This could be the Golden Age for the study of resistance.
For starters, we are going to need a great deal of nonviolent resistance to cope with the coming climate warming crisis. Our political system and our public institutions are ill-equipped to make the kind of revolutionary changes to the economic system we are going to need to respond to the climate catastrophe. The public institutions we need to help with this have been underfunded for decades; tax avoidance, along with the under-taxing of corporations and the wealthy, has left politicians with insufficient resources to undertake the necessary measures. Turning industrialised and industrialising countries into carbon neutral, green economies will require vast investment.
In other words, there is currently an adaptive capacity gap: the amount of adaption we are going to require to respond to climate change far outstrips the institutional and material resource capacities we currently have at our disposal.
Adding to this problem is that, as a 2014 Princeton Study demonstrated, ‘the general public has little or no independent influence’ on policymaking, at least in the U.S., while ‘economic elites’ have a ‘quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy.’ In other words, the political system, certainly in most advanced capitalist countries, is captured by the very class who benefit most from its continuation and the current status quo. It is therefore unlikely to voluntarily undertake the radical transformation of the system which benefits the rich and powerful, and which is responsible for climate warming.
This is the democratic deficit which prevents the political class from making the necessary policy changes and transfering wealth back to public institutions. At present, the political class are more indebted to, and more fearful of upsetting, their wealthy sponsors than to the public who elect them. This is one of the reasons why increasing taxes on corportations and the super-rich is viewed as politically impossible by most political parties in Western countries.
What this means is that, as George Monbiot recently expressed it,
“The political class… is strategically incapable of addressing even short-term crises, let alone a vast existential predicament. […] Those who govern the nation and shape public discourse cannot be trusted with the preservation of life on Earth. There is no benign authority preserving us from harm. No one is coming to save us. None of us can justifiably avoid the call to come together to save ourselves.”
In other words, we can’t rely on the political class to develop sensible, evidence-based policies to restructure the economy and save the planet. Our only remaining option is to come together to save ourselves.
We will need mass civil disobedience, rebellion and resistance in order to compel governments and corporations into making radical changes to society and the way capitalism operates, because they will not act decisively without the coercive pressure of mass nonviolent resistance.
Environmental justice groups like Extinction Rebellion are already starting to show the way forward in this regard, but we will need much more resistance over the next few decades to make significant progress in restructuring society. The study of resistance will be important as we try to better understand what kind of resistance works, how to build resilient social movements that can overcome government and corporate resistance to radical change, and how to construct local communities characterised by sustainability, as well as social and climate justice.
Another reason why the study of resistance is coming into its golden age is because resistance is currently growing around the world. As we discuss in a forthcoming edited volume on revolutionary nonviolence, the past two decades have witnessed a huge proliferation of educational and activist organisations around the world dedicated to the study and practice of nonviolent resistance and unarmed insurrection. There are now thousands of local and global activist groups and movements working for progressive social and environmental change across different areas in virtually every country.
Crucially, these groups and organisations are coming together to form global networks linking many thousands of scholars and activists to share information and resources, engage in nonviolent training, and support and coordinate civil resistance and social-change campaigns in different countries. Waging Nonviolence, among others, is an important example of this.
At the same time, the past two decades have also witnessed a genuine surge in the number of major nonviolent movements for social and political change, including major revolutions like the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and the Colour Revolutions in Europe. Alongside this, there has been an increase and spread of uprisings and urban revolts across the world, motivated in large part by increased wealth inequality and social exclusion. From 2001 to the present day, major disturbances and mass resistance have been seen in cities like Cincinnati, Paris, Athens, London, Stockholm, Istanbul, Ferguson, Baltimore, and Milwaukee and Charlotte – as well as urban revolts in Cairo, Sao Paulo, Madrid, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Khartoum and many other places. The rebellion in Hong Kong this month is an important example of these kinds of movements which are proliferating around the world.
The point is that these movements are growing and creating the conditions for radical transformations in politics and power. They are demonstrating new ways of doing politics, and in the process, they are forging new forms of collective power beyond the confines and limits of traditional party politics. In many cases, these nonviolent movements and unarmed rebellions are going far beyond simply making demands on the political system.
In addition to demonstrating and protesting, they are also building new kinds of communities, new economic systems and new ways of living and being. This kind of prefiguration is creating new sources of agency and power, and opening up spaces for wider political participation and deeper forms of democracy than the current systems can presently accommodate. It is transforming our understanding of what counts as politics, and what social justice entails.
In short, there is a global transformation under way which is changing politics, power and protest. It needs to be studied and better understood, for both analytical and normative reasons. Not only do we need to know how and why our world is changing, but nonviolent resistance might be the best hope we have of meeting and dealing with the overwhelming challenges the world is currently facing. Climate change on its own is a vast existential crisis, but it has in turn intensified other destructive processes, from extreme wealth inequality, to populism and hyper-nationalism, to the refugee crisis, water conflict, and more. We will need to better understand the strengths, weaknesses, pitfalls and opportunities of popular resistance in order to more effectively deal with these interlocking and evolving challenges.
The golden age of resistance is at our doorstep.
The late nonviolent activist, David Dellinger of the “Chicago 8” fame once said, “we are in the Edison & Marconi Stages of Nonviolent Action.” With the advent of the “Occupy Wall Street,” the Egyptian and Algerian Arab Spring Revolutions and Revolts, I wonder if we are in the “Digital Age” of nonviolent action or even nonviolent revolution? Gil Scott-Heron once wrote and sang “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” On the contrary, US Representative John Lewis of SNCC and the Civil Rights Era, a few years ago led a sit-in in the well of the House of Representatives on gun safety, when Paul Ryan blocked gun safety legislation, and when the Republicans shut off the lights and the CSPAN cameras, the Democratic members of the House and US Senators who had joined the action, used Twitter and Periscope to continue the protest despite the attempts of the Republicans to block and suppress it. So “the Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” but it will be Tweeted and Videostreamed via Periscope. Maybe we should revisit George Lakey’s “5 Stage Strategic Model of a Living Revolution, ” http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lakeylivrev.html ” the Global Nonviolent Action Database at http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/ and Gene Sharp’s work, http://aeinstein.org/. So rather than “act our way into thinking” we can “think our way into action,” like the late William Moyer (NOT THE PBS GUY!) once said.
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/moyermap.html
I agree with this. It’s a challenge to peace activism. Walter Fernandes. North Eastern Social Research Centre. Jagriti 2nd floor. GMCH Road, Christian Basti, Guwahati 781005, Assam, India. walter.nesrc@gmail.com
At Popular Resistance we saw the same thing. The 2020s are going to be a decade of potential great, positive transformation if we are ready to organize and mobilize people in an effective way.
That is why we have published the Popular Resistance School, How Social Transformation Occurs. It is on the web and freely available. It includes eight one-hour classes and links to reading related to the curriculum. You can see it here: http://www.PopularResistance.org/school.
Thanks for your article.
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, FROM LENIN ON VIOLENCE
Violence is the use of one or another group political social national or tribal or religious used against the other to acquire or preseve the economic and political control and to keep its privileges secure. The relations between classes, much like the internal struggles within the ruling class, manifest themselves as struggle for power.
You must use all forms of struggle against capitalism. This will depend on the correlation of forces. An uprising would be madness where the popular vote can arrive at the same place. In some countries antagonisms between classes make inevitable a violent result in social arena. In any case this can only be decided by the working class itself. The oligarchy is an armed force against the workers, but we will work against them peacefully where it can be done, and with armed struggle where there is no other choice. It depends on the moral (or demoralized) state of the bureaucratic military complex, the degree of resistance among the ruling class, the characteristics of the political institutions, and the degree of traditions respected in the Constitution and in social life. To what degree has the police machinery grown, how much has militarism taken over, and how far is imperial reaction willing to go? In some cases the ruling class can become convinced that resistance is useless, and would prefer to keep their heads. On the other hand, the kleptocracy is quite capable of imposing a civil war on the population, aimed at crushing people’s movements, and using bloody repression against poor people, working people and leftists.
However, we are entering a new situation- the shift to the left by large numbers of citizens in advanced capitalist countries, and the growth of the social base that understands the need for change. This can only happen if the left intensifies its efforts in parliamentary, political and elective activity. A peaceful socialist program can be developed withing existing institutions if the people elected to office are conscious and dedicated leftwingers. In this way we can arrive at a stage in which the masses would not have to recur to arms, but that depends on how solid the legal protests and political activity are. It is necessary to keep the government that is in power from contradicting democratic guarantees and the established legal order, in order to keep them from crushing the revolutionary movement with force.
There are many forms of violence. One is forced impositions at work. From economic exploitation, unpaid labor, the feudal system, violence has put on the mask of “liberty” for the worker, where in fact all such relations are different forms of slavery. We are living through a period that ranges from democratic formalism, to the establishing of dictatorships, militarism, fascism and the diktat for war in international relations. Violence is glamorized as the cult of strength, the rule of the elite, racial supremacy, etc. Violence may be needed to destroy the classes of this oppressive system.
Violence has been key to revolutions in history. However, one must not allow it to overwhelm the use of unnecessary bloodshed, the destruction of a culture, the loss of humanism and justice.
Violence is decided by the objective laws of development and the conditions of struggle. The dominant class may refuse to renounce its privileges and use all means within their grasp, including mass terror. The scale and forms of violence depend on the resistance of the workers and the strength and rhythm of the revolutionary process. Where there is an option, there must be a concrete historical analysis to reduce violence to a minimum. War pushes the people into its greatest suffering and sacrifice, the destruction of the productive forces, and the restriction of democratic institutions.
Counterrevolutions are often supported by interventionists from the outside. The task of the working class is to engage in mass political action, without establishing a people’s dictatorship. However in the first stages of socialism, coercion may be necessary against those who resist socialism and those who engage in machinations against the revolution.Their support from counterrevolutionaries needs to be withdrawn. This does not mean repression, much less eliminating them, but simply letting them be, not allowing them to proliferate, inviting to participate if they have skills useful to the construction of a new society. Instead of violence, the socialist system uses education and re-education to take away the brain washing that is a staple in capitalist education.
New forms of life are only possible with the cooperation of millions. Education, persuasion, organizations supplant the usual bureaucratic methods of violence that destroy democratic principles. One must fight against opportunism, revisionism, against bourgeois democracy, against militarism, the bureaucratic military complex, against dictatorships. Anarchists tend to engage in violent armed struggle but they dont realize that they are thereby providing the oligarchy with a pretext for further violence. Violence wrongly used is a gift to the security state. It allows the state to demonize the popular movement. It is wrong to try to apply violent methods to all areas of social life. The means may not become the ends. To bring about a humanist ideal by violent means would establish them as ends in themselves.