This is a good articulation of mlkjr's theology and dicipline around nonviolence, but I think its incomplete if you read it in isolation.
His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction)
Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing.
You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model
You (likely) act in a non-violent way every day. If you want some kind of change in your life, you achieve it non-violently.
Does that imply you are are actually a violent person that is choosing not to be violent? Are you implying “something violent” every day you act like a good person?
MLK didn’t have support because people were afraid of the alternative. They supported him because they agreed with him message.
I feel like you are just trying to justify violence to some degree.
Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say its not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.
You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs.
nobody is secretly violent ... just normal peaceful channels stoped working.
Recognizing that distinction isn't justifying violence its just explaining why nonviolence provides leverage in the first place
And those mechanisms, the military, the police, and the legal system, rely on violence as the ultimate fallback when other options fail.
So you may not be relying on violence to solve your problems, or the threat of violence, or the insinuation of it, but instead relying on the threat of someone ELSE’S violence. That is the social contract pretty fundamentally.
And when people can no longer rely on those figures who are supposed to use violence on their behalf, we shouldn’t be surprised that they attempt to reclaim the ability to use force. The social contract has been voided, in their eyes. The premise and promise broken.
> Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say it’s not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
If all of the enforcement bodies and normal legal peaceful channels available to you don’t agree with your assessment there is probably a “why”. If the reason that your property was seized is because you chose to not pay your rent, then I am not sure understanding, sympathy, or joining in violence would be an appropriate response.
If all of the enforcement bodies and normal legal peaceful channels available to you don’t agree with your assessment there is probably a “why”
Yeah, like maybe you didn't have $50,000 to appeal a bad decision made because a magistrate couldn't be bothered actually reading the evidence in front of them.
"Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say its not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.
You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs."
I would say it depends. Are there depts of rent involved in that scenario? Did the locking out just happened out of the blue, or was it communicated before, that it would happen?
Apart from that, I surely see more easy examples of justifying violence - for example to stop other violence.
I've listened to a lot of Malcolm X. He was a better speaker IMO, his rhetoric was better. I believe he had a more accurate understanding of the reality of how power really works. It has nothing to do with wanting to justifying violence, Malcolm X made a number of matter of fact observations.
I think the specific condition here is "change that someone else is willing to prevent using violence". I guess that is not present too often during everyday life.
Everyday you're not trying to achieve political change.
And a lot of those interactions are backed by implied violence: people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
> people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
Yes it is. If a normal commodity item such as bottle of milk was outrageous overpriced in a particular store. I would just go to another store.
As for whether I would pay for something without the threat of violence. I do so everyday. I've walked out of stores by mistake with an item I haven't paid for and gone back into the store and paid for it. I don't like my things being stolen, and thus I don't steal other people's things.
I pay for my eggs from a farm and it is a honour system.
> people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
... I genuinely can't fathom what it's like to live in a developed country and yet have such little social trust.
You really imagine that when others are in line at a checkout, they have the intrusive thought "I could just bolt and not pay, but I see a security guard so I better stay in line"? You really have that thought yourself?
Of course people have agreed on the price. That's why you don't see anyone trying to negotiate the price, even though they would be perfectly within their rights to try. And it's why you do see people comparison-shop.
You're missing the point -- I don't refuse to pay a parking ticket after the court orders me to do so. I don't stand in the checkout line trying to figure out how to run out without paying. I don't threaten people on the sidewalk and take their money when I notice there aren't any police around at the moment. I trust that the vast, vast majority of people act similarly. If they didn't, no amount of law enforcement would be enough.
> I don't threaten people on the sidewalk and take their money when I notice there aren't any police around at the moment.
What do you think happens to people who do that though?
You keep telling me what you don't do and how it proves you're implicitly non violent but you can't even imagine framing that response in terms that don't include representatives of the state's monopoly on violence being within arms reach.
Implying violence is never necessary while repeatedly describing not doing violence even if the state's violence distributing apparatus isn't currently present rather undermines the case.
> but you can't even imagine framing that response in terms that don't include representatives of the state's monopoly on violence being within arms reach.
This is not an accurate representation of GP:
> I don't stand in the checkout line trying to figure out how to run out without paying.... I trust that the vast, vast majority of people act similarly. If they didn't, no amount of law enforcement would be enough.
The OP is presenting a stupidly simplistic model of the problem, as though their regular middle class life ably answers the question of the role or threat of violence when demanding political change.
In a world they note of police, military and security guards, they're acting like whether this might have a reason is determined solely by whether people are planning to steal from a supermarket or not...while they're not poverty stricken or hungry, to boot.
Arguing "I simply obey all the laws" is real easy to do from a position of privilege.
Violence is never the answer is easy to say when it's not happening to you. Its also easy to say while you stand by as violence is done to others.
yeah the crazy part about that is one uncomfortable point many through history (and in threads today) have made is that nonviolence implicitly assumes a moral audience. And that injustice, once clearly exposed will provoke people's conscience.
History obviously shows that that "moral audience" was certainly the minority then.
MLK was already forcing that confrontation and by most accounts was succeeding slowly-but-surely. But it wasn't until his assassination that people were forced to confront the contrast he had been trying to illuminate all along.
Even his disciplined non-violence he was met with brutal force (as were the peaceful protesters) and this forced some sort of moral reckoning for those who had deferred or were complicit
> His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
I have read very many people claim this and exactly zero reasons provided by them why I should believe it is true.
It seems to me like basic common nature that if you see proponents of a cause behaving in a manner you find objectionable, that will naturally bias you against the cause. And I have, repeatedly, across a period of many years, observed myself to become less sympathetic to multiple causes specifically because I can see that their proponents use violence in spreading their message.
I've tried very many times to explain the above to actual proponents of causes behaving in manners I found objectionable (but only on the Internet, for fear of physical safety) and the responses have all been either incoherent or just verbally abusive.
> making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This would only make sense if social change required action specifically from people in power, who in turn must necessarily act against their best interest to effect it.
If that were true, there would be no real motivation to try nonviolence at all, except perhaps to try to conserve the resources used to do violence.
> You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective
First, no, that makes no sense. If that were true, formal debate would never occur and nobody would ever actually try to convince anyone of anything in good faith. The premise is flawed from the beginning; you cannot apply game theory here because you cannot even establish that clearly defined "players" exist. Nor is there a well-defined "payoff matrix", at all. The point of nonviolent protest is to make the protested party reconsider what is actually at stake.
Second, in practice, violence is never actually reserved as a credible threat in these actions; it happens concurrently with attempts at nonviolence and agitators give no credible reason why it should stop if their demands are met. In fact, it very often comes across that the apparent demands are only a starting point and that ceding to them will only embolden the violent.
No, because I am referring to a general memory of a general history of political discussions on the Internet across a period of ~15 years. It's hopefully understandable that at the time I did not have the foresight that I would be posting this today.
intrigued by this. i've spent a lot of timer over the last years with very committed nonviolence folks, and i keep wondering about the conditions for this to work.
can you recommend any sources that discuss this idea?
"I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."
My former experience has been that this quote is justification for one's political ingroup to be violent, but evidence that one's political outgroup (when they cite it) is morally unconscionable.
I purposefully refrained from judgement or commentary either way when posting it. My intention was merely to show that this line of thinking about the duality of violence and non-violence is something the nation's founders themselves were thinking about. It is the reason I posted the quote in full, instead of the abbreviated form most commonly referenced. I hope that the added context lends nuance and perspective which might otherwise be overlooked.
Today, history remembers MLK as a great man. There are parades in his honor, workers are given a day off. Rosa Parks is another peaceful pioneer credited with bringing strides forward.
Malcolm X and others are already fading from memory.
I believe that was the OP's point: we remember a sanitized version of the myth of MLK that flatters modern sensibilities, while ignoring Malcom X because we don't like to acknowledge he played an equally important role in bringing about change.
In a survey of ~600 movements since 1900, it was found that those that tended to use violence more succeeded about 25% in achieving their goals, while those that used less violence succeeded over 40%:
You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence. Further, less violent movements are more likely to end up more democratic / less authoritarian.
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence. So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
The book is 'minorly academic', but it's an easy read and probably more geared toward the general public.
(The studies/book recognize that "violence" exists on a spectrum. The book also talks about generally non-violent movement(s) that have factions that attach to them that want to use violence, and various other scenarios.)
> You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence.
Admittedly having not read the 400-page study, I don't think that's a causation that is necessarily supported by the correlation. It would be extremely surprising if the prior of "how likely is this movement to succeed" were not a determining factor in whether a movement tends to use violence, with the a priori less-promising movements being more likely to take violent action.
C.F. the difference between me demanding you give me an apple or your car.
> Admittedly having not read the 400-page study […]
It is not a 400-page study: it is a 400-page book that goes over the research available at the time and summarizes it. The book leans slightly academic, but it's a fairly easy read.
A movement's success is (partly?) determined by its size and how much of the general population gets on board with the original (presumably) small group that started it.
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence.
So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
> If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
The book covers such scenarios: where you are non-violent but the Powers That Be are violent towards your movement.
I will attempt to find a link when I'm not on my phone, but the methodology and results here have been solidly criticised (mainly around survivorship bias, as a sibling notes, as well as about the measures of success).
This study (and the one about 3% of the population being sufficient to enact a change) comes up constantly when you hang around leftists, and I've been known to quote it myself when I was younger, but it always felt too good to be true and uncomfortably aligned with liberal sensibilities.
Many people, especially in the US today, dont understand that non-violence doesn't mean passivity or even a willingness to compromise. It just means you do anything you can without actually punching and killing people.
And it turns out killing and punching people is sometimes the worst option of to play the long game. This is why nation states often twist themselves in bretzels to manufacture consent so they can go elsewhere and punch and kill people over there. If you don't have that consent, you will lose the popular support and that can mean that even if you won the battle, you lose the war.
Many people fail to consider second order effects. Offensive violent actions to address violent threat may seem like the natural solution, but a second order effect is often that it runs a wedge between the general population and those willing to use violence, shrinking the support. Another second order effect is that the other side will also use more violence and then the whole thing spirals into open weaponized conflict. A thing you should only provoke if you have the numbers, support and means to actually win it. So don't just scratch where it itches, think about the side effects and what psth it leads you down.
Non-violent opposition hinges on the fact thst many of the second order effects are positive. The non-violent side has usually more sympathies within the population, non-violent opposition can be really easy to get into, it could be as simple as a mail man strategically losing a letter, a sysadmin accidentally leaving a api exposed, a wine-mom building networks with others to keep open tabs on the neighbourhood, a peint shop not forgetting who printed a certain flyer when the state authorities show up and so on. Wherever you are, there is probably a way to resist. And if there are enough people normal operations of the regime become hard to sustain.
> A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence.
It's strange to me that this isn't obviously true to everyone.
> [Chenoweth and Stephan] have gone out of their way to correct people who treat it like a cheat code, and to caution against overreading any success of non-violent oppostion.
The rebuttal is against those arguing that 3.5% is a "magic number", that treat(ed) it like an 'absolute', when we're actually dealing with probabilities and likelihoods and odds.
The formulators of the "3.5% rule" do not treat it as an absolute, and neither do I: my GP post talks about "odds" and likelihoods.
Nice, so you didn't watch the video completely. Hopefully others don't make your mistake, both that and believing that garbage.
Resistance has always been violence/sabotage towards oppressors, if nonviolence actions were effective you'd see more armed forces bashing skulls at no kings protests.
I did: he talks about the 3.5% is "just" walking and chanting down the street, but about structure changes 'behind the scenes'.
But the video is generally irrelevant to the point being made in the comment, as Stoermer (video creator) recognizes the people who came up with the rule are criticizing some who are putting it forward certain ideas about.
Stoermer is putting forward the idea that the 3.5% needs to be done in a certain way to actually be something meaningful, which doesn't disprove the rule nor the originating comment: that you'll be more liekly to get to a critical mass of movement supporters by eschewing violence.
And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
It is actually 'interesting' in that it is one of the few examples where a non-violent movement ended up with an authoritative regime after "success": it's (almost?) unique in that regard per the author. Most non-violent movements end up in a democratic system.
> And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
"original" is doing some heavy lifting here - the Iranian revolution was not non violent. By the state or by the revolutionaries.
It's also impossible to talk about the regime without also bringing up the formative events in the early years of the Iranian state, namely the Iran-Iraq war.
Agape could be discussed as a philosophy between disagreeing figures like King and Carmichael. Today, fewer people have encountered the idea so they can’t choose it as a philosophy.
Without agape, political activism is more zero-sum and utilitarian. Non-violence becomes a gambit that is only appealing as long as it is making obvious gains against the current winners, and there is little motivation to remain nonviolent after becoming winners.
I've spent a lot of time with people who seem themselves operating within ML Kings lineage and have their lives committed to this kind of nonviolence work, and they defintely operate from within the an "agape mindset", even though they wouldn't frame it like that.
in my understanding some people use 'non-violence' to describe the more utilitarian version, and 'noniovlence' for that which exits the entire 'domination paradigm'
Sometimes, I suspect that Gandhi was helped by the global developments of that time, specifically the British context at the end of the war. Gandhi could have been lucky, in part, to find the British in a mood to relinquish their holdings. Bose, on the other hand, decided to fight by all means, though being no match against the British. Maybe, both strategies would have been equally weak, if there was no world war.
I feel like the role of non violence is over emphasized. It plays a part in these social and political movements. But the MLK era civil rights movement and even the Indian independence movement MLK drew inspiration from, involved a lot of violent resistance sustained for years. People paid with their lives to create unrest and draw attention to their oppression and and gather supporters. We shouldn’t ignore their contribution or forget that it’s part of the overall path to getting justice, alongside non violent resistance.
Women got their rights without a large group of violent female terrorists threatening violence, so you are wrong. Feminism has been the most successful liberating movement in history and it happened basically without any bloodshed.
> Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.
This is definitely true to some extent, especially when non-violence has been used in the more distant past.
But in recent history, the non-violent approach creates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties, who find violence against non-combatants to be unpalatable.
You can turn the world against an enemy by putting the enemy's asymmetric use of force on display.
This doesn't work in a lower empathy society.
>reates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties
Only if you have good advertising for your cause.
Violence is typically good advertising, most news is simply salivating to cover it.
Which means in any non-violent group seeking a goal, it is optimal to have a small violent 'unassociated' group cause just enough problems to get noticed in the global media.
Is anyone aware of a more thorough argument for why this must be the case? Is it a commonly held view? It sounds realistic, but not necessarily and immutable law, I’d like to know what thought has been given to this.
It’s an incentive problem. If even one party defects in a society of pacifists, the pacifists have no real method of recourse besides refusing to interact with the defector, and how many people are going to do that if the defector starts killing people to enforce compliance?
Some subscribe to a soft pacifism where non-destructive violent resistance like disarming the defector or disabling the defector using less-lethal technologies like a tazer would be fine. Pure pacifists who don’t believe in any kind of physical resistance whatsoever are almost exclusively religious practitioners who don’t ascribe a high degree of value to life in this world because they believe non-resistance will bear spiritual fruit in the next world.
Its also appropriate to remember that MLK was friends with Malcolm X, and both chose their own means to support the same end goal.
MLK chose nonviolent shows of force, whereas Malcolm X chose more direct forms of violence.
Governments could save face by negotiating with MLK, as he used nonviolent means. They couldn't negotiate with Malcolm X because thats the whole "we cannot negotiate with criminals and terrorists".
It's because people in positions of power can safely ignore nonviolence. They can't ignore the other option. Nonviolence on it's own is not productive.
Thats what disturbs me about yesteryears's protest marches, like MLK's March on Washington, compared to 50501 and No Kings.
MLK wanted a non-violent showing of force as to stay "legal", but a strong implicit threat of "well, you know, theres a LOT of us. We're peaceful for now". The bus boycotts almost bankrupted down in Atlanta, so money attacks also work.
But now, we have No Kings and 50501. The whole idea of mass protest as a 'nonviolent but imminent threat' is completely gone. Protests were a prelude to something to be done. Now, its more of a political action rally, with not much of anything to follow up the initial energy.
Which is also why the protests; pussy hat rebellion, 50501, No Kings - they've all failed. Theres no goals. Its just chanting and some signs.
Imo this is what happened once protests became a “right”. I know most people here won’t agree with the Canada trucker protest, but I remember when it happened, people were saying “ok, you’ve had your protest and exercised your rights, you’ve been heard, you can go home now” - framing it just like that, as a rally to show an opinion rather than a threat. It felt to me like “the establishment” just treats them as peformative, because as you say they usually are, and then doesn’t know what to do when it’s actually something they have to react to.
Yeah, the thorough argument is that people in power don't want people to rise up and challenge their authority.
It's absolutely not realistic. Every right we have was fought for and people died trying to get it. This is especially true in America where a fifth of the population was enslaved at inception. Nothing has never been given to us it had to be taken from abusers of power and there have always been abusers of power in this country.
I mean Trump is no different than Washington. Washington routinely ignored laws, he tried to have his lackeys go get his "property" from free states while never willing to go to court (a provision of the fugitive slave act).
John Adam's called Shays's Resistance terrorists because they had the audacity to close down courts to stop foreclosures of farms (fun fact, that was the first time since the revolution where Americans fired artillery at other Americans (and it was a paid mercenary army by Boston merchants killing over credit)).
You can go down the list, it's always been there but luckily there were always people fighting against it trying to better society against those that simply dragged us down.
A commonly cited example is during the Battle of Seattle the cops wanted to beat the shit out of a nonviolent sit in and the black bloc protected them through a combination of strength and diversion. The non violent people are there for the optics and the violent people are there assuring that any move made on the nonviolent protesters will be rewarded swiftly.
The important part is that the violence mostly doesn't start until someone tries to hurt those who are there peacefully. Good was there peacefully so retaliation is becoming a possibility.
Sorry, are you suggesting that violence doesn't also require coordination of a group? I think the record of lone gunmen solving institutional problems remains kind of scarce.
Whether you want to be a guerilla group, terrorists, or take a peaceful approach the first step is always going to involvefinding confederates.
The lone gunmen mythology has basically been key to getting America en masse to surrender it's rights.
So many complaints about government have the form "I'll hit my breaking point and then I'll shoot a bunch of people".
No plan to join a militia, no plan to engage in coordinated action before that. Just a plan to commit a mass shooting and then be gunned down as another statistic. And probably kill a bunch of people who have nothing to do with whatever the problem is.
I have an undergraduate degree in Peace Studies, and have spent extensive time in and around conflict or post-conflict zones.
Violence, particularly civil war, is utterly destructive to a society, completely tears apart the social fabric and creates wounds that never really heal.
That said, when you look at America, India, both movements required the threat of violence to succeed. MLK had the Black Panthers, and whilst Ghandi himself preached non-violence he did so against a background of riots in which thousands of British officers were killed and wounded.
The social reforms Western Europe and America saw in the post-war period were an capitulation to the implicit thread of violent communist revolution.
Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I think you are confusing the BPP with some other organization. All of King’s substantive achievements were accomplished before the formation of the Black Panther’s and he died before they came to national prominence.
Heh, did I mention that peace degree was a loooooong time ago. Totally appreciate the correction.
I remember reading an argument along those lines at the time that resonated. Perhaps not the Black Panthers? Or am I just totally wrong here and there wasn't a shred of political violence in the background?
>Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I have a feeling you probably should have put a bunch of caveats for both like "if you're willing to wait a few generations for your aims to be met".
When talking about both the American civil war, one side had engaged in violence for antiquity and had the force of the state which came to state that violence was the expected behavior. This violent behavior was very profitable, and the people profiting from this realize they were in a weak position so they started propagandizing was what they were doing was "in the name of god", "is good for the common man", etc. It moves the conversation from one looking at the violence of slavery to "Why do you hate god and country".
Simply put the US civil war was a temporary increase of violence that preceded the war with slavery and followed the war in neo-slavery.
There is a quote by Gandhi where he is talking about the Holocaust and he says: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs..."
This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.
This is a fundamental problem.
It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.
> Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
When the British outlawed slavery and made their moral arguments against it, it seems to me that that worked pretty well everywhere except the US. I mean, sure, they might have had to invoke military force against other Europeans, but the idea spread within Britain easily enough, and they didn't lack sympathetic ears elsewhere (e.g. in Canada; the Underground Railroad was possible for a reason).
The reason for abolishing slavery was that it was a backwards system that prevented the super exploitation that came naturally for the proletariat.
The abolition of slavery was the proletarization of slaves. It absolutely was economic in nature. There was no economic need for slavery anymore, it didnt end racism tho, which was the ideological weapon that permited slavery.
Racism was simply repurposed for the black (and other) proletariat.
Industrialization killed slavery not morality.
Where is the goodness?
You have an idealist conception of history.
How would this allow superexploitation?
When capitalism becomes more productive than the market can handle it just shuts down the factories or when it gets more efficient it just gets rid of workers. Try doing that with slaves.
Proletarization created a pool of unemployed and a labor makret that benefited capitalists.
Englishmen who wrote about liberalism during the abolition of slavery made it very clear that it was explicitly about morality.
And industrialization enabled slavery in the US rather than killing it, thanks to the Jevons paradox; the cotton gin allowed for land previously seen as unsuitable for cotton production to be bought up by slaveowners, increasing the demand for slaves (https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent ; see section "Effects of the Cotton Gin").
I don't recognize your concept of "superexploitation" in the first place.
Beware that while you may choose nonviolence to protest this regime, your local police department will water you like a row of daisies with giant cans of mace and CS while TikTok users get bored and swipe to the next video.
This is a good articulation of mlkjr's theology and dicipline around nonviolence, but I think its incomplete if you read it in isolation.
His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction)
Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing.
You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model
I’m not sure that logically tracks.
You (likely) act in a non-violent way every day. If you want some kind of change in your life, you achieve it non-violently.
Does that imply you are are actually a violent person that is choosing not to be violent? Are you implying “something violent” every day you act like a good person?
MLK didn’t have support because people were afraid of the alternative. They supported him because they agreed with him message.
I feel like you are just trying to justify violence to some degree.
Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say its not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.
You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs.
nobody is secretly violent ... just normal peaceful channels stoped working.
Recognizing that distinction isn't justifying violence its just explaining why nonviolence provides leverage in the first place
And those mechanisms, the military, the police, and the legal system, rely on violence as the ultimate fallback when other options fail. So you may not be relying on violence to solve your problems, or the threat of violence, or the insinuation of it, but instead relying on the threat of someone ELSE’S violence. That is the social contract pretty fundamentally. And when people can no longer rely on those figures who are supposed to use violence on their behalf, we shouldn’t be surprised that they attempt to reclaim the ability to use force. The social contract has been voided, in their eyes. The premise and promise broken.
> Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say it’s not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
If all of the enforcement bodies and normal legal peaceful channels available to you don’t agree with your assessment there is probably a “why”. If the reason that your property was seized is because you chose to not pay your rent, then I am not sure understanding, sympathy, or joining in violence would be an appropriate response.
"Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say its not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.
In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.
You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs."
I would say it depends. Are there depts of rent involved in that scenario? Did the locking out just happened out of the blue, or was it communicated before, that it would happen?
Apart from that, I surely see more easy examples of justifying violence - for example to stop other violence.
I've listened to a lot of Malcolm X. He was a better speaker IMO, his rhetoric was better. I believe he had a more accurate understanding of the reality of how power really works. It has nothing to do with wanting to justifying violence, Malcolm X made a number of matter of fact observations.
I think the specific condition here is "change that someone else is willing to prevent using violence". I guess that is not present too often during everyday life.
> MLK didn’t have support because people were afraid of the alternative. They supported him because they agreed with him message.
You sound like you've never heard of political triangulation before.
Everyday you're not trying to achieve political change.
And a lot of those interactions are backed by implied violence: people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
> people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
Yes it is. If a normal commodity item such as bottle of milk was outrageous overpriced in a particular store. I would just go to another store.
As for whether I would pay for something without the threat of violence. I do so everyday. I've walked out of stores by mistake with an item I haven't paid for and gone back into the store and paid for it. I don't like my things being stolen, and thus I don't steal other people's things.
I pay for my eggs from a farm and it is a honour system.
> people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
... I genuinely can't fathom what it's like to live in a developed country and yet have such little social trust.
You really imagine that when others are in line at a checkout, they have the intrusive thought "I could just bolt and not pay, but I see a security guard so I better stay in line"? You really have that thought yourself?
Of course people have agreed on the price. That's why you don't see anyone trying to negotiate the price, even though they would be perfectly within their rights to try. And it's why you do see people comparison-shop.
If you break the law, what happens to you? What does the state do to you?
Like say you persistently just refuse to pay a parking ticket after court orders to do so?
You're missing the point -- I don't refuse to pay a parking ticket after the court orders me to do so. I don't stand in the checkout line trying to figure out how to run out without paying. I don't threaten people on the sidewalk and take their money when I notice there aren't any police around at the moment. I trust that the vast, vast majority of people act similarly. If they didn't, no amount of law enforcement would be enough.
> I don't threaten people on the sidewalk and take their money when I notice there aren't any police around at the moment.
What do you think happens to people who do that though?
You keep telling me what you don't do and how it proves you're implicitly non violent but you can't even imagine framing that response in terms that don't include representatives of the state's monopoly on violence being within arms reach.
Implying violence is never necessary while repeatedly describing not doing violence even if the state's violence distributing apparatus isn't currently present rather undermines the case.
> but you can't even imagine framing that response in terms that don't include representatives of the state's monopoly on violence being within arms reach.
This is not an accurate representation of GP:
> I don't stand in the checkout line trying to figure out how to run out without paying.... I trust that the vast, vast majority of people act similarly. If they didn't, no amount of law enforcement would be enough.
The OP is presenting a stupidly simplistic model of the problem, as though their regular middle class life ably answers the question of the role or threat of violence when demanding political change.
In a world they note of police, military and security guards, they're acting like whether this might have a reason is determined solely by whether people are planning to steal from a supermarket or not...while they're not poverty stricken or hungry, to boot.
Arguing "I simply obey all the laws" is real easy to do from a position of privilege.
Violence is never the answer is easy to say when it's not happening to you. Its also easy to say while you stand by as violence is done to others.
> Arguing "I simply obey all the laws" is real easy to do from a position of privilege.
Poor Americans simply do not live in the Les Miserables world.
> Violence is never the answer is easy to say when it's not happening to you. Its also easy to say while you stand by as violence is done to others.
What violence are you even referring to?
I understand that. It is not relevant, and does not establish your original point.
He also had a 75% disapproval rating at the time of his killing.
The violence against him, in contrast with the nonviolence stand, made it stand out.
yeah the crazy part about that is one uncomfortable point many through history (and in threads today) have made is that nonviolence implicitly assumes a moral audience. And that injustice, once clearly exposed will provoke people's conscience.
History obviously shows that that "moral audience" was certainly the minority then.
MLK was already forcing that confrontation and by most accounts was succeeding slowly-but-surely. But it wasn't until his assassination that people were forced to confront the contrast he had been trying to illuminate all along.
Even his disciplined non-violence he was met with brutal force (as were the peaceful protesters) and this forced some sort of moral reckoning for those who had deferred or were complicit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKnJL2jfA5A&feature=youtu.be
If you give people one option it is a demand, and they may rightfully reject it.
Now, give people two options with one of them seeming much better it becomes a choice.
Violence is 100% an answer, it's just very rarely the best answer that can be provided.
> His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
I have read very many people claim this and exactly zero reasons provided by them why I should believe it is true.
It seems to me like basic common nature that if you see proponents of a cause behaving in a manner you find objectionable, that will naturally bias you against the cause. And I have, repeatedly, across a period of many years, observed myself to become less sympathetic to multiple causes specifically because I can see that their proponents use violence in spreading their message.
I've tried very many times to explain the above to actual proponents of causes behaving in manners I found objectionable (but only on the Internet, for fear of physical safety) and the responses have all been either incoherent or just verbally abusive.
> making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This would only make sense if social change required action specifically from people in power, who in turn must necessarily act against their best interest to effect it.
If that were true, there would be no real motivation to try nonviolence at all, except perhaps to try to conserve the resources used to do violence.
> You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective
First, no, that makes no sense. If that were true, formal debate would never occur and nobody would ever actually try to convince anyone of anything in good faith. The premise is flawed from the beginning; you cannot apply game theory here because you cannot even establish that clearly defined "players" exist. Nor is there a well-defined "payoff matrix", at all. The point of nonviolent protest is to make the protested party reconsider what is actually at stake.
Second, in practice, violence is never actually reserved as a credible threat in these actions; it happens concurrently with attempts at nonviolence and agitators give no credible reason why it should stop if their demands are met. In fact, it very often comes across that the apparent demands are only a starting point and that ceding to them will only embolden the violent.
> I have read very many people claim this and exactly zero reasons provided by them why I should believe it is true.
could you share some sources where people have discussed this? i'd like to understand their reasoning better
No, because I am referring to a general memory of a general history of political discussions on the Internet across a period of ~15 years. It's hopefully understandable that at the time I did not have the foresight that I would be posting this today.
Exactly, the potency comes from the fact that violence is the standard reaction
intrigued by this. i've spent a lot of timer over the last years with very committed nonviolence folks, and i keep wondering about the conditions for this to work.
can you recommend any sources that discuss this idea?
"I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."
-- Thomas Jefferson
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
My former experience has been that this quote is justification for one's political ingroup to be violent, but evidence that one's political outgroup (when they cite it) is morally unconscionable.
I purposefully refrained from judgement or commentary either way when posting it. My intention was merely to show that this line of thinking about the duality of violence and non-violence is something the nation's founders themselves were thinking about. It is the reason I posted the quote in full, instead of the abbreviated form most commonly referenced. I hope that the added context lends nuance and perspective which might otherwise be overlooked.
Essentially "good-cop-bad-cop" on a political level?
Today, history remembers MLK as a great man. There are parades in his honor, workers are given a day off. Rosa Parks is another peaceful pioneer credited with bringing strides forward.
Malcolm X and others are already fading from memory.
I believe that was the OP's point: we remember a sanitized version of the myth of MLK that flatters modern sensibilities, while ignoring Malcom X because we don't like to acknowledge he played an equally important role in bringing about change.
You should get that checked out.
Ask any kid “ Who was MLK?”
Then ask “Who was Malcolm X?”
You’ll see.
In a survey of ~600 movements since 1900, it was found that those that tended to use violence more succeeded about 25% in achieving their goals, while those that used less violence succeeded over 40%:
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...
You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence. Further, less violent movements are more likely to end up more democratic / less authoritarian.
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence. So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
The book is 'minorly academic', but it's an easy read and probably more geared toward the general public.
(The studies/book recognize that "violence" exists on a spectrum. The book also talks about generally non-violent movement(s) that have factions that attach to them that want to use violence, and various other scenarios.)
> You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence.
Admittedly having not read the 400-page study, I don't think that's a causation that is necessarily supported by the correlation. It would be extremely surprising if the prior of "how likely is this movement to succeed" were not a determining factor in whether a movement tends to use violence, with the a priori less-promising movements being more likely to take violent action.
C.F. the difference between me demanding you give me an apple or your car.
> Admittedly having not read the 400-page study […]
It is not a 400-page study: it is a 400-page book that goes over the research available at the time and summarizes it. The book leans slightly academic, but it's a fairly easy read.
A movement's success is (partly?) determined by its size and how much of the general population gets on board with the original (presumably) small group that started it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence.
So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
[Edited GP post to add some of this comment.]
Yea, causation here depends on a whole lot.
If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
> If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
The book covers such scenarios: where you are non-violent but the Powers That Be are violent towards your movement.
I will attempt to find a link when I'm not on my phone, but the methodology and results here have been solidly criticised (mainly around survivorship bias, as a sibling notes, as well as about the measures of success).
This study (and the one about 3% of the population being sufficient to enact a change) comes up constantly when you hang around leftists, and I've been known to quote it myself when I was younger, but it always felt too good to be true and uncomfortably aligned with liberal sensibilities.
Many people, especially in the US today, dont understand that non-violence doesn't mean passivity or even a willingness to compromise. It just means you do anything you can without actually punching and killing people.
And it turns out killing and punching people is sometimes the worst option of to play the long game. This is why nation states often twist themselves in bretzels to manufacture consent so they can go elsewhere and punch and kill people over there. If you don't have that consent, you will lose the popular support and that can mean that even if you won the battle, you lose the war.
Many people fail to consider second order effects. Offensive violent actions to address violent threat may seem like the natural solution, but a second order effect is often that it runs a wedge between the general population and those willing to use violence, shrinking the support. Another second order effect is that the other side will also use more violence and then the whole thing spirals into open weaponized conflict. A thing you should only provoke if you have the numbers, support and means to actually win it. So don't just scratch where it itches, think about the side effects and what psth it leads you down.
Non-violent opposition hinges on the fact thst many of the second order effects are positive. The non-violent side has usually more sympathies within the population, non-violent opposition can be really easy to get into, it could be as simple as a mail man strategically losing a letter, a sysadmin accidentally leaving a api exposed, a wine-mom building networks with others to keep open tabs on the neighbourhood, a peint shop not forgetting who printed a certain flyer when the state authorities show up and so on. Wherever you are, there is probably a way to resist. And if there are enough people normal operations of the regime become hard to sustain.
> A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence.
It's strange to me that this isn't obviously true to everyone.
This video is a good rebuttal of the 3.5% rule:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQUmDwB69cQ
From the video:
> [Chenoweth and Stephan] have gone out of their way to correct people who treat it like a cheat code, and to caution against overreading any success of non-violent oppostion.
The rebuttal is against those arguing that 3.5% is a "magic number", that treat(ed) it like an 'absolute', when we're actually dealing with probabilities and likelihoods and odds.
The formulators of the "3.5% rule" do not treat it as an absolute, and neither do I: my GP post talks about "odds" and likelihoods.
Nice, so you didn't watch the video completely. Hopefully others don't make your mistake, both that and believing that garbage.
Resistance has always been violence/sabotage towards oppressors, if nonviolence actions were effective you'd see more armed forces bashing skulls at no kings protests.
> Nice, so you didn't watch the video completely.
I did: he talks about the 3.5% is "just" walking and chanting down the street, but about structure changes 'behind the scenes'.
But the video is generally irrelevant to the point being made in the comment, as Stoermer (video creator) recognizes the people who came up with the rule are criticizing some who are putting it forward certain ideas about.
Stoermer is putting forward the idea that the 3.5% needs to be done in a certain way to actually be something meaningful, which doesn't disprove the rule nor the originating comment: that you'll be more liekly to get to a critical mass of movement supporters by eschewing violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_prot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025–2026_Iranian_protests
And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
It is actually 'interesting' in that it is one of the few examples where a non-violent movement ended up with an authoritative regime after "success": it's (almost?) unique in that regard per the author. Most non-violent movements end up in a democratic system.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Invalid counter-argument: the survey in question looks all sort of movements, both those that succeeded and failed.
> And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
"original" is doing some heavy lifting here - the Iranian revolution was not non violent. By the state or by the revolutionaries.
It's also impossible to talk about the regime without also bringing up the formative events in the early years of the Iranian state, namely the Iran-Iraq war.
Agape could be discussed as a philosophy between disagreeing figures like King and Carmichael. Today, fewer people have encountered the idea so they can’t choose it as a philosophy.
Without agape, political activism is more zero-sum and utilitarian. Non-violence becomes a gambit that is only appealing as long as it is making obvious gains against the current winners, and there is little motivation to remain nonviolent after becoming winners.
I've spent a lot of time with people who seem themselves operating within ML Kings lineage and have their lives committed to this kind of nonviolence work, and they defintely operate from within the an "agape mindset", even though they wouldn't frame it like that.
in my understanding some people use 'non-violence' to describe the more utilitarian version, and 'noniovlence' for that which exits the entire 'domination paradigm'
Interesting; you observe a drawn distinction between the hyphenated and non-hyphenated spelling?
Sometimes, I suspect that Gandhi was helped by the global developments of that time, specifically the British context at the end of the war. Gandhi could have been lucky, in part, to find the British in a mood to relinquish their holdings. Bose, on the other hand, decided to fight by all means, though being no match against the British. Maybe, both strategies would have been equally weak, if there was no world war.
Related:
Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46683205
I feel like the role of non violence is over emphasized. It plays a part in these social and political movements. But the MLK era civil rights movement and even the Indian independence movement MLK drew inspiration from, involved a lot of violent resistance sustained for years. People paid with their lives to create unrest and draw attention to their oppression and and gather supporters. We shouldn’t ignore their contribution or forget that it’s part of the overall path to getting justice, alongside non violent resistance.
"Nonviolence" only works when a group is doing that, AND there is also a contingent of violent folks with the same aims.
Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.
We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works.
Women got their rights without a large group of violent female terrorists threatening violence, so you are wrong. Feminism has been the most successful liberating movement in history and it happened basically without any bloodshed.
> Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.
This is definitely true to some extent, especially when non-violence has been used in the more distant past.
But in recent history, the non-violent approach creates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties, who find violence against non-combatants to be unpalatable. You can turn the world against an enemy by putting the enemy's asymmetric use of force on display. This doesn't work in a lower empathy society.
>reates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties
Only if you have good advertising for your cause.
Violence is typically good advertising, most news is simply salivating to cover it.
Which means in any non-violent group seeking a goal, it is optimal to have a small violent 'unassociated' group cause just enough problems to get noticed in the global media.
Somewhat relevant Cautionary Tales episode, wherein a slight variation on your same point is made from history and survey data: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-deadly-da...
Is anyone aware of a more thorough argument for why this must be the case? Is it a commonly held view? It sounds realistic, but not necessarily and immutable law, I’d like to know what thought has been given to this.
It’s an incentive problem. If even one party defects in a society of pacifists, the pacifists have no real method of recourse besides refusing to interact with the defector, and how many people are going to do that if the defector starts killing people to enforce compliance?
Some subscribe to a soft pacifism where non-destructive violent resistance like disarming the defector or disabling the defector using less-lethal technologies like a tazer would be fine. Pure pacifists who don’t believe in any kind of physical resistance whatsoever are almost exclusively religious practitioners who don’t ascribe a high degree of value to life in this world because they believe non-resistance will bear spiritual fruit in the next world.
Under scrutiny I'm sure your comment falls apart, but it is accurate from orbit.
I happen to hold this philosophy under different words.
Its also appropriate to remember that MLK was friends with Malcolm X, and both chose their own means to support the same end goal.
MLK chose nonviolent shows of force, whereas Malcolm X chose more direct forms of violence.
Governments could save face by negotiating with MLK, as he used nonviolent means. They couldn't negotiate with Malcolm X because thats the whole "we cannot negotiate with criminals and terrorists".
In Malcolms auto biography they it was explicit that they were not friends.
It's because people in positions of power can safely ignore nonviolence. They can't ignore the other option. Nonviolence on it's own is not productive.
Thats what disturbs me about yesteryears's protest marches, like MLK's March on Washington, compared to 50501 and No Kings.
MLK wanted a non-violent showing of force as to stay "legal", but a strong implicit threat of "well, you know, theres a LOT of us. We're peaceful for now". The bus boycotts almost bankrupted down in Atlanta, so money attacks also work.
But now, we have No Kings and 50501. The whole idea of mass protest as a 'nonviolent but imminent threat' is completely gone. Protests were a prelude to something to be done. Now, its more of a political action rally, with not much of anything to follow up the initial energy.
Which is also why the protests; pussy hat rebellion, 50501, No Kings - they've all failed. Theres no goals. Its just chanting and some signs.
Imo this is what happened once protests became a “right”. I know most people here won’t agree with the Canada trucker protest, but I remember when it happened, people were saying “ok, you’ve had your protest and exercised your rights, you’ve been heard, you can go home now” - framing it just like that, as a rally to show an opinion rather than a threat. It felt to me like “the establishment” just treats them as peformative, because as you say they usually are, and then doesn’t know what to do when it’s actually something they have to react to.
Yeah, the thorough argument is that people in power don't want people to rise up and challenge their authority.
It's absolutely not realistic. Every right we have was fought for and people died trying to get it. This is especially true in America where a fifth of the population was enslaved at inception. Nothing has never been given to us it had to be taken from abusers of power and there have always been abusers of power in this country.
I mean Trump is no different than Washington. Washington routinely ignored laws, he tried to have his lackeys go get his "property" from free states while never willing to go to court (a provision of the fugitive slave act).
John Adam's called Shays's Resistance terrorists because they had the audacity to close down courts to stop foreclosures of farms (fun fact, that was the first time since the revolution where Americans fired artillery at other Americans (and it was a paid mercenary army by Boston merchants killing over credit)).
You can go down the list, it's always been there but luckily there were always people fighting against it trying to better society against those that simply dragged us down.
A commonly cited example is during the Battle of Seattle the cops wanted to beat the shit out of a nonviolent sit in and the black bloc protected them through a combination of strength and diversion. The non violent people are there for the optics and the violent people are there assuring that any move made on the nonviolent protesters will be rewarded swiftly.
The important part is that the violence mostly doesn't start until someone tries to hurt those who are there peacefully. Good was there peacefully so retaliation is becoming a possibility.
“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk
> We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works.
[citation needed]
There are multiple studies and books that go over how the less a movement uses violence the more likely it is to be successful:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...
The above book has a chapter about how if a movement is non-violent, but a contingent/faction wants to use it, various ways to handle it.
> but we're not permitted to say that out loud.
You just said it out loud. Are you one of "them"?
Sorry, are you suggesting that violence doesn't also require coordination of a group? I think the record of lone gunmen solving institutional problems remains kind of scarce.
Whether you want to be a guerilla group, terrorists, or take a peaceful approach the first step is always going to involvefinding confederates.
The lone gunmen mythology has basically been key to getting America en masse to surrender it's rights.
So many complaints about government have the form "I'll hit my breaking point and then I'll shoot a bunch of people".
No plan to join a militia, no plan to engage in coordinated action before that. Just a plan to commit a mass shooting and then be gunned down as another statistic. And probably kill a bunch of people who have nothing to do with whatever the problem is.
I have an undergraduate degree in Peace Studies, and have spent extensive time in and around conflict or post-conflict zones.
Violence, particularly civil war, is utterly destructive to a society, completely tears apart the social fabric and creates wounds that never really heal.
That said, when you look at America, India, both movements required the threat of violence to succeed. MLK had the Black Panthers, and whilst Ghandi himself preached non-violence he did so against a background of riots in which thousands of British officers were killed and wounded.
The social reforms Western Europe and America saw in the post-war period were an capitulation to the implicit thread of violent communist revolution.
Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I think you are confusing the BPP with some other organization. All of King’s substantive achievements were accomplished before the formation of the Black Panther’s and he died before they came to national prominence.
Heh, did I mention that peace degree was a loooooong time ago. Totally appreciate the correction.
I remember reading an argument along those lines at the time that resonated. Perhaps not the Black Panthers? Or am I just totally wrong here and there wasn't a shred of political violence in the background?
You tell us - you started this thread
Do you still want to sustain your argument or retract ?
Otherwise your comment above still stands with false information + made worse by a flimsy appeal to authority (peace “degree”)
> both movements required the threat of violence to succeed.
How can you know that they wouldn't have succeeded otherwise, or even been successful faster?
>Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I have a feeling you probably should have put a bunch of caveats for both like "if you're willing to wait a few generations for your aims to be met".
When talking about both the American civil war, one side had engaged in violence for antiquity and had the force of the state which came to state that violence was the expected behavior. This violent behavior was very profitable, and the people profiting from this realize they were in a weak position so they started propagandizing was what they were doing was "in the name of god", "is good for the common man", etc. It moves the conversation from one looking at the violence of slavery to "Why do you hate god and country".
Simply put the US civil war was a temporary increase of violence that preceded the war with slavery and followed the war in neo-slavery.
There is a quote by Gandhi where he is talking about the Holocaust and he says: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs..."
This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.
This is a fundamental problem.
It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.
> Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
When the British outlawed slavery and made their moral arguments against it, it seems to me that that worked pretty well everywhere except the US. I mean, sure, they might have had to invoke military force against other Europeans, but the idea spread within Britain easily enough, and they didn't lack sympathetic ears elsewhere (e.g. in Canada; the Underground Railroad was possible for a reason).
Industrialization killed slavery not morality.
The reason for abolishing slavery was that it was a backwards system that prevented the super exploitation that came naturally for the proletariat.
The abolition of slavery was the proletarization of slaves. It absolutely was economic in nature. There was no economic need for slavery anymore, it didnt end racism tho, which was the ideological weapon that permited slavery.
Racism was simply repurposed for the black (and other) proletariat.
Industrialization killed slavery not morality.
Where is the goodness?
You have an idealist conception of history.
How would this allow superexploitation?
When capitalism becomes more productive than the market can handle it just shuts down the factories or when it gets more efficient it just gets rid of workers. Try doing that with slaves.
Proletarization created a pool of unemployed and a labor makret that benefited capitalists.
I don't understand how it's possible to read contemporary thinkers and come to those conclusions about their mindset.
What?
Englishmen who wrote about liberalism during the abolition of slavery made it very clear that it was explicitly about morality.
And industrialization enabled slavery in the US rather than killing it, thanks to the Jevons paradox; the cotton gin allowed for land previously seen as unsuitable for cotton production to be bought up by slaveowners, increasing the demand for slaves (https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent ; see section "Effects of the Cotton Gin").
I don't recognize your concept of "superexploitation" in the first place.
Beware that while you may choose nonviolence to protest this regime, your local police department will water you like a row of daisies with giant cans of mace and CS while TikTok users get bored and swipe to the next video.