Waging Nonviolent Struggle

"This is an interesting book. It’s a primer on how to wage a nonviolent struggle. Gene Sharp has been writing manuals for nonviolent resistance to injustice since the early 1970s. He was deeply influenced by the civil rights movement and by Gandhi , and unlike a lot of pacifists he’s very smart about strategy. He talks about the arguments of people who believe in violent struggle. He shows, case-by-case, how nonviolent struggle has been successful in the Philippines, in India and in the United States. His lessons are really about larger movements, society-wide movements such as those in India and nonviolent strikes like those in Namibia. But the main point he makes – that nonviolence can have a moral and strategic advantage over violence in the long term – is a lesson that the occupiers clearly take to heart. In almost every case where people on the left have used violence in this country, it has set them back. It’s not always easy to remain nonviolent, especially when you feel that the police are attacking you. The civil rights movements had problems with this. But to the degree that people have read Sharp, they are emulating people like Reverend [Martin Luther] King, Mahatma Gandhi and Cesar Chavez. Unlike with Zinn and some of the other books I’ve named, I’m not sure how many occupiers have actually read Sharp. I haven’t seen references to Sharp to the same degree that I’ve seen references to the others. But, for the most part, they are following the script that Sharp said successful nonviolent campaigns must follow. One of the things that he recommends which OWS hasn’t followed is that you be very flexible in your tactics. And by fixating so much on occupying places, the Occupy movement has put that particular tactic over a longer-term strategy for nonviolent change. That depends on the context, and how the nonviolent protesters were perceived to start with. If protesters who are attacked don’t respond to violence with violence then it can be a boon. The civil rights campaign is an example of that. In the Birmingham [Alabama] campaign of 1953, police with high-pressure water hoses and German shepherd dogs attacked a march of children. It was seen on television throughout the world. From that point until the Watts riots [in Los Angeles] 12 years after, for the first time a plurality of white Americans supported the civil rights movement. The violence directed against the marchers gave them the moral high ground. King knew that would happen – that’s why they sent the schoolkids out there. They knew the kids would get attacked because they knew that the man who controlled the police force, Bull Connor, was a vicious authoritarian racist. I’m not a reporter, but the headlines I’ve seen coming out of the protests in recent days are “Protesters Fight With Police”. That’s not a good headline because in the end, most people who are not involved in protests want order. For example, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago there was a huge protest against the Democratic Party. Mayor Daley’s police cracked down on the demonstrators. TV cameras caught it and famously the protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching”. But the public already perceived the demonstrators as prone to violence and most Americans sided with the police. OWS is affirming the argument that I make in the book, that the left is often more successful at changing public opinion than forming durable institutions. The core occupiers seem to think their encampments are all they need. They don’t want to form a party or any enduring organisation. Previous leftist groups wanted to but just weren’t able to. I think that we are now in an age of austerity that will last a while. And in an age of austerity, the critique that the Occupy movement and their allies make is going to continue to resonate. In an age of austerity, the question becomes who wins and who loses. In times like those we’re in, questions of social hierarchy and privilege become especially acute, and those are the kinds of questions that Occupy Wall Street is asking."