MLK and non-violent protest

What about the Deacons for Defense and Justice? And if we are going to talk about the Civil Rights Movement then let’s talk about sending the National Guard in to Topeka Kansas. The Civil Rights Movement was not imaginable without the federal government being willing to employ great amounts of power to ensure the enforcement of federal laws in the South. So long as the federal government was willing to use violence (Reconstruction and the post 1965 period) to enforce racial equality racial equality existed. When the federal government retreated, it ended.

“How far does this argument go? Not to the point of denying a right of self-defence against an attacker who is trying to kill or maim you, or (with more qualifications) to defend others against such attacks.”

I think you’re downplaying how much is actually covered by these exceptions. I mean, are we limiting your position to cases of “manifest and apparently immovable injustice” that don’t involve killing or maiming? If so, there’s not much left. Maybe (more likely) the distinction you’re going for is that it’s acceptable to defend against attacks in the moment, while the attack is actually going on, but when the attackers withdraw to plot their next move, you have to stop fighting? That seems defensible, but I think there’ll be a lot of tough cases for that kind of strategy.

I also think Watson Ladd makes some good points: more generally, you can’t treat the nonviolent civil rights protests as if they existed in isolation, without the presence of groups more willing to use violence.

Oh, and going back to my previous point, I think (though I’m far from an expert) that many of the non-non-violent civil rights groups agreed (at least in theory) with the letter of your rules for violence: it was only to be used in defense. (There’s a great Malcolm X quote about being in favor of non-violence, but only *reciprocal* non-violence.) One thing that made the non-violent protesters so remarkable was that they were committed to suffering violent physical attacks by police and mobs without resistance — so they actually went a bit farther than you seem willing to.

My brave, cool pragmatism tells me to say that nonviolence is in very nearly every case more effective than violence in achieving its ends. I completely agree that it would be both stupid and immoral for the OWS people to use violence or for the US to engage in yet another war. But even if you’re not the kind of person who’s opposed to killing people in principle, the fact remains that there are a vast number of nonviolent means with which you can pursue your goals, without risking the deaths of innocents.

The only caveat I would add – and admit to splitting hairs – is the case of hunger strikes. Of course it’s violence agianst one’s self, but I’ve always been surprised how effective, on the whole, hunger strikes seem to be.

If the choice is between “armed struggle” and “non-violence” I would be generally in agreement but that seems simplistic. Many Egyptians believe that the spontaneous destruction of more than 150 police stations across the country also played a role in the collapse of the state on the evening of January 28 (the first day of mass demonstrations but before a million people had occupied Tahrir). Perhaps better cases are what’s going on in Syria where the protest movement remains massive and nonviolent despite the murder of more than 3000 people and the events at Maspero in Cairo last weekend when 27 people were killed by army vehicles and guns. In both cases the protesters have sought to engage in peaceful protest and had no arms but have on occasion used their fists, rocks, and even molotov cocktails in response to the brutality of the state. I remain bemused by the desire of Americans–including the truly heroic leaders of the civil rights movement with whom you met–to believe that they played some role in the choice of tactics by the Egyptian revolutionaries. I think people who lived through the low-intensity civil war of the 1990s, the unbridled use of violence by both the Islamists and the government then and at other times, and viewed the American invasion of Iraq nightly on television had more than enough reasons of their own to avoid trying to wreak massive and thoughtless violence on their own society.

Nonviolence presupposes a moral audience, or at least capable of suasion.

That pretty much means that nonviolence is dependent on a fluid connection between the group and its audience. There must be accessible broadcast media microphones and reasonably secure communications from planners to doers.

Generally, as a tool, nonviolence only works to snap economically or politically untenable situations. Otherwise, the empowered simply silences, or if need be, slaughters. While there is an understanding about how the British were exhausted after WWII, people tend to underestimate the extent central bureaucrats were fed up with Jim Crow and all the redundancy and general bullshit. They also tend to underestimate the low geopolitical tolerance for conspicuous displays of inhumanity towards blacks in the days of the Soviet Union and the end of colonialism (with not yet dysfunctional African states with abundant natural resources). Lastly, the labor mobility of the Civil Rights Era made it much more possible for people to invest in controversial movements.

As far as the OWS stuff? Not important. What’s important are general strikes and denials of travel and communications.

Revolutions don’t happen because people want them to happen. Revolutions happen because it *must* happen. Pretty much all of them has to do with removing crazy stubborn and incompetent/destructive rentiers (and the power base that supports them) from power. They usually turn horrifically violent because as soon as any breathing space occurs in the pace of activities, the conservatives rush back in power and try to overturn everything and generally let everyone know we gotta do things the hard way.

As Aulus Gellius says at #3, the exception you want to allow for seems to let a lot in. Think of animal rights protestors, for instance. They may well think that in protesting violently they are exercising the right you allow, to defend others from the threat of death. The same point is less obvious for OWS, but I think still true: they are aiming to change the political system in ways that will prevent great harms to many people.

I should add that I certainly don’t endorse the use of violence in these cases. But I do think the reasoning offered here is less clear cut than you allow.

How does Prof. Quiggin enjoy many of the institutions and rights he currently possesses without the violence of the past? I’m thinking primarily of the English Civil War and the French Revolution.

What sort of world would this non-violent attitude give us? There would have been no unification of Germany or of Italy. Turkish territory would still extend to the Danube. Spain would still be the colonial Power governing most of Central and a lot of South America. The US would still be part of the British Empire. Vietnam and Laos would still be French. China would still be ruled by a Manchu Emperor.

Frankly, I don’t get it. Maybe Prof. Quiggin wants to draw a line at some point in time and say, in effect, “violence in pursuit of rights and self-determination was OK before that date, but not OK after it”. I don’t know how you would establish such a date.

Other than the Mennonites in the USSR whose goal was emigration not overturning the Bolshevik Revolution I can not think of any purely pacifist movements that were successful. This movement in the 1920s was partially successful. Even here it should be noted that during the Civil War (1918-1921) there were armed Mennonite “self protection” units in Ukraine. In almost every other case there is at least the threat of violent force articulated as part of the greater struggle. Previous commentators have mentioned this with regards to the US South, South Africa, and British India.

In the 20th century violent resistance was almost always a response to violence by colonial occupiers. Non violent protests were frequently met with extreme state violence by the regime in power and complete indifference by the outside world. Nobody paid any attention to the Palestinians at all until the 1970s when the PFLP began to hijack planes. Absent outside attention non-violent resistance is almost never effective. The earlier Mennonite example I mentioned caught the interest and support of governments and activists in Germany, Canada, the US, Lithuania, Latvia, and Paraguay. Without German support it is doubtful that the USSR would have allowed 20,000 Mennonites to emigrate during the 1920s. If you stage a protest and nobody notices you it does very little to put pressure on anybody.

Absent violent resistance it is impossible to imagine the French ever leaving Algeria, the Portuguese leaving Angola, or the end of White minority rule in Rhodesia. It is even more difficult to imagine anybody outside the Arab nations caring or even being aware that Palestinians even exist. I suppose it feels good for American academic leftists to denounce violence in a universal Mennonite fashion. But, since they are not themselves in engaged in suffering violence as were the Russian Mennonites it does not carry the same moral authority. Instead it comes off as a deliberate dismisal of the huge disparity in power and levels of violence between repressive states and armed resistance movements.

gordon @ #15 said:

How does Prof. Quiggin enjoy many of the institutions and rights he currently possesses without the violence of the past? I’m thinking primarily of the English Civil War and the French Revolution. What sort of world would this non-violent attitude give us?

Violent revolutionaries in general have been much better than spinning their administrations than actually administering them. They are vastly over-rated as a means of effecting worthwhile political change.

Conservative reformation beats obstructive reaction and destructive revolution hands down.

As I understand it the Magna Carta was a more or less peaceable settlement between barons and king. That seemed to work out pretty well for quite a while.

More generally, the spectacular success of the (generally) civil British political culture greatly strengthens the case for peaceful reform against violent revolt. And it validates the general principle of conservative reform, with freedom broadening down through the several strata, by successive precedent. Gandhi is the pardigmatic example of the way in which non-violent protest can secure lasting progress in constitutional order.

The Japanese social revolution (cunningly branded the Meji Restoration) was noticeably peaceable and very successful until disgruntled officers tried to muscle in on the act, with dreams of conquest. Things went downhill rapidly after that.

Not sure that the French Revolution would be my first example of the success of political violence in establishing a stable and democratic constitutional order. How many republics and empires have they gone through since Robespierre?

And was it really necessary for the American revolutionaries to come to blows with the British Empire for 40 years in order to secure the traditional rights of Englishmen? Australia and Canada managed to pull off the trick with nothing more exciting than an extended committee meeting chaired by a man with a beard. Meanwhile the slavery issue festered on in the US for another 50 years, during which time even the Russian Tsar managed to free his serfs without too much fuss or bother.

And don’t get me started on the Russian revolutionaries…

I agree with just about all of John’s post.

As to when violence is justified outside of self-defense in a domestic context, I’d propose the following conditions:

(1) The absence of a legitimate democratic process whereby change may be effected;
(2) The existence of severe and unrelenting violations of human rights;
(3) The existence of severe and unrelenting harm to human welfare;
(4) A reasonable likelihood of success;
(5) An ability to exercise reasonable control over the violence.

The Portuguese government collapsed in large part because of the decades long wars in Africa. Had there been no wars it is doubtful that any Portuguese government would have given up the colonies. They considered them to be integral parts of Portugal.

John. I think it very odd to discuss the English and French revolutions in this context. Take the French case. Did anyone sit down and think, “we should overthrow the unjust monarchy by violent means?” Basically no. There was a fiscal crisis of the French state followed by an attempt by the nobility to reassert their traditional rights, an attempt that backfired once the Estates General were assembled. After that, things just spun out of the control of the various actors in a cycle of action and reaction.

Essentially, you seem to be arguing against some kind of caricature Leninism here. But the violence in actual revolutions isn’t mostly a result of the deliberate choice of a violent strategy by an elite group, but is something that happens once authority breaks down and people get sucked into the necessity of self-defence. Even in the Russian case (where Lenin was certainly prepared to use force) there’s not all that much in the way of violence as part of the October coup. That comes later when the Bolsheviks were faced with the White Armies and the Archangel intervention, at which point non-violence just isn’t a choice they could have opted for even if they wanted to.

I am saying that actual collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship and the actual independence of Angola came about in large part because of the exhaustive wars in Africa for decades. The British only gave up their African coloniesin part because of violent resistance or the threat of it. The most famous example is the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. But, even where the independence movements were peaceful like in Ghana it was not guaranteed that it would remain so in the face of colonial obstructionism. There is also the fact that WWII exhausted the UK in the same manner that the colonial wars exhausted Portugal. Had the violence of WWII been avoided the British would have probably stayed in Africa a lot longer than they did.

In 1935, Geoffrey Gorer wrote, “For at least a century they must almost certainly be under the guidance of foreigners…A free Africa is today an unrealisable dream.” The violence between 1935 and 1957 had a lot to do with the British moving away from this attitude.

Prof. Quiggin (at 22) says that both the English Civil War and the French Revolution resulted in return to the status quo ante after a shortish period. In both cases, that is just wrong. And if anybody thinks that they can prove that modern British or French political (and probably economic) institutions would exist without those two violent episodes, he/she is having themselves on. As far as the unification of Germany is concerned, maybe the remark “…look again at the history of C20 before suggesting that would have been an unthinkable disaster” is just flippant, but if serious it would mean that Prof. Q. can accurately know the consequences of a non-unified Germany from, say, 1870 to the present. In fact, nobody can know that. It is unknowable.

Historical “ifs” are always fun, no doubt, but they aren’t serious. We study history seriously in large part to understand why things are the way they are. When people start to say “Things would be better if X had happened instead of Y” we are immediately on very thin ice. We can never really know that because there is no way of testing it. And if we go out even further on the ice and say “It is always preferable for X to happen instead of Y” we are taking an untestable guess and elevating it into a rule of action. I don’t know what that sort of proceeding should be called, but one word might be “silly”; another might be “dangerous”.

…and those Russians – if only they were smart enough to stick with Kerensky and keep fighting WWI for a few more years.

It’s a commonplace to point out that nonviolence (in the narrow aggressive sense that the word is normally used, not as a synonym with ‘not violent’) aims to provoke enough violence from your opponents to horrify their more lukewarm supporters. Nonviolence is, carefully and precisely but also aggressively, picking a fight. (If this seems critical of nonviolence, let me emphasize it’s not. I could go on and on about how picking a fight is usually the most effective thing you can do, and it’s almost always far far more effective if you can pull a Cool Hand Luke and not reciprocate.)

Arguably, the women’s suffrage movement too, unless you count damage to property.

But doesn’t ignoring damage to property throw out almost all of the violence that normally occurs in a non-nonviolent protest? A protest is violent if it damages people, sure, but also if it damages property in not-easily-revocable and costly ways.

Well, this discussion turned out to be just as stupid as I thought it would be. When you seriously have to quote the Onion…

Once again: no matter how thrilling it might be for people here to imagine themselves as speaking for anti-colonialist revolutionaries, or Malcolm X, or for the French or Russian revolutions, you aren’t. In the current world situation there is nothing justifying mass violence. If that situation changes, you’ll probably have plenty of time to have another pointless, over-generalized argument about it.

David Kaib: “There are too many voices that jump to defend wars and lesser military actions because they are initiated by a Democrat.”

Are there actually many who publicly opposed the Iraq War, but supported the war in Libya?

Are there actually many who publicly opposed the Iraq War, but supported the war in Libya?

There are certainly many who supported the war in Libya while by then opposing the one in Iraq. All answers here will of course be carefully cross-checked against earlier remarks relating to Libya.

nonviolent insurrections succeeded about 2/3s to 3/4s of the time while the violent ones only succeeded about a quarter to a third of the time

One obvious confounding factor would the the strength of opposition. Easier insurrections are more likely to be non-violent.

Easier insurrections are more likely to be non-violent.

Surely an enemy that can actually be defeated by on average less effective tactics like insurrection is thereby demonstrated to be weaker?

Certainly, the places where that tactic was successful post-1950 (Cuba, Nicaragua, Afghanistan (1980s), a few cases in Africa, etc.) are kind of notably small, poor and not particularly recent.

Political violence: not provably worse than accidentally stepping on a butterfly.

JQ – you did mention “destruction of goods or productive capacity” as one form that “symbolic violence” can take (my bad for not noticing). However, you didn’t state that property damage is “likely to provoke a violent response, without being serious enough to be effective”. You did say that “Symbolic violence is almost invariably ineffectual or counterproductive”, but didn’t make the link to “provok[ing] a violent response” – and, in any case, stating that X (i) often involves Y and (ii) is counter-productive doesn’t tell us much about Y. (Drowning often involves immersion in water and is fatal.)

@JQ

Some hypothetical cases to test propositions on the morality of revolutionary violence:

1) Getting sucked in. Suppose someone has already launched a revolution against a moderate to severely unjust system and that matters either hang in the balance or the revolution looks like succeeding. The moral calculation is clearly altered in this case, even though the moral qualities of the combatants are not. If it is moral to support the revolt in this case but not to launch the revolt in the first place, then it is claimed that it is moral to support an immoral cause.

Suppose the (already launched) revolution looks certain to succeed and rests moreover on political foundations of sufficient robustness and democracy to produce a more just order in future. Support surely then becomes a moral imperative, even if the sacrifice involved in the revolt cannot be justified in terms of the injustices overcome.

2) Defense. Is it just to fight to defend the status quo? Suppose somebody lives under a perfectly just system that comes under attack from moderately unjust adversaries. Is it just to fight to defend it? If so, then the non-violence argument against revolution for justice collapses into ‘well they started it’. Is the moral calculation the same no matter if the government looks certain to win, if the matter hangs in the balance or if the insurgents seem certain to win? These are not straightforward questions; if matters lean the rebels’ way, piling in against them merely prolongs the agony.

3) Ending the misery. Suppose a moderately unjust system comes under attack and the revolt looks certain to fail but matters have become so bitter that the revolutionaries will need to be ground down through every village and patch of woodland they hold. Is it the moral to fight for the unjust government in order to ensure a decisive and swift end?

4) Ideological content. What if a goverment espouses a dangerous ideology but its crimes are not severe (yet)? This was the case with Nazi Germany prior to the Sudetenland crisis. In any new case the benefit of hindsight will not be available, yet the possibility of truly nasty ideologies fulfilling their potential for violence will remain even if a state’s conduct remains restrained. The same argument applies to regimes that engage in extremes of cruelty even if the numbers of victims are small.

5) Pre-emption. Suppose you strongly suspect a dangerous but popular faction is about to launch a civil war against an unpopular and unjust system. If they get their oar in first, they’ll be in pole position to determine the final settlement. Is it then justifiable to attack first even if it would be unjustifiable otherwise?

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list, however the murkiness of the issues should be apparent. How much violence would have been justifiable in opposing Mussolini’s takeover in Italy once it became he was about to seize power, and why? Any complete answer must take account of the limited information available to Italians at that time, yet the truth is obvious in retrospect.

All that said, I’m in agreement with the basic point: that even justified revolts are often not worth it and that it is a tragic fact that war is for many revolutionaries as much an attractive lifestyle choice as it is a political act. Few forms of self-actualisation are so exhilarating, I’m sure.

Even so, we’ve gone from a situation prior to 2008, where nearly everyone, explicitly or implicitly, subscribed to Fukuyama’s idea of liberal democratic convergence, to the current point where a huge gulf separates the smug, willfully blind perspective of the administrative and political elites on the one hand and the evidence-averse world of the doom-mongers on the other, with the intervening ground being almost deserted. The “evidence-based policy” (to use a Blairite phrase) approach of the global consensus is nonetheless full of holes resulting mainly from national politicians’ lack of perspective on a global world. Caught down in the weeds of detail, they fail to comprehend that locally optimal solutions amount to guaranteed disaster internationally.

This has been most obvious recently in the case of austerity, but is equally true of labour and environmental standards and so on. Even the capital markets suffer from it; just as divided as the politicians, they tear the sick patient apart instead of nursing him back to health so he can pay his debts.

Even though I have no plans for violent insurrection, I’d claim that there are easily enough injustices either imaginable in the near future or present in the world today to make the correct course inobvious. The picture globally is far from clear. Projected conditions in the mid 21st century read like an object lesson in the causes of war. Are we in the same position as the Italians of the 1920s, letting our chance for freedom and justice slip through our fingers? It would be bitter if we were to continue to partipate in and support a system implying manifest injustice for billions only to be overcome by disaster in any case.

I have 3 problems with all the notes:

Violence is largely an emotive response and not a reasoned one. Some people throw rocks at protests because they take great joy at it, others however are genuinely angry over something, like a wage cut, their future insecurity, the deterioration of their right. So my first critic is that as an action fueled by feelings, violence is often unavoidable and moral culpability should be traced on the events that preceded this outburst and not on the outburst itself. At the point that violence manifests itself (and I am talking about large scale here, not an individual killing his wife) it’s usually not a choice but a result of crowd psychology and uncontrolled anger.

I feel nonviolent movements succeed mostly based on the implicit threat of violence from more radical elements in the movement that could become dominant if their demands are not satisfied and the smart use of provoking violence from their opponents in order to cause moral outrage. Unions couldn’t achieve so much without the implicit threat that they may violently revolt against a government if some of their demands are not satisfied and without disrupting enough services to pose a dilemma on a government of accepting a significant economic cost or utilize violence against them.

Third, the Greek junta only fell after two violent event went awry (the Polytechnic revolt and the Cyprus coup). The toll Portugal paid in its colonialist wars was a factor in the overthrowing of its dictatorship. Saying that these countries would still be a dictatorship is not something we could prove, but it’s very likely their dictatorships would be longer lasting. But even if they did, similar to the French Revolution, the violent events that took place helped shape the political landscape and framework after the dictatorships/monarchies fell. I don’t think the Greek colonels would have been so firmly punished if it wasn’t for the violent uprisings against them, something which the Spanish case highlights. France was 10 times the monster the Greek dictators were, but his cooperators got off lightly compared to the Colonels. And the post dictatorship politics got moved forcibly to the left due to the Left’s violent resistance throughout that historical period, while the Spanish didn’t. So the consequentialist argument is not that obvious for me in those examples.

Tahrir Square’s lesson to me is that the strict division we have between violence and nonviolence in the West might be somewhat culturally dependent. If you want to call Tahrir Square nonviolent or in any way MLK-ish, well, fine, but that means you got a nonviolent protest inspired by MLK that involved rock-throwing street battles.

I can’t see any situation where it makes sense for American OWS protestors to turn to any sort of violence, but in other contexts it seems to make sense to abandon a principle of nonviolence for one of non-escalation–don’t bring a gun or a knife to a rock fight.

“how do we justify the occupation of Iraq and the bombing of Libya? ”

We don’t.

And “speaking very hypothetically” gets us straight to Godwin’s Law at only comment #50. If someone wants to make a case for Hitler Of The Week — or, I guess, for Imperialist Invasion That Must Be Resisted By Brave Guerrillas Who Certainly Won’t Shoot Anyone Afterwards Of The Week — then they can try to make it. They can certainly refer to the lessons of history if they want to. But let’s have it be an argument about what’s happening this week, because otherwise it’s straight to dullsville “you wouldn’t have resisted the Holocaust”.

My point about the French Revolution was, inter alia, that the advice “don’t do X” (where X is “launch a violent revolution against an unjust regime”) is of limited usefulness for cases where no-one is trying to do X and no-one really understands they’ve done X until after the event (or until it is well underway and where going back and starting again is no longer an option).

If large-scale regime-change inevitably ends up involving mass violence (when things get out of control) and if non-violent mass resistance is more likely to tip a society into such a change than deliberately violent strategies would be (because violent strategies are less effective) then John’s tactical advice would have an interesting consequence.

OK, no violence, fine, but can I keep stealing?

novakant: I’m a bit astonished that the suggestion “it would have been worse if the Nazis had won WW2” is causing you so much trouble.

I tend to side with John Quiggin on this issue. So I agree with his remarks above about the English Civil War and the French Revolution, that all things considered they conform better to Quiggin’s revolution skepticism than to the alternative of revolution enthusiasm.

Think too about the American Revolution. Even though there was no dictatorship established in its wake, imagine what would have happened without the revolution. On plausible assumptions the US would now be like… Canada. National health care and all that. Maybe. Of course it’s impossible to know for sure, but my point is that it is not obvious that all things considered even the American revolution was for the best.

But surely “Violent revolution = counterproductive” can’t be an exceptionless law of history. So can you revolution enthusiasts out there suggest other possible examples of violent revolutions that all things considered led to more good than bad?

Less grandiosely, what about political violence short of revolution that led to more good than bad? Anti-apartheid violence, maybe?

I’d be interested in hearing of examples.

Bourdieu means something entirely different by ‘symbolic violence’. Roughly–the accepting by the oppressed of the very assumptions/classifications/schemata by which they are oppressed. Before King there was Gandhi and before Gandhi there was Mahavir. Someone tells me that the atheist Sam Harris has been speaking enthusiastically of the this belief system of non-violence.

If breaking Godwin’s Law was a capital offence, I would be in favour of the death penalty.

Had that only been enforced in the 1930s, then the whole problem would have sorted itself out as soon as Hitler said the word ‘Ich’.

Probably quite the opposite, in fact.

“The question of tyrannicide is certainly relevant today. ”

Novakant, really I’m surprised that you keep going with this. How is “the question of tyrannicide” today relevant to points about Hitler? Are any of the tyrants today as bad as Hitler?

Now Google the whole phrase “Hitler of the week”. Hmm, 38,000 hits. I wonder what those people could be talking about? Could it be that whenever the U.S. government wants to invade a country, they declare it to be a “question of tyrannicide”, and then somehow people in Libya are getting bombed? And the people who say that maybe we shouldn’t be dropping bombs on them are declared to be as bad as people who would have spared Hitler?

Whether you like it or not, your harmless little historical point isn’t harmless. It’s like someone cluelessly going on about some time when someone was tortured into revealing the location of a ticking bomb, whenever the subject of torture is brought up. That person is advocating torture, whether they think so or not. Just like you’re advocating aggressive war, whether you think so or not. It’s not my problem if you can’t figure that out, but it should be yours.

Non-violence only works when it is used to persuade others to commit violence on your behalf.
Dr. King wasn’t trying to convince the die-hard white Southern racists; regardless of what he might have said in public, he knew that was hopeless. What he was attempting to do, and successfully did, was to mobilize public opinion in the North to use the federal government to violently crush Southern resistance to racial equality. Without the intervention of federal armed forces (and I include the FBI in the category of armed forces), segregation could never have been put down.
Similarly, Gandhi wasn’t attempting to convince the British to leave India; he was attempting to convince the Americans to force the British to leave, by taking advantage of financial leverage, which is another form of violence.
The truth is that everything humans do is permeated with violence. It is an ineradicable part of who we are. Suggesting it be done away with is a foolish dream. The only question is who gets to use violence, under what circumstances, and against who it shall be aimed.

Ajay (at 36, commenting on my 33) says: “If you are trying to understand why things are the way they are, you are trying to come up with statements of the form “Y exists today because X happened in the past.” And it’s not then a huge leap to go for a statement like “if X had not happened in the past, Y would not exist today.””

That’s close, though I would be more likely to say “Y exists today because X was among the things that happened in the past”. There are interactions. But the point is really about being very careful with counterfactuals. If I satisfy myself that Y is probably a result of X happening earlier, or of some combination of events of which X is one, I’m basing that on what actually happened. I can find out about that, at least partially, so there are grounds for saying (as you note) “if X had not happened in the past, Y would [probably] not exist today.”

But there really is a huge leap in then going for the counterfactual and saying “If Z had happened instead of X, then P would have been the result”. That is where (at 33) I’m saying the thin ice is.

Prof. Quiggin (at 38): “The argument from historical unknowability seems to me to be about the weakest you can possibly make”.

Prof. Q. seems to be using the Onion piece to indicate that we can learn from history, and to imply that I am arguing against that possibility.

I’m not saying that we can’t learn from history. What I am saying is that when we start taking counterfactuals (the “ifs” of history) seriously, we are on very thin ice – see my reply to ajay (at 83). That is not the same thing.

It seems to me that Prof. Quiggin’s position is about counterfactuals. He is saying that if eg. the English Civil War, or the French Revolution, or the American Revolution, or other violent events hadn’t happened, things would, on net, be better. I dispute that on the ground that Prof. Q. can’t prove it, and in fact can never prove it because nobody can know what the present would look like if these events hadn’t occurred. I concur partially with Phil (at 42) and entirely with Watson Ladd (at 64). I assert that substanial positive benefits have accrued from what did occur, costly in life and property though they were. I therefore learn from history that violent revolts are at least sometimes a Good Thing.

Rich, Kimg Jong Il is probably as bad or worse. The conditions in the concentration camps that I’ve seen described by escapees are on par with Auschwitz. He’s responsible for the dire state of the North Korean economy, which is slowly starving many people in there. Of course he can flatten Seoul, which is a problem.

Craig, counterfactuals are problematic. The example of Charles I keeps later monarchs in line. The Glorious Revolution is of course the Dutch conquest of England, hardly a nonviolent event. Without Napoleon bringing law in his wake, the aristocracy could have clung to power for another century, as it did in Russia. We can’t say that the existence of reaction makes revolution unnecessary: such a reaction almost never wipes out the revolution. (1917 is probably the only example of a revolution being completely reversed I can think of)

sorry, 2nd paragraph above shd also be part of the blockquote

The problem is that Canada and the other Anglo settler colonies only received the fairly lenient status they did because of the example of the American Revolution. If the Revolution had failed, Canada would have been just another of the Empire’s milch cows: heavy taxes, prohibitions on domestic manufacture, no real political representation, and so forth. It certainly would have been nothing akin to a modern social democracy (which would probably not even exist in that timeline anywhere).

If the Revolution had failed, the US would have universal health care.

“Dr. King wasn’t trying to convince the die-hard white Southern racists; regardless of what he might have said in public, he knew that was hopeless.”

On the inauguration of an MLK memorial, let’s honor him by assuming that he was a cynical, lying user of violence, because after all we can’t imagine anything else.

This thread continues to meet my expectations.

This thread continues to meet my expectations.

Shucks. I tried so hard (in #62) to make up for earlier sloppiness (in #37), and only bothered specifically because your upset motivated me.

Organized targeted disruption works. It works on its own terms. It has worked in environmental campaigns. It has worked in anti-nuclear-reactor campaigns. It has worked in anti-industrial-negative-externality campaigns. It sort of worked in anti-ROTC campaigns (better than anything more violent would have; but ok, that one was a lost cause after 9/11).

In general and unless there’s really unusual mitigating factors, there’s neither a need nor an excuse for drawing blood that is not one’s own until organized targeted disruption has been violently suppressed.

This commonplace that nonviolent methods only work if someone else is willing to hold the gun should be vigorously challenged (someone could argue “everything is violence because to succeed at anything you have to rely on police officers that will enforce enough law and order to prevent people from murdering you and everyone you know” and there is a sense in which they are right and also a sense in which they are being obtuse).

To follow up on my (sort of silly) example, nobody ever came by to save Cool Hand Luke, especially not the law… I had this in mind (from IMDB, spoiler alert, if that kind of thing still applies to a movie from 1967):

After Luke says something that Dragline takes as a challenge to his authority, Dragline arranges for he and Luke to have a boxing match. Being much larger, Dragline simply pounds Luke into a pulp, but Luke will not give up, or stay down on the ground. What begins as a boxing match with enthusiastic prisoners and guards watching slowly turns into a sad spectacle. Prisoners begin to plead with Luke to lay down and refuse to get back up, and eventually Dragline himself pleads with Luke to simply stop fighting back, but Luke will not stop. The prisoners begin to walk away, unable to watch the sad scene any longer. Dragline himself wants the fight to end, and at one point has to catch the beaten and exhausted Luke from falling down, carrying him across his shoulder and gently setting him on the ground, only to have Luke use what little strength he has left to tap Dragline with one last punch. Finally, even Dragline cannot continue. The only men who are still entertained and watching are the guards and the warden.

…I’m bad about being oblique.

Hard to say since a thoroughgoing experiment in pacifism has never been made

…there was at least one. It was on a massive scale, relative to the size of the local population, it was sustained long-term with intensity, it won, and it did not win because it provoked the sympathies of people willing to be violent on others’ behalf. (Personal favorite. Pardon my waxing poetic for a bit.)

No gun-bearing army of the state took action to defend the life, livelihood, or security of Rosa Parks. No sheriff, no FBI agent, not a single member of the National Guard. The law didn’t intervene on her behalf. The law fined her $14. The police officer who arrested her couldn’t even articulate why. Neither she, nor any agent operating on her behalf, committed an act of violence (even under the increasingly expansive definition of violence that we’ve been sorting out).

The fight-picking threat that Rosa Parks helped to instigate, organize, and sustain — that rose up all around her, not spontaneously, but through careful coordination, what Bruce Wilder et al might call institution-building — was the unparalleled disruption of nearly forty thousand lost customers. For more than a year. Upwards of ten million unsold bus tickets, more than a million dollars of lost revenue, utterly shattered city transportation infrastructure without so much as scratching a nick of paint off a bus.

There is nothing more pacifist than forty thousand people acting in concert to systematically deplete and destroy the revenue of an entity that is treating them unjustly. (It helped that those individuals constituted the principal customers of that entity, mostly because the means for disruption were clearer.) If you want to disrupt an entity, put your bodies between them and their sources of revenue, and it won’t take long to see who’s more likely to face the barrel of the gun of the officer of the law. (Well, okay, the times I’ve actually done this didn’t exactly meet with guns in response, and it wasn’t nearly so effective, in part because the group had far smaller numbers and far fewer resources, and also in part because there wasn’t any direct means for disruption available… but probably mostly because we kind of sucked at it and/or were not sufficiently committed to it.)

And if the argument in reply is merely “but it’s inevitably violent because if they try to kill you all then the FBI and National Guard will have to step in and stop them,” then, ok, there’s really no disputing that on the level at which it is meant… but isn’t that true of every conceivable avenue of resistance or protest?

…ok, that’s as much energy as I have available to expend in fixing my earlier sloppiness/laziness. That’s all I’ve got, Rich. :)

I wasn’t complaining about your comments specifically, Salient; it’s more of a general sense that I’ve seen this conversation many times before, and it always ends badly.

“This commonplace that nonviolent methods only work if someone else is willing to hold the gun should be vigorously challenged (someone could argue “everything is violence because to succeed at anything you have to rely on police officers that will enforce enough law and order to prevent people from murdering you and everyone you know” and there is a sense in which they are right and also a sense in which they are being obtuse).”

I’d vote for “a sense in which they are being obtuse”. Any human society, even anarchist societies, relies on violence for some form of final sanction against people doing disapproved-of things. Even imaginary societies consisting wholly of committed pacifists would, I’d think, have people around to use violence to haul a crazy spree killer off to be restrained somewhere. This “validates law enforcement”, as Consumatopia writes, only if you think that every society has law enforcement. Clearly many of them don’t.

If you instead want to restrict the discussion to contemporary, Western societies, or something like that, then it’s still obtuse. Those societies have a force of public opinion. Public opinion leads to laws getting passed, and laws lead to, yes, law enforcement. It’s silly to say that a campaign intended to change public opinion and eventually law is “violent” by definition.

Why doesn’t anybody inaugurate a freaking memorial and honor someone who really made a difference by scaring the shit out of the Kennedy brothers, LBJ, Tricky Dick, and, of course, their boss, J Edgar Hoover.

I had forgotten what really top-quality trolling looks like. :)

Anyhow, why doesn’t anybody? They just did.

It’s obvious that the only reason for official canonization of ‘that guy’ King is that he was harmful and, in fact, dangerous to the establishment, channeling popular anger into increasingly broad and integrated coordinated assaults on capital infrastructure. Nixon, Thurman, Parks and King discovered a means for implementing economically disruptive tactics coordinated across disparate geography. If you think ‘civil disobedience’ consists principally of useless parades and not disablement of the enemy’s infrastructure–backed by shows of physical force and potential for escalation–well, you’re free to blithely mock what you perceive, and I’m free to try and set you straight, I guess. Hoover knew who to fear: the FBI spent their capital disabling King, at least as much as Malcolm X, and were increasingly frantic about it almost right up to the moment of his death… and hopefully we’ll all get to know more about how and why if we can survive to 1/31/2027.

Seriously. Christmas didn’t get put square on the winter solstice because the Pagans were so pious, dude. Mayday didn’t get enshrined because labor unions were so conciliatory. And in effect MLK, Jr. Day is a second Mayday — it was labor unions that pushed for the holiday’s creation/recognition (…and implementation uniformly on Mondays, for a long weekend…) and who collected millions of petition signatures (a bit more impressive in pre-Internet days).

King was a civil rights icon on the cusp of becoming a worker’s rights hero, there’s no reason to contribute to the endless dismissive whitewashing of that part of his history. Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with the blithe self-styling to blow off Malcolm X’s demise as ‘chickens coming home to roost’?

Celebrating “scaring the shit” out of Hoover as something that “really made a difference” is … well, high-quality provocative stuff, let’s go with that… and not merely because Hoover was scared of his shadow. What difference does that fear really make, hurt feelings, increased apprehension of loud noises in the night?

Malcolm X was at his most dangerous post-March ’64 — when the Nation of Islam was all but hunting him down as a traitor, and he was abandoning separatist initiatives to adopt a strategic disruption strategy focused on universal rights (and surprisingly strongly tied to strategic voting). There was a brief moment when Malcolm X and MLK, Jr crossed paths before diverging, King toward mitigating resentments among the working-class to better enable them as a political force, Malcolm X toward mobilizing a cohesive black community as a political force. And then they were both killed, in stupid and terrible ways, by assassins who were horrified to see what each of them had become.

And let’s not discount as well the importance of violent resistance to colonialism in Asia in the first place: China, Thailand and Japan were never colonized

China certainly was – if by “colonised” you mean “invaded, subjugated and occupied by foreigners”. Who do you think the Qing and Yuan dynasties were?

And doesn’t it tell you something? They wouldn’t honor someone who refused to bomb a Vietnamese village.
]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson,_Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Colburn

Apologies, the penultimate paragraph should be in italics, as it is a quote from Abiye’s comment at 68.

104: J & R, you have not yet convinced me that you have prevented violent revolution with your blog posts and your condemnation of previous desperate masses driven to irrational behavior. I don’t quite understand what you are about, but I think you are just throwing guilt in the wrong directions without providing any real hope.

JQ – before you declare victory on the grounds that other people are making themselves look silly, is there any chance of you stating what you consider violence to be and why you think it should always and everywhere be avoided? (Unless that’s not your view, in which case what is?) I should say here that I have absolutely no problem with saying that violence is a bad thing in itself, or that it’s a dangerous tactic to try and use. But these are prudential arguments, and (more to the point) are more or less universally agreed. I assumed from the OP, not least from its tone, that you were saying something a bit more controversial.

Here’s an edited excerpt from my book, on very much this question:

Many movement participants were actively involved in violence in the form of ‘militant anti-fascism’. Indeed, one effect of the mass mobilisations of 1977 was, at least temporarily, to drive the neo-fascists off the streets … In this context, physical force was viewed neutrally or with approval, as an appropriate means to a commendable end. Much of the diffuse violence of the youth movement, as well as the more organised violence of the small armed groups which grew up after 1977, can be understood in these terms; as well as neo-fascists, targets included heroin pushers and sweatshop employers. Ethically, this amounts to saying that it is appropriate for certain groups to be informally constrained by violence or the threat of violence.

The point being that this belief isn’t unique to wouldbe revolutionaries; we all hold it, unless we’re absolute pacifists. I don’t think the OP is arguing for absolute pacifism.

many movement participants [also] saw themselves as victims, actual or potential, of disproportionate levels of violence: as victims of street violence, police shootings or drug addiction. The movements argued that these socially legitimated forms of violence should be named and criticised as such, and taken into account when the violence of the movement was in question.

Point here being that violence always has a context, and it’s very often a violent context. You suggest that the rioter who hits a cop is using illegitimate violence against an ordinary worker; what was the cop who hit him first doing?

A reasonable rule of thumb is that if you are unhappy with the level of violence in society, and want to increase it (Miyamoto Musashi, some of the more romantic elements of the IRA, etc.), then you should use tactics more violent than you perceive your environment to be.

Plausibly you will succeed.

Vice versa logically follows. As does the point that if your specific problem is not with the current level of violence, but something else, including the possibility of things getting worse (say the streets becoming overrun with neofascists, Nazi Germany invading, etc.), then actions that are at that ‘normal’ level of violence will likely be necessary.

Because, by definition, that’s the way that the society you live in gets things done .

And if you want to ensure you spread confusion and bad tactical choices, or you feel the level of debate is too productive, it is certainly appropriate to go around redefining the meanings of generally understood words in easy-to-parody ways.

“Well, it validates violent norm enforcement, then. The point being that the success of nonviolent methods depends on the willingness of others sympathetic to you to employ violent methods.”

No it doesn’t. Most norm enforcement is done quite non-violently, because any society that has to jump right to the final sanction in order to get norms enforced is highly dysfunctional. What you’re doing is a version of the standard (and stupid) U.S.-libertarian argument that taxes are theft because if you don’t pay your taxes, MEN WITH GUNS will show up and make you pay them. And yes, if you persistently don’t pay your taxes for long enough and ignore every warning, and then physically resist when your wages are garnished or your assets impounded or whatever, then eventually this will happen. The same thing will happen if you resist any important norm in any determined fashion in any society. But only people who are determined to use nonviolence have this tediously pointed out to them over and over as if it means something.

Rich, there are norms and there are laws. In modern society they are distinct. No matter how many norms we violate we are safe because it is the violation of laws that brings sanctions. The law does not enforce a uniform mode of life upon us all, as a quick trip to your local gay neighborhood will confirm, or local immigrant neighborhood of whatever stripe.

To people who say the bus boycott was violent: wasn’t this people choosing to not spend their money in certain ways? Is the bus company entitled to a profit no matter what services it provides? That’s like saying New Yorkers commit violence against Einstein’s Bagels by refusing to eat those round pieces of bread.

Even given the temperature already implicit in the system, is it really that hard to form a principled objection to someone burning a house down?

Also, Samurai name-remembering failure above – I mean Mishima, not Musashi.

So MLK should not have categorically condemned violence because after he was shot, the state imprisoned his assassin, and therefore his efforts depended on violence as a backstop.

Let’s take this to its conclusion. If you live in a society with a state monopoly on legitimate violence and a system of laws, then all laws are backed by violence. If you live in a society without a state and/or without laws, then norms are backed by violence. So the only possible way in which you can do anything nonviolent in connection with politics, according to this idea, is by living in a society with laws and carefully not advocating anything that would change or support the law. If only the Civil Rights Movement had been divorced from civil rights law, then it could have Consumatopia’s permission to categorically condemn violence.

Let’s make this #1 in “Rules For Pacifists”, a little game that is played whenever people on the Internet gather to discuss what those silly pacifists must really believe. Supporting legal change is violence.

“If somebody says to me that neo-fascists have decided not to march through my town for fear of getting beaten up, I’m not going to denounce this as an outrageous denial of freedom of speech.”

Ah, and you’ve generalized this to “The point being that this belief isn’t unique to wouldbe revolutionaries; we all hold it, unless we’re absolute pacifists.” I guess that everyone in the ACLU is an absolute pacifist. Or that everyone who thinks it would be stupid for people to threaten the neo-fascists with getting beaten up, and that it only makes the fascists look like martyrs to their possible supporters, is an absolute pacifist. Or that unwillingness to denounce something as an outrageous denial of freedom of speech means that one ethically supports “it is appropriate for certain groups to be informally constrained by violence or the threat of violence.”

There is no intellectual content in that beyond “absolute pacifists == everyone who doesn’t think like me == DoublePlusUnGood.”

Ah, and you’ve generalized this to “The point being that this belief isn’t unique to wouldbe revolutionaries; we all hold it, unless we’re absolute pacifists.”

Not sure that I did, but never mind. In any case, you’ve generalised it even further to include lots of things that I didn’t say, but which do have the great merit of making my argument look silly. Well done. You win the thread.

Phil, when you wrote “Ethically, this amounts to saying that it is appropriate for certain groups to be informally constrained by violence or the threat of violence,” and then pretended that this was a common-sense statement agreed to by almost everyone, you made your own argument look silly. I didn’t really do it for you.

In fact, “Ethically, this amounts to saying that it is appropriate for certain groups to be informally constrained by violence or the threat of violence” is agreed to by almost no one as an ethical principle. That bland “certain groups” is doing a lot of work.

Bad faith? I don’t think that you’re arguing in bad faith; I think that you have a legitimately silly argument. Let me go back a sentence:

“Much of the diffuse violence of the youth movement, as well as the more organised violence of the small armed groups which grew up after 1977, can be understood in these terms; as well as neo-fascists, targets included heroin pushers and sweatshop employers. ”

All right, I’m not a pacifist, and I think it was stupid, counterproductive, and unethical for members of the youth movement to beat up heroin pushers and sweatshop employers. What’s more, I’d guess that a vast majority of non-pacifists would agree with me. Not because they think that only police can commit legitimate violence, but because most people think it’s stupid, counterproductive, and unethical for people to go around beating up anyone who looks like an enemy.

Your whole argument, such as it is, depends on characterizing “Hey, don’t hit that guy” as absolute pacifism, or as something else that can safely be dismissed as the viewpoint of a tiny minority.

It’s not a contentious statement? In what universe is “let’s not follow the rule of law” uncontentious?

Or is the “unspoken implication” that we commonly accept this as long as the right people in society do it? That we give a wink-and-a-nod to police suppressing striking workers, gay-bashers beating up a Pride march, etc? Sorry, still contentious. No one seriously proposes this as an ethical principle. When people in contemporary society do it, they take great pains to deny that they’re doing it through various propaganda vehicles, precisely because it is contentious.

Honestly, I don’t really see a lot of daylight between “Any human society, even anarchist societies, relies on violence for some form of final sanction against people doing disapproved-of things” and “it is appropriate for certain groups to be informally constrained by violence or the threat of violence”.

Let’s take this to its conclusion. If you live in a society with a state monopoly on legitimate violence and a system of laws, then all laws are backed by violence. If you live in a society without a state and/or without laws, then norms are backed by violence.

Those statements correctly describe my views.

So the only possible way in which you can do anything nonviolent in connection with politics, according to this idea, is by living in a society with laws and carefully not advocating anything that would change or support the law.

No, nothing like this can be concluded from anything I said. What I said @116 directly contradicts this. You can and probably should use nonviolent methods in connection with politics. You can do this because you believe it to be strategically prudent, or because you believe nonviolence is part of your personal calling or vocation.

What you cannot do is categorically condemn violence without categorically condemning society. If your nonviolent methods depend on the possibility of other people engaging in violence, then violence cannot be completely wrong. You’ve said that you aren’t a pacifist so I guess we agree on this.

All three of the last three comments were nonsense, and they were all the same kind of nonsense. The freshman bull session, Internet academic bit so characteristic of CT in which you divide everyone who doesn’t think like you into categories of your choosing so that they can be ignored.

Phil divides people into absolute pacifists, people who think that there are “some situations in which physical force is an appropriate means to a commendable end”, and rule-of-law absolutists, then says that #2 is the best match to his intuitions. Of course, there are many, many people in category #2 who think that Phil’s “Ethically, this amounts to saying that it is appropriate for certain groups to be informally constrained by violence or the threat of violence” is amazingly stupid, but this must mean that they are either absolute-pacifist idealists or doctrinaire legalists.

Conservatopia thinks that “What you cannot do is categorically condemn violence without categorically condemning society.” Note that he’s already agreed that this means *any* society, one with laws or one without; he’s not just talking about U.S. society. So, since no one can live outside of some society, that means that no one can categorically condemn society, and therefore no one can categorically condemn violence. Isn’t it all so simple when put like that? All of the people who thought that they were categorically condemning violence, in the easy-to-understand sense in which people normally understand it … they were speaking a logical impossibility.

Henri seems to think that I believe in a divine right of kings. Now there’s a new one. But yeah, I guess that if saying youth shouldn’t go around beating up heroin pushers makes you an absolute pacifist, it also makes you a metaphysical believer in Rule of Law.

There are many, many possible reasons, Henri. How about “because casually initiated violence against people who look like group enemies is always stupid. Especially when justified by a belief, like Phil’s, that by beating up this person you’re enacting an ethical constraint on a group, it’s not only stupid but immoral”?

And note that “regardless of the circumstances” is the same abstract BS that I criticized at the start of the thread. In fact, we know the circumstances of Phil’s example. Trying to decide on a purely abstract basis whether violence is always right or always wrong regardless of the circumstances is a recipe for deciding that violence is right in your particular circumstance, because people use violence sometimes are macho, while people who never do are crazy pacifists.

Well, it sounds like you’re arguing that it’s wrong under any circumstances.

Why does it have to be “casually initiated” and against “people who look like” something? It could very well be a question of life and death for the people living in the neighborhood.

Er, final sentence of first para should end “do not judge us”.

Of course, there are many, many people in category #2 who think that Phil’s “Ethically, this amounts to saying that it is appropriate for certain groups to be informally constrained by violence or the threat of violence” is amazingly stupid

On what grounds? Serious question. You’re saying it’s possible to believe that

“There are some situations in which physical force is an appropriate means to a commendable end.”

and to believe this without confining those situations to whatever’s legal in a given time and place, but not to believe that

“it is appropriate for certain groups to be informally constrained by violence or the threat of violence”

– indeed, to believe that the second proposition is “amazingly stupid”. What’s the problem with it? I’m sincerely puzzled. (Is it the word ‘groups’? Are you over-reading ‘certain groups’ to mean ‘groups on a pre-defined list’? What?)

Phil, you can’t see what’s amazingly stupid about “Hey, there’s a neo-fascist! Neo-fascists should feel constrained by violence from appearing in our town, so let’s beat him up”? I mean, sure, lots of people believe that if you see a member of a group you don’t like, you should beat them up, but it takes a rare person to elevate this to an ethical principle. You really don’t see any difference between this and “Hey, there’s a neo-fascist in the process of beating someone up! Let’s intervene and beat him up instead even though that’s possibly illegal because otherwise the person he’s hitting will get hurt.”

Violence against people for presumed group crimes, and constraining groups through informal terrorism — excuse me, “violence or the threat of violence” — have a long and colorful history in the U.S. A history connected to MLK, strangely enough. Of course you can say that you didn’t mean *those* groups of people, but you were the one who presented it as an ethical principle that most people shared.

OK, one last time, Prof. Quiggin (at 145).

France, Russia and China are still better off today than they were under the Bourbons (vintage 1788), the Romanovs (vintage 1914) and the Manchus (vintage 1910). I will leave it to Americans to defend their own current status against where they were in 1775.

I notice the English are missing from your list, as are the S. American republics, Israel, SE Asian republics, and lots of other relevant places (I’m too tired to attempt a fuller list).

And I enter a plea that, if you respond, you don’t tell us about where all these places might, could, should, or ought to be now if various imaginary events had happened in the intervening time. I know you like speculative fiction, but it’s not relevant here.

God only knows why I bother.

France, Russia and China are still better off today than they were under the Bourbons (vintage 1788), the Romanovs (vintage 1914) and the Manchus (vintage 1910).

Good grief. Look, it’s not a good argument for the French Revolution to say that the Average Frenchman is healthier and wealthier now than he was in 1788. It’s an incredibly stupid argument. The average German is healthier and wealthier now than he was in 1616; doesn’t mean that the Thirty Years War was a good thing.

John here is in the same corner as libertarians. I picture the average libertarian sitting in his house, by a government-built road, supplied by government with water, sewerage, electricity, advocating over a government-supplied communications net on a government-developed system the virtues of minimal government. His arguments may have merit, but they are surely not based on real-life examples. JQ lives on land acquired by violence, and is the beneficiary of some centuries of skilfully-applied naval and mercantile violence, to give just two examples. Cherry-picking history – and getting a lot of it arguably very wrong – does not contradict this. So both are like millionaires who insist that riches don’t make for happiness – they might be right, but they cannot claim to have tried it.

I would add that I think the utility of force has declined markedly over the last century, and that it is unlikely to pay politically at this time in western societies. But that’s a contingent judgement, not a sweeping a-historical assertion that everything will always turn out right is we avoid violence.

“I’m saying that, although there are many cases in which I wouldn’t approve of the tactic and many more in which I wouldn’t approve of the goal, nevertheless there are some cases in which I think this would be both appropriate and commendable – even if the law took a different view. I’m also suggesting that I’m not unusual in this.”

I think that you’re quite unusual in rationalizing it as an ethical principle. The situation in which “one group of people finds what another group is doing particularly objectionable and uses force to stop them” is the basis for ethnic cleansing, aggressive war, and apartheid. There is quite a lot of political theory — nearly all of liberal and conservative and political theory, for instance — that has as its base the unethical quality of groups of people informally using force against groups of other people. Even most socialist political theory basically says that it’s only OK when the socialist state, or the revolutionary vanguard, does it, based on their grasp of whatever theory is held to.

So it may be common in the sense that most people can think of a case of one group of people who they’d like to beat up and who think that is admirable and commendable. But most people are encouraged to think that this is wrong, not that this is an ethical principle that they should embrace on the basis that everyone does it.

@156:

In the South Africa case, the Cubans fighting the SADF to a draw in Angola and thus effectively defeating the Apartheid regime’s forward “defence” strategy, was a major factor in the regime’s deciding to enter negotiations with Mandela and the ANC. Situations are often more complicated and ambiguous than prior normative generalizations and prescriptions would allow. After all, Gandhi’s non-violent campaign for Indian independence didn’t prevent the massive violence with the partition of India, (the effects of which still persist nowadays).

How about probably more than ninety percent of the union-management contracts ever agreed upon?

The institutionalisation of union power would never have happened without violence, and – more interestingly – the domestication of violence: the redefinition of some things which were previously seen as violent (and hence criminal) as legitimate assertions of workers’ power. Pulling out my favourite quote from Charles Tilly:

during the nineteenth century workers, employers and governments engaged in a continuing struggle; its general outcome was not only the legalisation of some sort of strike activity but also the creation of shared understandings concerning the actions that constituted a strike. … It is not simply that legislators made some forms of the strike legal and other forms of the strike illegal. That happened, too. But in the process the antagonists created – in practice as well as in theory – a sharper distinction between the strike and other forms of action with which it had previously often been associated: sabotage, slowdown, absenteeism, the demonstration. A narrowed, contained strike entered the repertoire of workers’ collective action.

200 years ago the mere withdrawal of labour was seen as an act of violence, or at any rate as an act of insubordination which could legitimately be suppressed with violence. To go from the peace of the master/slave relationship to the peace of the union/management relationship may necessitate passing through a stage of violence.

200 years ago the mere withdrawal of labour was seen as an act of violence, or at any rate as an act of insubordination which could legitimately be suppressed with violence.

Exactly, coordinated disruption was violently suppressed, so my precondition was met,^1^ and in response violence may have been legitimate,^2^ at least until coordinated disruption could be restored and employed without the prospect of further violent suppression.

^1^If pressed I’d put forth other necessary conditions too, but let’s not worry about that because I’m almost certain they’d also be met in this case.

^2^the clause “where and when it is/was proportional” should probably always be appended to a statement of the form “violence is/was legitimate”

Ah, I see I’m finally getting the message across. Yes, Prof. Quiggin (at 163), that’s right; we’re where we are because of what happened in the past. And there’s no path from the past (pick any date) to the present except the historical one. Would we all be better off now if eg. old Adolf had fallen under a bus as a teenager? Maybe, but we’ll never, ever know. What would have been the full consequences of such an accident? Again, we’ll never know.

But don’t let me stop you and ajay and anybody else who’s interested from making up stories. Maybe one of the historical outcomes of this thread will be a sudden upsurge in alternative history manuscripts submitted to the world’s publishers!

I fear that Tim Wilkinson (at 164) is on the verge of concluding that we can draw no lessons from history. I don’t think that’s right. Look at Salient’s use of the Rosa Parks story (at 95). Knowing about Rosa Parks helps us with what Tim Wilkinson calls “the prospective case”; what we can do now to make things better in the future. It shows us that non-violent resistance can be effective.

Salient uses this example to conclude (at 156): “In general and unless there’s really unusual mitigating factors, violence is not justifiable at least until attempts at organized targeted nonviolent disruption have been violently suppressed”. I think that’s a reasonable conclusion about present action based in part on the lessons of history.

This is such a fundamentally stupid thread, so I changed my mind about commenting again.

First of all, almost all revolutions happen in the context of extreme, systemic violence–whether that be the state or otherwise. Other than the Samuel Adams and the Simon Bolivars of the world, most revolution are envelopes of irrationality. To say that a Haitian slave should not resort to force when given a real opportunity is to be inhumane. There are no norms of nonviolence that applies to a slave. It’s totally different when it comes to MLK in the US or Gandhi in India or whoever. Black people did exist in a context where violence against them must be rationalized in the Jim Crow South. Nonviolence works great at exposing the flimsy rationales for what they were. Violence at Hayes Pond also played a role in establishing some notion that it’s okay for black people to protect themselves with force.

Pretending that people generally have a choice whether or not to engage in political violence serves the purpose of blaming the powerless for being the victim. If the average foot soldier in a mexican narcotics operation is generally someone forcibly recruited for the cause, then where does Hizbollah rank in offensiveness? I mean, isn’t this general attitude about nonviolence with the underpinning logic of privilege why we have terrorist attacks? Conflict is part of the nature of human communities, and managing such thing seriously and appropriately usually means accepting that violence must happen if more civilized approach to resolution are normed out of practicality.

gordion @167 – It shows us that non-violent resistance can be effective.

Because (or: which is to say) we have good reason to think that without said resistance the effect would not have occurred. There are complications, for example to do with preemption, but counterfactual claims of that kind are essential to the idea of causation. They become particularly important if we’re interested in some kind of maximisation or optimisation rather than mere satisficing. (Especially when what actually happened is used as the standard of what was to be achieved all along. Could a better outcome than was actually reached have been arrived at if violence had been used?)

I’m only on the verge of concluding that we can draw no lessons from history on the assumption that such simple counterfactual assumptions can’t or shouldn’t be made. But I think they can and may.