I am not advocating Violence

[cthulu2016]

19. I think her work is sort of side-ways to the question

Last edited Thu Jul 5, 2012, 08:25 PM - Edit history (1)

I appreciate your post a great deal. I wanted to say that because I don't want my comments to be read as rejecting it.

It is obvious that armed revolutionary movements will typically lose to armies. Her results rely on boot-strapping that obvious historical fact into a conclusion that doesn't mean what she wants to say it means.

It would indeed be absurd for any group seeking social change in a Western nation to become an armed resistance seeking the violent overthrow of a government to replace it with a different government.

I agree.

But that has little bearing on the subject of the OP, which is that a credible fear of violence from the oppressed is a necessary element of a lot of social change.

If we try to divide history into campaigns and movements, yes, violent movements typically fail in their stated objectives. And I hope everyone would have assumed that to be the case. But social history is not a scorecard of how different manifestos worked out.

For instance, did the Black Panthers succeed or fail? By the standards of the Black Panthers that movement failed spectacularly. The Black Panthers did not achieve the overthrow of the US Government and its replacement with a revolutionary socialist regime. Almost all the Black Panthers ended up dead or in jail.

The Black Panthers would get a zero on the "campaigns and movements" scorecard.

But the fact that militant black Americans were shooting police and firemen had a tremendous impact. Negotiations with the city about resources devoted to black neighborhoods were shaped by the environment. The existence of an armed, revolutionary splinter group made concessions to more moderate groups likelier.

If the electrician's union was negotiating a contract the week after the bombing of the L.A. Times building they were backed by a threat they did not make conveyed by a tactic they had not employed. The same way somebody seeking a library or park in a black neighborhood, or a commission on police brutality, was backed by a threat they did not make and would not countenance that was conveyed by the environment where the Panthers were shooting people.

An armed movement, conceived as such, will almost always fail. Like I said in the OP, the first phase of a popular rebellion is the brutal suppression of the rebellion and hanging all the leaders. As a movement or campaign that's a failure. But the broader movement typically advances.

King was more successful than Malcolm X. But without what Malcolm X was thought to represent (it's all perception) people would have been less eager to make concessions to King.

Martin Luther King certainly did not plan or encourage waves of riots, but the riots shaped the environment of the last few years of his life. There is a world of difference between, "Do Y because it is right," and "Do Y because there will be less cities burned down." The later is not a threat, it's a social observation. But it focuses the minds of the people holding the power.

Much of the respect for and sympathy toward King among whites was fueled by the fact that he could have been so much "worse." He was one of the reasonable ones. Without the implicit fear of "the unreasonable ones" there is not power in being reasonable.

Many of Chenoweth's non-violent revolutions are based on the threat of violence, whether she recognizes that or not. She notes that a million people marching peacefully is more effective than an armed militia. True. If, however, it was guaranteed that the million marchers would remain peaceful then the powers that be wouldn't care much. A million people marching in the streets, however peacefully, is a plausible threat of popular revolt. A million people anywhere is scary.

Why do the powers that be respond to a million people in the streets? Out of a moral sensibility awakened by the spectacle or out of fear? I suggest that later. Why is a vast crowd assembling peacefully in a Cairo park intolerable? Because they can take every government building apart stone by stone if it comes to that.

I agree that any self-proclaimed violent movement will be met with military force and quickly fail.

And I also maintain that a mass movement in a world where violence was not on the table in same way would find much less influence.