I’ve just finished Erin Pineda’s Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2021), and it is a very welcome addition to the literature on both civil disobedience and the history of the US civil rights movement that anyone interested in either topic should read. Pineda is keen to push back against a particular liberal constitutionalist theory of civil disobedience, associated with Bedau and Rawls that purports to draw on the US civil rights movement but which, according to her, ends up both falsifying the history and provides succour to a narrative about civil rights that is used to discipline subsequent movements (such as Black Lives Matter) as failing to live up to the standards set by the activists of the 1960s. That narrative and theory also supports what we might call a form of soft white supremacy, according to which a nearly-just republic composed largely of white citizens was already in place and the task of civil disobedience was to communicate the anomalous exclusion of black Americans from the polity, so that white citizens, apprised of this injustice and stricken by conscience, would act to rectify things.
This standard liberal narrative around civil disobedience has fidelity to law and an acknowledgement of the basic justice and legitimacy of the established order at its heart. The task of civil disobedients on this view is to act non-coercively and non-violently but to break the law (a bit) only to raise the awareness of citizens considered as fellows who are thought of not as themselves implicated in the injustice but as basically good people who would act if only they knew. The civil disobedient on this view submits willingly, even eagerly, to punishment in order to testify to injustice whilst also accepting the shared framework of law. The tacit framework here is also a nationalist one (or at least a statist one) of shared co-operation among fellows who want to establish a just order on national territory together.
This picture, Pineda demonstrates, is just historically wrong and naive. Black civil disobedients did not see their position in a national frame and as an unfortunate national anomaly but rather saw their struggle as part of a wider global fight for racial justice that encompassed Indian independence, Ghanian struggles against colonialism and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Far from going to prison as an act of communication to white liberals, activists saw it as part of a refusal to compromise with a racist state, as an act of defiant self-actualization, and as a tactic for draining the resources of the oppressor. And far from seeing northern whites as being generally on the side of justice, they saw them as implicated in racial oppression, indifferent to the poverty and discrimination of the black citizens around them and too willing to see the South as somewhere exceptional that was nothing to do with them.
I only felt (mildly) frustrated by material that the book did not cover but which another book might have and which the author may yet address in subsequent work. The first of these is that the focus on the civil rights movement and the struggle for black equality obscures from view other aspects of the US as a white settler state such as the domination of indigenous peoples and their struggles and of the racially exclusionary laws against Chinese and other immigrants, also designed to bolster white supremacy. Second, I found myself wanting more comparative material about disobedience and non-violent resistance but drawing on other countries and traditions: some of that his here in the links drawn to anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles, but I also found myself thinking about France and its history of resistance internally but also the far-from-nonviolent story of resistance to its colonialism, particularly in Algeria (to be fair, Fanon gets a mention). And third, I found myself hoping that Pineda might engage with Erica Chernoweth’s work somewhere, and that didn’t come.
But these are minor things: the book gets ***** from me!
(Small note: the image on the cover, Jack Whitten’s Birmingham 1964, is a really arresting piece of visual art. I believe it is in the Brooklyn Museum, and I would love to see the original.)
{ 56 comments }
Michael Kates 06.22.22 at 3:54 pm
Very informative discussion, but there’s seems to be a typo/missing word in the following sentence: “Far from going to prison as an act to communicate white liberals…”
Chris Bertram 06.22.22 at 9:46 pm
@Michael, thanks, fixed (along with a few other typos).
LFC 06.22.22 at 11:27 pm
according to which a nearly-just republic composed largely of white citizens was already in place and the task of civil disobedience was to communicate the anomalous exclusion of black Americans from the polity
While Pineda’s criticisms of Rawls’s views on civil disobedience may be, in general, well taken, he said publicly (in 1973) that he did not think the contemporary U.S. was a “nearly just” or just society. (source: Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, p. 126 and p. 322, note 127)
John Quiggin 06.23.22 at 3:47 am
As I recall things, Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence was widely seen as the model for non-violent civil disobedience in the US. Can you say a bit more about how Pineda treats this model?
John Quiggin 06.23.22 at 4:00 am
The case for opposing political violence (including war and revolution) doesn’t depend on a view of your antagonists as basically good or well-disposed. It’s enough to observe that violence almost never produces good outcomes. Self-defence is an exception, but one that needs to be construed very narrowly.
Chris Bertram 06.23.22 at 5:50 am
@John Yes, she has a lot of discussion of Gandhi and this history of black activists in the US wrestling with his example. Gandhi, of course, doesn’t presuppose the legitimacy of his opponent in the way in which the liberal practice of civil disobedience does. On the case for non-violence, I don’t think Pineda necessarily disagrees with you but she makes the historical case both that attachment to it was often pragmatic and that the boundaries between violent and non-violent action are often hard to demarcate. Civil rights activist may have been committed to non-violence, for example, but their brutalization by the cops often provoked violent reactions from sympathetic bystanders.
@LFC Yes, but I guess there’s room to make a distinction between that sort of statement by Rawls and what is presupposed by the practice of civil disobedience that he promotes, a practice that is also elaborated in the work of other theorists such as Bedau who he incorporates.
Matt 06.23.22 at 9:09 am
I guess there’s room to make a distinction between that sort of statement by Rawls and what is presupposed by the practice of civil disobedience that he promotes,
Of course, the “practice of civil disobedience that he promotes” in TJ is one for a “nearly just state”, but as he noted that the US wasn’t “nearly just” (quite close to when TJ was published, importantly enough) it seems pretty straight-forward that he wasn’t “promoting” it, in that form, for the US at that time. Supposing otherwise seems to me to be part of the very annoying tendency to try to read Rawls as more conservative than he was. This tendency isn’t well supported, and almost always depends on misreadings (many wilful, I’d say) and projection. I’d be glad not to see it given more support here. No doubt Rawls, like alll of us, could have been clearer, but this doesn’t excuse misrepresenting the view.
M Caswell 06.23.22 at 12:53 pm
This analysis seems totally compatible with Rawls’: he shows civil disobedience is justifiable even if you think the regime is legitimate. Not sure there’s a disagreement here, let alone a falsification.
Chris Bertram 06.23.22 at 1:09 pm
I agree that nobody should read Rawls as being more conservative or more radical than he was. Those who want to make the case that Rawls advocated more radical forms of resistance suitable to the illegitimate state they claim he held the US to be are welcome to present the textual evidence. Bedau, whose approach Rawls largely adopted, can certainly be convicted of the presupposition in question.
J-D 06.24.22 at 12:55 am
It’s common enough for violence to produce outcomes that are good for the people who make the decision to employ violence. History is full of examples of rulers and leaders who got what they wanted by violence. The outcomes were generally not good by a more inclusive accounting, but the terrible toll of death and destruction is typically borne by other people, not by the people who made the choice of violence. Having violence inflicted on you is almost always a bad outcome, but the outcome of being the one who inflicts violence may often be bad but are also often good, at least as judged from that self-interested perspective.
This is also true of revolutionary leaders. There are many examples in history of unsuccessful violent uprisings, but there are also many examples of successful ones, where the rebels got what they wanted by violence, even if the people who paid the cost of it would have had another view of whether it was a good outcome.
John Quiggin 06.24.22 at 2:01 am
J-D @10. “It’s common enough for violence to produce outcomes that are good for the people who make the decision to employ violence. ”
More common than outcomes that are good for the world as a whole, but still the exception rather than the rule, at least in modern times.
Among the people who made the decisions to go to war in 1914, it’s hard to see any who prospered as a result, even on the Entente side. All the empires they ruled were destroyed or fatally weakened.
Even limiting yourself to successful revolutions, the mortality rate among rebels is pretty high. A large proportion typical end up on the losing side of the subsequent power struggles.
Chris Bertram 06.24.22 at 6:32 am
@John I think it is clear that what you say is right in the sense that violent anti-colonial struggles in, for example, Ireland, Algeria, Vietnam, all led to independence but with a lot of dead people in subsequent violence. What I’m not confident about is whether there was a non-violent path to independence available in those and other cases.
Faustusnotes 06.24.22 at 10:30 am
It’s possible that Gandhi’s non violence would have been treated differently by the British if he had not been preceded by 100 years of violent resistance. Also India was a special case in terms of both its physical value and the contingent situation of the British. Non violence was treated very differently among more disposable colonial possessions at different times (Eg vs indigenous peoples in undeveloped lands) or more valuable areas closer to the imperial core (see Eg Northern Ireland).
Discussions of whether violence achieved the goals of colonial resistance movements and were ultimately justified proceed very differently depending on whether one accepts the truth that colonial regimes were in general as despicable as the Nazis, or whether they are viewed as legitimate governments who were a bit rough on their citizens. Most white academics view them as the latter, and think what followed violent resistance was no better. That view is generally wrong.
J-D 06.24.22 at 1:56 pm
If we could make a list of all the people who have made decisions to employ political violence, what fraction of them would have produced results they wanted? I have no idea. I doubt the feasibility of making such a list or calculating such a fraction. It’s like asking what fraction of armed robbers make a success out of armed robbery. All I’d be confident of saying is that some armed robbers get what they want and some don’t, and I’d say the same of the users of political violence.
Matt 06.25.22 at 2:32 am
Those who want to make the case that Rawls advocated more radical forms of resistance suitable to the illegitimate state they claim he held the US to be are welcome to present the textual evidence. Bedau, whose approach Rawls largely adopted, can certainly be convicted of the presupposition in question.
It’s hard to know exactly what to say to this, because a lot of different ideas are crammed into a couple of sentences. For example, “illegitimate” and “not ‘nearly just'” are at least conceptually distinct. And, since “legitimate” is comparative and relational, it may not have the same extension as some other notions. Even in blog comments I don’t think it’s helpful to blur things here. I do think it’s straight-forward that Rawls didn’t think the US – at the time of the publication of TJ, or later – was “nearly just”. Simply reading TJ and looking at the US then (or now) should make that clear, though many refrain from seeing this. So, why talk about civil disobedience in a “nearly just” state, if that wasn’t what the US was? Because the whole book is about idealized cases, of course. It’s not an apology for nor an advice manual for the US (or any other country.) Maybe those things would be good things to write, but that’s not what Rawls was doing, obviously enough.
It’s also worth noting that Rawls says he follows Bedau’s “definition” of civil disobedience, but doesn’t say he’s following his application of it, or that he follows Bedau’s thoughts about the state of the US. He does say that he’s here “concerned with” this “narrow definition”, but goes on to say that “I do not at all mean to say that only this form of dissent is ever justified in a democratic state.” (TJ, 320, 2nd ed, fn 19 – the same place he mentioned Bedau.) He also notes that “…in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified.” (p. 323) Other than saying that this isn’t so in “a nearly just constitutional regime”, he doesn’t specify when, but given that it’s the case that Rawls didn’t (obviously, I’d say) think the US was a “nearly just constitutional regime”, it’s at least possible that he thought that this condition applied in the US. He would have had to have been writing a different sort of book to go on and apply that, and the book was already very long, but it does seem pretty clear to me that the conservative view attributed to Rawls here (and maybe in the book) is wrong.
Chris Bertram 06.25.22 at 7:04 am
@Matt yes I dropped “illegitimate” in there as a little trap to see if you would pick up on it. I don’t have my Rawls texts to hand in order to write the kind of reply that I would like to and it is certainly the case that his views evolved over time. What I do think is the case is that Rawls drew on the constitutional traditions of the US state (particularly marked in work after TJ, such as PL) is a way that is foundational for his work. While this may be consistent with an assessment that the actual US state falls very far short of being a just state it seems to me that is is something that someone wouldn’t do if, for example, they saw it as constitutively marked as as a racist enterprise in the way that, say, Charles Mills does. The difference here is between seen the state as having at its aspirational core a citizen status that at least some white citizens already enjoy and then seeing to extend that status outwards to the unfairly excluded, on the one hand, and thinking, on the other, of the US as a white settler state unjust in its origins and essence (just as, say, the British Empire was [unjust in its origins and essence]). Pineda makes the case that some of the liberal theorists of civil disobedience, including Rawls, operated with the first of these frames and that many of the black activists with the latter. I’d recommend reading the book to get a better sense of this than I can convey here though.
Stephen 06.25.22 at 4:42 pm
This is, as usual for CT, an informative and thought-provoking thread. Two thoughts of minor importance thus provoked, to which I would appreciate a response if it’s not too much trouble:
CB@12: not confident about there being “a non-violent path to independence available” for Ireland, Vietnam or Algeria. For the last two. I wouldn’t know, but for Ireland, well, by 1914 non-violent means had resulted in the Home Rule Act being passed by the UK Parliament. That wasn’t of course a direct move to independence, but it might have been a first step. Problems, of course: Ulster Unionists insisted that if Ireland wanted to be ruled from Dublin rather than London because that was the will of the people, then Ulster (however defined) could equally want to be ruled from London not Dublin because that was the will of the people. The 1916 rising in Dublin in response to this removed non-violence from the options.
CB@16: I can’t entirely understand your distinction between a “state as having at its aspirational core a citizen status that at least some white citizens already enjoy and then seeing to extend that status outwards” and “a white settler state unjust in its origins and essences”. Would you not agree that the 13 colonies and the subsequent US had “at its aspirational core a citizen status that at least some white citizens already enjoy[ed]”.and extension outward only came long after independence? How is that different from being, at first, an unjust white settler state?
Also, I’m not sure why you regard the British Empire as being made up of white settler states. In North America, South Africa and Australia, sure; in New Zealand, with some qualifications; in India (by far the greatest by population), West Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya, surely not.
Thanks, anyway, for giving me something to think about in these dark times.
John Quiggin 06.26.22 at 2:59 am
Chris @12 “What I’m not confident about is whether there was a non-violent path to independence available in those and other cases.”
With notably rare* exceptions, all the countries that were part of European empires are now independent. Those that gained independence through a violent national liberation struggle don’t seem to have done any better than those that waited until the Europeans left.
More fundamentally, though, I don’t think the difference between being part of a foreign empire and being subject to a local dictatorship is, in itself, worth killing and dying for. Some (not all) of the successor regimes were worse than the imperialists they replaced. We shouldn’t grant automatic support to “national liberation”, if it doesn’t involve actual liberation for people.
Chris Bertram 06.26.22 at 5:58 am
@Stephen, the difference isn’t between two categorically different objects but between two ways of seeing the same thing, one of which imagines it as basically ok but needing extension and the other as essentially rotten and needing reconstitution. The sentence about the British Empire was clumsy and I meant to convey the idea that it was fundamentally unjust as an institution from the off; of course you are right that it wasn’t just composed of white settler states but of various other elements too.
@John Yes, but violence doesn’t always arise because the oppressed decide “let’s adopt a violent strategy” but often as a function of the way people react to oppression, counter-reaction by those in power, the need to avoid being outflanked by more determined factions etc. I also wonder whether the Europeans would have left anywhere if there hadn’t been violent resistance somewhere, so those who waited may just have been free riders on those who didn’t.
J-D 06.26.22 at 11:49 am
On further reflection, there is something else I’d be confident of saying, which is that there are a significant number of instances of people massively* overestimating their chances of success through violence. That observation supports the conclusion that people should treat any proposal to use violence with extreme caution and make allowance for the normal overestimation of the chance of success.
*The Onion reports that American men describing hypothetical fights typically overestimate their combat effectiveness by a factor of 4000%.
J, not that one 06.26.22 at 5:37 pm
Political violence doesn’t only have negative consequences for the revolutionaries. It isn’t only “you might be executed for treason,” it’s “society might break down, innocent people might be killed, ordinary rights might be suspended.”
Ireland, India, and Algeria and similar anti-colonialist struggles are not really representative. Even the position of the Black population in Ghana is somewhat different than that in the United States or England.
John Quiggin 06.26.22 at 7:53 pm
“It’s like asking what fraction of armed robbers make a success out of armed robbery.”
This isn’t that hard. Something like 30 per cent of violent robberies in the US are reported and cleared, So, the average armed robber can expect to get away with three or four robberies before getting caught. Even first offenders convicted of armed robbery face years in jail. It’s not a good career choice.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/01/most-violent-and-property-crimes-in-the-u-s-go-unsolved/
John Quiggin 06.26.22 at 8:09 pm
Chris, I agree that violence is likely to arise in the ways you suggest, rather than as a deliberate choice, and that you shouldn’t, for example, condemn BLM because there was violence associated with it. Equally, though, the (relatively rare) instances of violent protests during BLM achieved nothing and harmed the cause, both by alienating people of good will and hardening the response of the state. I conclude that the correct response is to advocate non-violence, but to accept that it will sometimes happen.
J-D 06.27.22 at 12:28 am
I agree with the conclusion that it’s not a good career choice, and the observation I made earlier about the significant frequency of people massively overestimating the chances of success through violence is directly applicable. However, the stated analysis seems to me to leave out several important points (although I admit I do not have expertise in statistics, criminology, or any other relevant field, and am prepared to be corrected by those who do).
The most likely interpretation of the statement that ’30 percent of violent robberies in the US are reported and cleared’ is that 30 percent of those which are reported to the police are recorded as having been cleared (although other interpretations are possible). I would guess that the reporting rate for violent robberies is higher than for some other crimes, but there is good reason to suppose that there’s also a significant rate of non-reporting: for example, if drug dealers are targets of some violent robberies (and why wouldn’t they be?), they are unlikely to report them to the police. This would make the 30 percent an overcount.
I don’t know on what basis police in the US record crimes as having been cleared, but if that includes cases in which people have been convicted of crimes they didn’t commit (and why wouldn’t it?), that would affect the calculations. The calculations would also be affected if cases are recorded as cleared when some of the robbers have been convicted but some have escaped detection (and, again, why wouldn’t they be?).
The meaning of the 30 percent rate depends partly on the pattern of repetition. If the conviction of an armed robber is taken as having cleared all those cases which the police believe to have been committed by that robber, there is a mathematically possible scenario where the 30 percent rate means that 30 percent of all armed robbers are caught eventually, while 70 percent never are. On the other hand, there is also a mathematically possible scenario where the 30 percent which are cleared are all robberies committed by first-timers, in which case the fraction of all individual robbers who are caught might be very high, but the small fraction who aren’t caught might each get away with a large number of robberies over a lifetime career, and in that scenario it’s not reasonable to suppose that the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t is random.
Violent robbery is a bad thing! It is a bad thing because of the effects on people who aren’t the robbers, no matter how well it might seem to work out for the robbers! There are probably a lot of people who go in for violent robbery on the basis of a ridiculous overestimation of their chances of getting what they want out of it, who would have known better than to do it if only they’d had a sensible estimate of the prospects! However, by itself the observation of a 30 percent rate of violent robberies being cleared is not a sufficient basis for estimating how likely violent robbers are to get what they want out of it.
Finally: whatever the evidential limitations of the 30 percent rate of violent robberies being cleared, we do at least have that figure which does have at least some kind of indicative value; we don’t have even that much for political violence.
faustusnotes 06.27.22 at 4:43 am
Tell me John, what happened to the leaders of the peaceful BLM demonstrations in Ferguson?
As for this:
How many Aboriginal languages are spoken in the area where you live? How many are spoken in Washington, DC? Where is it better to live now, Vietnam or India? What were the consequences of Gandhi’s peaceful movement for national liberation for Bangladeshi people, or for Muslims and Hindus living on the partition divide? Do you believe the Bloody Sunday massacre was provoked, or was it a violent British response to a peaceful demonstration?
You can’t throw around these counter-factuals without first having a coherent view of who was responsible for starting, perpetuating and escalating violence. And you can’t have that view until you accept the truth about how morally degraded the colonizing societies were.
Faustusnotes 06.27.22 at 12:09 pm
J-D, 62% of robberies are reported and 30% cleared, so 82% go unsolved, according to that document.
Peter T 06.29.22 at 5:13 am
Without endorsing violence, the view that it is always unprofitable is detached from its actual practice – a kind of view from nowhere. Exploitation of any kind is, overall, unprofitable – that is, when the loss to the exploited is set against the gain to the exploiter. Yet exploitation continues, for those who can do it do indeed gain. Organised violence built most modern societies and enormously enriched those who were better at it than their competitors or victims. Those that ‘waited until the Europeans left’ were the remnants, discarded after the others had won free (and that includes India, where Gandhi’s non-violence was backed not only by by the Indian National Liberation Army but by the Indian Army itself – a somewhat larger force than the British army).
M Caswell 06.29.22 at 3:36 pm
Since everyone seems to agree there is a right of disobedience, maybe the old question of whether or not there is a right of revolution would be clarifying.
John Quiggin 06.30.22 at 3:13 am
Peter T. the natural reading of what you’ve written is that the (British) Indian Army, like the INLA, engaged in armed struggle against the British Army for Indian independence. I’m guessing you mean something else, but I don’t know what.
On the bigger question, it is as you say, obvious that there must be a net loss from violence. It’s also obvious that violence can be profitable to those using it. The question is whether, empirically, that is often the case.
Taking a currently relevant example: Putin is widely seen as having used violence successfully as a policy instrument. Do you think he will end up personally better off as a result? How about his inner circle of supporters and military leaders? The Russian people in general? I’d say it’s an open question wrt Putin, but most of those around him have lost out, and the Russian people are massively worse off.
M Caswell: The big extension from “right of disobedience” to “right of revolution” is the implied right to harm people who have done nothing wrong beyond being (willingly or not) in the service of a state you wish to overthrow.
J-D 06.30.22 at 4:29 am
A lot less often than those making the decision to use violence imagine it will be, but still a lot more often that I would like it to be.
Since he’s the one who made the decision to use violence, that’s a key question.
As far as I can tell, what he wanted and expected was that Ukraine would fold like a cocktail umbrella, and if that’s right, then he hasn’t got what he wanted yet*, and the chance that he would or will was and is a lot less than he apparently thought.
*I grant, ‘yet’. Still, even if he does eventually get what he wants, that won’t retrospectively transform it into the laydown he apparently thought it was.
faustusnotes 06.30.22 at 5:07 am
John, your example with Putin and your comment on revolution both assume that the decision to use violence is the starting point in a chain of causes, rather than the end point. I know that from a liberal perspective we all live in an already-perfect world and any decision to react against it is a strictly individual act of inexplicable resistance to a system that works, but that’s not actually what is going on.
It also presupposes that no one and no community would ever be willing to suffer an immediate cost for a greater gain (maybe this explains your desire to portray responses to AGW as cost-free, as well).
In Putin’s case, the violence we now see is the consequence of an 8 year long chain of causes, it is not the first violent act in a chain but is instead the culminating response to years of Nazi violence and NATO provocation. Putin doesn’t benefit personally from this and those around him might be willing to pay a cost to see the end of a violent Nazi movement on their borders. In that case the “net loss” you suggest they’re paying may reflect a desire to suffer short term sacrifices for the longer term goal of a Europe free of Nazism. It’s not like Russia don’t have form for that.
The same goes for revolution. The violent uprising you see is not the first, inexplicable act by a movement that has decided to “harm people who have done nothing wrong”, but the final culmination of years or decades of imperialist or classist aggression that you, standing on top of the pile of (mostly non-white) bodies, doom-scrolling on your phone made from resources stripped from poor countries in Africa and eating your mango in winter, cannot see. The net loss those people are willing to face in the short term is incurred to stop the pile of bodies growing. The “people who have done nothing wrong” have, in fact, been doing something wrong, and it may be that the violence against them is necessary and inevitable.
This was also the case with every colonial uprising. The colonial powers thought it was a selfish, foolish mistake by the people beneath them. You, looking back from the perspective of those colonial peoples, see imperfect post-colonial societies and compare them against a colonial society whose violence and bloodshed is mostly hidden from you, having been enacted on other people whose history hasn’t been written (or more likely, hasn’t been taught to you). So you think they must have made a mistake.
But generally, you would be wrong.
Peter T 06.30.22 at 5:36 am
JQ – The Indian Army and the associated Indian Administrative Service were the essential supports of British rule (not just in India- the Raj was the base from which rule in Burma, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and East Africa extended). Both the army and the IAS were progressively ‘Indianised’ – the very small cadre of British officers and civil servants admitted more and more Indians – who made it clear that independence was the price of support in WW II. It was not open violence – it was – “we have the strength to make you go, and we both know it”. The Mutiny was defeated by Indian troops – there was no prospect of a repeat.
I would argue that military violence was potentially a profitable tactic up to 1945 (although a risky one); increasingly less so thereafter. The violence embedded in domestic systems waxes and wanes, but is never absent. How far does one permit violence to be used against one before countering? A question with no good theoretical answer – just pragmatic ones according to local circumstances.
Chris Bertram 06.30.22 at 7:18 am
@Faustusnotes of course there are always questions about who started violence, who is really responsible and the like. Making that point is entirely legitimate. Unfortunately, real aggressors often claim to be acting in self-defence, responding to provocation etc. Such is the case with Putin, whose propaganda claims you have uncritically reproduced, something that is all the more obscene in the light of the murders and rapes of civilians by his invading army. I will not permit any repetition of this propaganda any more than I would permit apologetics for other genocidal aggressions here. Please don’t repeat and please don’t try to reply to this, the matter is closed.
faustusnotes 06.30.22 at 7:57 am
skirting around the P-word, my point here (from my first comment onward) is that the correct discussion of the “cost” of violence can only be had when we recognize that the status quo we (in rich, mostly colonial countries) accept as okay and normal is not, in fact, okay and normal. Most of us have been raised on a highly propagandized history of our own colonial enterprise, which enables us to look at flawed post-colonial (or post-revolutionary) societies and say that they weren’t worth the cost. But usually when we tally those costs, we aren’t properly incorporating one side of the balance sheet, because we can’t look honestly at the crimes of our own societies.
It’s also very easy to laud a particular non-violent approach if we externalize some costs that were imposed on the peaceful approach, or ignore them. Gandhi’s “non-violent” independence struggle still saw millions of deaths during partition and in the subsequent Pakistan-Bangladesh war. Perhaps if a violent strongman had fought for independence instead of Gandhi’s movement, the three countries would have been held together as one and those deaths (and the subsequent poverty associated with those upheavals) would have been avoided. But typically the communal violence following partition is somehow separated from Gandhi’s influence, even as similar levels of communal violence in other countries (such as China) are immediately blamed on the leadership of those countries. We need to consider carefully the facts before we can do these counter-factuals, and ask whether our understanding of the political context of this “non-violent” movement is something we really understand, as westerners. As Peter T observes, there were other forces at work in the Indian independence movement which need to be considered before we can say it was entirely peaceful.
The canonical example of violence being necessary is the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War, in which 10s of millions of Russians died to extirpate fascism from Europe, while the west largely stood by. Everyone agrees that this was worth the cost, even the Russians who paid the price (not just the people who stood by and watched). We are able to broadly agree on this because we are all, for once, on the same side. If we properly understood and accepted the damage done by our colonial enterprises, we would probably all agree that the violence done in overthrowing colonialism was worth it, and orders of magnitude greater violence would still have been worth it, because the European colonial enterprise was the most barbaric activity ever seen on this earth. But because we have been raised on a diet of Carry On movies, most of us think it was all just a slightly rough lark, and why were the natives so touchy, anyway? Which I contend is interfering in John’s calculations, on this occasion.
M Caswell 06.30.22 at 12:42 pm
JQ: “The big extension from “right of disobedience” to “right of revolution” is the implied right to harm people who have done nothing wrong beyond being (willingly or not) in the service of a state you wish to overthrow.”
Well put. Is the Pineda point– against the “constitutionists”– that activists eschewed revolution, but still thought they had a right to it?
J-D 06.30.22 at 11:49 pm
The meaning of this, in the context of the present discussion, is unclear, so I am going to make some general observations which may be relevant to faustusnotes’s point. I can only hope that they still have some value even if they are not relevant to faustusnotes’s point.
If somebody said ‘If those who have previously had colonialist violence inflicted on them use violence against their colonialist oppressors, it is justified in all cases whatsoever’, that would be wrong. If somebody said ‘In some cases, the fact that people have had violence inflicted on them in the past can contribute directly to justifying their decision to use violence’, that would also be wrong.
faustusnotes refers to a ‘balance sheet’. It’s not clear what kind of balance sheet faustusnotes has in mind. In evaluating a decision to use violence (or not to use violence), just as in evaluating any choice between options, the relevant kind of (notional) balance sheet is one which tabulates the probable effects of different choices, to the extent that it is possible to estimate them. What makes information about people’s use of violence in the past relevant to this kind of tabulation is the extent that it is evidence about likely future behaviour.
Perhaps, you say?–yes, perhaps! and perhaps if Gandhi and/or other people had chosen more violent options the result would have been more deaths and more poverty! It’s always true to say ‘If people had made different choices, a different outcome might have resulted’, but where does that get us?
No evidence has been provided that Gandhi’s influence contributed to the communal violence following partition.
It’s not clear what ‘largely’ means here. It would certainly be false to say that the West chose not to use violence.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, chose to use no violence against fascism from 1939 to 1941. There is a reason why it’s been called ‘the Great Patriotic War’ and not ‘the Great Anti-Fascist War’. The Soviet Union* was abundantly justified in using violence** to resist the Axis invasion, but the reason they changed course on 22 June 1941 was not a sudden change in the nature of fascism.
It’s not clear why faustusnotes should consider the Soviet use of force to resist Nazi aggression more ‘canonically’ justified than its use by other victims of Nazi aggression.
** This does not mean that every single instance of violence used by Soviet forces during the war was justified; it wasn’t, just as not every single instance of violence used by western Allied forces was justified. Once a war has started, even participants who are justified in fighting defensively typically perpetrate excesses; this is one of the reasons it is bad to start wars.
Faustusnotes 07.01.22 at 8:17 am
J-D the balance sheet here was introduced by John, who suggested violentlce always comes with a cost and presented post-colonial societies as not worth that cost. You should probably take up the details with him? I’m simply pointing out that the correct calculation of that cost needs to include the cost of violence done to the colonized by the colonizers under the system that the colonized sought to overthrow; and typically that cost is under calculated by those like John who do the calculation, because they typically underestimate (often by orders of magnitude) how violent the colonial occupiers were.
both sides do it 07.01.22 at 8:52 am
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
-- Twain
Peter T 07.01.22 at 10:34 am
Violence is not a simple issue. Steven Brust noted that aggressors often decry violence – they would much prefer that their victims yield without resistance (we see this in Palestine, or in the resistance of the colonised – there is much tut-tutting when the natives take up arms to resist dispossession). Georgian England was described as ‘oligarchy tempered by riot’ – and the riots were often very rough – broken windows were ordinary, beating up the servants of the rich not infrequent. Today’s China is much the same – there is a good deal of local direct action in response to perceived abuses, and the central authorities mostly take the side of the rioters, provided that some tacit limits have been observed (setting fire to the office and roughing up officials is ok, killing is not). Jim Crow was enforced with violence, and ended by, among other things, the overwhelming force of the federal government (eg the troops at Little Rock). Weber wrote that states claim a monopoly of the legitimate use of force, but very often the line between private and public use of force is very blurry – often deliberately so. The key point is that it cannot be an option reserved to one side only if our rulers are not to get totally out of hand.
LFC 07.01.22 at 4:34 pm
faustusnotes @34 wrote:
It’s also very easy to laud a particular non-violent approach if we externalize some costs that were imposed on the peaceful approach, or ignore them. Gandhi’s “non-violent” independence struggle still saw millions of deaths during partition and in the subsequent Pakistan-Bangladesh war. Perhaps if a violent strongman had fought for independence instead of Gandhi’s movement, the three countries would have been held together as one and those deaths (and the subsequent poverty associated with those upheavals) would have been avoided. But typically the communal violence following partition is somehow separated from Gandhi’s influence….
I don’t understand this particular point. Partition occurred because most Muslims, led by Jinnah, were determined to have their own state separate from India. The separation of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh (in Dec. 1971) occurred mainly because the Bengalis in E. Pakistan felt that they had long been taken advantage of economically and ignored politically by the govt of Pakistan, headquartered in W. Pakistan.
Neither partition after independence nor the secession of E. Pakistan had much of anything to do w the fact that Gandhi was the driving force behind Indian independence rather than a “violent strongman,” unless you think that a “violent strongman” would have forcibly repressed any partition, but that repression would have resulted in a large number of deaths itself. So even if you want to get into a pointless and unresolvable speculation about how many would have died in a repression of partition, versus the number that died in partition itself, I don’t think your point here has merit.
Looking at the section on Partition at this link does not suggest, at least not to me, any real support for your argument:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#Struggle_for_Indian_independence_(1915%E2%80%931947)
LFC 07.01.22 at 4:57 pm
P.s. My point here is restricted to the Indian case; I’m definitely not suggesting that violent independence struggles were never justified in any instance.
As for faustusnotes’ point about underestimating the violence inflicted by colonizers, I think that underestimation probably happens. However, I think that the underestimation is less frequent than faustusnotes supposes. A book like King Leopold’s Ghost was widely read, and C. Elkins’s Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022) has been widely reviewed, just to mention a couple of titles.
Faustusnotes 07.01.22 at 11:34 pm
J-D, I do t actually believe that the bengal war was Gandhi’s fault, but I don’t have to: I’m not the one saying Gandhi’s non violent approach was better. I’m simply pointing out that such a claim depends on ruling our all violent counter factuals leading to a better future for India. And we have an example right next door: China had a violent revolution and is better off than India in every way. They lifted 800 million out of extreme poverty and dodged probably 4million Covid deaths; that balance sheet alone offsets even the wildest claims about the cost of their violent origins. The end of foot-binding and elimination of famine are further examples of the dividend of their violent revolution, which never would have been allowed to succeed if committed peacefully.
LFC, the EU commission on Belgium Congo is yet to report, in 2022, but has already ruled out using the word genocide. There is ongoing debate in the uk about whether the colonial era was bad at all, and when John went to school he was no doubt taught the doctrine of terra nullius. We are all shackled by extensive propaganda in colonial states and a single best selling book on Congo, plus a well reviewed history in 2022, don’t mean we are out of it. You and I both know that people of our age were not raised in an honest environment when it comes to understanding colonial crimes, and need to throw off a lot of bias when discussing them.
Calls for non violent resistance / criticism of violent anti colonial revolts are the respectability politics of global politics, the “just vote” plea of the global ruling class. We can and should ignore them.
J-D 07.03.22 at 5:38 am
The exact words of John Quiggin’s comment were:
If he had used the exact phrase ‘balance sheet’, it could have made his meaning less clear. Your meaning was less clear than his because you used that phrase.
Each individual who was in a position to affect the development of the Indian independence movement had to choose between different options, some of which included advocating the use of violent means and some of which included opposing the use of violent means. MK Gandhi made one series of choices; other individuals (for example, Subhas Chandra Bose) made other series of choices. For each individual choice, a factor which would have been relevant to take into account, and which should have been taken into account, and which can reasonably be taken into account by after-the-fact evaluators (including ourselves, if we care to attempt such evaluations) is the likely response of the British, including the ways and the extent they were likely to use violence. If the independence movement does (or, had done) this, then it is (or, would have been) likely to affect the British use of violence in this way; if the independence movement does (or, had done) that, then it is (or, would have been) likely to affect the British use of violence in that way: those are relevant considerations.
What is not relevant in the same way, for an evaluation of a choice made at any given point of time, is the way violence had been used before that point in time.
It’s one thing for somebody to say ‘It was wrong to advocate non-violence, because if the Indian independence movement had employed more violence they would have got the British out of India with less total damage’; it’s another thing to say ‘It was wrong to advocate non-violence, because British violence had already done far more damage’; the distinction is important.
If the question is ‘Who did more harm, the British colonialists in India or the Indian independence movement?’, then the answer is easy (the British colonialists, obviously), and the quotation in another comment above from Mark Twain is entirely apposite; but even if it’s important (which I reserve the right to doubt) to answer the question ‘What should we deplore more?’, it doesn’t in any particular case answer the question ‘How should people choose between the courses of action which are available to them?’
I am not offering any particular evaluation of his choices. If all you’re saying on that point is ‘I can’t say whether he made the right choice’, then we’re in agreement: I can’t say either.
faustusnotes 07.04.22 at 4:44 am
J-D I know you like to go very strict formalistic readings of others’ writing but there’s no room for error here: talk of a “net loss” is impossible without the concept of a balance sheet and the calculation of a cost. That’s where a net loss comes from. John states that there is always a net loss from violence. That means he believes that there is a calculation balancing the total gain and the total cost of using violence, and the total cost is always larger than the total gain. There is no other way to interpret this. So, I’m simply pointing out that the cost needs to be correctly calculated. For an anti-colonial uprising or a revolution, this must necessarily include the cost of not doing anything, or some calculation of the gains and costs of a non-violent approach to the same problem.
Furthermore, the context of John’s comment makes it clear (to me) that he is talking about an external assessment of the total costs and benefits of an anti-colonial action – this is clear from his reference to the post-colonial governments that followed the action. So we aren’t talking here about, e.g. an Aboriginal Australian in 1920 deciding whether to violently resist expropriation of his or her land, unclear about the future risks and benefits of that action vs., say, non-violent action (<- which in this case we all know was impossible and brought zero benefits to the Aboriginal people involved). Rather, we are talking about a comprehensive post-independence or after-action assessment.
This point is clear in John’s comment 18, to which I was responding. He says:
and subsequently introduces the concept of a “net loss” in responding to Peter T’s comment about this. It’s very clearly a post-independence assessment of the benefits of violent vs. non-violent struggle, done by calculating the total cost and total benefit and determining through some magic that violent struggle “always” had a net loss.
There is a lot wrong with the sentence I quote here: who exactly “waited until the Europeans left”? What does “any better” mean? This is why I raised the question of dead languages – countries that were colonized and did not throw off their colonizers (Australia and the USA) suffered the complete extinction of some of their Indigenous cultures, vs. those in countries that resisted violently, who retained their language and culture. So what is meant by this exactly? How is John calculating the “net loss”? In the broader context of his comments, how is it that violence always has a “net loss” when in fact it is a response to obviously profitable violence? Is John assuming that colonialism did not involve violence (hence no “net loss”) or is it only violence in self-defense that carries a cost? None of these points are explained. Now it could be that John is trying to position the violence of native resistance in the same framework as his well-known belief that starting a war is almost always bad for the country that starts it, but if so he is making the mistake of comparing two completely different categories of violence.
Returning to the point about “waiting for the colonizers to leave,” I am not familiar with any countries that could credibly be said to have done that. It is the case that a large swathe of Asia didn’t get to cast out the colonialists because the Pacific War destroyed the colonial powers in Asia, so maybe John is thinking of countries like Myanmar, where the British were effectively kicked out by the Japanese. But that’s quite an unfair representation of history, or at least of the history of violence, since the only way the British got kicked out of those countries was one of the most violent wars the world has ever seen. Also, amongst those countries that were affected by the Pacific war, like Malaysia and Indonesia, we now know (and only learnt this year or last year) that the British government waged a long, highly effective propaganda and covert influence campaign to encourage a widespread campaign of violence against peaceful independence activists, which is estimated to have left hundreds of thousands dead. But John doesn’t select these non-violent independence campaigns and instead focuses on India. Where did non-violence leave the communists of Malaysia? In the ground.
I think fundamentally John’s position on violence is not defensible, it has many flaws, and if we explore it in the context of national liberation movements in the colonized world we will find it only works if built on a base of either historical ignorance or an under-estimation of the cost of colonialism for the occupied peoples. My personal view is that John has incorporated both those errors in his assessment, because most Aussies of our age don’t have a correct and clear understanding of colonialism. But it is certainly not the case that he is doing any of the things you seem to think can be inferred from his words here.
MisterMr 07.04.22 at 11:48 am
My two cents:
Generally when there are revolutionary movements, independence movements tc., there will be two branches of them: the violent insurrectionists and the “moderate” less violent ones (I put moderate between quotes because the moderate might have exactly the same aims of the violent ones, I’m speaking of the means here not of the ends).
If one is part of these movements he or she will have a conscience problem on whether be in the insurrectionist or the moderate branch.
However, if we look at the history of these movements, the two branches are almost always present together, so what happens is:
first the moderate branch is preponderant and tries to get its aims without direct violence; authority might react by ceding a bit or by repression.
second if repression ensues, but enough people are still willing to go against authority, the insurrectionist branch takes control and violence starts, which also obviously leads to increased repression.
third only if the isurrectionist branch manages to defeat authority the insurrection is succesfull.
So it doesn’t really make sense to compare the rate of success of violent movements against non violent ones, because they repersent two different “phases” of the same dynamic (even if not all phases necessarily happen): presumably violent insurrection only happens where it is obvious that less violent means are not working.
Therefore I don’t think that this kind of calculations are really useful to answer the moral question of the activist who is in doubt about what the best course of action is (morally some violent insurrectionist are retrospectively seen as justified, some other are not, but since everyone has his/her own opinion this retrospective view has only limited value).
LFC 07.04.22 at 1:22 pm
Just to note, re Faustusnotes above, that Malayan Communists and the British fought a 12-year war (1948-1960).
Faustusnotes 07.04.22 at 10:42 pm
Thanks LFC, I checked and I was thinking of later events after Indonesian independence , it’s sometimes hard to keep all the wars and atrocities straight. But it just strengthens my question of who, exactly, John is thinking of when he talks of countries that “just waited” for the colonists to leave.
J-D 07.05.22 at 4:15 am
That is an error: there is room for error here.
A balance sheet doesn’t show costs: a balance sheet tabulates assets and liabilities to calculate a figure for net worth* at a point in time.
An income statement can be used to calculate profit or loss over a period of time, with costs appearing as debits to be deducted from income credits. This can show a loss over the reporting period if debits over that period exceed credits. The calculation of loss or profit over the reporting period implicitly treats the position at the beginning of the reporting period as a neutral baseline.
Also intelligible is calculation of the profit or loss resulting from a set of transactions or activities over a period of time, similarly determined by setting credits against debits and treating the position at the beginning of that period of time as a neutral baseline.
When John Quiggin refers to the net loss resulting from violence, this is intelligible as an excess of the cost of violence, meaning the harm done by it or the loss resulting from its use, over the benefit of violence, meaning the good done by it or the gain resulting from its use.
If the perpetrators of, for example, colonialist violence derive benefits from its effects which exceed the costs they bear and/or the harm they suffer as a result of choosing to perpetrate it, then they profit from it; if the people against whom they perpetrate it suffer harm which exceeds any benefits** they may have received, then they lose by it; if deducting the loss to the colonised from the gain to the colonisers gives a negative balance, that’s a net loss in total.
If the colonised engage in violence in the pursuit of liberation, and the colonisers respond with retaliatory violence, then the effects of that retaliatory violence are a component of the cost to the colonised of their strategic choice; whether the choice results in a loss to them depends on what benefits they derive from the choice, as well as any other costs; whether the result in total, taking into account everybody affected, is a gain or a loss depends on all the costs and all the benefits to everybody. If the colonised adopt a strategy of non-violent resistance, and the colonisers respond with retaliatory violence, then the effects of that retaliatory violence are a component of the cost to the colonised of their strategic choice; whether the choice results in a loss to them depends on what benefits they derive from the choice, as well as any other costs; whether the result in total, taking into account everybody affected, is a gain or a loss depends on all the costs and all the benefits to everybody.
There is nothing implausible about the idea of a situation in which every possible course of action leads to a net loss. Advocating (in such a situation) for the choice which leads to the smallest net loss does not require pretending that the comparison makes it actually a gain and not a loss.
*Positive if assets exceed liabilities; negative if liabilities exceed assets.
** The Romans did build aqueducts in the provinces; it is not necessary to deny this was a benefit in order to calculate that the provincials still, on balance, lost out.
‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’
‘The aqueduct.’
‘Yes, which they took the money from us to pay for!’
John Quiggin 07.05.22 at 5:37 am
@LFC Interesting that you posted on the 4th of July. Thoughts on that revolution?
John Quiggin 07.05.22 at 5:49 am
@LFC Worth pointing out that the British saw the Malayan Emergency as a demonstration of the successful use of violence in counterinsurgency. I see you commented on this when I posted it https://crookedtimber.org/2021/08/24/the-malayan-emergency
Peter T 07.05.22 at 8:47 am
Some years ago the Economist had an article on an econometric study which compared the islands that were colonised (because they lay on trade routes) with those that were not. The article concluded that, since the GDP of the colonised islands was higher per capita, there were net benefits to colonisation. IRRC, the study did not include the costs to the original inhabitants of colonisation – as they were, of course, no longer around to ask.
lurker 07.05.22 at 12:37 pm
“countries that were colonized and did not throw off their colonizers (Australia and the USA) suffered the complete extinction of some of their Indigenous cultures, vs. those in countries that resisted violently, who retained their language and culture” Faustusnotes
Countries that resisted successfully. The Circassians defended themselves for a century (the longest war in Russian history) but were genocided in the end. Another Caucasian country, Chechnya, remains colonized despite an incredibly violent struggle to drive the Russians out. You can be as violent as you like and still lose.
I don’t see how the native peoples of Australia or North America could have resisted successfully a modern state determined to take their lands. They did not have the numbers or the organization. While there was a three-way contest for the control of North America between Britain, France and Spain, there was some chance of allying with one of them against the others, but that did not last.
LFC 07.05.22 at 3:35 pm
@ JQ
I do have one or two thoughts on the American Revolution but they’ll have to wait till later today.
faustusnotes 07.06.22 at 12:05 am
Seriously J-D?
Peter T, your culture could be wiped out, your language extinguished and your land confiscated but the Economist would say you were better off provided you got a casino and a couple of Maccas.
(But the problems with that study should be obvious).
LFC 07.06.22 at 4:22 am
Instead of reflections about the American Revolution (which I don’t have any deep thoughts about at the moment), I’ll offer a different, and admittedly unoriginal, observation.
Throughout much or most of U.S. history there’s been tension or conflict between the authority of the federal govt and that of the states, or, put differently, between what one historian has called “the language of nation” and the language of regionalism and states’ rights. This tension has waxed and waned but never been definitively resolved, and now it seems to be again becoming central. (See, to take just one instance, Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs case, with its repeated emphasis on returning the matter of abortion to the states.)
For “the language of nation,” see S. Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830 -1910 (pb, 2017), pp. 193-198.
J-D 07.06.22 at 12:23 pm
Are you genuinely in any doubt about whether I am serious?
There are times when I am not serious, but on those occasions I write in a different style.
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