Last Friday night, in a conversation with a longtime Occupy Wall Street organizer while walking (and skipping) toward an elusive Spokes Council meeting, we got to talking about violence. We’d done so before, always enjoyably; he’s a nimble conversationalist and well-dressed to boot. He’s also one of those in the movement who declares his openness to violent tactics if necessary. To him, the violence of state oppression ultimately justifies whatever means it might take to remove it. Revolutionary violence on the part of the oppressed is not really violence at all. Breaking windows is not violence. Nor, presumably, is a well-placed bomb.
As he sees it, a commitment to nonviolence only constrains a movement, preventing it from doing any meaningful resistance (despite the fact that Occupy Wall Street has effectively made just such a commitment). It was in explaining this that he reminded me of how, at Berkeley, the authorities described protesters locking arms as violent. If they can say that, he concluded, then nonviolence is by definition tantamount to passivity.
True—but only if we’re willing to accept the kind of wordplay that somehow passes muster at Berkeley.
Here’s some of the statement from UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau following an incident of police clubbing protesters:
It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.
We regret that, given the instruction to take down tents and prevent encampment, the police were forced to use their batons to enforce the policy.
Added the university police force’s Captain Margo Bennett: “The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence.” (H/t Rei Terada’s thoughtful analysis.)
Wrong and wrong. The damage of these statements is twofold. Firstly, they ask us to believe that it is violent to link arms willfully with another willing person, harming no one and no thing. Really? The reasoning appears to be that posing any obstruction to the work of the police is doing violence. Who could possibly believe that, short of a totalitarian? Secondly, by defining violence this way, Bennett and Birgeneau invite others to otherwise redefine it according to their own particular theory of how society should be arranged.
I hope we know better. There’s no need to let anyone—Bennett and Birgeneau, or Molotov-throwing activists—tell us that violence constitutes something other than the obvious. We know what violence is; we know what it means to be peaceful. Violence is harming other people—physically or otherwise—and being peaceful is not.
A simple definition for nonviolent resistance is simply to do something one should be doing (even if you’re told not to) or to not do something you shouldn’t be doing (even if you’re told you must). It’s using means worthy of the ends you want to achieve, acting in accordance with the world you want to create. Once you reach your goal, after all, it’s really hard to do away with the means that got you there. The fact that my conversation at Occupy Wall Street happened on Armistice Day should’ve been a hint: wars don’t end war, they breed more. Locking arms with one’s comrades, however, looks more like a glimpse of utopia.
Among the most eloquent defenses of nonviolence in the Occupy movement has been Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House,” which appears in the second n+1 gazette and online at ZNet. She makes much the same argument I just have, as well as speaking out against the “authoritarianism” of a violent minority within a movement. She also offers an eloquent passage on the question of property damage:
I want to be clear that property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break her. It’s violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the animate.
Quietly eradicating experimental GMO crops or pulling up mining claim stakes is generally like the firefighter. Breaking windows during a big demonstration is more like the husband. I saw the windows of a Starbucks and a Niketown broken in downtown Seattle after nonviolent direct action had shut the central city and the World Trade Organization ministerial down. I saw scared-looking workers and knew that the CEOs and shareholders were not going to face that turbulence and they sure were not going to be the ones to clean it up. Economically it meant nothing to them.
Violence, terror, destruction—these are “the master’s tools,” she writes. “The master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house. And they sure won’t build a better house.”
Nor is nonviolence the preserve of the privileged. If this past century has taught us anything, it is the power of nonviolence in the hands of oppressed people. Largely nonviolent uprisings—from India to Serbia to the Philippines to Tunisia—prevailed over ruthless regimes. Some of the poorest, most powerless people in the world built movements capable of dispatching dictators and expelling empires. This isn’t to say that one should condemn those who use violence in self-defense and out of desperation. But it does mean that, if one wants to help them, there are better things to offer than a gun.
When Birgeneau equates locking arms with violence, he is trying to justify his own violence, which he deemed necessary for the sake of his university. In the process, though, trading common sense for the semblance of a clean conscience, he invites others to claim that acts of violence are actually otherwise.
So glad you highlighted Rebecca Solnit’s recent piece. I thought it was one of the best arguments against “diversity of tactics” yet. I liked this part as well:
Yes! Though of course, as you know and as I’ve argued (as has Philippe Duhamel), I think the term “diversity of tactics” can be meaningful rescued in a nonviolent context.
I’m just flabbergasted that someone, much less a university head, would have the audacity to claim that sitting down with your arms locked in place is an act of violence. Talk about Orwellian.
a tremendous amount addiitional information with this kind of issue online on a website, observe.
People use a variety of mental strategies to avoid feeling bad when they commit acts of violence or harm others. Psychologist Albert Bandura listed a number of these strategies, which he referred to as “moral disengagement.” I’ve written a post on my blog about moral disengagement. You can read it at:
http://www.lovemyenemy.com/2011/11/07/moral-disengagement/
Any discussion of “violence” has to include a clear definition of what constitutes violence – otherwise you end up in nonsensical discussions like those with the UC Berkeley Chancellor. For me violence is to do harm to “living” beings. This can be either physical force, psychological or the denial of things essential to their well-being, i.e. food, water, shelter, medical care, community, a right livelihood, freedom or right to self-governance etc.
The use of violence vs nonviolence is a fundamental tactical, strategic and moral issue at the heart of any true revolution (transformative change that builds the new rather than tears down or reforms the old). The commitment to nonviolence is perhaps the primary means for establishing solidarity in movements like Occupy Together. The use of violence or nonviolence as the primary/exclusive means for resolving conflict is the defining moral imperative in the ongoing struggle between the patriarchal world view and the new (more matriarchal) worldview at the heart of the new world that the occupy movement is building,.
That said, I also believe that we have a moral obligation to resist and defend against violence as well as if necessary destroy private property that is used to perpetrate violence (property that is not essential to a person’s well being and in fact may be harmful to the well being). For example, this could be a gun or can of pepper spray, a tank, a corporate owned bulldozer building the XL pipeline, or Wall Street financial firm computers.
We must not forget that corporations are not “living beings” and thus it is difficult to do violence against them. But not impossible, because the mindless violence exhibited by a few people at the Nov 2 Oakland, CA general strike and elsewhere in NYC on Nov 17 is a type of violence too. Violence because it is random and not specifically focused on private property that is used to perpetrate violence. Destroying private property apart from the context of our moral obligation to resist and defend against the means of violence is itself no different from any other form of violence. It is also a violation of the moral solidarity and social contract that those who take part in nonviolent direct action make when they voluntarily become part of those actions. On a tactical and strategic level, random, mindless violence not directed at the means of perpetrating violence is a supremely counter-revolutionary action and those involved are nothing more than lackeys and agents of the 1% – what are called “provocateurs” and what I would call traitors or enemies of the people.
Forming a human chain to block police from removing tents from an illegal encampment is not violence, but it is not nonviolence either.
The definition of violence provided by Ed Lytwak above is accurate enough: violence is harm done to life, either by physical or psychological force, or by the denial of basic necessities. By that definition, locking arms to block police cannot be called violence.
Nonviolence, on the other hand, is support given to life, either by physical or psychological force, or by the provision of basic necessities. Furthermore, nonviolence is an effort to live in harmony with life. By that definition, locking arms in this case cannot be called nonviolence either.
One might argue that protestors intended to call attention to the need to provide the basic necessity of education to students at a fair price and thus hoped to support life in that way. But the means must support the ends. How does violating a policy against encampments on university property dramatize the injustice of income inequality? It doesn’t, not unless students were protesting the high cost of housing by seeking to live in Sproul Plaza as a rent-free alternative.
This is a difficult injustice to dramatize. It’s easy to see why protestors locked arms in defense against the organized force of the state; it made for a visible confrontation between armed and unarmed combatants. But shouldn’t we give more attention to how to dramatize income inequality than to the mischaracterization of nonviolence as passivity?
I think your definition of nonviolence is a bit too limited. You’re of course entitled to it. But, particularly in the wake of Tahrir, a mass encampment in a public space is a powerful and widely-admired way of saying that the present state of affairs is intolerable. Yes, one would hope that they’d take on actions more clearly directed at the question at hand. Maybe refusing to pay fees en masse, risking expulsion. But it’s hard to do that without first building a visible movement, having a public discussion, and making a show of force. Nonviolent movements have always relied on such public demonstrations, whether they were legal or not. I think your definition does have enough of a role for direct, oppositional, but peaceful resistance against an unjust system.
“To him, the violence of state oppression ultimately justifies whatever means it might take to remove it.”
Translation: “Delusion-based self righteousness totally gives you the license to go out and attack people and set bombs, lolz”
That’s “lulz”:)
Either is acceptable.
Particularly because it’s not actually a word, in case you were unaware. 🙂
” For me violence is to do harm to “living” beings. This can be either physical force, psychological or the denial of things essential to their well-being, i.e. food, water, shelter, medical care, community, a right livelihood, freedom or right to self-governance etc. ”
I’m sorry, what was that you were just saying about “nonsensical discussions”?
You may have a shifting and utterly hypocritical view of what does or doesn’t constitute “violence” (if I threw a rock through your window or blew up your car to protest your idiotic totalitarianism-based political dogma or self-rigtheous fetishizing of violence you’d be singing a different tune), but fortuanetly the Law and the vast amount of human beings in this country and others think otherwise.
Now, it’s me that is confused. Is the above comment an example of nonsensical discussion? Just asking. Marxist Hypocrisy 101’s first problem is understanding what the word “hypocrisy” means, although i’m guessing that “he” knows that it is a very emotively effective way of making ad hominum attacks. Its interesting how those who see violence as the primary means for resolving conflict always frame it in terms of one individual perpetrating violence against another. How typically patriarchal. It is only by using the individual rather than collective context that the inevitability of violence makes “sense.” Ultimately, Marxist Hypocrisy can’t escape the trap of history. Humans have always been violence, therefore they always will be violent. Once you deny that violence only begets violence you can accept that violence in inevitable. Once you accept that transformative change is impossible you are therefore free to believe that a real political revolution is also impossible. We can only have one group of violent men taking power from another.
“.Marxist Hypocrisy 101′s first problem is understanding what the word “hypocrisy” means”
It means you say one thing, and you do another. It means you hold everyone else to a higher standard of behavior tnan you yourself practice. Clearly you’re the one in need of a dictionary here, you might also look up “ad hominem” while you’re at it since you do’t seem to fully understand that one either.
“Ultimately, Marxist Hypocrisy can’t escape the trap of history. ”
Squawks the revisionist.
“”Humans have always been violence, therefore they always will be violent. Once you deny that violence only begets violence you can accept that violence in inevitable. Once you accept that transformative change is impossible you are therefore free to believe that a real political revolution is also impossible. {
Which is a nice, self-fellating way of saying, “it’s acceptable for me to initiate violence on others for daring to disagree with me because I’m a sollipsistic fanatic”. How typically collectivist.
bull connor lectures king on the definition of non-violence. how wd we react? and how is this recent example of their lying any different? and wd we bother playing word games with hitler on the topic?
c’ mon, folks. by getting into this argument, we are helping piles of sh*t spray perfume on themselves.
the effective tactic against a liar is to never miss an opportunity to document the fact that it is a liar. so far we’re not doing well in this area.
paineskid
The only lying and violence to be found here is once again on the behalf of the OWS jackboots.