Political theorist Gene Sharp, sometimes called “The Machiavelli of Nonviolence” or “the Nonviolent Clauswitz.” AP Photo.
Subjects may disobey laws they reject. Workers may halt work, which may paralyze the economy. The bureaucracy may refuse to carry out instructions. Soldiers and police may become lax in inflicting repression; they may even mutiny. When all these events happen simultaneously, the man who has been ‘ruler’ becomes just another man.
–Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973)
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.–Angus, Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 2)
Over the course of the previous two installments of this post about “power and politics” I have tried to focus on some of the (subjective) conditions that are necessary to the work of “organizing for power” on the part of the diverse communities of the American Center-Left.
I have forced myself down this uncomfortable path due to my “despair at my own liberal despair” over effective minority rule by the Trump-captured GOP at all levels of democratic governance (or democratic non-governance as the case may be). The challenge, therefore, has been to think about power and politics, but to do so “with a practical intent”—to think about power with the goals of organizing for power, using power, and holding power always in the forefront—to make sure that under these conditions at least, the “vita contemplativa” should function in the service of the “vita activa.”
In the first installment (and as a sort of a self-exorcism) I took a detour through Michel Foucault’s structuralist and Nietzsche-inspired account of “power/knowledge” and “relations of power” because these had formed the backdrop for my own “identity politics” in the 1980s and 1990s. I concluded this reunion tour by saying that Foucault’s various historiographic investigations to expose the origin and workings of “orders of domination” lacked a sufficiently voluntarist, action-theoretic dimension. As such, I said that it amounted to cultural criticism rather than a practically-oriented account of power, and thus was not very much in the way of a useful “tool box” despite his claims to the contrary.
In the second part, I tried to address the American Center-Left’s “crippling ambivalence” about contesting for power and wielding power. To try to chart a course beyond my own liberal despair, I reviewed a recent flurry of Democratic party “tough love” literature, all of which, according to Sam Adler-Bell, have “Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals” in their DNA.
Reading Alinsky again after a long stretch of years, I then tried to capture something of his unique attitude concerning power tactics and effective community-based political action as a way to try to break the habit of powerlessness. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals offers a set of principles and rules for the development of effective political tactics and is meant to function (as self-contradictory as this may seem) as a guiding source of inspiration for political realists, among them would-be professional organizers.
Gene Sharp began his career without a bang, when he refused conscription into the military during the Korean War, and decided to go to jail instead.
Re-reading Alinsky has somehow helped me to really internalize something I otherwise already knew to be true—we have entered a stage of political conflict in the US where the basic attitudes and institutional mechanisms that normally support resolution through compromise are now effectively superseded by the conditions of out and out political struggle.
Alinsky writes that it is impossible to imagine a world devoid of power, and that power is experienced and then exercised in relation to a pragmatic understanding of human self-interest. He also says that organization amplifies the individual quantum of power through expressions of common cause. This all being said, the conduct of political struggle need not necessarily be violent struggle. This is why it is especially important that the sources, dynamics, and tactics associated with the exercise of power need to be clearly understood.
Gene Sharp & the Sources of Power
Perhaps, with all the other hullabaloo going on in the world, you did not notice that on January 28th, 2018 the foremost political theorist of nonviolent struggle, Gene Sharp (sometimes referred to as the non-violent Clausewitz) died at his home in East Boston, aged 90 years. If you did not notice it, you can be easily forgiven, since most people in the US don’t know anything about Gene Sharp. This is not true, however, for lots of people engaged in popular political struggles throughout the world over the last thirty years or more, including Burma (now Myanmar), the Balkans, Georgia, Ukraine, and the countries of the Arab Spring.
Gene Sharp began his career without a bang, when he refused conscription into the military during the Korean War, and decided to go to jail instead. After release, he went to Oxford, and did field work in Norway to study the manner in which school teachers refused fascist education under Quisling. He then wrote his first book which was on Gandhi as a subtle theorist of political power. According to journalist Mark Engler, writing about Sharp in Dissent in 2013, Sharp was largely responsible for the scholarly reappraisal of Gandhi, who up to that point had been the subject of study only within religion and ethics courses.
Sharp’s most critical insights arise in this period, from his reflection on the nearly incomprehensible spectacle of how thirty thousand Englishmen from the East India Company could somehow rule over two hundred million people on the subcontinent in the first half of the nineteenth century if not without some degree of consent on the part of those subject to the Raj.
Like both Foucault and Alinsky, Sharp starts the first part of his three-volume work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Part One: Power and Struggle) by acknowledging that “power is inherent in practically all social and political relationships.” Also like both Foucault and Alinsky, Sharp locates the basis of political power in social power, which he defines as the “capacity to control the behavior of others.”
Political power, he says, is really just social power wielded for political objectives. The manner in which “the roots of political power” can be seen to “reach beyond and below the formal structure of the state into the society itself” supports what Sharp will have to say about “the how” of dealing with an opponent’s power.
The theory of nonviolent action is based on the view that political power can be controlled via its sources.
Sharp says that there are two basic views of the nature of political power. In what he calls the “monolithic theory” of power, people are dependent upon the good will, decisions, and support of their government. In the contrary view, we recognize that government or the political system as dependent upon the people’s good will, decisions and support. If you recognize in this case the outline of the classically modern political idea of the sovereign subject and the social contract as the basis of state sovereignty, you would not be mistaken.
In the first case, power is a fixed quantum. If it were true, Sharp writes, then power could only be controlled by the self-constraint of rulers, or by changes in the “ownership” of the monolith/state, or by means of war between states.
In the second case, it is recognized that power is pluralistic (has a variety of sources) and is thus potentially fragile. Sharp identifies the following as exemplary sources: belief in legitimate authority (the right to command or direct, to be heard and obeyed) accepted voluntarily, and thus without sanction; the existence of necessary human resources (people to provide special assistance, to cooperate, and to obey orders); the skills and knowledge of the “helpers”; a host of intangible cultural factors; access to and ability to direct the use of natural resources, finances, property, the economic system, transportation and communications. Last but not least, there is the type and extent of sanctions available for use against those who would refuse to cooperate.
Sources of Power & Obedience
The theory of nonviolent action is based on the view that political power can be controlled via its sources. For example, the existence and operation of a regime require an acceptance of authority, of the right to rule and to command. From this it follows that effective rule depends on the cooperation and assistance of the subjects needed to run the economic and administrative system, as well as subsidiary institutions and organizations.
Once you go down this road, it becomes clear that even the ability to impose sanctions on individuals and populations who refuse to obey derives from voluntary obedience on the part of those needed to carry them out. Also, the weapons and instruments of submission, as social products are thus among the material sources of power that can be disrupted if and when obedience is withdrawn by the pertinent sectors of the society.
And even where troops and police are enthusiastic in obeying orders, their effectiveness is still tied to the degree of obstruction or support found among the general population (nobody generally wants to shoot their own kin). The internal stability of a regime, Sharp writes, can be measured by the ratio between the number and strength of the social forces that it controls or conciliates and the strength of the social forces that oppose it.
In part two of the Politics of Nonviolent Action, Sharp lists and describes no less and no more than 198 specific methods.
No doubt a lot of this seems rather self-evident–but there is a certain (practical) power in the simplicity and straightforwardness of Sharp’s writing about power.
Since, per Sharp, power is the ability to control the behavior of others, the heart of the matter is found in the question of obedience to authority. Here we can see that Sharp is asking many of the same questions about the nature of legitimacy and legitimation that also concerned Max Weber (I have written about this elsewhere).
Why then, do the many obey the few?
A clue is already to be found in the very notion of a “power relationship.” In his paper “Superiority and Subordination as Subject Matter of Sociology,” Weber’s contemporary George Simmel writes, “every social occurrence as such, consists of an interaction between individuals…each individual is at the same time an active and a passive agent in a transaction. In case of superiority and inferiority, however, the relation assumes the appearance of a one-sided operation; the one party appears to exert, while the other seems merely to receive an influence. Such, however, is not in fact the case.”
Obedience, understood in social interactionist terms, only actually exists at the point at which the subject has complied with or submitted to the command.
While Simmel and Weber disagreed on many things, recognition that there are elements of reciprocity and mutual dependence to be found in any interaction– even in the various species of command and obedience–was not one of them. The assertion that obedience is made up of a combination of both coercion and consent is the keystone of what Sharp has to say about nonviolent political struggle—that obedience is essentially an act of volition involving tacit consent, and as such, consent can also be withdrawn.
The crux of the problem of power, Sharp says, rests in understanding the various and multiple elements in the origin, constitution, and maintenance of voluntary obedience. For Thomas Hobbes, Sharp reminds us, the answer was simple. Subjects obey rulers because of fear. For David Hume, on the other hand, the answer (as with many other things) resolved to habit. But even in the case of obedience by habit, Sharp writes, “the subject accepts the view that it is best to continue to obey without consciously trying to examine why he should do so.” Sharp also looks at moral obligation (including appeals to the common good, to “supra-human factors” to legitimacy, and social norms); self interest (money, position, prestige); psychological identification with the charismatic ruler; and what he refers to as “lack of self-confidence” necessary for resistance.
Taken together, these make up a mixed roster of specific aspects of coercion and consent. Once understood in their specificity, it becomes easy to understand how power, through its sources, is not a stable quantum, and can thus can in principle be weakened.
Nonviolent Struggle as Political ‘Jiu-Jitsu’
If the monolithic theory of government power is correct (it isn’t) then efforts to weaken regimes by undermining the sources of their power (e.g. the allegiance of civil servants, participants in critical industries, police, soldiers, etc.) can do no more than create minor and temporary problems for them. Where the monolithic theory of reigning is seen to reign, therefore, the options for controlling a ruler’s power are limited.
There is reliance on the ruler’s self-restraint. There are constitutional and institutional arrangements, such as those found in liberal democracies, designed to limit and control executive power. Finally, there is the threat of superior violence via variety of means—rioting, assassination, violent revolution, guerrilla warfare, coup d’état, civil war, etc.
Some conflicts, Sharp writes in his general introduction, do not yield to compromise, and so can only be resolved through struggle. Where regular institutional procedures for controlling a regime’s power are not a viable option, the choices are pretty much these: surrender, violent struggle, and non-violent struggle.
Given an understanding of the sources of a regime’s political power, therefore, and the use of tactics undertaken to weaken that power by turning it against itself, the techniques that Sharp has in mind amount to what he calls “political Jiu-Jitsu” (henceforth referred to as Jujutsu). Nonviolent action so understood is generic for turning mass opposition into a strategy and a host of tactics involving protest, noncooperation and intervention (e.g., sit-ins, obstruction, nonviolent invasion, parallel government, etc.) where the “actionists” conduct the conflict by doing or refusing to do a variety of things without resorting to physical violence.
It is also important to point out at this point that as an active political campaign in the context of struggle, nonviolent action is not pacifism, nor is it necessarily principled nonviolence. Rather, because of the underlying strategy to weaken the sources of a regime’s power, the commitment to nonviolence is pragmatic (something necessary if the strategy is to work).
One Hundred and Ninety-Eight Nonviolent Methods
Where Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals was not written to be a detailed handbook for direct action and civil disobedience tactics (each situation is different he says) Sharp is deadly serious about providing a practical, How To guide. In part two of The Politics of Nonviolent Action, called The Methods if Nonviolent Action, Sharp lists and describes no more and no less than 198 specific methods.
Here we see Sharp really in his element, and where his (otherwise criticized) autodidacticism and taxonomic writing style find their intended potency. This stuff is damn useful. The first chapter includes fifty-four methods (tactics) of protest and persuasion, broken into subcategories, and ranging from the ambitious (formal declarations) to the lowbrow (rude gestures).
The ensuing chapters’ entries include social noncooperation, economic noncooperation/boycotts and economic noncooperation/strikes, and then political noncooperation, and the methods of nonviolent intervention. Finally, the third volume is all about dealing with things like blowback, movement discipline, and what to do when you win (including guarding against a coup from within the ranks of the movement).
Between the Day of Rage in January 2011 and the fall of Mubarak in July of 2013, the jujutsu fails.
The 2011 documentary on Sharp, “How to Start a Revolution” (released when appreciation for Sharp’s recipe was at its highest) provides dramatic illustrations of the ways in which Sharp’s fingerprints are all over the global use of tactics to throw despotic regimes off balance.
Around that same time, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan published their study, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Chenoweth and Stephan looked at 323 campaigns from around the world from 1900-2006, and concluded that the nonviolent ones were twice as likely to succeed as their violent counterparts, and say explicitly that the purpose of their empirical work is to “comprehensively test many of the ideas that Sharp and [his colleague Robert] Helvey have developed” and to “explain why it succeeds relative to violent resistance, and under what conditions it succeeds or fails.”
The upshot of the study’s conclusions is that nonviolent campaigns have the advantage because they can mobilize many more people (both internally and externally) than violent ones, and because nonviolent campaigns (and violent reactions to them) increase incentives for “loyalty shifts (political jujutsu) among those who otherwise support and cooperate with the regime.
Political Jujutsu in Reverse
Just as Sharp’s ideas, validated by Chenoweth and Stephan, were well on their way to becoming what political scientist Thomas Richard Davies called “the new conventional wisdom” the world bore witness to the general failure of the so called “Arab Spring” between 2011-2013. While it would be wrong to say that Sharp has “fallen on hard times” it is nonetheless the case that the efficacy of “political jujutsu” has been receiving a greater degree of scrutiny (Chenoweth and Stephan spend quite a bit more time on the successes than on failures).
In “The Failure of Strategic Nonviolent Action in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, and Syria: Political Jiu-Jitsu in Reverse” Prof. Davies seeks to explain these disappointing outcomes, by identifying the discernable failure modes of these campaigns: successful suppression, transformation into violent action, non-achievement of objectives (superficial concessions), and descent into civil war. The case of Egypt provides a nice (ok not so nice) sampling of the sorts of things Davies finds at the root of these disappointing results.
Between the Day of Rage in January 2011 and the fall of Mubarak in July of 2013, the jujutsu fails—the attempt by protestors to court the military ends up helping to legitimate military rule after the uprising; the regime/military also exploits the reluctance of liberal parties and Islamicists to enter into a common popular front; and the uprising fails to find sufficient international support, including that of key foreign governments like the United States, which under Obama/Clinton waived congressional human rights requirements in order to resume aid to the Egyptian military in 2012.
Similar failures (in different combinations) are also seen to beset the other Arab Spring popular uprisings. In Bahrain, failure to convert the armed forces, and a lack of external support. In Syria, conversion of only some elements of the military, causing splits that result in a civil war. In Libya, the active and violent involvement of international third parties in this case leads to an escalation of violence overall that changes the nature of the struggle.
Sharp’s highly voluntarist account of political power (obedience is based on consent and can be withdrawn) finds its relevance between two extreme limit cases.
At the present time, there doesn’t appear to be any clear consensus about the optimum conditions for successful nonviolent struggle, and it seems clear that success also depends on things related to the goal setting as well as a variety of conditions. There are those who say that Sharp’s ideas are designed for weakening and overturning dictatorships, but are less effective in more complex social arrangements, where discussions of ruler/subject dichotomy seem rather out of phase, especially given cases where there is extensive and complex mass media manipulation on the part of an elite corporate class (as opposed to just state media).
There are others still who say that the methods of nonviolent struggle are only likely to be successful where there is at least some deference to universal human rights, as in liberal democracies, or at least among client states that are dependent upon some level of exchange (and approval) from a liberal international order.
Sharp’s highly voluntarist account of political power (obedience is based on consent and consent can be withdrawn) finds its relevance in the space between two extreme limit cases. On the one hand, there is Sharp’s “aha moment narrative” concerning the Indian subcontinent and the company/British Raj; surely this is de facto proof that subjects submit to their rulers voluntarily.
At the other end of the relevance spectrum, there is the case, raised by some critics, of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during WWII. Nobody believes there could have been much of an opportunity for a nonviolent resistance movement to be successful in the face of such an implacably fascist foe. On the other hand, it seems rather obvious that Poland 1943 is rather late in the game, when the whole world was already at war—perhaps a better example for thinking about the efficacy of nonviolent struggle would be the cause of the “good Germans” in the early 1930s.
And yet, armed with Sharp’s theory of power and catalog of tactics, it is easy to start to believe that a mass nonviolent resistance to a minority GOP regime (one which is only semi-loyal to the American constitutional system) could shut the thing down decisively in fairly short order with effective political jujutsu.
Last Thoughts: Organizing for Power
In the second installment of this post, I used Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals to help me recover the attitude toward power one needs to have when entering the stage of political conflict in which institutional mechanisms that normally support resolution through compromise are now effectively superseded by the conditions of out and out political struggle.
In the balance of this third installment, I have tried to leverage the work of Gene Sharp to take a step further, in order to internalize the theory of power and related tactics that support popular campaigns of nonviolent action to weaken and replace unpopular regimes or to win meaningful concessions in fights over more limited community goals.
The “elite theory of power” common among well-intentioned liberals, McAlevey says, leads to the advocacy model of social and political change.
I’d like to tie this off for now with some last thoughts on what needs to happen in order to “organize for power.”
In No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power, long-time labor and community organizer Jane McAlevey makes the case that progressives have experienced four decades of decline in the US because of a long-term and significant shift away from deep organizing in favor of reliance on advocacy and shallow mobilizing. Her overarching objective in the book is really to show the necessary connection between labor organizing and community organizing, sort of a “unified field theory” that she thinks is needed because the split between labor and social movements is the underlying reason for the failure of both unions and progressive politics, “resulting in…the ongoing shrinking of the public sphere, and unabashed rule by the worst and greediest of corporate interests.”
McAlevey has interesting things to say about each approach to change she discusses—advocacy, mobilizing, and deep organizing. Each approach has its place, and each produces different outcomes. But she thinks that progressives have largely failed to challenge the gross inequality of power in the US because, in relying on advocacy and mobilization models, we have largely ignored and omitted discussions about power or power structures, and we have relied on proxies to do our fighting for us.
Liberals and most progressives don’t do what she calls a “full power structure analysis,” she says, because consciously or not, “they accept the kind of elite theory of power popularized by Mills in the 50s. They assume that elites will always rule. At best, they debate how to replace a very naughty elite with a better elite, one they can work with.”
The “elite theory of power” common among well-intentioned liberals, McAlevey says, leads to the advocacy model of social and political change. The advocacy approach relies on charitable contributions to support lawyers, pollsters, researchers, and communications firms which wage the battle. Where the elite theory of power is also accepted by progressives, she adds, the result is “the mobilizing approach.” This is better than advocacy, because it brings people power into the fight.
The problem with it, however, is that they are generally always the same people—dedicated activists who show up dutifully to rally and protest for good causes when activated by their conscience and the professional staffers who direct and control the mobilization. Mobilization efforts want bodies so that the mobilization will pass the grassroots test (so it doesn’t really matter who shows up).
They Had Money, We Had People
What then is organizing for power? As should be abundantly clear, it still remains difficult for me to say.
The analysis attempted here whipsaws among insights about power belonging to community organizing, political organizing, and labor organizing. In my defense, I can only say that there is something about the present political moment (liberal despair, minority rule by the most revanchist social conservatives imaginable) that calls forth an urgent need for re-imagining political solidarity in a fashion that also raises rather radical ideas about work and communities.
Reading McAlevey, organizing for power means developing the sort of intra-group solidarity and inter-group coalition politics in which it again becomes possible to imagine seeing the power of economic and political elites checked by the self-selected representatives of ordinary people. For this to occur, something akin to collective struggle, presumably through nonviolent campaigns, needs to be re-experienced. This will be a long process.
But a certain low point has most definitely been reached. I like to think of it as the “Scott Walker moment” in which Wisconsin unionists spearheaded a recall effort against the union-busting governor of Wisconsin, and the recall failed, even among union membership. There’s really no place to go but up from there. Something has to happen that bolsters movement struggles with community solidarity and support in a way that overcomes the totality of forces deployed to make it seem natural for most people to see their individual interest as severed from everybody except those with whom they nurse their resentments.
I recently read an article in Dissent about the successful primary campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that seemed to be describing something like this. The article said that the lesson of the campaign was that old-fashioned shoe-leather politics can work wonders “if the campaign has a compelling message and aims beyond so-called prime voters.” For decades, Democratic campaign strategy has focused on prime voters who voted in the last few elections, because it’s efficient. But as the article points out, this contributes to a “withering of the voter base” by contacting only the most engaged. But what do you do if the district in question is changing dramatically, and there are many working class people of color and young people who move around a lot? Volunteers from partner organizations like the DSA spent months going door-to-door to reach these voters. In the end, the much-feared party machine was a paper tiger. Ocasio-Cortez beat Crowley by a whopping 15-point margin.
The title of the article, by the way, is “They Had Money, We Had People.”
