The encampments at Standing Rock worked to keep prayer and nonviolence at the center of their actions. (photo: Joe Zummo)
Standing
Rock and the Return of the Nonviolent Campaign
By George Lakey, Yes!
Magazine
08 January 17
There’s something even better than electoral politics and one-off
protests when mobilizing citizen power.
Nonviolent
campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions—think of
Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force.
All the more puzzling that the concept of a “nonviolent campaign”
is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power,
for example, to prevent Donald Trump from erasing gains made in addressing
climate change.
For
many, the choices are limited to lobbying, petitions, and looking for promising
progressive candidates to run a different kind of campaign—the electoral
campaign. Thinking outside that box usually means a one-off march or rally, or
possibly a protest. The trouble is, a nonviolent march or rally or protest is
not nearly as effective as a nonviolent campaign. One or two
of those actions could not have the impact of the enduring Standing Rock
campaign.
What
marks a nonviolent campaign?
Swarthmore
College researchers have been digging into that question, analyzing over 1,000
nonviolent campaigns waged in almost 200 countries. Swarthmore’s publicly
available database goes back historically to 12th century Egypt, when
laborers building a tomb for the Pharaoh successfully campaigned for wages that
were being unfairly withheld. The researchers found protests are usually
one-off events that express grief, outrage, or plain opposition to an action or
policy, and if the protest gets attention, it may be repeated. Campaigners, by
contrast, carry out a strategy over time. They plan a series of nonviolent
actions that continues until the goal is reached. That may be a matter of
weeks, or months, or years.
When
Earth Quaker Action Team reached year three of its campaign to induce PNC Bank,
the nation’s seventh largest, to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining
in Appalachia, the members of EQAT began to tire. They researched the
Swarthmore database and discovered that the British campaign to force Barclays
bank to divest from apartheid in South Africa took 20 years to succeed. The
Barclays campaign gave EQAT fresh perspective on endurance. Two years later,
the group won its “Bank Like Appalachia Matters” campaign.
True,
many campaigns are resolved in a much shorter time. America’s earliest recorded
nonviolent campaign was in colonial Jamestown, Virginia, when Polish
artisans—the first non-English settlers—campaigned for the right to vote
equally with the English. The Poles won their demand in three months.
The
Allegany County Nonviolent Action Group in New York won its 1990 campaign to
prevent a nuclear waste dump from being built there in less than a year.
Citizens in Bodega Bay, California, with the help of Berkeley students and
folksinger Malvina Reynolds, needed two years to cancel a plan to build the
nation’s first commercially viable nuclear power plant. In 1964, campaigners in
Los Angeles won cancellation of a planned Malibu plant as well.
Campaigns
have specific demands and targets
Nonviolent
campaigners know what they want: clean water in North Dakota for indigenous
people; the Dream Act for students brought to this country as children by
undocumented immigrants; a cleanup of chemicals at Love Canal in upstate New
York; university goods and clothing made by workers who are treated fairly with
safe working conditions.
Campaigners
also know who can make the decision they need. Alice Paul led the National
Woman’s Party campaign for suffrage and targeted President Woodrow Wilson. As
the film Iron Jawed Angels reveals, the women demonstrating
during World War I compared the president to the German emperor, calling him
“Kaiser Wilson!” In her later years, when I interviewed Alice Paul, she said
she was confident that Wilson could make the difference in persuading a balky
Congress to pass the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. She was
right. Her 1917 escalation of the campaign brought voting to women just three
years later.
Escalation
is an art
The
1960s civil rights movement showed expertise in locating and sequencing direct
actions to escalate pressure on their target.
When
President John F. Kennedy refused Martin Luther King Jr.’s request to provide
leadership for a civil rights bill, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference made an unusual strategic decision. Instead of taking the obvious
next step of focusing action in the nation’s capital in order to gain victory
there, the SCLC decided to escalate in Birmingham, Alabama, at that time a
major industrial city. It was where the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a member of
SCLC, had for years led an ongoing antisegregation campaign.
In
spring 1963, SCLC brought additional organizers and trainers to Birmingham to
join the local struggle. Campaigners escalated their tactics, confronting the
segregationists’ police dogs and fire hoses with nonviolent discipline. When
mass jail-ins left a scarcity of adults available for civil disobedience,
children stepped in to fill the streets. The sheer volume of disruption
dislocating Birmingham and the national charisma of Dr. King effectively
pressured the White House. Kennedy reportedly got on the phone with U.S. Steel
President Roger Blough and others of the power elite, gaining agreement that
the time had come for a national civil rights bill that would guarantee equal
accommodations.
Campaigns
can build movements
The
civil rights struggle also illustrates the way campaigns build mass social
movements. On Feb. 1, 1960, just four college students initiated a sit-in
campaign at a segregated lunch counter near their campus in North Carolina.
Inspired, students at other campuses followed suit. Within a month there were
student sit-ins throughout the South and a solidarity campaign at Woolworth
stores in northern cities as well. Multiple, replicated local campaigns turned
a few students’ efforts into the widespread and iconic “freedom movement.”
When
Gandhi faced the largest empire the world had ever known, he knew that India
would need a massive movement to sustain protracted struggle and gain
independence. Initially, he believed that his people were too disunited and
disheartened to forge such a movement. So he led a series of campaigns, using
them to win smaller demands, build leadership and organizing skills, and
develop the necessary self-confidence. The campaigns eventually built a
large-enough national movement to wage the famous Salt March of 1930–31, which
in turn increased the size of the growing movement by supporting more, smaller
campaigns involving still more people. A little more than a decade later,
critical mass forced the British to give up the prize jewel of their empire.
Overshadowed
by politics
The
obsession of the U.S. mainstream media is electoral campaigning. In Denmark, a
national political campaign is limited to six weeks and paid advertising is not
allowed on TV. Danish voter participation is much higher than in the U.S. Mass
media have a small window in which to present and clarify the issue differences
among the parties and candidates. They do that efficiently.
In the
United States, media bombard citizens for at least a year with the horse-race
dimension of elections. People may not learn much about the issues, but they do
gain a sense of how a political campaign works, including strategy.
By
contrast, no one hears how nonviolent campaigns won or what their strategic
choices were. Context is absent: What mainstream media source gives us that
kind of context about Standing Rock, comparing it with other campaigns waged by
indigenous groups for their tribal and environmental rights? When do we hear
academic experts on nonviolent struggle explain the dynamics behind breaking
news in a nonviolent campaign?
The
result is a public ill-informed about its options when facing an authoritarian
president or a wave of policy changes that diminish human rights and planetary
sustainability.
The
good news is the reemerging art of the nonviolent campaign. Our choices are not
limited to petitioning politicians or staging a protest. Instead, we can start
something big.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment