I have told this story before, but let me repeat it. One of the main
factors that radicalized me was the Vietnam War. I was opposed to it and
in the anti-war movement I came under the influence of pacifists. They
had a very good point. It is utterly insane for people to go off and
kill and be killed by people that they have nothing against in the first
place. It is utterly atrocious. While I was radicalizing I also was
dividing up who were the bad guys and who were the good guys. In that I
was under the influence of the Marxist movement. It was becoming more
and more clear to me that war was caused by the endless pursuit of other
people's wealth by the forces of capital. However, I was faced with a
dilemma. That is, I was seeing the communists as the good guys while
still holding pacifist ideas and it so happened that communists kill
people. How was I to resolve this? Then I read Socialism On Trial by
James P. Cannon. It contains transcripts of the trial in the early 1940s
when Cannon and other activists were sent off to prison because of the
Smith Act. In the trial Cannon was asked about revolutionary violence in
order to show that he advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S.
government. He explained it this way. Throughout history when an
exploiting class rules over an exploited class the members of the
exploited class resent the situation and proceed to try to alleviate
their exploitation. They do this peacefully and they do not want
violence. Violence is something to be avoided. It tends to get you
killed for one thing and for another thing it tends to destroy the means
of making a living and the products that have been created to make life
possible and bearable. The ruling class, though, will push back. The
interests of the ruling class and the ruled class are in direct
opposition and cannot be reconciled. This process is called the class
struggle. Sometimes the ruling class will get the upper hand and
sometimes the ruled class will get the upper hand. As time goes by the
struggle will sharpen and the exploited class will get more and more of
an advantage in the struggle and the exploiting class will push back
even harder. The ruling class will never willingly give up its power and
privilege. They may make concessions from time to time in order to
perpetuate their rule. They really don't want violence either. But when
it seems very likely that their rule might actually be in danger they
will use any means that they can to hold onto it. That includes
violence. When the exploited class finds itself under violent attack it
has every right to defend itself and to defend itself by any means
necessary. That is, if you are being shot at you had better shoot back
or you will be defeated and probably killed. This means that every
revolutionary war has always been a war of self defense. Well, it did so
happen that my pacifism allowed for self defense and this explanation
dovetailed almost exactly with what I had already incorporated in my own
code of ethics. That is, never seek violence, but be prepared to defend
yourself with violence if the violence is perpetrated against you. This
book allowed me to reconcile my pacifism with the concept of
revolutionary violence and so allowed me to accept the communist
movement as something I could join. Looking back on it I think that
Socialism On Trial by James P. Cannon was probably one of the most
influential books on my life. In the sense that I have described it I
have never stopped being a pacifist. But I do not ordinarily call myself
a pacifist anymore. I don't because it implies things that I have never
agreed with, the position that one should just lie down and take it when
being attacked.
On 10/21/2017 9:23 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Well, I never claimed to be a Pacifist. But when a People are
brutalized and the decision is made to mount an armed retaliation,
then all I'm suggesting is that the battle is lost. History teaches
us that when violence is used to throw off the yoke of oppression, the
new regime becomes a replacement for the old one, and the cycle begins
again.
When our best efforts reduce us to meeting our opponents on their
terms, then why make the sacrifice. But if we resist peacefully and
our opponents take that to mean they can kick us in the teeth and roll
over us, then armed Resistance has to be used.
In a political situation such as we find ourselves, it is difficult
not to want to pay Donald Trump back with some of his own medicine.
But then, why bother? If we're going to behave like those whose
behavior is so abhorrent to us.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/21/17, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The reason violence begets violence is that when people are attacked
they have the right to defend themselves and they do defend themselves
as well as they can. If you renounce violence at all times and in any
circumstances you are just setting yourselves up to be smashed.
On 10/21/2017 2:21 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Absolutely correct!
Any time we resort to the tactics of the Corporate State, we lose.
Remember the hard and fast rule: Violence begets violence.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/20/17,
comes the following message: > Only Nonviolent Resistance Will Destroy
Corporate State
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
October 19th, 2017
Above Photo: The Oceti Sakowin camp, near the Standing Rock reservation
in
North Dakota, in November 2016. (Becker1999 / Flickr)
The encampments by Native Americans at Standing Rock, N.D., from April
2016
to February 2017 to block construction of the Dakota Access pipeline
provided the template for future resistance movements. The action was
nonviolent. It was sustained. It was highly organized. It was grounded
in
spiritual, intellectual and communal traditions. And it lit the
conscience
of the nation.
Native American communities-more than 200 were represented at the
Standing
Rock encampments, which at times contained up to 10,000 people-called
themselves "water protectors." Day after day, week after week, month
after
month, the demonstrators endured assaults carried out with armored
personnel
carriers, rubber bullets, stun guns, tear gas, cannons that shot water
laced
with chemicals, and sound cannons that can cause permanent hearing loss.
Drones hovered overhead. Attack dogs were unleashed on the crowds.
Hundreds
were arrested, roughed up and held in dank, overcrowded cells. Many were
charged with felonies. The press, or at least the press that attempted
to
report honestly, was harassed and censored, and often reporters were
detained or arrested. And mixed in with the water protectors was a small
army of infiltrators, spies and agents provocateurs, who often initiated
vandalism and rock throwing at law enforcement and singled out
anti-pipeline
leaders for arrest.
The Democratic administration of Barack Obama did not oppose the
pipeline
until after the election of Donald Trump, who approved the project in
January 2017 soon after he became president. The water protectors failed
in
their ultimate aim to stop the construction, but if one looks at their
stand
as a single battle in a long war, Standing Rock was vitally important
because it showed us how to resist.
In November of last year I spoke with Kandi Mossett, one of the water
protector leaders, when I visited the North Dakota encampments. We were
standing over one of the sacred fires.
"He starts throwing rocks at police," she said of an infiltrator who
shadowed her and pointed her out to law enforcement for arrest. "When he
throws rocks I see a few other people throw water bottles. One of our
women
says, 'Stop throwing shit!' So people stop. But there's instigators and
infiltrators. We've had, here at this fire, two women who were called
bikers
because of the way they were dressed. When they lifted up their hands
with
everybody, people saw they had wires on. [Water protector] security went
to
them. They said, 'We see that you're miked.' They took off running. Went
over the fence. And a car came zooming, picked them up, and they took
off.
It's not easy to keep [infiltrators] out. They can roll under the fence.
They can come from under the security gates. We know they're here."
The corporate state, no longer able to peddle a credible ideology, is
becoming more overtly totalitarian. It will increasingly silence
dissidents
out of fear that the truth they speak will spark a contagion. It will,
as
in
China's system of totalitarian capitalism, use the tools of censorship,
blacklisting, infiltration, blackmailing, bribery, public defamation,
prison
sentences on trumped-up charges and violence. The more discredited the
state
becomes, the more it will communicate in the language of force.
"This world is heading towards economic systems that continue to eat up
life
itself, even the heart of workers, and it's not sustainable," Native
American and environmental leader Tom B.K. Goldtooth told me when we
spoke
at one of the camps last year. "We're at that point where Mother Earth
is
crying out for a revolution. Mother Earth is crying out for a new
direction."
"As far as a new regime, we'll need something based on earth
jurisprudence,"
he said. "A new system away from property rights, away from
privatization,
away from financialization of nature, away from control over our . DNA,
away
from control over seeds, away from corporations. It's a common law with
local sovereignty. That's why it's important we have a system that
recognizes the rights of a healthy and clean water system, ecosystem.
Mother
Earth has rights. We need a system that will recognize that. Mother
Earth
is
not an object. We have an economic system that treats Mother Earth as if
she's a liquidation issue. We have to change that. That's not
sustainable."
"If the pipeline is built, is that a defeat?" I asked him. He replied
wryly,
"That oil is going to run dry a lot sooner than they think. Maybe that
corporation is going to go bankrupt. Who knows?"
"I talk about the need for young people to have patience, to put the
prayer
first, rather than just jumping out there and putting their energy into
action," he said. Angry reaction is "what the corporations want. That's
what
the government wants. They want us to react. They want us to feel that
anger. When the anger escalates, our feelings, frustrations, it goes
back
to
that rage. The rage of the machines. It's also unhappy. It feeds off the
unhappiness of people."
George Lakey, the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social
Change emeritus at Swarthmore College and a sociologist who focuses on
nonviolent social change, talked about Sweden and Norway's response in
the
1920 and '30s to the rise of fascism and compared it with the response
in
Italy and Germany. We live in a historical moment similar to when
fascism
was ascendant between the two world wars, he argues. Lakey was a trainer
during the civil rights movement for Mississippi Freedom Summer and
co-authored "A Manual for Direct Action: Strategy and Tactics for Civil
Rights and All Other Nonviolent Protest Movements," one of the seminal
texts
of the civil rights movement.
"Fascism was a definite threat," he said of the situation faced by
Sweden
and Norway. "And they were also experiencing [economic] depression.
Norway's
degree of depression was even worse than Germany's. It was the worst in
Europe. The highest unemployment in Europe. People were literally
starving.
The pressure, the pro-fascist setup that the depression brings, was very
present both in Sweden and in Norway. What the Nazis did there-what they
did
in Germany and what the fascists did in Italy-was provocation,
provocation,
provocation. 'Bait the left. The left will come. And we'll have street
fighting.' "
Street violence, he said in echoing Native American elders, always
"strengthens the state."
"It puts more pressure on the state-which is presided over by the 1
percent-to step in more and more forcefully, with the middle class
saying,
'We care about order. We don't want chaos,' " he said. "That's what
happened
in Germany. It was a strengthening of the state. This happened in Italy
as
well. That's what the game plan was for fascists in Norway and Sweden.
It
didn't work. It didn't work because the left didn't play their game.
They
didn't allow themselves to be baited into paying attention to them,
doing
street fighting."
"Instead, [what was done] in the civil rights movement we would have
called
'they kept their eyes on the prize,' " Lakey said. "They knew the prize
was
to push away the economic elite, get rid of its dominance, so they can
set
up a new economic system, which is now called the Nordic model. What
they
did was: massive strikes, massive boycotts, massive demonstrations. Not
only
in the urban areas, which is what you expect, but also in the rural
areas.
During the Depression [in Sweden and Norway], there were lots of farmers
who
had their farms foreclosed on. Farmers are perennially in debt and had
no
way of repaying that debt. When the sheriff came, farmers in that county
would come to join them and collectively not cooperate-not violently,
but
very strongly-in such a way that the sheriff couldn't carry out the
auction."
"Remember who is actually running things, and we keep our focus on them
both
politically and economically," Lakey said.
"The group I'm involved with [Earth Quaker Action Team] loves to go
after
corporations," he said. "We went after a bank [PNC], the seventh largest
bank in the country but it was the No. 1 financier of
mountaintop-removal
coal mining in Appalachia. We forced that bank out of [the] business of
financing mountaintop coal mining. Nonviolently. Disrupting. Disrupting.
We
were in bank branches all over the place. We shut down two shareholder
meetings. We led a boycott in which people took out money from that bank
and
were putting it in their local credit unions. So there's more than one
way
to go after the 1 percent."
"These days, a very smart way to do that is to focus on the economic
entities that are owned by the 1 percent, who are basically responsible
for
the oppression that we experience," he said.
Resistance, he stressed, will come from outside the formal political
system.
It will not be embraced by either of the two main political parties or
the
establishment, which is now under corporate control.
"The Democratic Party is out to lunch," he said. "The Republican Party
is
actively grinding us. But even so we can make tremendous strides and
start
building that mass movement, which in Norway and Sweden was able to push
the
economic elites away. So that's an indication of the way to build a
movement-which is not to take them on the way antifa suggests. Instead,
in
the way the civil rights movement did. It worked. I was there. The Ku
Klux
Klan was much stronger then than it is now. In the Deep South, the Ku
Klux
Klan virtually ran the [region]."
Resistance, he said, means movements have to keep "pushing, pushing,
pushing. Campaign after campaign after campaign." It must always stay
"on
the offensive. That's the secret."
"As soon as they lost that sense of going on the offensive, choosing
campaign after campaign and winning those campaigns, that was when they
lost
their momentum," he said of the civil rights movement. "The important
thing
about what happened in Norway and Sweden was they kept their momentum.
The
campaigns continued to grow in number and in power until the economic
elite
was out."
"I was very influenced by Bayard Rustin, who was the chief strategist
for
Dr. [Martin Luther] King," he said. "I heard Bayard say over and over
and
over, 'If we don't get this economic justice thing done, in 50 years
we're
still going to have rampant racism.' He was right. But Dr. King and the
other leaders who understood that were not able to get a sufficient
number
of people to make it. Now, the '63 march was for jobs and justice. So
they
were able to do it to some degree. They kept moving in that direction,
involving white trade unions in that process. But in the situation of
general prosperity, there were many people who were content with our
economic system."
Economic decline, deindustrialization, austerity, debt peonage, decay
and
collapse of social services and infrastructure and the impoverishment of
the
working class, Lakey said, have changed the configuration. The working
class, in short, can no longer be bought off.
"We're in a very different situation," he said. "We're still in
austerity.
There's not the degree of [contentment] that there once was. Trump has
obviously capitalized on that fact. There's discontent. I think what Dr.
King and Bayard and others wanted to happen in the '60s is now
realizable."
"The impact of ignoring climate change is going to be more and more
disastrous," he added. "We're just through it now with [a devastating
hurricane in] Houston. We're going to see more and more money drained
off
by
that [kind of natural disaster]. Again, the 1 percent won't want to pay
their fair share. What that leaves us is a population that is more and
more
discontent. We see that polarization going on. Polarization always goes
along with increased inequality. We can expect more polarization. That's
a
part of the temptation of antifa: 'I'm more and more upset.' "
"When dealing with mountaintop-removal coal mining, we went from an
organization [Earth Quaker Action Team] that started in a living room to
13
states," he said. "We were steadfastly nonviolent. And we were targeting
something people understood. 'Wow, you're going after the bank that's
financing this? I want to join that.' Even though there were some people
who
were like, 'We'd like a little more politeness, please.' They didn't get
it
because what we were about was making the bank's life so difficult that
they
would choose instead to get out of the business [of mountaintop
mining]."
Lakey cautioned against diverting energy to attacking neo-Nazi and white
supremacist groups. That, he said, is a gift to the state.
"There's really no need for us to shift our attention from going after
the
1
percent to go after, often, working-class guys on the extreme right," he
said. "For one thing, we look at their real, genuine grievances and
address
them. For example, how many people on the right are from working-class
families who have family members who are not being served by our health
care
system? Many people on the far right are from a demographic that is
actually
losing life expectancy for the first time in U.S. history. The health
care
system in the U.S is a mess. Obamacare is better than previous, but it's
a
mess. So what we can do is address the genuine grievances instead of
writing
people off as if obsession with racism is all that's going on. Fascism
grows
when the economy declines. So let's address the real thing instead of
the
symptom."
While refusing to be baited into violent confrontations with the radical
right, we must also be vigorous in using militant, nonviolent tactics to
block hate speech. Article 4 of the International Covenant on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the United
Nations in 1965, stipulates that "all propaganda and all organizations"
based on ideas or theories of racial or ethnic superiority should be
illegal. It urges states to take positive steps to eliminate them.
Dr. Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance dealt with
the
issue of hate speech recently when a Baltimore chapter of the League of
Women Voters held a series of panel discussions on immigration. The
chapter
invited speakers from anti-immigrant white supremacist groups listed as
hate
groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Despite public outcry, the
league
refused to withdraw the invitations. At the initial event the speaker
was
prevented from completing his presentation by anti-racist activists and
members of the local chapter of the Green Party.
"Organizations and institutions do not have a requirement to include
those
who espouse hate," Flowers and Zeese wrote of the event. "They are not
required to give a platform to or legitimize white supremacist views. In
fact, one could argue that it is anti-social to do so."
"We would do better as a society to debate the best ways to eliminate
white
supremacy," they added.
Lakey's prescription: "Consistently occupy the moral high ground, and
that
attracts support." "It defangs those who want to do us in," he said.
"It's
not like the 1 percent was fond of the civil rights movement. They had
to
be
dragged kicking and screaming into making concessions. J. Edgar Hoover
was
even quoted as saying, 'He's [King] the most dangerous man in America.'
"
And, Lakey said, "there's a psychological reward. Going for what you
want,
instead of opposing what you don't want, is itself fulfilling. It was
civil
rights. It was called the Freedom Movement. It's also called a black
liberation movement. It was all about positivity."
