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The search for a better way to live will go on as long as unsatisfactory ways like ours are the norm, a.k.a. mainstream. Therefore all experiments in alternative communities, economies and even cultures are interesting, especially those that succeed — like the Mondragón communes in the Basque region of northern Spain. In a well-defined geography with a language all their own 𑁋 Basque is one of only five languages in present-day Europe not related to any other; what we call a “language isolate.” However much the size and distinctness of the region are responsible for — or at least facilitate — its cooperative spirit, the people and their culture have much to teach us.
Our friend Georgia Kelly has been an ardent student and friend of this fascinating place for many years, taking tour groups there almost annually. (Their next Mondragón seminar is scheduled for May 11 – 18, 2025.) She is, like us here at Metta, interested in all aspects of the “experiment” of Father José Maria Arizmendiarrieta, remarkable because of its size, longevity (how many communes have lasted more than a few decades?) and thorough reorganization — or rather alternative organization of economy, politics and, yes, conflict management. And, as mentioned, its success. All in all, a fascinating human experiment.
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Stephanie: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook. And I’m here with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.
So, at Nonviolence Radio and the Metta Center for Nonviolence, we like to emphasize the constructive side of nonviolence and really highlight the positive and humane models that can replace violent structures in our world. The reason for this is that because the more people know that there are other ways, the more likely we are to learn more about them, which is really important. As well as to explore how to adapt them to fit wherever we may be in the world while also still holding fast to the nonviolent principles they contain. That’s really part of the mission of this show.
So, on this episode we speak through Georgia Kelly. And we talk to her about the Mondragón cooperative business model that was born in the Basque region of Spain. And Georgia is the director of the Praxis Peace Institute. They focus on economics, education, and generally the pathways to peace. And she’s been taking groups to the Mondragón cooperatives for many years. People go to learn and observe and then bring home insights for building a more cooperative and just world everywhere. Let’s hear from Georgia.
Georgia: I’m Georgia Kelly. I’m the Director of Praxis Peace Institute, which was founded in the year 2000 actually at a peace conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia
So, I’ve had two different careers, both that I’m very passionate about. Especially getting to peace when it seems like we have less of it in the world today than we did when the organization began 23 years ago. So, that’s my focus is peace, and all the avenues that would lead us there. So, the economic avenues that lead us there. The educational avenues that will lead us there.
So, Praxis Peace Institute really examines all the different ways we can get there and the ways that we’re being blocked in those particular fields. So, that’s my area of interest and passion in the last several years.
Stephanie: Beautiful. And you’re an expert on the Mondragón cooperatives. Would you agree with that?
Georgia: Well, I know a lot more about that than most Americans. Yes. And it’s been another really strong interest of mine when I started looking at what would the economics of peace look like? Are there any models out there that are economic models that really support peaceful relationships?
And that’s when I discovered Mondragón. And I thought I’ve got to learn more about this. And eventually I did invite one of the directors of dissemination at the Mondragón to speak at a conference we hosted in Dubrovnik in 2007. And when he was there I said, “Is there any possibility that we can bring people there for a seminar to learn about the cooperatives, and he said, “Sure!” So, that’s when we begin – the next year. And we’ve had 12 seminars there now.
So, learning about the cooperatives has been a very important part of my education toward, how do we get to peace in a practical way? And since going there so many times, I’ve learned it’s not just the business and the economics, it’s also the ethics, and the culture, and the governing body of the Basque parliament. And what their priorities are, which are quite different than ours.
So, it has been very inspiring to learn that this is a whole system. The cooperative businesses are just part of a larger ethical system. And that’s taken me several years to pull all those pieces together and see that. But now that I do, I see that they’ve created a model that exemplifies what we need to do if we’re serious about manifesting peace.
Stephanie: That’s a serious hypothesis, I’d say, for economics and peace. So, I’m hoping that in this interview we can explore more about the Mondragón cooperatives for people who may not have heard of them or only know a little bit, if that’s okay?
Georgia: Yes. Sometimes I just assume people know because I’ve been there so many times. But yes, the Mondragón cooperatives comprise the largest grouping of worker-owned businesses in the world. There are a little over a hundred businesses, and the workers are the owners. It’s one vote, one worker, one share. There are no shares to buy and sell.
If a worker leaves, then they can cash out what’s in their account, but they can’t sell their share. So, they’re not open to being taken over by outside business interests, which is a very strong protection for the cooperatives and for the integrity of the cooperatives.
So, they have about close to 100,000 worker-owners in this complex of businesses. And they make everything from computer chips to car parts. They actually sell brake pads and car parts to all the major car manufacturers in the world. So, you don’t see their names on cars, but their parts are in almost all the cars.
So, they have also the largest research and development complex in Europe with 14 different entities. So, they’re always sort of at the cutting edge of what needs to be invented or created in our society. And their idea is, we look to see what is needed in the culture, in this society. Not how to make money, but what do people need? And then they create the business to fill that need.
And as they say, “People before profit.” And that is the motto. It’s people before profit. The CEO of a large manufacturing worker-owned business will not usually make more than six times the lowest paid worker, and so there’s solidarity – what they call, “wage solidarity.” So, this is a model that I think we can learn from.
And of course, as you know, there are businesses in the Bay Area that work on this same model. The Arizmendi Bakeries, Alvarado Street Bakery. So, we do have some local businesses that operate on that model as well.
Stephanie: Can you talk about what motivated their creation?
Georgia: Yes. They were founded by a Catholic priest, Father Arizmendiarrieta. He was sent to Mondragón as a parish priest in the mid to late 40s – 1940s. And when he was sent there, the whole Mondragón and Basque region was really impoverished. It was the poorest area of Spain, up to 70% unemployment. I mean, it was really in dire conditions.
It’s interesting that today, and largely because of the worker-owned businesses, it is the wealthiest region in Spain. Even more so than Catalonia or where Barcelona is. And it’s wealthy not because you’ve got mansions on the hills and gated communities – which I didn’t see – it’s wealthy because there isn’t any poverty. They pretty much eliminated poverty. And that’s real wealth. The society is wealthy because they’ve eliminated poverty.
And when you eliminate poverty, you also eliminate a lot of the reasons for strife and war and anger. And they’ve managed to do that. So, you know, I think what they’ve created – and also, Mondragón has been inspiring to a lot of other people in the region because there’s an additional, almost 1000 cooperative businesses in the Basque region. So, it’s definitely a model that’s not just Mondragón. It’s also spread through the Basque region. It spread through other parts of Spain.
But that area, particularly, when Father Arizmendi came there, he saw this very high unemployment, people really struggling. And he decided to start a polytechnic school that would train people for jobs in the region. They didn’t have the skills. They weren’t educated. So, he began with the training school.
And from that training school, a few years after it began, five people who graduated from it ended up starting the first worker-owned business, the Mondragón cooperatives. There were five people. It was Fagor, was the company. It still exists. Fagor Industrial Appliances still exist today. It’s large. They started making kerosene stoves. It was just this little five person business.
Today, it’s a huge business, and they make industrial appliances for restaurants, hotels, and really cutting-edge appliances. So, that’s what they do today. And I think, when Arizmendi went there, he saw the potential. This was such a poor area. He thought it’s almost like a blank slate. And he had the right vision and probably really good timing and was able to rally people around this vision.
And it’s quite remarkable. People said he wasn’t charismatic, but yet able to inspire people, which is quite astonishing. And he was a parish priest all that time, but also helping build the cooperatives. He helped found the bank, which now has over 400 branches located throughout Spain. So, he said, with the bank is what will keep us on course and what will help us expand and grow. And of course, it has.
So, it’s a large complex of businesses, banks, university system. You know, it’s a whole culture, basically, what they’ve created.
Stephanie: And are all of these systems – the banks, the educational systems, are they all based in cooperative principles as well?
Georgia: Yes. They all are.
Stephanie: That’s amazing. So, decision-making within cooperatives is different than we would see in other forms of organization and I wonder if you can speak to that, how that process might look different or be different.
Georgia: In some ways it’s similar, and some ways it’s different. I mean they still have managers, you know, at businesses. They don’t hold meetings where every worker gets to vote on everything for every decision. No, they don’t do that. They have a general assembly that meets once a year where they vote on policies.
But the day-to-day managing of a company is really in the hands of managers. They do have meetings where workers make decisions, but they don’t make them every day, or else they’d never get any work done. They have, really, I think, created a model that’s efficient, but democratic. And that’s their goal, and I think they’ve pretty much succeeded in doing that. And it’s an on ongoing process because they never think they’ve reached the point of success. They’re always working on the model and improving how they work together.
So, it’s never a static process. And this is what I’ve seen over the 12 times that I’ve been in a seminar there. Is that it’s never the same Mondragón that I go back to. It’s always something new. I’ve always learned something new. And the quality that is really part of their community that doesn’t change is the humility that they have. And that’s really inspiring. You don’t find hubris or “our way is the way.” No one talks like that.
Stephanie: It sounds refreshing.
Georgia: It’s very refreshing. And it’s the reason why, you know, when I first started going there the first few times – I brought some people there for a week-long seminar. People said, “Well, after you go many times you’ll get over your fascination with it and your,” you know, kind of what they thought was my pie in the sky view of it. But, you know, it’s only gotten more.
The more I go there, the more inspired I have been by the model. Because partially they’re always improving it, and they’re always learning something new and incorporating it. And yet, while they do that, the humility remains, and it’s really quite inspiring. So, I say, I go there to exhale.
Michael: Georgia, I read a book some years ago that I was really impressed with called, “The Starfish and the Spider.” And what I took away from that is the demonstrable success of a kind of mixed model where you do have a hierarchy, but the hierarchy is not autocratic. The hierarchy doesn’t imply that the decision makers are superior. And in fact, that people could be rotated out and into these different positions.
And that sounds very much to me like part of the ethics of Mondragón. It’s not a leveling, like some people on the left try to do, you know, everybody is at the same level. No, we have different responsibilities. This is very much a Gandhian model also, we have our different responsibilities. But the higher and lower aspect of it is discouraged. It’s not present in terms of I’m a better person than you because I have more power. It’s just that I’m in a different role.
Georgia: That’s exactly the way they see it and practice it. Their hierarchy is not one of domination. You need a certain kind of hierarchy to be efficient, but you don’t need a dominating hierarchy.
And so, they don’t have a hierarchy that one is better than the other. No. And I’ve talked to people at the Alvarado Street Bakery in Petaluma, and they have that same ethic that even the person sweeping the floor is getting their the same share, you know?
So, all work is respected. That’s the whole idea of a cooperative, and they emphasize that at Mondragón. All work is respected, no matter what it is. Sweeping the floor or the CEO or baking the bread or making the computer chips, every level. It’s the human that’s respected.
Michael: Sounds like Gandhi to me.
Georgia: It is like Gandhi. Yes, it is. So, to me, it’s a very evolved way of living. It’s very inspiring to be around it. But they don’t preach. This is the other thing. They’re not preachy people. They’ll say, “Well, we’re just normal people.” And on one level they’re normal, but on another level, compared to us or our culture it’s very, very different.
I think that’s important because I remember talking to the first CEO of the Alvarado Street Bakery, Joseph Tuck, who told me, “You know, when we started in the 70s we would have all these meetings where we met about everything. Every decision that was being made, we all had to have a meeting. And finally, we were realizing that we were spending more time in meetings than baking bread, and we were going to have to change this model, or we’d go out of business.” And that’s when they learned that, no, you can’t have everybody making all the decisions or nothing will get done.
And the other part of decision-making at Mondragón that I think is very wise, is if they need to, they can operate on a 51% majority. They prefer having 80% buy-in on decisions they make, but they also know they have to get things done. So, they’re not sticklers with everybody has to agree.
And people are mature enough to know that, okay, they’re not going to get what they want every time. And they’ll say you have to be mature to really operate well at this model. And you do. You have to be able to let go of your thing one time, and maybe you’ll get it another time. It takes maturity to work democratically, basically.
Michael: Maybe that’s our problem. That’s why it’s not working here.
Georgia: Yes, I think it is.
Stephanie: I have a basic, basic question here, but where does the name Mondragón come from? What is that?
Georgia: You know, there’s kind of a myth about it being a mountain dragon. And they have a myth and I kind of forget what it is. But I don’t really know. I think it did come from that myth of some good witch that’s in the mountain. And it’s a good witch. It’s not a bad witch. Who does something with a mountain dragon, but not kills it. It’s something different, and I don’t remember what it is.
But it kind of sets the tone of what Mondragón is all about. It’s cooperation. It’s working things out.
[music]
I think for peace lovers, this is a really important lesson, ETA – ETA. As probably many know and have heard for years that this Basque terrorist organization that wanted to separate the Basque region from Spain, and they were terrorists. They killed almost 1100 people over 60 years.
They formed in reaction to Franco because Franco had banned the Basque language and couldn’t speak it in schools, they couldn’t learn it in school. So, this was formed as a reaction to Franco, but then it continued after Franco was gone and was still murdering people who they felt were not working in their behalf to separate from Spain.
So, there was a peace organization that the Mondragón people took us to during our first visits there. And I met the person who founded it, a really extraordinary man who’s written a few books. A couple of them have been translated into English. His name is Jonan Fernandez. Extraordinary peacemaker.
And he decided at one point to try and work with some of the people in ETA and some of the victims, really to create a peace and reconciliation process. And, you know, no one thought it was really possible. You know how people don’t think these things are possible. But I think what he did was manage to get the people who were most open to having those first discussions. And so it worked.
I mean he did get people together. They did have these meetings. I don’t know the details of what happened. But I do know within a year, the ETA members decided they would no longer perpetuate any violence. They were giving up violence. They weren’t giving up their weapons, but they wouldn’t be violent anymore. No one believed it because they had said it before. But they hadn’t had somebody like Jonan Fernandez working with them before, either.
So, at this point, I believed it because I knew him. And sure enough, you know, they never have resorted to violence since. And a few years later, they turned in all their weaponry. They said, “Well, we don’t need this anymore. We’re going to work politically. We don’t need the weapons.” We were there when they did that. That was in 2017.
Stephanie: Wow.
Georgia: and it was quite a wonderful moment to realize this process had been so successful. And the following year, 2018, ETA disbanded its own organization. So no one had to ban them. No one had to say, “You can’t belong to this,” or “you can’t exist.” They, through this process, realized we don’t need to exist any longer. So, it’s an extraordinary story.
Stephanie: Kenneth Boulding’s first law that if it’s happened, then it’s possible.
Georgia: Right. Right.
Michael: Georgia, that brings up the question of have people from Mondragón gone elsewhere to spread the message in Europe and maybe beyond?
Georgia: Well, this is an interesting thing about Mondragón because I think when they formed they were under the radar because it was during Franco’s regime. And actually Arizmendiarrieta was arrested at one point for being a, you know, troublemaker or a socialist.
Michael: Communist.
Georgia: A communist, yeah. So, he was arrested, but they let him out, they think primarily because of the Catholic lobby within the country, he got out. But they were afraid of being too overt, too making any noise about who they were. They were very much below the radar, and that’s how they managed to exist during Franco’s terms.
And they’ve kind of kept to that way of being. Which is interesting because I’ve talked to them about it and so have other people. And partially, they want to get their model known throughout the world, and partially they don’t. And I completely understand the reticence. Because once many people know, they’re going to want to come and either do a massive criticism of it or it’s going to be misunderstood.
You know, I had mixed feelings about it because they were doing a survey about what they might need to do to make their work better known. And they asked me to take part, be one of the people that was surveyed. And I said, “You know, I have mixed feelings about it. I want this model to be known all over the world, but I don’t want it to be attacked all over the world.”
because it has been attacked by some people. They just don’t want to think this could work. So they want to find something wrong with it and then magnify that one little thing they find. And then they dismiss the whole thing. So, I think there’s that kind of reticence with making it too public. And yet, they do want more people to know.
I’ve brought 12 groups there to learn from them for a week. And those people, many of them, are educators, and they’ve been educating other people about it in universities. But I do think they do want to get the word out more, but they’re careful about how they want to do it.
Stephanie: Well, that makes sense as well because as we know, there’s a very familiar dynamic in nonviolence and conflict that if something is a threat to the status quo it will be pushed against. It will be silenced. It will be destroyed even. So, yeah, not quite prepared for taking that on.
Michael: Georgia, I’d like to push a little bit more on what is the organic unity, so to speak, between the economic model and the way of resolving conflicts.
Georgia: Okay. They have social councils which might act similar to a union in some ways. Like let’s say if a problem develops between people or between management and some of the workers, then they go to their social council. Every business has a social council. And they work through it with a conflict specialist. They work out whatever the problem is. So, they have a way of doing that within the business framework. They have a way of working things out. It doesn’t just get pushed under the rug or passive aggressively dealt with. They have a way to deal with problems.
And I know early on many of the people would ask in our seminars, “What do you do when someone is slacking off on the job, and they’re not really doing their work. Can you fire the person? Because they’re a worker-owner, can you fire them?”
And I remember [Nick Nelson] said, “Oh, we do not fire people.” And he said, “What we would do is go to the person and find out what’s going on in their lives that all of the sudden they’re not working up to speed. You know, maybe they’re going through a health problem or a divorce or something in the family.”
And so, they go to find out what’s wrong, what’s happening with the person. It’s like a personal investigation. It’s not a punishment or a chastisement. It’s let’s find out what’s going on in this person’s life. And I thought, “What a different way of approaching someone who’s slacking off on the job. Instead of going and reprimanding them, going and saying, “You know, what’s happening in your life?” That’s a peaceful model.
Michael: Yeah. Does it actually extend? I mean I would imagine that, though it is kind of utopian, there is the odd crime here and there that probably happens in Mondragón. And then does the restorative justice model that you were just describing in the businesses and the social councils, does that extend what I’m going to have to call, I guess, criminal behavior?
Georgia: Well, I don’t know much about the criminal behavior, I have to say. It’s low in the Basque region. And part of the reason why it’s low is you don’t have the poverty problem. And once ETA has dissolved, really there’s not been the violence like there was before.
I am not aware of – you know, I don’t see policemen around. You just don’t feel that kind of presence. Because also, you know, Basque is an autonomous region of Spain, they have their own parliament. And they developed, or formed, a Department of Peace after Jonan Fernandez started working with the truth and reconciliation process, they made him head of the Department of Peace.
And now they call it something else. I think they call it the Department of Coexistence and Human Rights. They changed the name. They said, “Well, we have peace now. So now we will change the name.” They work with prisoners, rehabilitation, you know, teach conflict resolution.
So, they have that model in the society. And the Basque parliament, I think, is quite exemplary as a governing body. And we had one of the – I think, the vice president, who spoke to our group this year. We were very lucky. And you see that the ethics that they’re operating on as a governing body is very different than ours. And they’re not looking to posture. They’re looking to solve problems. And it’s really a different model.
You know, I’ve just sent a letter recently about calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and I get back like a form letter from the congressman. And I think, you know, they’re posturing. They’re not peacemaking. And we need peacemakers, negotiators. We don’t need people posturing for a minority of people they think they’re satisfying.
There’s so much hubris in our governing in America. It’s really depressing, actually. Especially when you can contrast it with this body that has a really different way of looking at governance and taking it as a responsibility.
Michael: But they do have to get re-elected?
Georgia: They do have to get re-elected, but they do. Or at least some of them do. They told me that the woman mayor who spoke to us last year was, I think, more of a center-right party. But the one who just got elected is definitely on the left. And she’s also a woman. They have a woman mayor of Mondragón. And they’re young. The other one was elected when she was 35 or 36. And this one, I think, is in her early 50s. But there are quite a few women in parliament there now. So, that has helped, I think, refocus some of the way they look at things.
Stephanie: Let’s do take a moment to go into women’s roles or women’s status within the cooperative and the founder’s views about women as well, and how that helped to emphasize greater democratic opportunities, freedoms. I mean in your article, you quote him saying you can measure a society by its women’s role.
Georgia: Right. Yes.
Stephanie: And coming from Spain at that time.
Georgia: That was a big deal. Arizmendi did say the measure of a society is the role that women have in it. And definitely saw that. And you know, when we first went there, there weren’t so many women in management in the cooperatives. And our group would notice that and say something about it. But they were already working on it, and there are more women in positions of management now than there were when we went there in 2008. Quite a few more. And they have a training program for people. And they encourage women to take the training program to become managers, to become board members of businesses.
So, they have a lot more women in those positions now than they did. And you saw from the article that there’s more than 50% women in the parliament now. So, it’s changed dramatically from where it was maybe 20 years ago or even 15 years ago. In all the cooperative Mondragón businesses, women make the same salary as men in all the same businesses. Always. And always did.
Stephanie: Wow.
Michael: Hurray.
Stephanie: Is that so hard?
Michael: You know, the more I know about Mondragón the more I ask myself, could it happen here? And there are two factors that I think would make it difficult, not impossible, but I wanted to get your take on it. One of them is culture. I know that about 15 years ago some GM workers were sent over to Sweden to see how Volvo operates because it was a very successful business.
And it turns out that the way Volvo manufactures cars is they have teams of workers. And each team is responsible for a car. So, you don’t have this thing where, you know, I tighten the bolt on the left front wheel as it goes by. And there were other kind of democratic features that flowed from that. And these guys came back from Volvo, and they said, “We can’t do that here.” There’s some lack of vision, lack of imagination.
Georgia: Lack of cooperation.
Michael: Lack of cooperation, yeah, in a competitive world. Yeah. And the other thing that strikes me about what makes Mondragón work and might not work elsewhere is the size factor. The Basque region is a coherent culture with its own language that’s not spoken anywhere else in the world. And it’s a reasonable size. That doesn’t mean that small countries are always successful – witness Israel.
Georgia: Right. Right. Exactly.
Michael: But I think it is a factor, and you’d have to have more of a regional culture, which isn’t impossible in a large entity. But you could have more regional cultures in the United States. You know, I’m from Brooklyn.
Georgia: Well, I think the Bay Area could be one of those regional cultures.
Michael: That’s right.
Georgia: One of the things I had talked about with the different worker owners at the Arizmendi bakeries and Alvarado Street Bakery is that they worked with the same financial institution, the same bank, they might have more leverage for expanding when they need to or hiring or bringing more people in when they need to. It might bring them more together as well, you know, having the same economic base. But they’re spread, you know. Arizmendi has six different ones, but they’re part of an umbrella organization like Mondragón. Alvarado is a wholesale bakery, so they sell all over the country.
So, they’re different and there’s some different models. I don’t call ESOPS, which are Employee Stock Ownership Programs, where they own different amounts of stock the same as a cooperative where one share, one vote, one share, one person. It’s a different cooperative model.
So, I think what you’re bringing up, size is critical. I mean America is huge. There are cooperatives on the East Coast. There are cooperatives here. And there’s some spread out in different places, but they’re not connected the way like Mondragón cooperatives are connected with an umbrella organization.
There are nonprofit organizations that bring them together, but they’re not connected economically. It’s too loose a connection, to just having a conference once a year. It’s not like Mondragón. And part of it is size in different parts of the country. And when you mention culture, this is a big part of it.
Culture is critical because our culture is so engrained with this individualism, very strongly. And cooperativism is such a hard sell with a lot of people. They don’t know what it is.
Stephanie: Or they don’t believe in our capacity to do it, honestly, I think.
Georgia: Right. I think it could be done, but size and culture of the two – you brought up the two problems that need to be overcome, that need to be figured out. Too bad we don’t have Arizmendi still around.
Stephanie: Georgia, tell us, are going to be taking people again over there? Are you going to be doing more groups? And how can people get involved in that and other parts of your work?
Georgia: Presently we have the dates October 6-12 for the next seminar in 2024. It could slightly change because we may be doing a conference over in Europe in early October, but they might go right together. We’re working that out right now. But right now, the dates we have for next year are October 6-12. And the way to get in touch with us is PraxisPeace.org. Send an email to info@praxispeace.org or go to our website.
There’s information. There’s a whole page on the Mondragón seminar that we have. And it gives the details. The prices will change because they raised them this year. But everything is pretty much the same that’s on the page.
Stephanie: That was Georgia Kelly. She’s the Director of the Praxis Peace Institute and she was sharing with us her insights and learning from the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. You can learn more about at PraxisPeace.org.
We turn next to the Nonviolence Report with Michael Nagler. He’s going to highlight some more constructive resources, ideas, and news, events taking place around our world and how to analyze them and understand them through the critical lens of nonviolence.
Michael: Welcome everyone. I’m Michael Nagler. This is the Nonviolence Report. And I’d like to start it by shouting out to War Resisters International, one of the oldest peace organizations in this country – and worldwide. And they’re celebrating their 100th anniversary this month. So, thank you and congratulations, WRI.
Now, a lot has been happening on campuses recently, which is not too surprising, but it’s building up to some interesting forms of resistance. For example, three years ago, there was a grassroots antiwar movement on campuses called Dissenters. And one of the things that they’re doing which is very modern in terms of resistance is to take the intersectional approach that connects wars with corporate elites, local police, border walls, surveillance, and prisons.
And they have campus chapters around the country. They have training fellowships, and, of course, a strong social media presence. And they’ve been organizing for college divestment from weapons manufacturers. And I’m remembering Kenneth Boulding, a mentor of mine, who passed away in 1983, writing that nothing could assist the development of peace in the world more effectively than to have the universities divest from military research and military recruitment.
And he said that because – and I think it is still true – it’s not just that they do the research that leads to horrendous developments in military technology, but also, of course, that being universities they give it a kind of wall of protection from interference from outside. Which you know, the old question here is always freedom with responsibility.
If you take responsibility – this is from Gandhi – if you take responsibility for doing your job correctly, the rights will ordinarily follow suit.
Now at the University of Massachusetts, Dissenters have organized several campus actions. They disrupted a hockey game. And that struck me as interesting because this is partly symbolic, but partly not. In the ancient world, where I had some background, rituals preceded actual warfare. And modern rituals have become games.
So, competitive games, yeah, on the one hand, they do release some tensions, but I think psychologists have discovered that the effect – the other effect of increasing the enthusiasm for competition and consequently ultimately for violence is much stronger than any release of inner tensions.
So, the UMass Dissenters, doing mostly what we call obstructive program, but they’re also doing teach-ins. And here, from Northwestern in Chicago, we get a very interesting statement which I’m going to quote from you now. Quote, “We’re not just worried about destroying things. We want to rebuild something new. Dissenters is a movement that is rooted in love. It’s all coming from a place of wanting to care for each other, for us to feel accountable to each other, for us to stand in solidarity with those all across the world who are being affected by US imperialism and colonialism and war.”
So, it was the first part of that statement, which, as you can imagine, I was particularly interested in. The conscious effort, which I think is very important and very effective, to concentrate on building. What can we build? And then when we have counteracted a lot of negative things, we can go after what’s left with civil disobedience and obstructive program, and it’ll be much more effective on that basis of our having built ourselves what we needed. Constructive program.
So, I mentioned Chicago. For three years now, these young organizers and others, including a venerable organization, the American Friends Service Committee, have urged Chicago to “stop feeding Boeing’s bottom line.” That’s a direct quote. There’s a heavy investment in Northwestern from Boeing, which is one of the two biggest arms manufacturers in the US. The other being Raytheon. And they have quite an interesting name for their movement – these students do. It’s called, “Divest from Death.”
So, the campaign in 2021 was called The Boeing Arms Genocide campaign. And that was organized by our old friends, The Dissenters. I might just mention at this point that I am made nervous by the way the word genocide is being thrown around. I don’t even think what Israel is doing in Gaza right is genocide.
That is, they are not attempting to obliterate all the Palestinian people, though I’m pretty sure some Israelis would actually welcome that horrendous outcome. But because they’re not taking action against the entire race or population, it’s not technically genocide, and I think we should save that word for things that are technically genocide because they have much more power that way.
So, I’ve been talking about Dissenters. There’s also a group called Palestine Action US. And back in October, they took direct action against Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, which is called Elbit Systems. Don’t ask me what that means or where that word comes from.
And it has a quote, “Innovation Center,” in Cambridge, Mass. So, the activists blocked the main entrance and drenched the building with red paint and so forth. And they cried out as they were locking down the front doors of Elbit, “War criminals work at 130 Bishop Allan Drive.” That, I think, may not be an exaggeration because both the Palestinians on October 7 – Hamas, that is, on October 7 – and the Israeli IDF – Israeli Defense Force, have unquestionably committed international crimes and made themselves war criminals, so far without accountability.
Over in Palestine itself now there was a youth activist, a fellow named Fadi Quran, aged 23, who organized a peaceful march to one of the checkpoints, the Qalandia checkpoint. And he was interviewed on Democracy Now!, and he explicitly cited nonviolence. The nonviolence of Gandhi, King, and the civil rights movement. He and his people undertook quite a bit of training, and they claim this is not an intifada, an uprising. It’s more of a movement, which is more longstanding and more constructive. And as he said, “We want freedom, justice, and dignity.” Hard to quarrel with that.
So now, a Quaker nonviolence activist in this country, Sander Hicks, who is also a Zen student, he’s got an article in the New York Daily News arguing what we’ve been saying at Metta right along, that nonviolence is the only way out of the bitter conflict and the hatred that’s now developed in Gaza.
And it reminded me of the old definition of nonviolence as a way out of no way. In Sander’s article, he says, “It’s time to think anew about nonviolence. Don’t do it because it’s righteous. Do it because it works.” I really think this is an important sentence. Nonviolence is often put in a moral/immoral/amoral category and that obscures what it really is, which Gandhi said it was all along, a science, a force, a central element in human nature. So, I very much approve of Sander Hicks when he says, “Don’t do it because it’s righteous. Do it because it works.”
And he goes on to say a practice of nonviolence right now would be a fresh alternative to the retaliatory “genocide” happening now in the Middle East. I have no doubt that nonviolence is a way out. What we need is some strategic thinkers to tell us exactly what that would look like. And Hicks does go a bit of a way toward that conversation.
We have so many interesting organizations and groups of people that are springing up. One of the most interesting to me is a group called the Scientist Rebellion. So, this is an international group of researchers. They use civil disobedience to promote climate action. And they have organized protests across 23 countries. And these protest have gone on and are going on throughout the COP28 meeting which is supposed to be charting a course out of climate destruction. And they’re boycotting the meeting, even though as scientists they were called upon to be there.
And it reminds me of something else that Kenneth Boulding shared with me and with the general public, that the way we practice science in the West, if you practice it well, that is not a means of creating mechanisms of destruction, but science is actually the pursuit of truth. And therefore, science inherently is an aspect of nonviolence. And I only wish that it were practiced as such.
I want to quote now before we leave the Middle East, I want to quote from a friend of ours who is a teacher up in northern Israel. I visited him about seven years ago. And he says, “We have initiated a new program where we are providing training for teenagers in high schools to act as educational mentors in elementary schools during school hours.”
So, in Israel, there’s a social final exam called Bagrut, and this is part of that exam. “The main idea,” my friend goes on to say, “is for these mentors to enter elementary schools to work with young children on social and educational levels, so to narrow the learning gap and provide a safe social environment. And this is teachers who face all the burdens that they have today. And of course, they’re training all the educational elements are in the spirit of the good in mankind and nonviolence.”
Incidentally, the idea of a safe social environment in schools has become absolutely critical in the United States in the face of this horrendous epidemic of school shootings.
I’m still tarrying on the Middle East for just a bit, if you don’t mind. There is a group called Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance, MECA. And last month they had a solidarity march here in San Francisco and a major march in Washington calling for a ceasefire. And I want to point out that it’s in the course of this disaster – actually, a little bit earlier. It started in the Ukraine that Nonviolent Peaceforce, an organization that we work with closely, has departed from their original guidelines of not putting people into – that is, not putting their people into what are called hot conflicts. That is, shooting wars. And that lasted for a while, but in Ukraine, it had to go down.
And so, we now have a total of four people who have been killed in this kind of action starting from Tom Fox in Iraq. And I want to mention that here for a particular reason. Back in the early days of the start of unarmed civilian protection, the kind of activity that Nonviolent Peaceforce participates in, we went to a well-known funder here in San Francisco, and she said to me quite flat out, “This effort of yours will collapse the first time a person has gotten killed.”
And I’m happy to say in a funny way that the courage and the determination of these people is much stronger than that. This organization has only gone on and gathered strength. It’s a horrendous tragedy that these people are killed, but it has not stopped them. And for that, we should really encourage and support them.
Now, there’s another organization that’s doing this kind of work just now, the World Council of Churches has gotten together a group of 24 accompaniers. They carried out the ecumenical accompaniment program in Palestine and Israel. And they originally were in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but they had to be moved out of those areas for things that are slightly safer. And now a lot of them are carrying on this essential work from their home countries.
And again, they have a useful quote for us. They are guided by what they’re calling, “principled impartiality.” This is one of the cardinal principles in unarmed civilian peacekeeping. When people go in to do unarmed civilian peacekeeping, they almost always end up protecting victims and potential victims of state-sponsored or other violence. So, isn’t that a kind of partiality, that you’re protecting one side against another? But no.
They say, “We do not take sides in the conflict nor discriminate against anyone. But we are not neutral in terms of human rights and respect for international humanitarian law.” So, I thought that was very, very well expressed. It should be helpful to this entire worldwide movement of unarmed civilian protection otherwise known, incidentally, as unarmed civilian peacekeeping.
Here in the US, there’s a person called Nick Estes, who is a member of the Sioux community. He talked about Wounded Knee on the 50th anniversary of that event. And he said, “In the public memory of the Wounded Knee occupation, it was sort of a militant Red Power movement. But in fact, the participants didn’t see it that way. For them, it was the beginning of something greater. Because the next year you had the foundation of the International Indian Treaty Council, on the Standing Rock Reservation you have the United Nations conference on discrimination against Indigenous populations in 1977, the Black Hills Gathering in 1980, and so on.
So, the Wounded Knee episode was a transition point from the more confrontational tactics to something different. In my opinion, that something different, is a genuine step forward in nonviolence.
Now I want to say one thing about Ukraine – we mentioned briefly. There is a journal called The Conversation. And back in March, they had something reminiscent of the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square, who stood right in the path of armored vehicles coming in from Russia. But there are other – and I’ve been looking for these and by golly, there are some – there are nonviolent ways of resisting.
Some Ukrainians have stopped Russia tanks by blocking them like this person did. Others have confronted troops with boos, chants, and verbal tirades, which I would be hesitant to call nonviolence in principle. But here’s one that you might remember from days gone by. The Ukrainian Road Company has encouraged people to remove road signs to confuse the invaders. Does that sound familiar?
It should, because the Prague Spring in 1968-1969, that is exactly what they did. They didn’t remove road signs. They turned them around so at one point you had this massive invasion coming from Poland, driving all day, at the end of the day finding themselves back at the Polish border. And as a matter of fact, the Prague Spring confrontation, which in so many ways is similar to what the people of Ukraine have to do now, was not as confrontational. They used more humor.
And as we know, the result of that was nothing short of spectacular. The Soviet high command had planned – and Gene Sharp found this out from a dissident soviet officer at Harvard – they had planned to overrun Czechoslovakia in four days. And it took them something like eight months to establish any kind of control in the country.
I would like to conclude with something that a region that I started with, what is going on in Gaza. Outside of the region, Jews in Europe have been condemning Israel’s war and using the phrase, “Not in my name.” This is going on in Scotland and the UK, Barcelona. Many Jewish protestors, who have taken on quite a bit of abuse in the process, have joined pro-Palestinian rallies.
And they point back to a man whose name I was familiar with for years but haven’t heard him mentioned recently. His name was Joseph Abileah. He was a musician. He was born in Austria. And he’s considered to be the first individual in Israel to stand trial for refusing to serve in the Israeli military. And he did that just months after the Jewish state was established in 1948. So, that was a much more principled stand than it would be today with the “Not in my name” movement.
He managed to escape a prison sentence, and his stance really has kind of paved the way for generations of conscientious objectors in Israel.
I remember asking a friend of mine back in – probably 2014 – how he felt when he was called up, but he didn’t have to go in because he had served before. And he said enigmatically – I went and asked, “How did you feel about not going in when you were called?” The country was under attack. He said, “How did I feel? Like a Jew.”
Well, I leave you to figure out with me what exactly that means.
So, friends, thank you very much for listening. As you can tell, there’s a great deal going on in the world in the way of nonviolence, which is not covered very much, in the way of violence, which is covered too much. Until next time.
Stephanie: You’ve been at Nonviolence Radio. We want to thank our mother station, KWMR. To our guest today, Georgia Kelly, to Matt Watrous, Annie Hewitt, Sophia Pechaty, to Bryan Farrell, thank you very much for all your support on the show. And to you, our listeners, we want to thank you and everything you do for nonviolence. Let’s stay inspired. Let’s keep practicing. And until the next time, please take care of one another.