition-building, forming early alliances with Chicano, Puerto Rican and Native American groups, and with colleagues in the predominately white student organizations of the time, including Students for a Democratic Society. Because of critiques of opportunism by whites, including in groups like SNCC and the campaigns led by Martin Luther King, the Panthers were careful to forge principled alliances, working cautiously with only small groups of whites whom they felt they could rely upon. This simple set of cautions did not make them nationalist.

It is also historically misleading, as Lakey does, to call them “an outright alternative to the civil rights movement” at a time when that phrase was already beginning to lose favor amongst many participants. In the years previous to the start of the BPP, many communists, nationalists and other radicals had begun to emphasize the phrase “human rights” over civil rights, as a more tactically useful moniker to frame the movement (which some, from the start, had more simply called “the freedom movement”).

Just a few months after the BPP was birthed, Stokely Carmichael helped popularize the phrase Black Power, which became — along with the idea that “black is beautiful” — the most utilized phrase to describe political self-definition, at least amongst young people of African descent. From “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “Afro-American,” “African American,” “New Afrikan” and just plain “African,” words were in great contest (especially then but also now), and most accounts make it clear that the Panthers saw themselves not as an alternative but rather as an improvement — the next generation taking up what needed to be done where the last had left off. It is striking, in that respect, that Oakland was one of the very few Northern cities which had no riots in the days following the assassination of King. Though the Panthers were only a few years old, their influence in the city of their founding was enough to keep calm; resorting to angry looting and violence, they urged, was no way to honor the martyred King.

It is very true that not enough notice has been taken of the Panther’s most intensive legacies: founding community-based institutions which were borne of the need for survival as well as self-determination. The mix of these two ingredients made the BPP medical, educational and food programs much more than charitable hand-outs. They were based upon people’s empowerment for liberation and revolution. Therefore it is critical that white progressives take note when black radical researchers make essential new contributions to our fields of understanding. One such example is the recent publication of Alondra Nelson’s Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Struggle Against Medical Discrimination. Nelson chronicles and details the BPP’s efforts at Sickle Cell anemia testing and treatment, the setting up of free neighborhood clinics and other initiatives.

Similarly, Donna Murch has built on contemporary research about the pedagogical basis for and work of the Panthers in the 2010 book Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party. In fact, a veritable cottage industry of books has come out in the past five to 10 years documenting aspects of Panther history. As far as the community structures they were instrumental in setting up, Panther co-founder David Hilliard helped publish the 2008 retrospective Service to the People Programs, which gives evidence to the long-lasting nature of the those grassroots BPP campaigns. It is hard not to think that these efforts are amongst the closest and most successful U.S. answers to Gandhi’s call for de-colonized constructive programs.

The questions concerning the role of self-defense — including the use of arms — during the black liberation movement (or black-led freedom movement, as historian and close King associate Vincent Harding has suggested we say) have also come under some serious and thoughtful study. Pure Fire: Self Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era, a 2005 book by American studies scholar Christopher Strain, breaks down the dichotomies of much of the mainstream history texts on the “civil rights” era, carefully examining the daily realities (and contradictions) faced on the grassroots level, especially in the South. Strain suggests that “in order to grasp the subtleties of this activist approach to self-defense,” we must stop creating false divisions between a “pre-1965 era” and a “post-1965 era,” between rigid definitions of integration and segregation, between Malcolm and Martin and violence and nonviolence. These oversimplifications, Strain suggests, have not served our current movements well — “blurring” the distinctions between the violence of racial animosity and limited acts of self-defense, and equally contributing to the popular misunderstanding of nonviolence as passivity in the face of danger.

An even more difficult argument, on the potential dialectical connections between violence and nonviolence, is made in the well-researched 2007 release by Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. More than a simple, theoretical call for a “diversity of tactics,” Wendt has carefully examined the actions and reactions that led to various positive anti-racist changes in the midst of the 1950s through 1970s. He documents quite candidly the differences, for example, between groups like the armed Deacons for Defense, which helped defend southern civil rights workers, and the Panthers and Black Power advocates, who were often seen as too provocative and militaristic by their Southern counterparts. Wendt readily admits that, even with his own extensive research, “there is too little evidence to argue that actual, as opposed to rhetorical, black violence aided the nonviolent movement on a widespread basis.” He also brings us the important perspective that a non-nuanced, one-sided explanation of social change in the 1960s — emphasizing only nonviolence or armed struggle, with little distinction for the often-tough calls of when a given act of movement “violence” began — “will only obscure our understanding of the civil rights era.”

This obscuring has been a major factor in our movement’s inability to properly assess the lessons of that period.

Amongst those lessons, I would also add, are that solid organizations committed to lasting social change do not leave anyone behind — locked in prison or destitute or forgotten. True reconciliation and peace requires nothing less. That is why most mature movements around the world place a good deal of attention on the political prisoners of previous generations of struggle — so as to maintain continuity, appreciate and learn from history, and show current and future activists that state repression will not be successful in breaking the back of current endeavors. U.S. movements for justice and peace have much to learn in this regard.

It is therefore no coincidence that amongst the longest-held, worst-treated and most obviously political U.S. prisoners are former Black Panthers. Russell Maroon Shoats, at close to 70 years old with most of the past 30 years spent in solitary confinement, is a classic example of the quietly-kept ongoing torture which the U.S. government engages in (and U.S. human rights groups all too often ignore). Still, Shoats remains a beacon of analysis and reflection, providing his own version of the lessons and legacies discussed by scholars far from the front lines. The main contribution of the BPP, in Shoats’ assessment, is that they served as an introduction to radical politics to many youth of the period (both “of color” and others).

Never one to shy away from critical thinking, Shoats acknowledges — by looking at the non-democratic, sometimes sexist and militaristic aspects of Panther practice — that “the methods they chose to use were contradictory to the ends they sought.” Though Shoats is no pacifist, his critiques of Panther “naked terror and violence,” forced on them by an FBI campaign of murderous “counter-intelligence” (COINTELPRO), underscore the importance of just one voice, often unheard but far from muted. His joy at the events of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and other recent developments is reflected in his writings that these new, popular movements have come “to the rescue!”

History suggests that the role of the nonviolent activist has got to include raising militancy without accepting militarism, helping to build and defend people’s movements without ever resorting to violence. Solidarity suggests that the role of the white activist should be to promote self-determination before critiquing what others choose as self-defense. We must attend to some basic requirements of history and solidarity, in part through simple acts (like signing an online petition or joining the new campaign to get Russell Maroon Shoats out of solitary confinement, or checking out the work of the Jericho Movement to free all U.S. political prisoners). But we must also go deeper, building future campaigns that learn from the mistakes of our collective past. The glorification of the gun is surely one of them, but unresponsiveness to past and present repression — whether due to ignorance or apathy or over-work, or to disagreements with the methods used by those being repressed — is surely another, with equally dire consequences for us all. With so much at stake, our inability to look carefully at the lessons of recent movements is truly indefensible.

The Yes Men pose with their satirical defensive suits, the Survivaballs.

“Protection” is a slippery concept. Consider the November 2011 pepper-spraying incident on the Davis campus of the University of California, when students identifying with the Occupy movement were demonstrating nonviolently on their campus and were repeatedly sprayed with injurious chemicals. Videos of the police brutality electrified the nation, woke up uncounted potential allies who until then had been asleep and energized the movement. Sociologists call it “the paradox of repression”: the brutality is intended to stop a movement but instead gives it energy and strength.

Strategically, would we prefer that the Davis students had been protected from that act of repression, leaving no one the wiser about what the 1 percent are willing to have their agents do to protect their privilege? For that matter, would Occupy Wall Street prefer that New York activists had been protected from the police blunder of assaulting them in those early days of campaign, which caused the initial tidal wave of support for Occupy?

Obviously it’s just as true today as ever that a great strength for activists is our ability to “take it” in order to advance our cause. Nonviolent struggle in that way is the same as armed struggle — soldiers unwilling to risk suffering are of little use in combat. We cannot, however, ignore a cultural double standard. Mainstream opinion automatically honors those who risk injury and death by going to war with a gun in their hands. There is no such automatic honoring of activists who take sometimes equally high risks. We do not, while shopping in the drugstore with our activist T-shirts on, hear from total strangers, “Thank you for your service.”

Given the cultural double standard, it makes sense that the Deacons for Defense, the Black Panthers and others could believe in protecting activists while protesting so we might be exempt from suffering for our cause — even if our suffering is required for winning.

I am not advocating for a martyr complex any more than the military is looking for martyrs. I love life and have been hugely relieved each time I’ve risked my life on a direct action and gotten out of it alive. What helped me take those risks, however, was knowing that high school classmates of mine had risked their lives while wearing a uniform, and I am not entitled to an exception. Struggle is struggle. They, and I, wanted to win our cause, and it’s not about glory but simply doing what needs to be done.

On the other hand, strategically, we need to accept that people can get tired and angry and burned out from repeated punishments over time. Not everyone is a John Lewis, the SNCC member who endured dozens of beatings and jailings, and once nearly died as a result.

The key to effective protection may be a matter of timing more than whether one uses arms or not. When campaigners are fresh and protection techniques seem likely to slow down the movement or limit visible state repression, why use them? On the other hand, when campaigners are fraying and tired, protection might be necessary to keep the movement going.

Nonviolent protective supports exist — collectivity, for example.

The affinity-group mode of organizing became widespread in the late sixties in the U.S. I remember my affinity group in the mass sit-down at the U.S. Supreme Court entrance in 1986, protesting the court’s affirmation of Georgia’s criminalization of gays. The organizers wanted all participants to be in an affinity group, especially people no one knew. A young stranger joined my group, and we had little time to integrate him before the civil disobedience started. But our ties were still strong enough to ensure that we looked out for him. When the police came near the young man, he had a psychic break, making loud weird noises and looking scary. Some of us protected him with our bodies while others told the police what was happening, demanding they should leave him to us. We were able to protect him through the arrest and into the police bus, several times strongly confronting the police to let him alone once they’d put cuffs on him. A couple hours later he’d gotten through the episode and became himself again.

I once led a workshop in Thailand that consisted of activists from Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand. I asked them what they found worked in confrontations with police and soldiers, since the three countries offered many opportunities to face very harsh repression. It was striking how much overlap there was in very different cultures and political situations. They all found that singing reduced the violence; both soldiers and police found it hard to keep cracking heads when the activists were singing, especially when activists were also trying to make eye contact. In all three countries they found that sitting down reduced the violence. Taking initiatives of all kinds, like offering the police drinks from their water bottles, helped.

Shifting out of confrontation and into another mode takes the heat off the activists for a while and gives them time to regroup. Low-risk activities can be substituted for high-risk ones. In Chile, part of the gathering resistance to dictator Pinochet in the 1980s was banging pots inside apartments and houses, leaving windows open. Whole neighborhoods and cities banged pots at agreed-upon times, making an amazing din and building strength but eliciting little repression. Another method Chileans used in that campaign was the “quickie” demonstration. Like today’s flash mobs, at a pre-arranged time a group would appear on a corner, unfold banners, demonstrate for a few minutes and disappear before the police came. These “quickies” were used to build courage and boldness at a time when most people were very fearful of challenging the dictator.

A very different form of protection was tried in Chile in 1931, when students led a nonviolent insurgency against a dictator imposing an austerity program.

Very early in the campaign, students occupied a university building. Police surrounded the building and threatened to come in with guns drawn; danger increased when some armed students fired at police from the windows. The students’ parents, professionals involved with their national professional organizations, warned the dictator that if he ordered a massacre of the students they would themselves go on strike and organize others to do so. The massacre didn’t happen, though as the campaign expanded rapidly those professionals joined the campaign anyway.

The Chilean experiment offers an example of nonviolent deterrence. Contrast nonviolent deterrence with the violent deterrence such as that of the Deacons for Defense. The Deacons were able to deter some opponent violence by showing their weapons; in those incidents, the racist side backed down. If they hadn’t, the Deacons — in order to keep their deterrence credible — would have had to shoot, and a shoot-out of some kind would have occurred, with consequences far beyond the control of the movement. The campaigners’ goals probably would have gotten lost in the dynamics of whatever would follow a shoot-out.

With nonviolent deterrence, in contrast, if the opponent isn’t deterred but instead goes ahead and injures or kills campaigners, the campaign can continue to focus on its goals, and it often expands rapidly by winning public sympathy.

Yet another approach that has deterrent effect is to invite into one’s struggle a third party that has credibility of some kind with the opponent; the nature of third party nonviolent intervention (TPNI) is not to take sides, but to monitor the situation or even to offer protective accompaniment. I was part of the initial team of Peace Brigades International (PBI) when it went to Sri Lanka to protect human rights lawyers who were being assassinated by hit squads. Our job was to be nonviolent bodyguards, going wherever our lawyers wanted us to, in order to raise the stakes for the controllers of the hit squads. In that situation, our credibility came from the fact that the PBI volunteers were recruited from countries that gave aid to the Sri Lankan government. If we were killed in the course of the hit squad’s assassination of a lawyer, our governments would become less inclined to give aid to the government. Like SNCC in its early years in Mississippi, the lawyers used their opponents’ self interest to keep themselves safe.

Peace Brigades International stayed in Sri Lanka for a dozen years of war, protecting journalists, women leaders and others standing up for human rights. Not one of those being protected by unarmed bodyguards was killed. There is a growing variety of cases of TPNI’s effectiveness in many cultures, and in my view activists have only scratched the surface of what’s possible.

One of the most surprising cases of nonviolent protection was carried out in the Philippines in 1986, during the People Power insurgency against Ferdinand Marcos, the well-established (and U.S.-supported) dictator of the Philippines. Previously, armed efforts to overthrow Marcos had failed, and a nonviolent movement was on the way to succeeding; one reason for its growing success was that it succeeded in splitting the army. Unlike last year’s tragedy in Libya, in which the rebel soldiers joined the movement against Qaddafi with guns and created a civil war, the Filipino rebel army in 1986 made a different choice. The anti-Marcos part of the army retired to a military base not far from the capitol city of Manila. Marcos sent the larger, still-loyal part of his forces to attack the rebel army.

The movement’s organizers called on civilians to come to the aid of the rebels, and a million people intercepted Marcos’ army and confronted the force nonviolently. Nuns, priests and others climbed on tanks and began praying the rosary. The people reached out to Marcos’ soldiers, offering them candy and cigarettes. The loyalist troops felt compelled to retreat. The best protectors of the rebel soldiers turned out to be large numbers of unarmed people.

Gandhi himself justified the use of violence if the person threatened couldn’t figure out a nonviolent way to mount a defense. But he also went on to assert that, with sufficient creativity, practical nonviolent tools could be found. The real question underlying the self-defense debate, therefore, is: How creative are you willing to be in exploring strategically the possibilities of nonviolent defense?

Protesters participate in one of the May Day rallies in early May, 1971. Photo credit: Star Collection, DC Public Library; © Washington Post

April may be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot once claimed, but May is the month of exuberant mass action. We’re currently in the thick of the latest iteration of May mobilizations for justice and peace, with the worldwide protests that got rolling on May 1 and the actions that will take place later this month in Chicago focused on the NATO summit. May actions are a venerable tradition, reaching back to Emancipation Day in 1886 when — also in Chicago — 340,000 workers went on strike demanding an 8-hour workday. Since then, by design or coincidence, numerous May protests — perhaps egged on by the feisty vitality of spring and its alluring promise of rejuvenation — have been momentous.

In the month of May, one million South Africans demonstrated against apartheid (1986); 1,400 people were arrested protesting the construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire (1977); the Freedom Riders challenged racial discrimination in interstate travel (1961); hundreds of schoolchildren were arrested during the civil rights movement’s historic Birmingham campaign (1963); the Poor People’s Campaign challenged economic inequality (1968); a general strike spread across France calling for social change, eventually mobilizing ten million people (1968); and millions protested U.S. immigration policy across the nation (2006). These, as the invaluable This Week in History attests, are only a small fraction of the many historic social struggles that have been launched in the month of May.

Here is one of the most notable.

Forty-one years ago today — May 3, 1971 — thousands of people were arrested in Washington D.C. as they clamored for an end to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Though no one could have known it at the time, this event proved to be the movement’s last monumental mobilization. There would be other national and local demonstrations before the war finally ended in 1975, but nothing would match the sheer size and intensity of this powerful drama played out on the streets of the nation’s capital.

In 1970 the U.S. had escalated the war by invading Cambodia, which led to nationwide demonstrations, including those where soldiers had fired on demonstrators, killing four at Kent State University in Ohio (May 4) and two at Jackson State College in Mississippi (May 14). In February 1971 the U.S. invaded Laos. For many in the still burgeoning anti-war movement, this raised the possibility of even greater escalation, including a ground war in North Vietnam. In response the movement threw itself into organizing a series of demonstrations, slated to take place from late April through early May.

In his book The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam, political scientist Tom Wells details each of these actions, including a five-day witness by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) that began on April 19 and featured an encampment, guerrilla theater at Arlington Cemetery, a contingent marching to the Pentagon to turn themselves in for war crimes and the drama of hundreds of vets returning their medals.

This was followed on April 24 by half a million people marching from the Ellipse behind the White House to the Capitol. A week of protests followed. There was guerrilla theater on Capitol Hill, Congressional lobbying and a series of civil-disobedience arrests: 151 Quakers in front of the White House, 200 demonstrators blocking the doors of the Selective Service System (the military draft), 224 at Health, Education and Welfare, and 370 at the Justice Department.

Not only does Wells chronicle the actions of the anti-war movement; he also scrupulously charts the U.S. government’s considerable efforts to surveil and checkmate the movement. (In fact, one of the book’s major points is that policymakers began to shape the policy of the war itself in response to the growing power of the anti-war movement.) This attempt to track and counter the movement was true of the late April actions. Wells provides pages profiling the innumerable ways President Nixon’s aides schemed to delegitimize and disrupt these events, including getting a court injunction against VVAW’s base camp on the National Mall, and then going back to the judge and asking it to be rescinded when the vets wouldn’t budge — but this was especially evident with regard to the May actions that followed.

The slogan of the May Day actions was “If They Won’t Stop the War, We’ll Stop the Government.” Organizers sought to do this by using mobile tactics, in which small groups of people would occupy intersections and then move along to the next one before being arrested. As the Rainbow History Project recounts:

Rather than mounting a single massive protest they took a page from women’s movement organizers and structured the protest around smaller cohesive groups or “tribes” that were assigned particular sites and tasks within the protest.

The Nixon administration did not take this impending action lightly, as Wells recounts:

The administration took steps to keep May Day under control. CIA agents penetrated May Day groups. [Presidential counsel John] Dean tracked incoming intelligence on the protesters. “There were detailed briefings on the precise transmission frequencies of the demonstrators’ walkie-talkies, which would be monitored,” Dean writes. The White House readied its basement command post for monitoring demonstrations.

While the government had originally planned to let the Washington, D.C. police handle the protesters, it eventually shifted to a military response, as this summary underscores:

While protesters listened to music, planned their actions or slept, 10,000 Federal troops were quickly moved to various locations in the Washington, D.C. area. At one point, so many soldiers and marines were being moved into the area from bases along the East Coast that troop transports were landing at the rate of one every three minutes at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland. Among these troops were 4,000 paratroopers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. These troops were to back up the 5,100 D.C. Metropolitan Police, 2,000 D.C. and National Guard that were already in place. Every monument, park and traffic circle in the nation’s capital had troops protecting its perimeters. Paratroopers and marines deployed via helicopter to the grounds of the Washington Monument.

On Sunday, May 2, the government revoked the permit that allowed the 17,500 demonstrators to continue to camp in West Potomac Park (which the demonstrators had renamed Peace Park). Police wearing riot gear knocked down tents, used tear gas and formed a phalanx to force campers out of the park. Some people left Washington, but 10,000 of them regrouped in other parts of the city for the next day’s action.

On May 3, while troops secured intersections and bridges, police swept through the city using tear gas and arresting anyone who looked like a protester. (For a video report, click here.) While many demonstrators were nonviolent, some used trash cans, tree limbs and parked cars to impede traffic. Police dispensed with standard arrest procedures, not even bothering to charge protesters with specific offenses. “Martial law might not have been declared,” Wells writes, “but it was in effect.”

Before the morning was over, 7,000 people were arrested and held behind a fence erected adjacent to RFK stadium. This was the largest number of arrests in a single day in U.S. history. By the afternoon, most federal employees (except those who inadvertently had been arrested) made it to their jobs. Over the next few days, the total number of arrests would grow to 12,614. (Click here to read former government analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s brief account of this event and a follow-up action in Boston in which he and Howard Zinn participated. Ellsberg’s largest contribution to the anti-war movement would become clear less than two weeks later when the New York Times began to publish the top secret Pentagon Papers he had released.)

Four decades on, there are many potential lessons from May 1971 that might be helpful in our own time.

First, Wells’ book convincingly chronicles how the government, even as it often ignored the anti-war movement in public, devoted an enormous amount of time and energy paying attention to it. It worried about the movement’s ability to persuade the nation (and even other parts of the government — for example, 500 Federal Employees for Peace rallied across from the White House during the May Day actions) to end its support for the war.

Second, its massive militarized response to a movement of unarmed citizens emphasizes the lengths to which the U.S. government is willing to go to defend its policies.

Third, the peace movement had succeeded in making a compelling case to the nation that the war must end — polling data at the time confirmed this — which was demonstrated, in part, by the sheer numbers of people that sustained these actions.

Fourth, while the police sweeps and indiscriminate arrests initially posed a potential public-relations problem for the administration (and Wells documents the propaganda counteroffensive Nixon’s people pursued), immediate polling data suggested that public reaction to the May Day actions was decidedly negative, with Wells citing polls showing 71 percent of the public disapproving of them.

This relates to one last lesson that we might especially mull on today. The May Day mobilization turned out to be the last enormous, national anti-Vietnam War event.

There are likely many reasons for this, but one may be the tactics that were used. While the power of May Day 1971 was rooted in the planned dispersal of demonstrators to intersections across the city, this also led to a lack of organization and nonviolent discipline. The government was able to use this to justify its draconian strategy. More significantly, it may have weakened the appeal of mass action for the larger public at a time, ironically, when it increasingly opposed the war.

These lessons may offer food for thought for all May actions, including our own.

Occupy Wall Street activists built an impressive coalition of organized labor, immigrant-rights groups and others for a general strike and “day of economic non-cooperation” on May Day. On Tax Day, a broad spectrum of organizations helped protestors spotlight corporate tax loopholes. Assemblies from around New York City gathered in Central Park on April 14 to celebrate, share ideas and talk about campaigns. This month has also seen debate about whether the “99% Spring” week of trainings was an attempt by the institutional left to co-opt Occupy, or whether Occupy is actually co-opting and radicalizing non-profits and unions that were uninterested in direct action before the movement began.

Occupy’s spring resurgence, however colorful, still has not answered certain questions. How is Occupy Wall Street going to consult with organizations? How can this movement draw larger numbers of people into assemblies, committees and participatory structures that can serve their needs, while still connecting the dots between local ills and corporate power?

Relevant here is the story of a small group of predominantly white university students in South Africa in the early 1970s who helped to organize African workers and had a significant impact on the anti-apartheid movement.

It was not easy to do labor organizing in the early 1970s. Africans had been denied collective bargaining rights since the 1920s. The state’s security apparatus was becoming more labyrinthine. Nelson Mandela and others were serving life-sentences for plotting sabotage attacks. In the mid-1960s, the militant South African Congress of Trade Unions had been crushed. By the next decade, there were just a few unions in which African workers were active in parallel wings. Only when black intellectuals and underground members in liberation groups teamed up with white students in Natal and began agitation work amongst workers around the demand for wages above the poverty line did the tide begin to turn.

Steve Biko had recently led students classified as “non-Europeans” in forming breakaway student groups focused on inner resistance, self-empowerment and black consciousness (as well as collective action and self-help). “The strongest weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” he said in 1972. White student activists discovered that blacks students did not want to work with them, however well-intentioned they might be.

At this time, young people were absorbing a potent mix of ideas from abroad. A philosopher named Richard Turner returned to South Africa after studying at the Sorbonne and writing a dissertation on Sartre. He published a pamphlet on participatory democracy in 1972. In Durban, he urged students to see themselves as a revolutionary force, to “humanize” themselves and to reject materialism. Turner was friendly with Biko and the two collaborated on a community development project. With liberation leaders across the continent simultaneously promoting neo-traditional communalism and African unity, a cluster of white students formed a Student Wages Commission to draw media attention to the problem of poverty wages for African workers and to try to “redirect the flow of information” out of white institutions and into the streets.

The students circulated mimeographed pamphlets among workers at factory gates and bus stops. In isiZulu, workers read about the huge gulf separating their wages from what experts said about measurable minimum needs — specifically the “poverty datum line.” In Durban and Cape Town, dockworkers went with students to meetings of the Department of Labor’s Wage Board and used these statistics to demand higher pay, together with a coalition of church and other community organizations. In this way, these students did something similar to what we see happening today; they popularized inequality statistics and made them an idiom of political dissent.

Importantly, these young activists did not spurn help from experienced allies, despite real differences of viewpoint. They learned from established labor leaders. David Hemson and other students initiated a link with Harriet Bolton, the general secretary of a predominantly Indian union. Bolton convinced the students to help her set up an intermediary organization — a funeral benefit savings fund. African workers were still reluctant to form unions after the reprisals of the 1960s, so they could not simply be called out to join a movement.

In an interview with me, one former student organizer spoke of his initial skepticism. Yet this innocuous sounding mutual-aid society would have a surprisingly big impact. It attracted only a few members in 1972. But things changed dramatically in January 1973, when African workers in Durban launched a major and unexpected strike.

Durban newspapers reported that columns of striking workers were marching in toyi toyi step, carrying sticks and chanting, “Filumunti ufilusadikiza!”(Man is dead but his spirit lives). Brick factory workers were the first to walk off the job. Municipal workers and dockworkers followed. Business in the city center slowed for a week. Ships lay idle in the usually busy harbor. And white workers were photographed collecting trash — a newsworthy event in apartheid South Africa. The strike was peaceful and workers refused to identify or send out leaders, lest they be arrested.

One union leader who participated in the strike recalled the electric atmosphere. This former protestor described to me how he felt compelled to stay awake one night in his workplace writing an alternative history of Dutch colonization and apartheid in chalk on the side of a factory trolley.

The 1973 Durban Strikes did not simply occur spontaneously. Dockworkers had agitated for higher pay in 1972; a few months prior to that, contract workers in neighboring Namibia organized a major strike. Some government officials in South Africa had warned that the black-white wage gap needed to be reduced or industrial unrest would result. During the general strike, workers also demanded minimum wages very close to poverty datum line, suggesting that the students’ pamphlets also played a part.

In light of the questions mentioned above — questions about how Occupy can work with existing organizations and also develop ways of consulting with their members — what seems most significant about this story is the aftermath of this general strike.  After workers acted collectively and voiced their anger, members of the Student Wages Commission found a way to seize the moment by building something constructive.

After the strike, which punctured nearly a decade of black labor inactivity, workers felt emboldened. People’s fears about attending public meetings receded. African laborers came to Bolton’s union hall in substantial numbers. When they did, the students helped to enroll them in the funeral benefit fund. It functioned as a cloud-like interregnum between a situation in which African workers were loosely affiliated to local networks but intimidated to do more, and a new phase in which shop stewards were able to organize workers to become active participants in member-led organizations.

In 1974, the benefit fund’s members split into four new proto-unions, which made up the Trade Union Advisory and Coordinating Council. Amid ongoing debate about how these unions should be structured, that organization blossomed into the Federation of South African Trade Unions in 1979. In 1985, it became the Congress of South African Trade Unions — South Africa’s current umbrella union and part of a three-part alliance with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

In the early 1980s, these unions supported the United Democratic Front. Together, with help from the outside, they created a crisis for the regime by holding massive demonstrations, supporting boycotts, and partnering with civic organizations, youth, street committees and other grassroots groups that fell under the capacious umbrella of the United Democratic Front — an essential coalition in the ending of apartheid. In 1987, the trade union organizations and the UDF collectively organized the largest May Day general strike in South African history.

What’s the lesson here for Occupy? Focus on the aftermath.

Bolton’s low-risk intermediary body was stitched together with the help of a small group of young people who had carved out their own ideological space and developed an appreciation for participatory methods. It grew into organizations with the capacity to turn out huge numbers of people and to be held accountable to the rank-and-file. Already, the group in OWS that planned for May Day has begun preparing to carry the momentum forward into a series of anti-austerity actions being planned in the city for mid-May. This is a promising sign that OWS organizers are thinking about next steps.

After a general strike — after people have lost their fear and begun gathering and speaking out — it is essential for a successful civil resistance campaign to turn deliberately and intentionally to consultation and patient outreach with an eye toward long-term movement-building, even if that means working with existing organizations and meeting people where they are.

Since September 17, 2011, strong networks of activists have formed. Even stronger and more diverse parallel structures are needed, though, if Occupy is going to partner with extant groups and gather the forces needed to fight corruption, put people over profits and spread participatory democracy.

A general strike can be one of the most potent noncooperation methods in the repertoire of nonviolent resistance. It is a widespread cessation of labor in an effort to bring all economic activity to a total standstill. Although it is easy to broadcast the call for a general strike, it is exceedingly difficult to implement for the maximal impact that it potentially exerts. What’s more, a general strike must be called prudently, because it loses its effectiveness if weakly executed.

The Occupy movement’s calls for a general strike in the United States on May 1 make me think of an instance in which a general strike was brilliantly carried out and with great effect, in Czechoslovakia in 1989 — for only two hours.

For years beforehand, the sharing of subversive literature, drama and ideas against the communist regime had been occurring in Czechoslovakia, virtually unseen. In fact, historian Theodore Ziółkowski reminds us that “almost from the moment when the Soviet empire, after Yalta, swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe, the fight against Communism began.” Thousands of clandestine samizdat (Russian for self-published) publications had been manually typed on onion skin with carbon paper, read, passed from hand to hand and circulated sub rosa. Incarcerated authors and dramatists worked intensively in contemplation and planning from their prison cells. While building strong networks among these civil society organizations in formation, Czechoslovaks considered how to withdraw their cooperation from the communist party-state, and thereby bend it to the popular will.

On November 17, 1989, in Czechoslovakia’s capital, Prague, police brutally interrupted a student demonstration. In response, the Czechoslovak people undertook what came to be known as the Ten Days, as I have recounted in more detail elsewhere. Events seemed to unfold instantaneously, but anyone who has studied nonviolent struggles knows otherwise. Aided by Radio Free Europe and labor unions, Prague’s theatrical circles would become catalytic in organizing a massive national resistance, including major demonstrations against the procedures of the regime. Citizens were emboldened by listening to Radio Free Europe and reading samizdat, and were thus aware of the popular national nonviolent mobilizations already underway in Poland, Hungary and East Germany. The Czechoslovaks also benefited from a more enlightened Soviet policy than during the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. These relative advantages, and the caliber of leadership emanating from the playwrights and thinkers in theatrical circles, meant that the Czechoslovaks would be able to bring about their 1989 Velvet Revolution with astounding haste and effectiveness, a key element of which was the breadth of participation in a general strike.

Overnight on November 17 — Day One — and into November 18, students became determined to go on strike. They spread word to Prague’s Charles University and other colleges and universities. Although students were the first to call for strikes, by Saturday afternoon the denizens of Prague’s famous theaters had declared their support and were proposing a national general strike for November 27. The students straight away endorsed the proposed general strike and for six weeks would persist in striking on their own, to a great extent backed up by similar noncooperation measures by actors and dramatists. As the students published releases announcing their strikes, the theatrical managers and actors circulated theirs, while Radio Free Europe broadcast texts transmitted by telephone. Official media, having long toed the government line, condemned the officials’ violence of November 17. Employees at television stations denounced biased coverage and disputed untruthful news reports. Broadcasts of the first photographic images of the Prague demonstrations proved to be critical because they disclosed to thousands what was happening in their own country.

On Day Three — Sunday, November 19 — a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Prague for a demonstration to protest the police brutality against the students. That night a citizens’ pro-democracy organization called the Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been persistent critics of the party-state. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague. Tens of thousands of young people and students took over Wenceslas Square, carrying flags and chanting slogans: “Freedom,” “Resign,” “Now’s the Time” and “This Is It.”

With playwright Václav Havel as the guiding light, Prague’s Magic Lantern Theater became the nerve center of the Civic Forum, in part because of its proximity to Wenceslas Square. Its wardrobes and changing rooms were assigned to committees, and Havel became the author and mediator for the Civic Forum’s statements and positions. Throughout the Velvet Revolution, the forum would act as the speaker for the Czechoslovak people, while coordinating the collective nonviolent actions of the broad opposition. The Civic Forum encompassed most perspectives and sentiments of opposition, and included some reform-minded communists. A Slovak group, Public Against Violence, acted as partner to the forum.

Prague’s theaters were perfect for hearty political debate. Instead of the curtain rising on productions, the actors would lead audiences in discussions of the situation. Signs instantly appeared in theaters across the country reading “We Strike” or “On Strike,” rousing unity because of the popular esteem for the dramatic arts. Theaters in Bratislava, Brno and Ostrava went on strike the next day. Wherever actors and dramatists gathered, they joined the noncooperation.

On Tuesday, November 21 — Day Five — the Civic Forum and student representatives met officially with Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, who guaranteed that no violence would be administered against Czechoslovak citizens. The government announced that “socialism was not up for discussion,” but no one missed the meaning of such a meeting in the midst of mounting popular defiance. In Wenceslas Square in Prague and in Hviedoslav Square in Bratislava, mass demonstrations ratified calls for a general strike on November 27. Václav Havel addressed the multitude as the exemplar of the Civic Forum, his speech blunter and less courtly than usual. When he and the respected banned priest Václav Malý spoke, the crowd could hear every word, because rock groups had lent huge amplifiers. A message from the Roman Catholic František Cardinal Tomášek declared, “We cannot wait any more,” stressing that Czechoslovakia was surrounded by countries that “had broken the back of totalitarianism,” referring to Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. Bells rang. One journalist reported 200,000 sets of key rings unforgettably jangling. Throngs chanted “Today Prague, tomorrow the whole country!” and “Time’s up!” Striking students held sit-ins at institutions of higher learning throughout Prague.

On Wednesday, November 22 — Day Six — the Civic Forum formally announced a two-hour general strike for Monday, November 27. The forum and its partner, Public Against Violence, sought an incapacitating general strike with the participation of virtually every citizen to exert sufficient pressure on the government to accelerate a rapid, nonviolent transition of power. A general strike could reduce the threat of reprisals among large numbers of participants, yet many were ambivalent about hurting an already stagnating economy. By limiting the strike to two hours, the effect of a general strike would be wielded while minimizing harm to the economy.

Coal miners in northern Bohemia announced that they would join the work stoppage, but no one knew to what extent laborers in the country’s smokestack industries would join the growing noncooperation action. By Thursday, November 23 — Day Seven — Wenceslas Square saw more than 300,000 marching. The party-state started to split and divide. The ministry of defense that day announced that the Czechoslovak military forces would not be deployed against Czech and Slovak peoples. The Civic Forum issued a statement renewing commitment to a Czechoslovak tradition: “We are against violence and do not seek revenge.”

Striking students insistent on free elections and a change in government then sent hundreds of their numbers into the countryside to visit industrial plants and talk with workers, enlisting their involvement in the general strike. The government raised calamitous warnings of economic breakdown and tried in other ways to frighten the workforce not to join the general strike. Reporters who traveled to machinery works encountered busloads of communist militia members blocking the students from contacting the laborers and sharing handouts. The Reverend Václav Malý, now a spokesperson for the Civic Forum, proclaimed that workers at more than 500 enterprises had pledged to strike.

On Saturday, November 25 — Day Nine — the Civic Forum pronounced the upcoming national general strike as a “referendum” on communist rule. In Prague, 800,000 marched; in Bratislava 100,000 demonstrated. On national television, with Havel announcing that the planned November 27 national general strike would proceed, the forum had become the rudder for the nationwide preparations for the two-hour strike action. The forum encompassed virtually the entire Czechoslovak opposition to the party-state, served as the representative for the Czechoslovak public, coordinated the opposition’s civil resistance and had become a national voice. Comporting itself in a sensible, ethical and deliberately open manner — if a slightly chaotic one — the Civic Forum called its program “What We Want” and concentrated on civil and human rights, a free and independent judiciary, multiparty electoral democracy and political pluralism, economic and free-market reforms, and alterations to the nation’s environmental and foreign policies.

Roughly 6,000 strike committees were at work preparing to bring all economic activity to a halt. As midday approached on Monday, November 27, the population stopped functioning as church bells rang. Minutes before noon, a television broadcaster stated that he was joining the strike and would go off the air. Taxi drivers aligned themselves so as to block Prague’s ring road with a two-mile succession of cabs. This elegantly executed national noncooperation action lasted from noon until two o’clock — during lunchtime, so as not to endanger jobs. The colossal industrial strike reflected no divisions between classes, as laborers, workers of all skills, intellectuals, academicians, students, artist and theatrical personnel together orchestrated the nationwide general strike.

This countrywide, successful act of noncooperation brought the Civic Forum and the government into discussions that would soon lead to a peaceful democratic transition of power. The party-state began to yield. The Civic Forum and the government began discussions. The “leading role” of the communist party, protected in a constitutional clause, was formally rescinded. On December 29, 1989, the Federal Assembly, the communist-dominated national legislature, unanimously elected Havel as president.

The artists, playwrights, academicians, priests and activist intellectuals wanted genuinely revolutionary change that would transform Czechoslovakia permanently and construct a resilient democracy. Years of prudently building the strength of civil society had culminated in the ability to mount a memorable and effective national general strike. With the united voices of the Civic Forum and Public Against Violence, the people had brought about an expeditious transition of power. Czech educator Jan Urban explains the logic of those who were coordinating Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution: “[F]rom the first moment, we wanted to be aggressively nonviolent in our stance — to make a power of our lack of weapons.” He summarized, “In the course of one week, in November 1989, Winter blossomed into Spring in Czechoslovakia. A nonviolent mass movement … triumphed … in transition from the negation of the old to the building of the new.”

ACT UP's 25th anniversary demonstration on April 25 in New York City. Photo by author.

Long before the red ribbon became an innocuous symbol of AIDS “awareness” and celebrity philanthropy, there was the pink triangle and there was ACT UP and there were thousands of people taking to the streets for their lives. Once a symbol used to mark suspected queers for death in the Holocaust, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle for themselves, now flipped on its base, pointing upward on a black field, away from the grave, signed with the call to arms, “SILENCE = DEATH.” 

Death didn’t just come in the form of a virus, even and maybe especially in the early days of AIDS, when ACT UP (an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in New York. Government neglect and corporate greed made AIDS an epidemic, and they also gave birth to a raucous and creative network of direct action activists. For ACT UP, death was the drug maker, and the drug profiteer, and the drug regulatory bodies who refused to release them. When ACT UP’s members first laid down their bodies in protest, therefore, it was against the already-booming business of AIDS, and for their debut action in 1987, they brought their rage and their grief straight to Wall Street.

On the morning of April 25, 2012, ACT UP took back those same streets, alongside activists from the Occupy movement, itself aspiring to be the kind of umbrella that can gather and propel young queers and allies to work together. Hundreds of people carried those trademark ACT UP banners (with some homemade signs for that Occupy touch) in a march down from City Hall to the New York Housing Administration to Trinity Church. A break-out action took the intersection at Park Street, where activists set up house with sofas and chairs, chaining themselves together with the cry, “Housing saves lives!” Another group dressed in Robin Hood green locked down an intersection at Wall Street, demanding a 0.05 percent tax on financial transactions to funnel to AIDS relief. I imagined each person I saw in a fading ACT UP shirt — the seriously garish image of Ronald Reagan in neon branded AIDSGATE, and countless pink triangles now on a field of soft grey — to be a surviving elder, or standing in the garment of a lover or friend who should have lived to walk alongside them.

Reclaiming that story — of greed and neglect, and also of resistance and loss — is what drove Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard to produce their film United In Anger, using footage drawn from their joint archive, The ACT UP Oral History Project. Schulman recalls that the film’s origins were in her visceral response to an NPR story on the 20th anniversary of AIDS that she heard while driving a rental car through Los Angeles:

“At first America had trouble with people with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then, they came around.”

I almost crashed the car.

She didn’t crash. She did call up Hubbard, though, and their work began. The film premiered this February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of ACT UP.

Now, just a few months after the birth of another direct action protest movement on Wall Street, it is difficult not to connect these familiar images through a quarter-century-long struggle. Here are the throngs of young people linking arms along Broadway, the high sheen of cop uniforms as police push their way into crowds, locked arms being wrenched apart in the grip of twice as many cops as there ever are activists, and the way — as he’s being loaded into a cop wagon — one of the activists turns his head to call back to the others, to the cameras. It’s a performance, and a sincere one, that’s become part of so much protest, and it’s captured here well before the YouTube age.

ACT UP hit the streets just as cheap consumer video did, defining the visual and tactical conventions of activist video. Through the late 1980s, ACT UP spawned several activist video crews, like DIVA TV, or Damned Interfering Video Activists. In addition to serving as witnesses at actions, DIVA produced compilation tapes to educate and inspire ACT UP activists around the country and the world, who then shared them with each other at parties, bars or through the mail.

Captured in all that glorious 80s footage is a raw, life-affirming anger. For all the comparisons drawn between Occupy and ACT UP,  Occupy has yet to fully embody this urgency, or this rage, that transforms pain into action and back again. The most moving sequences of United In Anger are set to a funeral march, a low drumbeat that carries through political funerals in Manhattan and Washington, culminating in a group funeral procession to the White House, where several ACT UP members requested their remains be delivered as a final demand.

As powerful as ACT UP’s tactics are to observe — banner drops at Shea Stadium and Grand Central Station, storming the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration — it’s the testimony of ACT UP members that provides real depth, humor and contradiction to these victories and contentious setbacks.

The most dramatic of these was ACT UP’s legendary Sunday-mass protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which turned even some of their supporters against them. For many in ACT UP, that was no failure. “We said for years in ACT UP that our job was not to be liked,” said Ann Northrop, an early member. “We were not doing what we were doing to get the public to like us. We were doing what we were doing to accomplish something about particular issues, and I think we did that, enormously successfully.”

What cannot be ignored, in this film or in our attempts to make sense of the early years of the epidemic, is the power of people to organize in the face of death, to claim expertise, to lead. As the gatekeepers in medicine and government struggled to catch up with the virus, ACT UP took caring for their communities into their own hands and took their fight to the doors of those in power. Through United In Anger, we meet activists who worked to redefine AIDS, to take account of their lives and what could be done to preserve them, and to hold those who abandoned them to death accountable. “In my view as a witness, people did not die of AIDS,” Shulman said in a recent interview. “They died of government neglect and indifference. These are political deaths.”

An article published by CounterPunch yesterday, “Inconvenient Truths about Tar Sands Action,” argues that the grassroots campaign targeting the Keystone XL pipeline was nothing more than “a manipulated charade, funded and run with loads of money from pro-Obama Democrats through non-transparent organizations like the Tides Foundation.” It follows, then, according to the article, that the real goal of Tar Sands Action “was to manufacture Obama a ‘green victory’ during his first term in the run up to the 2012 election.”

In short, for those thousands of you who participated in the White House sit-ins or encirclement and became “True Believers in the mission,” you were duped. What you took part in “was not social change, nor was it grassroots empowerment.” You became nothing more than a name on an email list. You were “converted into clicktivists who will hopefully contribute money to the Obama ‘I’m In’ 2012 Presidential campaign, ecological landscape be damned.”

I’d ask you how it feels, but I should know. I’m one of you. The article mentions Waging Nonviolence along with the socialist group Solidarity and author Naomi Klein as being among the “principled radicals” who “drank the kool-aid.” So how do I feel? Well, for someone who has supposedly been drugged, I feel remarkably sober and unconvinced.

To believe that the Democrats mobilized thousands of people to get arrested as part of an effort to manufacture an environmental win for Obama is to ignore the fact that he rejected this gift-wrapped, hand-delivered win. He never fully acknowledged the claims of the campaign, and has recently spoken positively of the pipeline, thereby ensuring neither an environmental win nor the support of environmentalists.

Despite the joyous rhetoric  (“BIG NEWS: We won. You won.”) that emerged from the campaign after Obama’s November announcement that he would be delaying a decision on the pipeline until 2013, excitement has waned in the months since. More recent emails from organizer Bill McKibben have focused on the hard realities of the pipeline — for instance, Obama’s recent trip to Oklahoma, where he “lauded his administration’s fast-tracking of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like a campaign or a president working in cahoots. Yet, according to the author of the CounterPunch article who goes by the pseudonym The Insider, the two have been in lock-step, tricking environmentalists into doing the Democrat’s bidding. Never mind that the president hasn’t kept up his end of the bargain; the evidence of deception is clear to The Insider. For starters, there’s the fact that tar sands oil will be flowing into this country with or without the Keystone XL. So, since Tar Sands Action (TSA) is not targeting all entry points at once or trying to smash the whole industry at once, it is clearly just a sham. From The Insider’s perspective, TSA’s effort to build a mass movement from scratch through a series of concrete victories is irrelevant. What’s important is ideological purity.

This is where the Tides Foundation conspiracy comes in to play — which is where the article starts sounding like a Glenn Beck rant. While neither TSA nor its organizational affiliate 350.org received any Tides money (at least according to the document cited by The Insider), many of the groups that supported it did — for instance, the Sierra Club, NRDC and Friends of the Earth. Why does that matter? It boils down to Tides having “Democratic allied funders.” That’s the smoking gun. And apparently we can just take it on good faith that anyone who accepts money from Tides is actively working to reelect Obama. The proof is in the fact that some people showed up at the White House sit-ins and encirclement wearing Obama pins and shirts.

The Insider draws out this idea of co-optation further. “Tar Sands Action was a sophisticated, extremely well-funded model for creating the illusion of movement building, complete with mass civil disobedience,” the article contends, “but the real goal, mirroring its cousin, ‘The 99 Spring,’ was (and is) to hammer Republicans and fire up grassroots enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.”

Co-optation is always a legitimate and serious concern, but as Nathan Schneider noted in regards to the 99% Spring, it’s important to ask, “Who’s co-opting whom?”

The logic of a civil resistance movement is always to co-opt the existing structures of the society around it, to radicalize them, to drive them away from the status quo and into doing something truly revolutionary. And it is precisely by co-opting these institutions that the movement is generally able to build enough capacity to make real change.

That’s how I’ve always seen Tar Sands Action: as a campaign that recognized the power of grassroots action but knew it needed the reach of the big green NGOs to be effective. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, authors of the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, point out, “The tactical and strategic advantages of high levels of diverse participation explain — in large part — the historical success of nonviolent campaigns.” So, to ignore the big greens and their massive base of supporters is to make your job as an organizer much harder. But to co-opt them, their email lists and their political influence is to give your campaign a huge boost.

Of course, doing so is not easy, despite what The Insider thinks about the Tides money that somehow made all the pieces fall into place. I recently spoke with Linda Capato, who handled recruitment for TSA, and she explained just how much the big green groups had to move outside their comfort zone to support the two weeks of civil disobedience.

We’ve always been told don’t do something that’s too nuts. Mass civil disobedience in front of the White House gates for two weeks, that’s crazy. Sierra Club isn’t going to sign on because of course they can’t. They have those mandates. NRDC isn’t going to be supportive. All these big greens are not going to come to the table and it was like okay, we can do it without them. And so it was this moment of let’s try. And then, as it was happening and as we were organizing, everyone was jumping onboard because it was a smart idea, it was the time to do it, it was the right target, the right strategy, and the right tactic.

That, ultimately, is what The Insider is overlooking. The Keystone XL was a strategic target which had a major leverage point in the president, since the decision was his alone to approve or reject. It was not meant to bring down the tar sands industry. To fault it for not doing so is like faulting the lunch counter sit-ins for not ending segregation. Furthermore, to say that “Martin Luther King must be turning in his grave,” is to deny that King not only appealed to the moral rhetoric of Lyndon Johnson but also met with him.

The TSA sit-ins and encirclement of the White House were hardly Obama campaign rallies. They were strategic actions meant to draw in a diverse crowd. A few radicals on tripods or in armlocks are wonderful, but to succeed, the effort needed a much broader coalition. Make no mistake, though, most of the organizers who helped guide TSA come from radical organizing backgrounds; for them, using the Obama rhetoric was a way to underscore the gap between the president’s lackluster record and his inspiring rhetoric.

That kind of messaging has far more potential to stimulate a mass movement than the kind of angry screaming that often takes place at protest and is why McKibben at one point said, “We are not going to do President Obama the favor of attacking him. We are going to hold the Obama campaign to the standard it set in 2008. Denying this pipeline would send a jolt of electricity through the people that elected this president.” That, to me, sounds like an attempt by TSA to co-opt one of the largest political movements in recent years and galvanize it into acting for the environment. But all The Insider hears is “well-funded, political theater and public relations.”

The problem with conspiracy theories in general is that they dismiss the contributions of ordinary people. Instead of giving credit to the participants in TSA for shaping their own campaign, which involved significant sacrifices both of time and body, the conspiracy theorist disparages those who took part as “rank-and-file day-to-day worker-bees.”

That’s simply not the case for Tar Sands Action. The reality is that as much as the campaign was about bringing thousands of people to the White House, it was also about empowering local communities to take their own action against the pipeline. ”A lot of the communities along the pipeline route are working together that haven’t before,” Linda Capato told me. “Folks in Nebraska who have been dealing with imminent domain are working with folks in Texas on the same issue. If the zombie pipeline does come back, at least we’ll have a lot more power and part of that power is these communities are talking to each other.”

The Insider concludes by quoting activist John Stauber, another skeptic of TSA, who says, “I would love to see the real people who have bought the hype and taken these civil disobedience trainings, and who have gone through the arrests, rise up and seize control of their own movement.” Perhaps he just needs to open his eyes.

Huey Newton and Bobby Steale, via Wikimedia.

The Black Panther Party was an African-American radical organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Originally it was called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and even though it emerged in the North, it was responding to the same anger and frustration as the Deacons for Defense felt when watching black people get punished for standing up for themselves in the South.

The Panthers’ immediate goal was to protect black neighborhoods from police brutality. The group evolved from black nationalism to a broader revolutionary socialism. It rapidly expanded to many cities, still mainly in the North, and became influential. It differed from the Deacons for Defense in that it didn’t think of itself as a security force for the civil rights movement. Instead, it offered an outright alternative to the civil rights movement, with goals that included “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” Its best-known programs were its armed citizens’ patrols to monitor the police, and Free Breakfast for School Children. Other programs included free medical clinics, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and an experimental school to develop new methods for educating African-American children.

Not nearly enough notice has been taken of the Panthers’ effort, as a revolutionary organization, to include alternative institutions in their program. Many in the Occupy movement have made the same move. Both are in alignment with a framework that emphasizes “prefigurative work,” which builds skills and creates new ways for organizing life in a future society.

What drew more attention at the time, and still dominates the image of the Black Panthers, was their insistence on carrying weapons and their willingness to use them to defend the community. In 1967, for example, the party famously organized a march on the California state capitol, and the marchers openly carried rifles. So I was surprised in 1976 when two members of the Black Panther Party sat in my living room, which was filled with radical activists, and calmly stated that, looking back, they thought they’d made “a militarist error.”

Some of my friends protested: “You had the right to defend yourselves. Self-defense is enshrined in the Constitution! You weren’t saying you were arming yourselves to do revolutionary warfare!”

The Panthers on my sofa agreed with all of that, and said they were making a point about strategy, not about morality. Militarism, they said, is a point of view that makes violence more powerful than it really is. It makes carrying guns appear to outweigh the realities of color, and the intensity of white racism, and the vulnerability of the black community, and the nature of the racist mass media, and the strength of the apparatus of the modern security state.

Now, knowing about the U.S. government’s COINTELPRO program and its particular attention on groups like the Black Panthers, we see more easily what the two men were talking about. The Panthers’ moral claim to self-defense did not protect them, and carrying guns was a fact easily used as justification to wipe them out. Life isn’t fair, but then they knew that.

The strategic question is: Does defensive violence, or the threat of it, help us or hurt us as we struggle for justice? The inability of the Black Panther Party to protect even itself, much less to survive to protect the black community, speaks eloquently.

In 2012 we need to ask: What has changed since then, to make us believe that this time a strategy of armed self defense would work better than it did in the sixties? Has the national security state weakened in the meantime, its means of surveillance and infiltration become degraded? Has the 1 percent become more liberal, more interested in the well-being of all? Since the sixties, have potential allies become more attracted to violence as a means of struggling for justice?

I respect the Black Panthers’ launching a response in the North when the civil rights movement was reaching a point of self-evaluation, and that their response included creativity and an ideological inquiry. Note the mood of the period: By 1965, after 10 years of amazing victories in the most violently racist part of the country, the Deep South, many people in the North who identified with the movement carried mixed emotions. They felt disgust with the amount of suffering that it had taken to achieve those victories, and at the same time an expectation that those victories should by now have transformed America in a more profound way.

I was among the activists, both black and white, who toured the country in those days doing workshops at the request of local people. I remember an increasing number of complaints in the North: “Why hasn’t our situation changed in this community? Racism is going on just like before. All this nonviolent stuff and it’s still the same — maybe nonviolence doesn’t work!”

In response I would ask them to tell me about the direct action campaigns they themselves had waged in their communities. All too often the answer was, “Well, none yet.” Gandhi, tough old bird that he was, in my place would have asked, “You expected someone else to liberate you?”

I understood the complaint in cultural terms. From the national media coverage of the movement, Northerners could believe that this was a national movement about racism and poverty everywhere. Yes, to some degree it was national. But mainly it was a Southern movement focused on regional issues like that cup of coffee at a lunch counter and the right to vote.

Rather than wait for someone else to liberate them, the Black Panther Party started to act in the North. They found it hard going, but made some gains. Martin Luther King also turned to the North in that period, and began to address new challenges both culturally and politically. The nonviolent part of the civil rights movement saw some progress in the North, but found the intersection of race and class to be very tough, as did the Panthers. The Panthers added class struggle theory to help them, and King did so as well, only more slowly. (By the time he was killed, King was challenging capitalism as a system as well as building a cross-race, cross-class coalition to focus on poverty.)

From the point of view of the 1 percent, things were not going at all well in the mid-sixties. The machinations of the FBI to divide the civil rights movement weren’t very effective. The movement was growing and more people were raising a question that alarmed the 1 percent: Do we want a bigger piece of the American pie or does the pie itself need to be re-made? The country as a whole was polarizing; National Rifle Association membership was climbing as an expression of white anxiety. Escalating the war in Vietnam wasn’t working to marginalize the civil rights movement and restore overall unity, which was disappointing, considering that a historic function of war is to reduce internal divisions.

Still, the 1 percent had more cards to play. They could mount a bogus “War on Poverty” that co-opted smart young black organizers by giving them jobs in self-help agencies. (I heard Bayard Rustin say cynically, “It’s the first time the U.S. ever went to war with a BB gun.”) They could also make illegal drugs and weapons more easily available in Northern black neighborhoods, and it has been alleged that they did so.

Then the power-holders got a couple of big breaks. The civil rights movement itself divided over Black Power and the question of violence. The second big break came in the form of the riots that tore up people’s neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Detroit, Newark, Watts and elsewhere.

The movement stopped growing. White activist allies left for the more welcoming territory of anti-Vietnam war organizing, and emboldened racists took up their refrain once again but in the coded language of “law and order.” Because the movement lost the moral high ground, a minor bill introduced into Congress for an appropriation for urban rat control was openly laughed at in open session — an unthinkable act two years earlier. The urban ghetto doesn’t need rat control, said the attitude of the now-bolstered right wing, it needs more police and larger prisons!

The power-holders no longer needed to make significant concessions to the civil rights movement. The interest in armed self-defense and the flirtation with violence, beyond dividing the movement, went nowhere.

Left holding the bag most tragically were those black inner-city neighborhoods where the riots took place. A study found that, 40 years later, those neighborhoods across the country had still not fully regained lost ground. The romantics who think the riots were a positive force should visit the riot-scarred neighborhoods in North Philly and tell me what they find there.