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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Whose non-violence is it, anyway?



Gwynne Dyer
writes:

From Lisbon in 1974 to Manila in 1986, East Berlin in 1989, Moscow in 1991, Jakarta in 1995, Belgrade in 2000 and Cairo early this year, popular revolutions using non-violent tactics have driven dictators from power.

Violent revolutions have been commonplace for more than two centuries now, but the great discovery of our own era has been how to make the dictators quit without shedding blood.

Dyer is a well-known independent journalist of Canadian origin.  His 1983 PBS series War had a pivotal influence on my understanding of the state and imperialism.  Dyer is not a Marxist; he might best be termed a "Weber" materialist.  Since the end of the cold war he has written on "food wars" and "climate wars" - which have the benefit of being a bellwether, if nothing else.  In his article posted today, "Non-violent revolutions remain viable," he tries to make the best of a horrific class reality in Libya with more than a little wishful thinking.

Now, in Libya, we seem to have a throwback to an earlier time.

It's a good thing that Qaddafi is finished, but nobody can claim that this is a success for non-violence.

What lessons should we draw from this, especially at a time when several other attempts to use non-violent techniques to bring about a democratic revolution, notably in Yemen and Syria, are struggling to survive?

This line of liberal reasoning explains why Dyer is not a household name like Anthony Beevor or Max Hastings.  His illusions in the great power states of cold war Atlanticism remain strangely intact.  To writers like Dyer, the "international community" is not a concept for the latter-day Julius Streichers of the Heritage Foundation.

The "non-violent" revolution in 1986 against the Marcos dictatorship was little different than the 2011 mass movement against Mubarak: a long-anticipated but conjuncturally spontaneous event that posted more questions for working class and peasant revolutionary leadership than it solved for the historic demands of the masses themselves.  Today in the Philippines it is all the clearer that without revolutionary leadership that has developed within the toiling classes and won their allegiance, the capitalist ruling class is prepared to acquiesce to an endless iteration of games of musical chairs.  Like elections in imperialist democracies like the United States, they allow "lessons" to be drawn and the organizational capacities and determination for self sacrifice of different classes to be weighted, but only by our rulers.

Dyer praises activists willing to go the non-violent route.  But whose route is it, and for what reasons?  The supposedly non-violent national and class struggle battles in the United States offer an instructive example of how liberal thinkers and writers of Dyer's caliber can kid themselves over decades.  Examples?  The Civil Rights Movement, we are told in school and in our public pronouncements and monuments, was non-violent.  But this was only true if we shave a very thin layer of examples off a very bloody historical hoof.  Chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and the electoral autonomy of the Democratic Party, all of which were built on oppression and terrorism against the Black nationality, were not a non-violent hegemony which could be defeated by non-violence.  They were examples of a profoundly aggressive and unspeakable capitalist dictatorship which could only be defeated at the hands of direct action.  Questions of violence or non-violence did not enter in to it.  Jim Crow was defeated, for instance, when its defenders realized their enemy would end Jim Crow by any means necessary.

For Marxists Dyer's other examples

East Berlin in 1989, Moscow in 1991

are problematic at best.  In both cases, regimes that spoke in the name of workers and farmers, in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, collapsed after decades of doing the opposite, in most cases, of the communist line they espoused.  The fact that a few members of the nomenclatura were forced into early retirement for their sins can hardly make up for what has been twenty subsequent years of capitalist dictatorship, low-wages, and the victory of dog-eat-dog anti-humanism.  Not very non-violent for anyone, other than the commentators.

There are worse and more brutal rationalizers of bourgeois right than Gwynne Dyer.  His eminently reasonable, reflective, and Solomonic modes of reasoning just make it worse, for all that.




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