This Saturday, April 14, Occupy Wall Street groups and assemblies from neighborhoods around New York City will join with allies in labor unions and community-based organizations for a “Spring Awakening.” Discussions about this citywide assembly began in December. Now, it is being billed as the kickoff for upcoming actions — especially May Day — and an opportunity for collaboration between Occupiers, older organizations and the public.

“We hope to pull new people in,” says Colby Hopkins, one of the organizers, “by creating a welcoming environment for families and interested people who have not yet taken up activism as a lifestyle.” The second half of the day, Hopkins adds, will be a facilitated assembly that helps organizers and activists “foster and strengthen networks.”

Far from just a day in the park, planners hope to plant the seeds of something new — a democratic mechanism through which disparate organizations can come together to strategize about how to combine their campaigns to attack the root causes of shared problems, including corruption and the unchecked political influence of the 1 percent.

In preparation for this event, Occupiers are also thinking about how to grow the grassroots. At the request of Spring Awakening organizer and eviction-defense activist Michael Premo, on March 27 and April 3, Paul Getsos led two trainings on “how to build a participatory, base-building and effective work group/organizing committee.” About 60 people attended the first training, and about 40 attended the second.

Getsos joined Occupy Wall Street last fall. He is a veteran of ACT UP and the gay rights movement, and a co-founder of Community Voices Heard, which is primarily made up of women on welfare. In the trainings, Getsos praised Occupy for changing the national narrative. Quickly and cheaply, it did something that unions and community organizations have failed to do for decades. However, since the fall, Getsos has been pressing his younger, less-experienced colleagues to answer some tough questions.

How will Occupy be able to get 100,000 people in the streets and shut down the New York Stock Exchange? How will it become an outward-looking movement that draws in new people, instead of one with ever-shrinking numbers? How can it build transparent accountability structures and organize people to meet their own needs?

Premo says that he asked Getsos to lead the trainings because “so many people in Occupy have talked about the need to create structures that can do movement work.” Community Voices Heard has able to grow and serve its base by constantly bringing in new people. As one of its documents explains:

An organization or a campaign builds a large base in order to have enough power to win. Numbers matter! The more people we can mobilize to show our power, the more people we will have to make policy changes to improve our members’ lives.

Even if OWS is not exactly an organization or a single campaign, it too must draw more people into its orbit and enable them reach meaningful goals if it is to continue to shape public conversation, deliver policy changes and compellingly model alternative cultures.

It’s difficult to know if Gestos’ trainings (or the Spring Awakening) will affect the direction of the movement. Yet, in the midst of the one-on-one exercises and other tool-sharing sessions, several participants reflected on Occupy meetings and expressed frustration. Some talked about the need for new kinds of structures. Many seemed enthusiastic about the idea getting “directly affected” people into campaigns with “intentionality.” And everyone appreciated the importance of interlinking the efforts of different groups — in theory, at least.

If there were, say, 20 committees with a committed core of 50 organizers each, and if these could mobilize thousands for campaigns, perhaps these committees could get 100,000 people into the streets for one shared action. Moreover, under the banner of the 99 percent, these committees could do base-building — be it by neighborhood or by issue — in a way that would enable the committees to be simultaneously local and global, focusing their attention on the ways in which key issues, like housing, relate to corporate power.

It also remains unclear what the movement’s current capacity is for mobilizing in the first place. The overriding focus right now is May Day — which includes calls for both a general strike and a more modest “day without the 99%” — and that will be an important test of OWS’ strength and its ability to support those who join with it in turn. If the base isn’t strong enough, however, a major call to action like May Day could also present serious dangers.

One of the most significant general strikes in South Africa, for instance, suggests that protests organized by people who are not accountable to one another — people who have not planned their campaign together or agreed in advance about goals and tactics — can leave participants vulnerable to the unexpected and the ugly.

When approximately 2,000 coal miners struck in northern Natal, a prominent Indian politician rushed to the scene and convinced the men to use civil disobedience by marching across the Transvaal border and breaking their contracts. The government would then have to arrest them all or negotiate. In the meantime, indentured sugar workers on southern Natal plantations spontaneously stopped working as well. Railway workers, domestic servants and hotel staff joined the strike — making it “general,” at least among Indians.

The strike’s leader, M. K. Gandhi, was blamed for the violence that occurred during the weeks-long action. According to Joseph Lelyveld’s biography, Durban newspapers frothed about “coolies run amuck” and mobs of men brandishing sticks, wielding cane knives and urging fellow indentured workers to join them. Cane fields were set on fire. One murderously angry planter said he wanted to “teach the whole tribe a lesson.” Workers were sentenced to hard labor without pay for six months. Mine owners imprisoned workers underground. Protesters were whipped. Indians won relief from a tax on ex-indentured workers who wanted to remain in the country (as well as legal recognition of traditional marriages), but the indentured workers won nothing.

When Gandhi’s 20-year sojourn in South Africa ended, he did not forget these experiences. In fact, he would later call off some satyagraha campaigns after months of hard work out of fear of similar disruptions.

One must be exceedingly careful when comparing the United States in 2012 to South Africa in 1911. Some basic points can be made, however. In order to avoid a situation in which OWS organizers find themselves at the helm of actions that turn into a lot of mayhem with little rewards, they need to focus not just on calling people to protests, but on organizing structures through which people can work toward self-interested goals — structures that can withstand disruptions and provocations and give the protesters lasting power.

Events in French West Africa offer a related lesson about base-building. African leaders took advantage of new opportunities to reframe their relationship with France and their employers after the Second World War. Ex-servicemen spoke of “equal sacrifices, equal rights.” African unions, which had been repressed under Vichy rule, resurfaced and found ways to transcend tactics used in the past. They remembered one poorly-planned strike by temporary railway workers in 1938 that led to violent confrontations, eight deaths and few gains.

African unions grew after a general strike in the port city of Dakar in late 1945. Dockworkers shut down the port for 12 days and were joined by civil servants, literate clerks and market sellers. Railway workers did not join the protest in hopes of being rewarded for their loyalty (which they were not).

The Dakar general strike showed that workers were willing to band together as “workers,” despite French attempts to divorce a few relatively wealthy “citizens” from millions of “subjects.” Unskilled workers won large pay raises and civil servants won family allowances, although the protesters did not secure equality with the French. But the commonplace colonial argument, heard in South Africa as well, that African families were too traditional (and too large) for men to receive European-style breadwinner wages had to be scrapped.

The Dakar port shutdown was followed by a much larger strike two years later. During the 1947–48 railway workers’ strike from Dakar to Bamako, 20,000 train workers participated. The action lasted five months in some areas and relied on longstanding relationships and trans-regional networks. The movement’s leader, Ibrahim Sarr, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. According to interviews, Muslim leaders supported the strikers in private, as did women, who provided food, composed songs praising the union and made life difficult for strike-breakers.

The strikers were able to hold out for so long, ultimately, because they weren’t isolated. Rather, the railway men had networks that enabled them to grow their own food or return to rural villages.

After two years of negotiations, the railway workers won the right to unionize and to strike, along with a universal labor code complete with family allowances. They were not transported into a new world of freedom, however. Paradoxically, their victory brought them deeper into French legal structures and the politics of nationalism by allowing a few of the union’s supporters to become successful politicians. The protesters built a movement based on rural-urban, trans-class and trans-cultural networks of solidarity, but soon found themselves vulnerable to being divided once again, now by nationalist politicians oriented towards their own short-term goals.

It doesn’t just matter that there is an organized base, therefore, but what kind of organization, and what kind of leadership structures, unites that base.

The lessons here are simple. First, protests organized by people who are not in two-way relationships, and are not accountable to each other, are protests with a high degree of uncertainty. Who knows who’s coming? Who knows what they will do? This is a problem that many Occupiers know well.

Second, campaigns that pursue only short-term goals can be easily exploited by opportunistic politicians in the long term. This is why the base must have its own forms of decision making.

Third, organizing that does not look at the roots of problems is particularly brittle. Once an immediate solution to an urgent problem is won, the thread between the present and the possible can get cut. Solidarity only for the sake of a short-term goal can leave people vulnerable to co-option and unable to see how immediate problems are part of larger systems.

How can Occupy win recognizable victories against foreclosure, debt, crony-capitalism, militarism, mass incarceration and climate change while also drawing people into transparent structures that serve their interests and enable them to amass lasting power? How can the movement increase and strengthen its base? As Occupiers look toward May Day and a busy summer, they have an opportunity before them now to answer these questions for themselves, in their own ways. The Spring Awakening and Paul Gestos’ trainings are signs that people in some sectors of the movement are already thinking very much in these terms.

To plant to the seed of people-power, organizers need to look honestly at the obstacles before them, including the challenges involved in building a base of support. The words of one historian and war-theorist seem pertinent here. Said Thucydides, “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet not withstanding, go out to meet it.”

Illustration of self-defense, from James E. Homans' 1908 New American Encyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information.

We have a moral right to defend ourselves against violation; there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Persons and groups have boundaries for a reason, and integrity generally requires that we defend them. Gandhi said that this is an obligation that trumped his call to experiment with nonviolent action; if you can’t think of a way to defend yourself nonviolently, he said, use violence. I believe Gandhi would have sympathized with the Deacons for Defense, for instance, an armed civil rights group in Southern U.S.

Of course Gandhi also believed that, with sufficient creativity, there is always a way to devise a nonviolent defense. He also recognized that either violent or nonviolent defense might fail in an immediate sense; there is such a thing as overwhelming force.

I think it’s no accident that the question of self-defense has been coming up in some circles in the Occupy movement at this time. Having the discussion reflects how many people are realizing that moving the 1 percent out of the driver’s seat is a revolutionary mission. The person who doesn’t feel fear at the prospect of revolution is out of touch with their feelings. It’s only natural at such a moment to wonder if there is some way to act boldly — and at the same time stay safe.

The reality is that there is no way to guarantee safety. What we can do is to increase the chances of survival for our comrades and ourselves while building a movement that can win. Activists have for at least a century been creating methods for consciously increasing the chances for survival. Some of these methods are similar in both violent and nonviolent strategic struggle. Everyone can learn from them.

It helps first of all to accept our primal human programming: When deeply threatened, we’re driven to fight or flight. There are pacifists who want to avoid this choice, and they with others have invented the field of conflict resolution; many useful things have come out of that world. Nevertheless, when the troops or thugs are sent to kick your butt, the choices are fight or flight.

While both military commanders and nonviolent organizers believe there is such a thing as strategic retreat, participants in both kinds of struggle are trained to fight, not run away. Running away usually means the loss of the battle and a weakening of one’s forces, whether violent or nonviolent. Even though the point of running is to try to be safe, flight often increases the number of casualties for our side.

I remember Andrew Young, a key organizer working with Martin Luther King Jr. telling a group of us in the North that we were probably misreading the frequent tactic in the Southern civil rights movement of bringing a group of people to the point of violent confrontation and then having them get on their knees and pray. “You probably thought we were praying for divine intervention,” Andy smiled, “and we were, but we also knew that if those people facing the guns and dogs broke and run, more of them would get hurt! And we’d lose that battle.”

“The thing about praying is,” he said as his smile broadened, “you can’t run on your knees!”

Fight or flight. How many soldiers in combat have heard a loud voice inside them urging them to run away from a situation where they are likely to get hurt or killed? The same is true at hard moments in nonviolent movements, probably in an equal percentage of heads. Unless a strategic retreat is sensible, which means of course an organized retreat, the smart choice is to stay and fight.

I saw how unsafe the flight response can be during the first campaign in which I was arrested, a civil rights struggle in which the state police were called in to back up the local police. As the Chester, Pa., freedom struggle of 1963 escalated, more people joined who had no idea what their black sisters and brothers had learned in the South. Sometimes the Chester people met ugly police charges with courage and stood their ground, out of sheer grit. But sometimes they broke and ran, and the police went crazy, sometimes chasing them upstairs and into their apartments to beat them mercilessly with their nightsticks and guns.

A few years later I saw the largely white demonstrators in the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party convention make the same mistake. In my experience white activists are even less likely to learn from the actual experience of the civil rights movement than black activists, so I wasn’t at all surprised when the demonstrators broke and ran from scary police charges. As in Chester, but on national television, the police chased the demonstrators, even to the point of soaking carpets with blood in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. The convention demonstrations were largely a strategic loss for the movement, as almost all convention mass confrontations have been, but at least thanks to television coverage the police behavior was roundly criticized as well.

The history of flight is not a pretty one, so let’s go on to the “fight” option. We can choose one of the most dangerous nonviolent campaigns in U.S. history, the 1961 entry of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee into Mississippi, the hardest of the hardcore segregationist states of the South. Mississippi was ruled by the White Citizens Councils and, more brutally, that long-lived American terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

For readers who take seriously the question of self defense, I recommend the Danny Glover film Freedom Song, which pulls no punches as it shows what young people experienced in those early days. The staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) knew they would get no protection from local law enforcement; men who were police in the day could at night be wearing the white sheets of the KKK. State police were hostile. The FBI was hostile, and Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department was mostly trying to look the other way. SNCC was on its own.

The film shows SNCC workers leading training workshops for young students. At one point the trainers harassed a young man in a role-play to toughen him up. When the student lost control and attacked the harasser, the trainers held him and tried to reassure him. The young man said something like, “I can’t do this. I gotta fight back.”

The reply came quickly: “By joining us, you are fighting back.”

SNCC’s lesson in 1961 was that safety and effectiveness came from fighting back with nonviolent methods. A second big lesson for the young man came a couple of weeks later. He asks the biggest and most muscled SNCC organizer whether he has adopted nonviolence as a way of life. The organizer explains that if someone threatened him at another time he’d beat up the assailant, but he’s adopted nonviolent action as a strategy, in order to win the struggle.

This stance was typical of people I met throughout the civil rights movement; most weren’t pacifists but learned that in highly dangerous situations, nonviolent discipline gave them the best chance to stay safe — and to win.

SNCC workers said that nonviolence didn’t remove the danger – protesters would still get hurt, and some might be killed. SNCC’s first chairman, and now a member of Congress, John Lewis, was beaten dozens of times, and very narrowly escaped death. He and others in SNCC said the stakes were too high to expect racist privilege to give up easily. But the nonviolent discipline removed the pretext justifying long-term and widespread repression. In fact, the repression most often worked against the perpetrators, just as in jiu-jitsu the savvy warrior uses the violence of the opponent against him. Typically, when white racists used violence against the movement, it grew, and allies appeared, and the racists started dividing among themselves, and the campaign won in one more town.

The best-known leader of the armed Deacons for Defense, Charles Sims, was quoted in The New York Times as favoring nonviolent direct action as the best way to gain civil rights. The Deacons could be found without their guns inside demonstrations. At the same time, Sims believed that nonviolent demonstrators should be protected by guardians carrying guns, accompanying protests to deter the KKK and others, and the Deacons did exactly that.

Anyone who has researched, taught, written or published on the subject of nonviolent struggle appreciates the headaches of vocabulary. Gandhi himself suffered the pains and perplexities of language, as in this passage from Satyagraha in South Africa:

None of us knew what name to give to our movement. I then used the term “passive resistance” in describing it. I did not then quite understand the implications of “passive resistance” as I called it. … As the struggle advanced, the phrase “passive resistance” gave rise to confusion and it appeared shameful to permit this great struggle to be known only by an English name.

The English word nonviolence is not much better. It is ambiguous and multifaceted. My students, for whom English is often a second, third or fourth language, frequently complain that the word “nonviolence” says what it is not but does not tell us what it is. The ability of average people to study this subject with linguistic precision, however, has lately taken a quantum leap with Oxford University Press’s publication of Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts, by the scholar of nonviolent struggle (and Waging Nonviolence contributor) Gene Sharp.

Sharp began formal studies on nonviolent struggle six decades ago in 1951, working toward his master of arts degree in sociology at Ohio State University. From then until 1955 — during which time he spent nine months in federal prison for refusal to cooperate with conscription for the Korean War — he explored the history of nonviolent action and the speeches and writings of Gandhi. Sharp started corresponding with Albert Einstein and sent the theoretical physicist his manuscript for Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, eventually published in 1960 by the Navajivan Publishing House, which was founded by Gandhi in Ahmedabad. Einstein wrote the foreword for the small volume, calling it “a truly important work” and describing Sharp as a “born historian, in whose hands the various threads are held together and woven into a pattern from which a complete picture emerges.” Einstein later wrote that this book was the finest he had seen on Gandhi.

Sharp spent 10 years in Britain and Norway, first at the University of Oslo’s Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas and then at Oslo’s Institute for Social Research. There he caught the attention of Thomas C. Schelling, a Harvard professor who would in 2005 win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Schelling invited him to Harvard. Having started on his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1960, Sharp finished his thesis at Harvard, and in 1968 was awarded the D. Phil. in political theory from Oxford. His study emphasized theories and philosophies of the nature of political power, authority and obedience, dictatorial systems and totalitarianism, and resistance and revolutionary movements. His dissertation was 1,428 pages long.

Sharp edited his thesis and in 1973 published it in three volumes, as The Politics of Nonviolent Action (also known as Sharp’s Trilogy), a sweeping historical examination of the phenomenon of nonviolent resistance. This is where his 198 methods first appeared. The Trilogy would become one of the most important, influential, and authoritative works in history on the spread of ideas about fighting with nonviolent action. Of paramount importance, he based the Trilogy on actual events, specific instances and real-life examples, while drawing heavily from the body of political theory. Both analyzing and describing the powers and properties that are fundamental to the technique of nonviolent resistance, the three volumes spread around the world from hand to hand. He has written many more books and pamphlets since then, each expanding and clarifying the field of study that he helped to shape.

Just as Gandhi was confounded by problems of terminology, Sharp recognized early that the quandaries of language impeded the understanding and teaching of nonviolent methods of fighting for social justice and political change — all the more so when translation comes into play. Many languages today have no word whatsoever for this subject, including Hebrew and Arabic. Yet even in English, something so small as the decision to hyphenate — nonviolent and nonviolence versus non-violent and non-violence — is ambiguous. Hyphenating the expression further accentuates a negative connotation; without a hyphen, the word becomes a more straightforward affirmation.

Since 1949, Sharp has undertaken an ongoing project of scrutinizing the predicaments and quandaries faced by anyone writing and speaking about the power of this form of struggle. The result has been a long-awaited dictionary of nearly 1,000 entries, described by the author as meant “to develop greater conceptual clarity.” This is a critically important development, because explanations of nonviolent action have often tended toward the bizarre, romantic or quixotic. (I recall a young man in Pondicherry, India, some years ago, who described civil resistance to me as “something to do with boldness.”) Despite numerous historically successful instances of major accomplishments from nonviolent action, it is regrettably true that universities, social scientists, news media, diplomats and policy makers have generally failed to study and grasp its power and the way it works; the lexicon is not well known even in closely related fields. Journalists and diplomats — whose work often brings them into contact with nonviolent conflict — do not receive training in this subject.

Privately, I am hopeful that a pet peeve of mine may be positively affected by the availability of Sharp’s Dictionary, namely the vacuous phrase we routinely see in Western news accounts: “the people took to the streets.” Journalists and others write this as if it were factually explanatory, when it is actually misleading in implying that impetuous, improvisational street action is all there is to nonviolent resistance. Sharp has long held that nonviolent action is actually more complex in its use of power and strategy than is military action, as this dictionary shows.

I am glad to have at hand, for instance, his re-conceptualization of “sanctions.” Sharp explains that while sanctions typically refer to punishment for failure to behave as expected, and may be used specifically in the context of international relations as one nation-state acting upon another, the phenomenon actually occurs in a wide range of social relationships, including the firing of an employee or disobedience with respect to certain laws.

“Sanctions may also be applied by the citizenry against the State, by certain nongovernmental groups against others, and by States against each other,” Sharp writes; “Sanctions in domestic and international politics are usually a key source of political power.” Among nonviolent sanctions used by non-state groups, he cites boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. Finally, “A key element in the operation of nonviolent action against repressive opponents is the refusal to capitulate or submit in spite of official sanctions and unofficial reprisals.” This broadening of the word’s meaning reflects Sharp’s thoroughgoing analysis of power, which respects not merely state-controlled physical force, but also includes the power that ordinary citizens can wield through organized, strategic action.

The dictionary also reveals ways in which nonviolent action has shaped world history, even if it is often veiled by the ways we talk about our past. Consider the entry for “protest emigration,” which Sharp defines as follows:

Deliberate migration from the Jurisdiction of a State as an expression of extreme disapproval because the resisters believe it to be responsible for certain injustices or oppression. Such action is a very serious method of social noncooperation. However, a protest emigration by very large numbers of people may take on the character of political noncooperation. Protest emigration may be permanent or temporary.

He goes on to explain, “Voluntary emigration was called hijra in seventh-century Arabic. The term hijra derives from Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina, undertaken instead of submission to oppression in Mecca.” I would add that this term, meaning “to abandon” in Arabic and employed in 622, was corrupted to hizrat when it reached India. In East Germany, the continual westward flow of East Germans to their democratic neighbors in West Germany was called “exit” and was, of course, permanent, in instances when successful.

By defining words and terms non-judgmentally and with the greatest economy, the dictionary makes rapid clarification readily accessible. Having been spoiled by the intellectually provocative historical examples that suffuse Sharp’s Trilogy, I found the dictionary upon first encounter so terse that I felt deprived. Yet, as Sharp’s Dictionary spreads throughout the world, I believe that it will contribute to both the understanding and the use of nonviolent action. For now, I am certain of one thing: No other person alive today could have produced this work, and we should be grateful that he has done so.

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.
Paul Mason
Verso Books (2012)

Seasoned activists from many of this country’s 20th century movements gathered for an extraordinary weekend in Birmingham with Narayan Desai — a prominent biographer of Gandhi who spent decades living with him in the ashram before going on to become a leader in Gandhian nonviolence in his own right.

In the midst of such widespread protest I thought it odd that, of the sixty or so participants, more youth were not attracted to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn, nearly firsthand, the spirit, tactics and strategy that was able to liberate India from the British Empire. We enjoyed the privilege of experiencing the spirit of Gandhi from one of the last living practitioners of satyagraha who knew Gandhi intimately. But, I wondered, what is the relevance of their weathered experience for today’s unfolding global revolutions?

The scale and depth of the worldwide protests of the past few years — with 2011, in particular — are unprecedented. Paul Mason, in his new book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, details the arrival of these global uprisings that are youth driven — and, in many places, prominently nonviolent.

Mason’s journalistic project, which grew out of a blog — “Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere” — that he maintained as economics editor for the BBC, is rooted in the “near collapse of free-market capitalism.” This collapse, combined with “an upswing in technological innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means” has led to a crisis and protest around the world.

These “global revolutions” — the crossroads of potential widespread social change — are as much about confronting failing systems as they are about the emergence of new modes of relating and being in the world. The uniqueness of these global revolutions are reported by Mason:

many of the activists I’ve interviewed are hostile to the very idea of a unifying theory, a set of bullet-point demands, a guru or a teleology … For the youth, increasingly, knowledge is drawn, on demand and free, from online articles and commentaries and — often breathless — tweets. And for many, politics has become gestural: it is about refusing to engage with power on power’s own terms; about action, not ideas; about the symbolic control of territory to create islands of utopia.

Allergic to ideology. Technologically fluent. And not interested in traditional politics but militantly political. Considering these essential characteristics of the global revolutions and reflecting on the crowd gathered at the Birmingham retreat it begins to dawn on me that the kind of shift we are in is more than just the kind of social change — best exemplified by the nonviolent campaign — as expected by my elders.

With stunning insight — because he listens — Mason provides an exciting account of how the revolutions and uprisings in Greece, Spain, Cairo, New York and elsewhere unfolded. The book’s journalistic style, even to the point of citing “tweets” by including #hashtags and @followers, reflects one of the first attempts to detail the revolutionary shift made possible by a faltering capitalism, social networking and alienated but educated populations. But Mason is more than just a reporter; he is also a commentator — a guide — through the confusing geography of network theory, revolutionary history and social psychology that corresponds to the new global revolutions.

It is at this intersection between social change and identity that Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere helps me unpack the competing hopes, dreams and criticisms for the Occupy movement: the anthropological understanding of the revolutionary is changing. Thankfully, Mason has recorded for militant occupiers, hopeful revolutionaries and exiled malcontents — young and old — a useful map for understanding the milieu of protest and constructive programs (borrowing the Gandhian term) that embody the contradictions of a postmodern resister to capitalism organizing from an iPhone to bring down a dictator.

At a Gandhian gathering such as it was in Alabama, it may come as no surprise that Occupy was front and center in our conversations. But the frustration, despair and even anger of an elder generation with the nascent movement palpably outweighed the excitement, creativity, freshness — and dare I add success — that many of my generation have found among occupiers.

To be sure, this generation of elders, who cut their teeth in the civil rights, peace, anti-nuclear and Central American solidarity movements, are ardent supporters of the Occupy movement. David Hartsough, co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce, called it the best hope for confronting the empire. As I listened to the impassioned cries from a generation who walked with the civil rights movement and successfully shut down nuclear power plants by occupying them grieve over Occupy’s apparent leaderlessness, lack of strategy and wavering commitment to nonviolence, I began to realize why I was one of the few young people in attendance — we are speaking a different language.

One of the most challenging aspects about the Occupy movement, for the establishment left and an aging generation of pacifists, is its stubborn commitment to leaderless structure and its militant emphasis on holding public space, direct defiance of the police, and aversion to make demands.

Setting aside the diffuse nature of the movement — and its burgeoning successes as part of the resistance against home foreclosures — one the main criticisms still tossed at Occupy is that it lacks focus. But what the global revolutions suggest is that the bizarre, pseudo-apolitical lack of focus is part of its method, in addition to being capable of toppling autocratic regimes. Bernard Harcourt coined the term “political disobedience” and Mason observed it in the riotous, anarchistic streets of Greece, the town squares of Spain and the General Assemblies in Zuccotti Park.

Some dismiss the Occupy movement as short-sighted or, as the 99% Spring subtly suggested in their announcement for massive nonviolent direct action training, undisciplined in their revolutionary quest. But oddly enough and rarely recognized, the occupiers in Zuccotti Park, many suspicious of the American dream appealed to by the 99% Spring in the first place, also reflect some of that Gandhian spirit. Their adamant commitment to horizontalism, what Mason calls the “norm for a generation,” affirms process over product and confirms a generation’s hope for alternative political spaces.

In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi wrote that “there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the ends as there is between the seed and the tree. We reap exactly as we sow.” When speaking of means and ends, the exhausting discourse on diversity of tactics comes to mind. And while Mason does a fine job resisting polemics as he documents the different tactics (and their intended and unintended consequences) utilized by the various protest movements around the world — such as the Black Bloc presence at the UK Uncut protests in March 2011 in London — the often over-looked relationship between means and ends has to do with occupations themselves. “The act of taking a space,” writes Mason, “and forming a community within it might be just as important as the objective of the struggle.”

Because the discourse of tactics eschews a steadfast commitment to nonviolence, as Gandhi clearly embraced, and the emphasis to reclaim and hold public space as the commons seems to neglect a concerted struggle for justice or peace, the old guard is having some difficulty recognizing what many youth, poor and working class people instinctively recognize: an individual can be liberated in horizontalism; Mason, citing a British anti-globalization activist, calls it “the most useful method for people with no power.”

When veterans of social movements who are used to being consulted as the experts are upstaged by some unemployed kid from the slums or an inexperienced, living-with-the-parents college graduate whose voices are equally valued in the assembly, a revolution of another sort is taking place. The orators, experts and professionals must take a back seat because the global revolutions embrace skepticism to the ready-made answers that are complicit with hierarchy and profit.

What the elders are wondering is if a self-absorbed generation plugged into Facebook and YouTube, jumping from the latest Black Eyed Peas hit on iTunes to an InterOccupy call or a livestreaming General Assembly, can really be the next Dr. Kings? A brief story from Mason reveals what may be the most challenging aspect for anyone who is less-than-adept with the latest social networking info-technology to realize: the “plugged in” individual is part of a community. Breaking down network theory and its role in protest movements, Mason cites a London student by her Twitter name, @littlemisswilde: “I can be hanging out in the same room as another activist, tweeting, and other people will see us and say: you’re being antisocial. But in fact, we’re being ultra-social.”

For many reasons, it is hard to imagine Gandhi on Twitter. But no one can deny that he, too, was “ultra-social,” especially how his open-ended fasts could mobilize all of India to end outbreaks of violence. The point, one concludes from Mason, is that social networking, leaderless movements and a dislocated or alienated populace don’t need Gandhi-type leaders to inspire revolt or occupy a park. Combine the appropriate #hashtag and networked individuals with a trigger event such as police brutality gone viral or a desperate and courageous self-immolation. Add high youth unemployment and economic anxiety and stir. A revolutionary occupation emerges.

Paul Mason’s work is a must-read for those captivated, either as participant or observer, by the global revolutions that are fundamentally altering how the alienated youth and the poor are understanding and relating to power. So as I meet young people — occupiers and otherwise — who don’t care much for the kind of conversations that I have with my elders about Gandhi’s piety or the finer points of satyagraha, I am still impressed by their commitment to a better world and their willingness to fight for what is right at great personal cost. Maybe the global revolutions are on their way to Gandhi’s liberating practice of nonviolence and truth. Because, as even Gandhi would say, satyagraha is a process — a praxis — more than an ideology. And an elder generation is poised to join in that struggle and offer its wisdom gained from blood shed and experience weathered — but it must do so first and foremost as listeners in the catharsis of the global revolutions that represent the best hope for another lost generation of young people.

Che Gandhi, courtesy Beautiful Trouble and Andy Meconi

When contemplating “The Marriage of Gandhi and Che,” the subtitle of my contribution to the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, I was originally thinking of something frilly with lace — perhaps an off-white gown of appropriate drama. Confronting this challenge of representation, Agit-Pop co-founder Andy Meconi came up with a more iconic image expropriation: the smiling old soul superimposed onto the dashing beret. Two great faces that face great together.

This week’s formal release of the OR Books publication put together under the auspices of Agit-Pop and the Yes Labs (“assembled” rather than edited by Andrew Boyd with Dave Mitchell) is indeed a cause for celebration. Bringing together more than seventy authors in a collection of two-page mini essays, Beautiful Trouble looks at interdependent theories, principles, tactics and case studies. Though largely written by a younger generation of agitators, including Waging Nonviolence’s own Bryan Farrell, Nathan Schneider and Eric Stoner, the book includes pieces by Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, Arun Gupta, Nadine Bloch, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and many others. Accompanied by a growing website of supplemental materials, the toolbox package seeks to put the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change makers. Written in an engaging style and format and chock-full of photos, cartoons and visuals to incite and inspire, the book is sophisticated enough for antiwar and human rights veterans, while being easily accessible for newcomers.

The special timing of this effort has not been missed by any of the media-conscious movement-builders involved. With the birth of a new global people’s movement firmly in mind, the wranglers responsible for Beautiful Trouble understand that “the impossible suddenly seems possible, and all around the world ordinary people are trying out new tools and tactics to win victories where they live.” The urgency of this political moment, in the words of Andrew Boyd, “demands resources that will transform outrage into effective action” — action for building the next revolution.

For many of us, the revolution we seek must understand the connections between means and ends, as well as include the mass-based people power central to effective unarmed civilian resistance. Though the term “nonviolence” has long seemed negative to many, rehabilitating the phrase by reviving the more militant concept of “revolutionary nonviolence” is also a process whose time has come. Mainstream politicians and misguided textbooks have tried to convince us that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were extreme opposites whose visions and practices had nothing to do with one another, but the truth has always been more nuanced, dialectic and complicated than that.

It is not that Che Gandhi seeks to become the new “brand” (Che McGandhi, if you will) by accepting everything those two forefathers believed. This author, for one, does not think that Che’s idea of foco guerrilla warfare has much to offer modern-day radicals; nor do I accept Gandhi’s notions on abstinence and sexuality. The hero-worshiping of both of these figures has done much damage to their most significant joint legacy — that one must give one’s all to a total revolution which is based on love of the people. Che McGandhi’s mass appeal might not yet match the Mc-numbers we’d like — only 300 billion served? How about getting the other six and a half billion their social change with equal portions peace and justice, please? Perhaps we need to invent another prophetic hybrid, this time a West African woman — in tribute to all the women of the Global South who are leading nonviolent revolutions today. Let’s call her Cheluchi NGandhi (points for anyone who can parse the multiple hidden meanings).

What we surely and certainly need, in the U.S. and across the planet, is a new approach toward organizing that includes a sense of humor, breathtaking creativity and a focus on appealing to greater numbers of people without losing sight of how issues and struggles are connected. As we join together for that upcoming uprising, won’t we be causing some beautiful trouble then?

As I flew in from Illinois, the thunderstorms over Birmingham cleared long enough to let us land in good order. I had come to Alabama to attend a retreat featuring Narayan Desai, one of the last living disciples of Mohandas Gandhi, who made the trip there from India at the invitation of longtime activists and authors Shelley and Jim Douglass. Born in 1924 in Gandhi’s ashram, Desai has consistently undertaken Gandhian work for eight decades, and has recently published a 2,300-page biography of Gandhi. It was not only deeply moving to spend three days last week in the presence of this life-long Gandhian, but to do so in Birmingham, the site of one of the civil rights movement’s most iconic struggles.

Even as several friends and I were collected at the airport and driven to the retreat center, I was vividly aware with each passing mile that we were traversing holy ground. This terrain resounds with a process for freedom set in motion a half century ago: a decision by African-American children, women and men to join together in concerted and bold nonviolent resistance for full and equal participation in society.

I believe that places where human beings band together for transformative justice become sites of enduring power. I first felt this in the 1990s when I was part of a bicultural team leading nonviolence retreats with Latino youths in California’s Central Valley. The land itself seemed imbued with the determination, courage and creativity of the migrant poor who, against very long odds, built the United Farm Workers and engaged in protracted — but ultimately successful — strikes and campaigns that sought the right to organize, increased wages and improved working conditions. In celebrating what would have been César Chávez’s 85th birthday this Saturday, we also honor the thousands who took action with him in the fields. This is only one of many struggles around the world that not only worked for concrete outcomes but left a legacy that seems to inhere in the land itself.

Such an inheritance can reframe how we see such land: from a terrain of oppression to a topography of liberation. This alternative overlay doesn’t erase the facts of injustice. Rather, it retrieves and holds dear the creative and stubborn ways injustice has been challenged through time. I suspect that virtually every acre on earth has not only been subject to domination and injustice, but also to struggles for justice. One of our jobs as agents of change is to rescue the memory of this seen and unseen resistance.

Birmingham has done this through the magnificent Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which captures the history of oppression that the self-styled Magic City lived for decades, as well as the intricate details of a movement for nonviolent change that rose up to challenge it. The museum is situated directly across the street from the 16th Avenue Baptist Church, where four little girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — died when the church was bombed on September 15, 1963. During the pivotal Birmingham campaign that took place earlier that year, thousands of young people gathered in that same church and headed out to make history. In watching films over the years from that momentous protest, I had somehow thought that they had processed quite a ways before meeting the police. I was wrong; directly across the street is Kelly Ingram Park, where a storm of water cannons and German shepherds was turned on the youth of the city. The park is now studded with sculptures and statues memorializing the turning point that in many ways helped re-map Birmingham and the nation.

Gandhi’s Indian independence movement was also about re-mapping: transforming a terrain of colonial conquest to a nation under self-rule. Over the weekend, Narayan Desai shared his experience of this geographical and spiritual re-inscription. The three gifts of Gandhi that Desai illuminated were ashram observances (the vows and principles that Gandhi developed and served as the source for action, by which one can “convert personal virtues into social values”), the constructive program (18 comprehensive social programs), and Satyagraha (soul-force, truth-force and love-force activated for nonviolent social change). In both constructing new institutions and organizing many large and small Satyagraha campaigns — including the 240-mile Salt March in 1930 — the Gandhian movement was slowly reframing how one saw and understood India.

As we know, the power of this re-mapping went far beyond the Subcontinent. In the U.S., Gandhi’s vision and practice inspired numerous key figures in the civil rights movement, including Howard Thurman, Bayard Rustin and James Lawson. A few years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where Gandhi’s ideas had been seminal, Martin Luther King Jr. journeyed to India to immerse himself even more fully in Gandhi’s vision of soul-force. Gandhi’s grandson Arun Gandhi tells the story that, during this trip, King visited a museum which had previously been a private home where Gandhi often stayed. During the tour, King became fascinated with the sparse room where Gandhi slept and abruptly announced that he would be spending the night there. The museum official showing him around was bewildered and resistant. No one was allowed to stay in this room, he told his guest; besides, there were no amenities for him here. But King insisted and, after the official made a call to his superiors in the Indian government, he prevailed.

Apparently, King was eager to make contact with the spirit of Gandhi as he prepared for the next phase of his work. Just before leaving India, Dr. King was interviewed on national radio, and he said:

Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.

Just as King seized the opportunity to grow closer to Gandhi during his Indian pilgrimage, those of us who were in Birmingham last week had a chance to grow a bit closer to him through Narayan Desai, as we prepare for the next phase of our work for a nonviolent world.

For decades, Desai has carried on Gandhi’s mission in many ways — such as collecting three million acres of land for the poor as part of Vinobe Bhave’s Land Gift movement, and organizing Gandhi’s Shanti Sena or “Peace Army” along the northern border when there were tensions with China — but, after being in his presence for a few days, it seemed to me that he has done this most profoundly by, over many decades, imbiding and sharing Gandhi’s spirit.

Memorial in Delhi to Ganhi's Salt March. By Tom Jordan, via Flickr.

What do Native Americans, Costa Ricans, Thai villagers, Hispanic students in U.S. colleges, Indian independence activists and Maasai women have in common? They’ve all organized long marches as part of campaigns for justice. Their campaigns’ very different choices about how to use the tactic raises strategic questions for us today. In some campaigns the long march was used primarily to heighten awareness, while in others it was to gain new allies. Sometimes it was used to launch other kinds of direct action. It has also been used at the end of a campaign, to escalate the pressure (just as a general strike is sometimes used). But what conditions make a long walk a truly effective tactic in a campaign, rather than just a chance to get some good exercise?

For me, that question is personal right now. On April 30, I will begin a 200-mile walk to the Pittsburgh, PA, headquarters of the PNC Bank to challenge its funding of mountaintop removal coal mining. The march is organized by the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team as part of its BLAM! campaign: Bank Like Appalachia Matters! For that reason — and with the help of the Global Nonviolent Action Database — I’ve been reviewing the ways in which long marches like this have been used by others, with varying degrees of success.

One of the most recent long walks was taken by four Miami College undocumented students who walked from Florida to the U.S. Capitol in support of the immigration reform proposed in the Dream Act. They called their 2010 march The Trail of Dreams. They not only ended up expanding support for the legislation, but also stimulated five students to add an additional walk of 250 miles from New York to Washington, timed to arrive at the same time as the walkers from Miami. Although the Dream Act was not passed, the action certainly increased the momentum behind it.

In 2009, Tanzanian police set fire to eight Maasai villages to evict 3,000 people who were living on traditional land that the government secretly leased to a wealthy businessman from the United Arab Emirates for his hunting and recreation. Widespread protests were stonewalled by the government. Thousands of women in the region then decided to march back to the village area in April 2010; despite arrests and blockades along the way, 1,500 women made it. The women had as allies a network of NGOs, three leaders of which were arrested as well.

Also in 2010, Costa Rican protesters marched from San Jose to Las Crucitas, over 100 miles, to overturn a government decision that permitted open-pit gold mining. The stakes were high: A Canadian subsidiary wanted to mine an estimated $1 billion gold deposit, even though it would remove 600 acres of yellow almond trees — the main food for the endangered green macaw. The march, along with an occupation, hunger strike and other actions, forced a Congressional vote to ban all new open-pit mining projects, and in a court case the protesters won a ban of the Las Crucitas mine.

Most U.S. activists have heard of the 1965 Selma–Montgomery march in Alabama that brought to a peak a national crisis that forced the U.S. federal government to pass a voting-rights law to allow African Americans to vote in the South. The strategy in the previous cases I’ve mentioned was to use the long march as a “wake-up call” to mobilize a broader campaign for their cause. But in the 1965 civil rights movement, the long march was placed strategically at the end of the campaign, to escalate the pressure when allies around the U.S. were already mobilized.

A variety of tactics had already been used before the march: Alabama blacks showing up at voter registration offices even though they wouldn’t be allowed to register; sit-ins and picketing of white-owned businesses; short marches (sometimes even escalating to night marches — a highly dangerous tactic in that context); and other tactics usually involving tense confrontations and thousands of arrests. The young black protester Jimmy Jackson was shot and killed by police, and the white Unitarian-Universalist minister James Reeb was beaten to death.

The rising storm of protest around the U.S. forced the Attorney General in Washington to begin working on a voting-rights bill. President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Dr. King to de-escalate in view of the increasing violence. King, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others in leadership believed that more pressure was needed. They planned a five-day march from Selma, which had been the center-point of the campaign, to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama — since voting laws are usually decided by the state government.

The march would be extremely dangerous, passing through rural areas “owned” by the white terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan. Three hundred trained people were allowed to go the whole way, with the understanding that thousands could join on a day-by-day basis. Eight thousand people left Selma for Montgomery on March 21. Demonstrators marched through rain, singing and chanting, arriving safely on March 25, although the Ku Klux Klan murdered one more protester as she drove back to Selma.

This successful campaign spotlights two important strategic decisions: one was to place the timing of the walk near the campaign’s end, as a functional alternative to the tactic chosen in some labor-based campaigns: the escalatory general strike. The other was to base the campaign in a location other than where the power holders sit (in Alabama, the state capital, and in the U.S., Washington, D.C.). Because empowerment was a fundamental theme for civil rights organizers, emphasizing the grassroots rather than the seat of official power — and forcing the power holders to deal with the results — was often seen as most effective.

The Selma–Montgomery march was directly influenced by knowledge of the March to the Sea in India led by Gandhi in 1930. In that case, the long walk initiated the entire campaign: the Salt Satyagraha. The 240-mile march began at Gandhi’s ashram and ended at the sea, where the marchers made salt in defiance of the British Empire’s monopoly of salt manufacture. While the country was already well-organized and probably didn’t need the march to mobilize, the leadership wanted drama to kick off the campaign. The drama was provided by suspense: would the British arrest Gandhi or not? It was a classic dilemma demonstration. If the British arrested Gandhi they would make him a martyr and prove correct his claim that their presence was repressive and illegitimate. If they didn’t arrest him, he, the “Great Soul,” would be the first to make salt and defy the British. Either way, the British were in trouble; the campaign continued on a mass scale for two years and paved the way for India’s independence.

In Thailand, a rural campaign to re-open the Pak Mun Dam, whose construction had turned out to be an economic and ecological disaster for the region, used the long walk in the middle of the campaign. In 2000 the Assembly of the Poor first did a series of protests that culminated in seizing the dam and building villages there, preventing dam workers from gaining access. Although they had studies by academics and the World Commission on Dams to back them up, they realized that their struggle needed more allies, including among the urban poor, working class and middle class. So 150 representatives of impacted villages participated in a long march of 400 miles to Bangkok to win more allies. Once there, they began a hunger strike, created a mock village outside the seat of government, and did a “die-in” to dramatize their outreach.

Their success in winning allies even among the middle class resulted in the government not only compromising substantially — opening the dam gates four months each year — but also effectively ended new dam construction in the country.

In 1978, 26 Native American activists walked 3,000 miles in what they called the Longest Walk – from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. Thousands of people joined them at various points along the way. Symbolically they were reversing the Trail of Tears that marked the history of so many tribes, ejected from their homes by white supremacy and made to walk westward. Practically, they were walking to catalyze a new level of energy among allies, against the threat in the U.S. Congress. Congress was considering a set of 11 bills that would — once again — injure indigenous people in the U.S. The Longest Walk succeeded in blocking the bills.

The Global Nonviolent Action Database contains more campaigns that used long walks. Many activists have used this method, turning it into a tactic — as militaries use the term — by attaching it to a very specific objective. Campaigners in various situations have placed the long walk in the beginning of a campaign, or the middle or the end, making it serve one or another of a variety of campaign needs. Its strategic flexibility makes it tempting.

A downside is that effectiveness requires a great deal of organization, and many protest groups simply don’t have the infrastructure to carry it off to get what they want. I’ve known long walks that were intended to build allies but didn’t because the walk attracted hyper-individualists with nothing better to do than string along with the walk and alienate the potential allies along the way. Depending on the culture, those who initiate a long walk need to have serious skills in organization and conflict resolution. Depending on the level of danger, they also need skills in training. I was once called in to assist a group whose long walk resulted in several injuries and deaths among the walkers; we worked hard to build the capacity of the organization in nonviolent self-defense. In future walks, no one was killed.

The long walk is not the only method that has advantages and challenges to implement — most do. However, campaigners who rely simply on marches and rallies risk death by boredom, which is one reason why one of the most effective recent campaigns I know of began with a solemn agreement never to hold a march or a rally! Maybe a long walk is for you. Maybe you’d like to join us on ours? Follow #greenwalk and #m16 on Twitter for more details.

Women working in a solar engineering lab at Barefoot College. Photo by Miki Kashtan.

One of the challenges that nonviolent campaigns face is how to engage those in power. Whether it be the British officials, as in Gandhi’s case, or the 1 percent, as for the Occupy movement—seeing and appealing to the humanity of those whose actions we oppose is central to practicing nonviolence.

While I have known this for years, it wasn’t until a recent trip to India, where I visited an unusual school created for the poor called Barefoot College, that I learned in full just how far this principle goes and began to wonder how we might practice it in a place like North America.

Based in the rural desert area of Rajasthan, one of the poorest parts of India, Barefoot College aims “to work with marginalized, exploited and impoverished rural poor, living on less than $1 a day, and lift them over the poverty line with dignity and self respect.” The bulk of what Barefoot College does is direct empowerment of communities through training these poor, rural people in critical skills that contribute immeasurably to their lives and reduce the massive conversion of self-reliant rural people into unskilled urban laborers. Barefoot College has a collection of programs and projects that include training in solar engineering; running night schools staffed by “barefoot teachers” for poor children who need to support their families during the day; making medical lab services available at a fraction of the cost of anywhere else; and perhaps a dozen others. Rural communities evaluate the relevance and applicability of projects to their specific conditions, participate in design, provide labor and skills, and form community management teams for all projects.

Women constructing parabolic solar cookers. Photo by Miki Kashtan.

As people become empowered, many learn about their legal rights. They are supported and encouraged by Barefoot College staff or alumni to persuade the government, as individuals or as groups, to ensure that laws are actually applied. The results are at times astounding, from installing new water pumps in poor villages to changing how minimum wage laws are applied. And even while Barefoot activists putting enormous pressure on the local and sometimes the national government to uphold laws, the state of Rajasthan provides a significant portion of the college’s budget.

The similarity with Gandhi’s commitment to and remarkable success at maintaining good relationships with the British despite vehement opposition to their practices and even to the Raj itself became immediately apparent.

Gandhi often spoke of the significance of the intimate knowledge of British culture he acquired while living in London. Knowing the British meant, in part, understanding their values and modes of operating. This made the appeal to their humanity much more tangible. Not knowing the British culture as well as Gandhi did, I can only guess what those were: a gentlemanly attitude, being civilized and reasonable, being seen as decent. By both being treated with dignity and being recognized as caring about dignity, the British were pushed into a moral corner in relation to their own values and invited into living in integrity with such values.

Barefoot College’s struggles also call upon a government’s moral legitimacy—in its own eyes as well as the citizens’—especially its claims to beneficence and to supporting the rule of law. As I understand it, India has many laws on its books that, if enforced, would create immense benefit for ordinary people. In a manner similar to Gandhi’s approach with the British, Barefoot College inspires and supports people to push the government or its agents into a moral corner in relation to practicing their own laws.

How might this approach be applied to current conditions in North America? We live in a place where the laws don’t seem to be serving the people, and where a professed commitment to support poor and marginalized people paints us in suspect political colors. We cannot create a moral corner for those in power by appealing to the values of care, generosity or interdependence, since these are not among their primary professed values. The entire practice relies on the fundamental assumption that everyone would want to act in integrity with their own professed values.

What are the values that are deeply rooted in U.S. culture that would be recognized as such by the so-called 1 percent? If we only see those in power through the lens of greed and desire for control, we lose our ability to have power with them to create change, and we fall back into the win-lose, either-or paradigm. When we call powerful people to their own deep values, however, we offer them a gift in return for their giving up significant elements of their power: the gift of their own full humanity in the form of their own ethical and spiritual consistency.

In attempting to create a moral corner for the 1 percent, I feel compelled to understand, deeply, their full humanity. What are the values that are core to their way of being in the world, values that they could be called on in order to act according to their own sense of integrity? The candidates which come to my mind immediately are independence, the freedom to act, self-responsibility and fairness. What other values can be added to this list? I’d like to believe that our movements for change could become that much more powerful if we strategize together about how to mobilize our resources to create a moral corner for the U.S. power elites around precisely those kinds of values.

Barefoot College has created a modern version of Gandhi’s spinning wheel, empowering village economies by training women (and some men) to be solar engineers who then built and installed solar units in 10,000 households in 574 villages. It has also updated Gandhi’s policies towards the British Raj by holding Indian governments to their own stated purposes. If we look to their example, we may learn how to adapt and translate Gandhi’s principles and practices to our own very different conditions.

For one thing, we can learn to use the moral language shared by the people in power, not just that of our own constituencies. Then, when we engage in nonviolent resistance campaigns, we can be in dialogue with the people in power about what practices, institutions, social structures and overall social arrangements can truly align with their core values as well as ours—for everyone’s benefit.

A protest sign at an anti-Gandhi rally in San Diego last year reveals the tensions that still exist between India's independence leader and minority groups.

When I first heard that Gandhi was viewed as “the enemy” by many Dalits in India (formerly called “untouchables”), I was dumbfounded. How and why could Gandhi be seen as having betrayed the Dalits when he opposed untouchability even in the face of active discomfort on the part of close associates?

Last month, while I was in India teaching Nonviolent Communication to 120 people, including a significant number of Dalits, I had the opportunity to explore this question further. During a session called “Gandhian Principles for Everyday Living,” a topic about which I have written at length, one of the 60 people present expressed anguish, pain and anger towards Gandhi. He was a Buddhist, like many other Dalits who had chosen to follow the Dalit leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in leaving behind centuries of mistreatment under Hinduism.

I dedicated much of the two-hour session to hearing and understanding his experience. I learned more about the power of deep empathic reflection than about the issue itself. With the presence and active attention of an entire group, he experienced a profound shift in his perception. In the end he said: “Perhaps it’s personal pain from my childhood and all the experiences I had that I just attached to Gandhi.” He didn’t actually know the details of what Gandhi was held accountable for. Nor did I.

After the training ended, I went on a personal pilgrimage to Gujarat, Gandhi’s home state and the birthplace of the Salt March. I met with the editor of a Gandhian journal in Gujarati, who told me that he believed Dr. Ambedkar saw things more accurately than Gandhi, and that his followers have something to teach the Gandhians. Slowly, the details emerged.

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar

The bitter dispute originated in the 1930s, when Gandhi mounted a “fast-unto-death” in response to a British proposal, based on Ambedkar’s recommendations, to award the “depressed classes” (the Dalits) a separate electorate in the Indian parliament. Frantic negotiations under pressure of saving Gandhi’s life resulted in the Poona Pact which substituted a guaranteed number of seats in the parliament for the separate electorate. Although the pact was signed by Ambedkar, his followers, and many of Gandhi’s followers, the complex provisions elaborated in it appeared to many to deny the Dalits any real access to power.

Despite what Ambedkar said at the time to Gandhi and others, he later said he signed under immense pressure and claimed that Gandhi was actually against equality for the Dalits. Ambedkar suggested in a 1955 interview that Gandhi didn’t truly “deserve” the title of Mahatma (great soul). And yet, a close look at Gandhi’s own words leads me to conclude that his position was based on a deep commitment to fully eradicating untouchability from Hinduism.

I have no difficulty understanding and even sympathizing with Gandhi’s reasoning. Gandhi didn’t see political solutions per se as fundamental and lasting. He sought, instead, moral and spiritual paths. He called on Hindus to atone for and redeem the sin of untouchability. He was concerned that being politically separated from the issue would leave Hindus without the motivation to create the necessary change of heart. He believed that his willingness to die would awaken Hindus to the poison of untouchability. Indeed, following his great fast, scores of communities removed barriers to “untouchables” attending temples and drinking water and eating with others.

Nonetheless, I see Gandhi as having made a serious mistake in pressing the point, and am not surprised that his strong opposition to granting rights to a despised minority has been seen as lack of interest in their equality and empowerment.

Knowing people’s dedication to him, Gandhi used the moral force of his person to call on people to live up to a vision that was not yet possible. In other instances, he accepted purely political and less-than-ideal solutions to work with practical realities. This is what Ambedkar was proposing, and what the Civil Rights movement in the US was able to press for: despite a lack of true change of heart, legal-political solutions can make a tangible difference in the lived experience of disadvantaged groups. The vision of a united Hindu society was so dear to Gandhi that he wasn’t willing to accept a partial solution. This error is one of the reasons why Gandhi ultimately failed. The moral force of a person is not sustainable. The partial gains made at the time of his fast were short lived.

Once Gandhi died, all that remained was what people had internalized and integrated. A true change of heart happened only to a few. The legacy of separation, endemic to most of our human cultures, took hold again, and violence swept the country. Instead of the unity and transformation Gandhi sought, and the empowerment and freedom that Ambedkar stood for, India remains saddled with the weight of untouchability, which is still widely
practiced despite being proscribed since 1950, and the Dalit community is splintered into several religions and still separate from the rest of Hindu society. As the Dalit Freedom Network tells us “In 70% of India’s villages…non-Dalits will not eat or drink with Dalits” who also “constitute the largest number of people categorized as victims of human trafficking and human enslavement in any single nation on earth.”

I struggle with similar dilemmas today, albeit with far smaller ramifications. Hardly anything possible in the present would ever align sufficiently with my large vision for me to support it. I nonetheless know that to remain relevant and respected I need to balance vision with practical reality.

No easy answers, ever. Working for a true change of heart may well be an unaffordable luxury when urgent action is required, such as when global planetary resources as well as social, political, and economic institutions are collapsing. And yet, no matter the urgency, if we want to create sustainable long-term change and establish relationships, structures, and systems that serve all life, we need to augment political and structural arrangements with ongoing efforts to transform how we approach social change work. Gandhi’s fundamental lessons still stand. There is no substitute for an inclusive vision and actions based on love.

The demand was resoundingly clear: “We want them back alive.”

During Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the military government assassinated thousands of citizens, a group of determined women who had lost their sons and daughters to this tsunami of political repression stood up. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did what few others were willing to: publicly defy this state-sponsored reign of terror by breaking the silence and challenging the chilling paralysis that kept it stolidly in place. They did this by using the most powerful symbol at their disposal, their own vulnerable bodies, as they marched over and over again for years at great risk in front of the presidential palace with their implacable message: “You took them away alive—we want them returned alive.”

Governments quite easily take life. No government, however, has yet discovered how to return it.

The mothers named this state-sponsored killing “assassinations” and the killers “assassins.” The murders were politically motivated, carried out in secret, and covered up. In addition, they bore another important connotation of “assassination”: prominence. To their mothers, these women and men were as eminent and distinguished as any public figure—and only grew more so in death.

This immense violence is unspeakable. This is true not only because words fail to convey the horror of this particular case of terrorism, but also in the sense that theologian and activist James W. Douglass (drawing on the American monk Thomas Merton’s notion of The Unspeakable) means: “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe… a systemic evil that defies speech.”

Since the mid-1990s, Douglass has peered clearly into the void of The Unspeakable by making a protracted study of assassination and its meaning. His raft of books on the power of nonviolent action that preceded this focus—including Resistance and Contemplation and The Nonviolent Coming of God— prepared him to unearth the place of premeditated, targeted killing in the maintenance of the state; in the reinforcement of a culture rooted in the saving power of violence; and (as Douglass brilliantly and soberly illuminates) in the attempt by systems of domination to suppress and extinguish the nonviolent option.  For fifteen years he has been engaged in a long-term research and publishing project focused on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy.

The first book that appeared was JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. This carefully researched study, published in 2008, tracks President Kennedy’s gradual shift from a traditional Cold Warrior to a covert peacemaker who was engaging with his putative enemies to defuse volatile international crises and to attempt to build a more enduring peace on the major fronts of his day, including Vietnam, Berlin, Indonesia, Cuba, and the barreling nuclear arms race. Douglass assembles convincing evidence that Kennedy was assassinated because of this pursuit of the nonviolent alternative.

Before completing his next projects on King and Malcolm X, though, Douglass began researching the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. As he explained in a 2011 talk at Marquette University, it increasingly became evident to him that what he was discovering about Gandhi’s assassination could shed light on the dynamics of the assassinations that took place in the U.S. in the 1960s.

This week—as we marked the sixty-fourth anniversary of Gandhi’s death on January 30—Douglass published the fruit of this research: Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth (Orbis Books). This summary highlights Douglass’s findings:

While researching [the Kennedy assassination], Douglass learned from Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Indian liberation leader, that his grandfather had been killed by a conspiracy involving powerful nationalist forces within the Indian government—not a lone gunman. This led to Douglass’s rigorously investigating thousands of documents on Gandhi’s 1948 murder. He now provides readers with a slim, elegant volume containing explosive insight into who conspired to assassinate the father of modern nonviolence and why. “Gandhi’s murder, followed by the repression of its truth,” writes Douglass, “forms a paradigm of killing and deceitful cover-up that U.S. citizens would soon have to confront in our own government.” No other contemporary writer is exposing the mechanics of assassination as methodically and bravely as Douglass. But because he is a Catholic independent scholar and activist most well-known for his writings on nonviolence and suffering, this book is more than a fresh look at historical circumstances: it’s spiritual spelunking into the depravity of unchecked political power.

Douglass has devoted his life to illuminating the potential of nonviolent action to create options in a world caught in a web of violent and unjust forces—especially by engaging with, having faith in, and loving the enemy. He has done this through his writing, but even more importantly, he has done this by pursuing his own Gandhian experiments with truth. Here are two examples.

In 1979 Douglass, Rosemary Powers and John Clark engaged in nonviolent action at Naval Submarine Base Bangor, the Pacific homeport for the U.S. Navy’s Trident submarine fleet in Washington State. They scrambled over a security fence with the hope of making their way to the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC), a nuclear weapons storage area at the center of the base. As Douglass wrote in “Pilgrimage to Ground Zero” in Sojourners magazine (March 1980):

Our plan was to walk through Bangor’s woods, crossing six roads patrolled by naval security, and eventually climb over SWFPAC’s two high security fences in order to pray at “the physical site of an evil we all refuse to see, and thus refuse to take responsibility for”—as we put it in our advance leaflet to the Marines, passed out at the base three weeks earlier.

In the course of our pilgrimage to SWFPAC we spent 12 hours undetected on the base, continuously pursued by helicopters, civilian security guards, the Naval Intelligence Service, and hundreds of Marines as we climbed fences and crawled through the brush… We were finally arrested near a conventional weapons site just short of the high-security fences of SWFPAC.

In meditating on this anti-nuclear pilgrimage, Douglass noted the urgency of finding a way to “break the hypnotic spell nuclear weapons have over America.” He explained that:

After reflecting on the absurdity of the situation—what does one do in the presence of an H-bomb?—we decided that the only thing we could do was to go to SWFPAC, in a pilgrimage to that point of responsibility. Once there, we could only ask God’s forgiveness and mercy for our responsibility in creating such weapons, and pray for the power to be transformed in our collective conscience to a responsible, loving people capable of disarmament.

The following year—on January 6, 1980, the Feast of the Epiphany—Douglass and Clark again made their way inside the base. After not being detected on the grounds of the 7,000 acre facility the first day, they spent an all-night vigil in the woods in preparation for the next day’s events:

The next morning we used stepping stools and rug remnants to climb over the 12 foot-high double security fences enclosing SWFPAC… We walked alone and unimpeded to the first nuclear bunker. It was like a tomb—huge sliding concrete slabs shut under a small mountain of earth. We stood in silence for several minutes on the concrete entry, joined hands, and said aloud the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then we walked on to the next bunker, and prayed there in the same way. We continued our nuclear Stations of the Cross for six bunkers before we were arrested.

The spirit of this Gandhian nonviolence is also conveyed in the text of the leaflet distributed to the Marines at the base beforehand:

We know that it is your responsibility to guard these nuclear sites. We ask you to consider carefully in advance our attempt to join you there. We know that by government regulations you are “authorized to use deadly force” in protecting nuclear weapons. Brothers, we ask instead that you lay down your arms, for the sake of all our lives. We know that you are good people, and that you love and respect life.

Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—whose courageous vulnerability contributed significantly to the nonviolent struggle for the eventual restoration of democracy in Argentina—James W. Douglass in these and many other actions has communicated his hope for profound social transformation in his own vulnerable body. And like Gandhi—whose vision and embodiment of soul-force continues to challenge and change our world—his hope has been enduringly vested in a transformed relationship with the enemy.

In this time of a growing national security state which increasingly depends on the proliferation of “targeted killings”—one of the faces of The Unspeakable today—may each of us be inspired by Douglass’s words and deeds to take nonviolent action to transform our lives and our world.

Martin Luther King, Jr. beside a picture of Gandhi. © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

How does one learn nonviolent resistance? The same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did—by study, reading and interrogating seasoned tutors. King would eventually become the person most responsible for advancing and popularizing Gandhi’s ideas in the United States, by persuading black Americans to adapt the strategies used against British imperialism in India to their own struggles. Yet he was not the first to bring this knowledge from the subcontinent.

By the 1930s and 1940s, via ocean voyages and propeller airplanes, a constant flow of prominent black leaders were traveling to India. College presidents, professors, pastors and journalists journeyed to India to meet Gandhi and study how to forge mass struggle with nonviolent means. Returning to the United States, they wrote articles, preached, lectured and passed key documents from hand to hand for study by other black leaders. Historian Sudarshan Kapur has shown that the ideas of Gandhi were moving vigorously from India to the United States at that time, and the African American news media reported on the Indian independence struggle. Leaders in the black community talked about a “black Gandhi” for the United States. One woman called it “raising up a prophet,” which Kapur used as the title of his book.

While a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, King was intrigued by reading Thoreau and Gandhi, yet had not actually studied Gandhi in depth. A friend, J. Pius Barbour, remembered the young seminarian arguing on behalf of Gandhian methods with a reckoning based on arithmetic—that any minority would be outnumbered if it turned to a policy of violence—rather than on principle.

The more that King read Gandhi, though, the less he doubted the validity of a philosophy based on “Love,” which in turn was central to his preparation for the Christian ministry. “As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi,” he later wrote, “my skepticism concerning the power of Love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.” His serious contemplation of Gandhi’s fundamental approaches for organizing a movement began in Montgomery, soon after becoming pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in April of 1954.

When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a public bus to a white man on December 1, 1955, JoAnn Robinson, a leader in the Women’s Political Council, worked through the night to organize an action of mass economic noncooperation. King was unanimously elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which would sustain the boycott of city buses.

With the start of the Montgomery boycott, a number of activists, pacifists, reformers, radical Christians and socialists arrived in town. Elated by King, they believed that he could take the fight for justice to a new order of magnitude unlike anything the United States had seen since the abolition of slavery. Among them was 44-year-old Bayard Rustin, 17 years King’s senior, who went on to help King build the Montgomery boycott into a mature campaign. The War Resisters League let Rustin work for King full-time for this assignment.

The black community in Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, was armed, and there was concern that it could turn to violence in the struggle. Rustin was worried that King himself might falter without deeper foundations. Plying him with books at night, he helped him to analyze Gandhi, and was the first tutor to teach King the essentials of nonviolent struggle systematically.

The boycott’s success—recognized when the Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956, that local laws obliging segregation on buses were unconstitutional—raised hopes for comparable abolition of other discriminatory practices in the South. That the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s would be based on Gandhian strategic nonviolent action partly resulted from the success of the Alabama city’s exquisitely unified black community. “While the Montgomery boycott was going on,” King said, “India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

In February 1957, at Oberlin College in Ohio, King met a black Methodist minister named James M. Lawson, Jr. Lawson had served 13 months in U.S. federal prison for refusing to cooperate with conscription during the Korean War. While locked up, the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church successfully petitioned the court for Lawson to be handed over to them. They assigned him to teach at Hislop College in Nagpur, India. Arriving there four years after Gandhi’s death, he spent the next three years teaching. He also met numerous individuals who had worked with Gandhi and learned of the Indian campaigns firsthand from participants. King was impressed by Lawson’s background and experience, especially considering they were both just 28 years old. He asked Lawson not to wait to finish his studies to come South: “Come now! You’re badly needed. We don’t have anyone like you!” As I have documented elsewhere, Lawson became a human bridge, connecting knowledge from India to the fledgling U.S. civil rights movement and contemporary struggles.

James Lawson and Martin Luther King during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Photo by Jack E. Cantrell.

After Lawson met King in 1957, he contacted A. J. Muste, a foremost Christian pacifist then still at the helm of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Muste offered Lawson the position of southern field secretary of FOR, and by January 1958, Lawson was settled in Nashville. Upon arrival, he discovered that the Reverend Glenn Smiley, another of King’s tutors and national field director of FOR, had arranged for Lawson to conduct a full schedule of workshops—including one arranged for early that year at the first annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Columbia, South Carolina. There, King enthusiastically introduced Lawson. “Be back promptly at 2:00 p.m.,” he declared, “for Brother Lawson’s workshop on nonviolence!” Before the agreed time, King seated himself in the first pew, waiting attentively for the three-hour session to start. Lawson once recalled in an interview with me:

Martin did that at every SCLC meeting as long as he lived. He would ask me to conduct an afternoon workshop, usually two or three hours, and he would arrange for it to be “at-large” so that everyone could attend, with nothing else to compete. He put it on the schedule himself.  A few minutes early, he would show up and sit alone, as an example, in the front row.

In Nashville, throughout the autumn of 1959, Lawson led weekly Monday-evening meetings in which he and interested students analyzed the theories and techniques that he had encountered in India. His workshops scrutinized the Bible, and writings of Gandhi, King and Thoreau. They practiced test-cases, including small sit-ins. Lawson’s workshops lasted for several months before news broke on February 1, 1960, of the Greensboro sit-ins. Hearing of the Greensboro actions, seventy-five Nashville students followed suit, creating the largest, most disciplined and influential of the 1960 sit-in campaigns. In working with Lawson—who was always calm and self-effacing—the Nashville students were not only being trained by one of King’s own instructors, but they were benefitting from direct acquaintance with Gandhi’s experiments. The sit-ins would give the overall movement its regional reach, and the Nashville students would become a cornerstone of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which I was a part.

In commemorating Dr. King’s birthday, it is worth remembering that everyone can learn nonviolent action as he did. King may not have invented the nonviolent strategies that he advanced, but he was an apt student, and his understanding of them would in the decades to come encourage other movements on the world stage. He became one of history’s most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence. How he himself learned the theory and practice of civil resistance is a reminder to each of us that these methods are neither intuitive nor spontaneous; they’re a system of logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.

If 2011 was the year of the protester, 2012 may prove to be the year of nonviolence. What’s the difference? It’s as great as between yes and no. A crucial awakening that envelopes humanity’s collective struggle for justice, peace and democracy is happening; it is an awakening that clarifies the circumstances we embrace with a yes and those by which we respond with a vehement no. Like many I know, I often teeter between despair and hope–stuck in a kind of uncomfortable tension resembling Wendell Berry’s poetic instruction to “be joyful though you have considered all the facts” –grasping for some measure of sanity to make sense of all that is happening.

It is tempting to succumb to despair, what with the onslaught of major media coverage telling us all the bad news, dismissing the promising news, and ignoring the good news. Consider the challenges: the unraveling violence of the Egyptian revolution, the 5,000 killed in Syria, climate change and the instability and disasters brought by extreme weather patterns and an ill-equipped global populace with inadequate leadership, the threat of random violence and terrorist activity–Norway, Belgium, India, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq–and state and cultural violence against immigrants, women, refugees, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and people of color. So where is the hope? Well, in 2011, the fires of our hope were stoked by the global protest movements–the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street–of millions of people rising up to say: كفاية …Basta…Enough!
Resistance was in the streets and occupations in city squares. A resounding “no” echoed around the world–what Bernard Harcourt has perceptively termed “political disobedience”–signifying contempt, dissatisfaction, and rejection of entrenched governments and status quo economics. Dictators were ousted in Egypt and Tunisia. Revolutionary fervor was sparked by nonviolent action in Libya, Syria and Yemen. South Korean activists are poised to possibly shutter the building of a controversial US naval base with profound geopolitical implications. Afghan youth are getting organized–an incredible feat considering all the challenges they face. Palestinian nonviolent resistance and the Free Gaza movement is growing as are Israeli protests for social justice. In the US, activists and organizers in Wisconsin and Ohio occupied their state capitals to protest budget cuts and GOP anti-unionism. Undocumented students–DREAMers–took it to the streets and Senators’ offices. Environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, students and citizens staged sit-ins at the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline–whose fate is still TBD but the resistance is growing. And then there was Occupy Wall Street. The movement propelled American activism back into public purview and is proving to be the era where a generation of young people–equipped with the tools, knowledge and experience of the civil rights and anti-war generations–are cutting their teeth in nonviolent social change. We are telling ourselves that there is reason to hope because we incarnate it.

The protests of 2011 are the harbinger of what we’ve already known–what we’ve been waiting and working for–that neoliberalism’s carte blanche as signed by the Washington Consensus is on the way out. The days of political regimes that are not truly democratic (and, apparently, equitable) are–at the very least in ideological terms–numbered. In the 00s, there was an explosion of social commentary on globalization: Thomas Freidman, Naomi Klein, Paul Hawken, Vandana Shiva. Paul Kingsnorth, a British journalist, penned a book whose title has stayed with me: One No, Many Yeses. The catchy, chant-like title offers a simple way to reflect on the the historical moment we are experiencing. As symbolized by Time‘s “Person of the Year,” there is a global “no!” to anti-democratic governments and unfettered capitalism. But at the same time, that singular no of protest is united by the multitude of “yeses” whose global resonance signifies the arrival of a comprehensive vision of nonviolence.

This yes to nonviolence signals the awakening consciousness that summarily connects us to that which is most important in our lives and our communities: the desire to be connected, to live without fear, to be healthy and be in healthy relationships, to be free to have self-determining and mutually-supporting ways of living, working, parenting, learning, teaching, creating, and, yes, even dying. Never before have we witnessed the acute, raw, powerful desire for life in such a way that so many diverse peoples are willingly struggling for that way of being.

Nonviolence–however broadly we choose to define it, whether that be strategically, principally, as a communication technique, as a tactic, as a religious commitment, as a process–has inspired hope, awakened creativity, and substantially changed, once again, the world. Gandhi’s term, “satyagraha,” contains a meaning so varied yet concrete and so distinct yet common that “nonviolence” left lacking. Satyagraha is means and ends. It is an effective tactic of protest, a viable social program and an eternal, utopian hope. The nonviolence in 2012 is shoving the nonviolence of protest into the “constructive program” that rejects the there-is-no-alternative to global capitalism. The nonviolence of 2012 will continue to hold up the alternatives to violence, oppression, and injustice by being the vision it seeks. Democratic participation, consensus-based decision-making, decentralized leadership models, shared responsibility, and economics of common wealth and individual affirmation of uniqueness are being experimented with across the world in thousands of different contexts–and with success! “General assembly” being a household word, the lack of charismatic leadership and establishment confusion over what protesters demand all confirm that nonviolence is more than just protest.

Despairingly, I don’t have much hope in protest alone any more; many of us do not. The record-breaking millions who protested the 2003 Iraq War and the continued political impotence on climate change–like in Copenhagen, 2009, and Durban, 2011–show that the “system” is incapable of responding to genuine democratic sentiments. But the hope of nonviolence, besides having some ability to shake the system into response, is in its birthing new paradigms that are more about praxis and participation than they are about ideology. Through these protests, power is in the process of being fundamentally redefined as something to be shared. Political systems and social relationships–having been more or less stagnant since political liberalism first appeared on the Enlightenment scene and later re-affirmed post-Cold War–are showing early signs of social evolution, an indicator that we are not yet at the end of history. Nonviolence, then, as a common denominator in politics, economics, relationships, and resistance movements can be a guiding–and deciding–force for local and global solutions that are democratically-directed and people-powered. I have hope in 2012!

Jason Ahmadi of the War Resisters League carries a sign with a quotation from Gandhi on the first day of Occupy Wall Street, September 17.

At Religion Dispatches, Ira Chernus (whom I interviewed here a few years ago) ably responds to Ian Diaz’s New York Times op-ed, which argues that Gandhi would call for disbanding the Occupy movement:

[T]he Mahatma would have been amazed at the conclusion Desai draws: Dismantle the occupations and fan out to establish “community centers, schools, shelters, charities” everywhere. That’s a subtle distortion of Gandhi’s program of “constructive work.” It had nothing to do with charity and everything to do with creating alternative economic and social institutions while actively resisting the dominant, dominating institutions.

Where better to start brainstorming and experimenting for a new society than in Zuccotti Park and the dozens of other urban spaces where occupiers are building real 24/7 communities? Split those communities up into little teams of volunteers and their creative energy would soon be gone, which is no way to fulfill our responsibility to transform a society that is unjust in so many ways.

Chernus goes on to reply to Desai point by point—very much worth reading. But the whole question seems odd to me. This is of course a whole sub-genre in the debates about the Occupy movement, that of asking what this or that historical figure would do if suddenly transported to the present. Would Jesus occupy? Would the Founding Fathers? How about Rosa Parks? The trouble is, the reason these people changed the world is that they responded to their circumstances creatively, beyond a simple yes or no. What they did to confront the challenges of their time pushed beyond the either-or that other people were stuck in. If they lived in our time, they’d probably surprise us too.

On Saturday night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, just before the third act of Faust began, a man began yelling from the audience, “Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Wall Street!” It had neither the rhythm of a chant nor the participatory quality of the usual “mic check” that has been used to disrupt so much lately, interrupting public figures including Michele Bachmann, Scott Walker, and Barack Obama. (Maybe having the quorum for a mic check would have cost too many tickets.) It was first received with a boo from someone on the opposite side of the theater, but that was quickly drowned out by a round of applause—something like what a singer might receive at curtain call for a decent performance in a supporting role. The protester was carried away by the NYPD.

Presumably this comes as part of Occupy Lincoln Center, which on December 1 held a protest attended by Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson. That night, the Met performed Glass’s opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha. One sign read, according to the LA Times, “Gandhi would be pepper sprayed.” Like the other Occupy actions under the umbrella of Occupy Museums, these protests oppose “cultural institutions that serve the nation’s wealthiest citizens at the expense of the vast majority.” (It doesn’t help that people aren’t being allowed to protest on Lincoln Center’s plaza—apparently, it’s Koch-Blocked. Or that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s media is one of Lincoln Center’s chief funders.)

More from Occupy Museums:

We believe that institutions promoting a cult of celebrity, unfair labor practices, extreme commodification of art, and which trivialize or glamorize political struggle and protest are only the logical outcome of an entire culture stolen from the people by the 1%. We point to the visual promotion of corporate or private sponsorship seemingly without limit—as if this small group, not the public, truly own our cultural commons.

Some people at the December 1 protest reportedly complained about the high ticket prices at the opera; to that, Seth Colter Wells at The Awl responds well:

[A]t the Met, the most expensive opera tickets are indeed expensive, but you can stand behind the orchestra section—or even sit at the upper reaches of the house—for less than the cost of an IMAX showing at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 multiplex up the road. This persistent fiction of “elitism,” and contemporary classical music’s supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer you not ever cost-compare a Family Circle seat to Satyagraha alongisde a 3D screening of Transformers 3. … [W]e can take a page from Adbusters‘ “every dollar spent is a vote” ethos and decide what do with the $20 bills that we do control.

It’s also worth mentioning the $20-25 rush tickets for orchestra seats, or the Met’s “Live in HD” program. Still, those programs depend heavily on 1-percenter donors, so point taken: there needs to be more public support for the arts.

There’s a better point these protests call us to consider, though: are we really listening to the operas themselves?

Both Satyagraha and Faust carry quite radical messages. Glass’ work confronts us with the politics and spirituality of Gandhi’s life. When this production of Satyagraha first came to New York in 2008, as I wrote back then, the Met even put on a publicity blitz with messages on posters like “Could an opera make us stand up for truth?” and “Could an opera make us warriors for peace?” Reasonable questions. As usual, though, audiences attended, reviews came and went, life went on. It was just marketing, after all.

The new production of Faust—an opera composed in mid-19th century France—has a polemic of its own. Director Des McAnuff sets it during World War II, with Faust as a nuclear scientist. Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that would fall on Japan, dangle overhead behind him. It’s a conceit that works remarkably well with the libretto and is remarkably damning—literally, to hell—for a country that for more than a half century has built its quest for global dominance on possessing enough nuclear weapons to bring about the end of the world at will. (The Met has previously taken on similar issues with performances of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic.)

Why, then, are these operas not treated as revolutionary? Why are they not causing their establishmentarian funders to stand up (“for truth”), leave, and take their money with them? Probably the simplest answer is that the productions enjoy the benefit of what’s now quite distant hindsight: it’s easy enough to pretend that the empire Gandhi opposed and the Promethean dawn of the nuclear age are past. Of course they’re not. But they’ve now taken ostensibly different forms, which somehow makes it conveniently optional to translate these operas’ implications to the circumstances of the present.

The Occupy presence, for all its rough edges, might at least lend the performances of works such as these the urgency they deserve. This is not polite social commentary, the protesters say—this is a crisis. This is our crisis. Listen harder.

The day after Mothers’ Day, May 14, 1961, the front-page picture of a Greyhound bus engulfed in flames galvanized the American public. It was Anniston, Alabama, and Klansmen had fully intended to burn the freedom riders alive. For the first time many Americans realized the full depth of hatred faced by black southerners—and those who came to help them.

Right now two videos may be having a similar effect. They show shockingly savage attacks on students by the police; at Berkeley, we see protesting students with linked arms being jabbed and beaten by police “batons” (as poet laureate Robert Hass pointed out, this is not an orchestra and those are not batons—they’re clubs). At Davis it’s a line of seated, peaceful students being casually doused with pepper spray by an apparently impassive police officer.

If the salutary shock of this confrontation were to wake up the public as the photo of the burning bus succeeded in doing in 1961, what might they learn? I think, three things.

1. This is just the surface of a much bigger problem. As I write, the U.S. Senate is getting ready to debate, and hopefully reject, S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which would give all future Presidents the right to do what President Obama has already done: to assassinate American citizens without trial, anywhere—including on American soil. This bill, which was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing, is only the latest step in the noose of militarization that has been tightening around our freedoms (or our very lives) since 9/11. In an article entitled “SWAT Teams, Flash-Bang Grenades, Shooting the Family Pet: The Shocking Outcomes of Police Militarization in the War on Drugs” that appeared on Alternet recently it was pointed out that there are more than 50,000 police paramilitary raids in the US each year—more than 130 every day, mostly for prosecution of drug warrants. The first lesson an awakened public should draw from the scenes at Berkeley and Davis is really that there’s no such thing as “appropriate” violence that can be contained in a corner and not spill out where we don’t want it—or more accurately, where we are forced to recognize what it really is.

2. And the next lesson is similar to the first, for an illusion has been spun around the wonder-weapons of modern warfare: pilotless drones. In a highly significant disclosure by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, drones, designed to allow us to kill “others” without endangering ourselves, are already in use for border surveillance, and from there the next step has already been taken: a Texas Police Department recently acquired a drone with taser capability. Others have submitted their requests across the country. Violence that we hurl at others—and make no mistake, the cowardly aspect of drones means that they are a form of violence, possibly one of the worst, in Gandhi’s view—comes back. As the Buddha said, to hate another is to throw sand up in the air: it must come back upon the thrower.

But not all the lessons of the photos are negative. One is downright inspiring.

3. When I heard from Mica and Hayden, two of our Metta volunteers, how they and the other students stood up to shockingly brutal treatment without retaliating, I immediately thought of that highpoint of modern nonviolence, the “raid” on the Dharsana salt pans in Gujarat, India on May 21, 1930. That event, where Satyagrahis walked resolutely into certain beatings for hours together without retaliating, marked the end of British control in India—arguably the end of colonialism in its classic, overt form.

Since then an even more dramatic scene has unfolded at Davis, where a large group of students were on the verge of a violent confrontation with a smaller (doubtless frightened) line of police. The police were menacing the students with shotguns armed with another sub-lethal type of ammunition, when one of them shouted “mic check” and proceeded to have them all in unison say to the police that they were giving them “a moment of peace” in which to leave. And the police left!

So far, the students say they are using nonviolence (or at least that’s what’s reported in the press) because it gives them “the moral high ground.” In other words, it’s a winning strategy. If—no, when—they take the next step and realize that nonviolence is the only force that rehumanizes as it works, that can permanently reverse militarism and not just give it another form, I believe nothing will be able to stop them.

The freedom riders delegitimated racism; perhaps this generation, with their creativity and their courage, will delegitimate violence itself.