His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction)
Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing.
You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model
You (likely) act in a non-violent way every day. If you want some kind of change in your life, you achieve it non-violently.
Does that imply you are are actually a violent person that is choosing not to be violent? Are you implying “something violent” every day you act like a good person?
MLK didn’t have support because people were afraid of the alternative. They supported him because they agreed with him message.
I feel like you are just trying to justify violence to some degree.
In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.
You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs.
nobody is secretly violent ... just normal peaceful channels stoped working.
Recognizing that distinction isn't justifying violence its just explaining why nonviolence provides leverage in the first place
In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.
You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs."
I would say it depends. Are there depts of rent involved in that scenario? Did the locking out just happened out of the blue, or was it communicated before, that it would happen?
Apart from that, I surely see more easy examples of justifying violence - for example to stop other violence.
You sound like you've never heard of political triangulation before.
And a lot of those interactions are backed by implied violence: people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
Yes it is. If a normal commodity item such as bottle of milk was outrageous overpriced in a particular store. I would just go to another store.
As for whether I would pay for something without the threat of violence. I do so everyday. I've walked out of stores by mistake with an item I haven't paid for and gone back into the store and paid for it. I don't like my things being stolen, and thus I don't steal other people's things.
I pay for my eggs from a farm and it is a honour system.
... I genuinely can't fathom what it's like to live in a developed country and yet have such little social trust.
You really imagine that when others are in line at a checkout, they have the intrusive thought "I could just bolt and not pay, but I see a security guard so I better stay in line"? You really have that thought yourself?
Of course people have agreed on the price. That's why you don't see anyone trying to negotiate the price, even though they would be perfectly within their rights to try. And it's why you do see people comparison-shop.
Like say you persistently just refuse to pay a parking ticket after court orders to do so?
What do you think happens to people who do that though?
You keep telling me what you don't do and how it proves you're implicitly non violent but you can't even imagine framing that response in terms that don't include representatives of the state's monopoly on violence being within arms reach.
Implying violence is never necessary while repeatedly describing not doing violence even if the state's violence distributing apparatus isn't currently present rather undermines the case.
This is not an accurate representation of GP:
> I don't stand in the checkout line trying to figure out how to run out without paying.... I trust that the vast, vast majority of people act similarly. If they didn't, no amount of law enforcement would be enough.
In a world they note of police, military and security guards, they're acting like whether this might have a reason is determined solely by whether people are planning to steal from a supermarket or not...while they're not poverty stricken or hungry, to boot.
Arguing "I simply obey all the laws" is real easy to do from a position of privilege.
Violence is never the answer is easy to say when it's not happening to you. Its also easy to say while you stand by as violence is done to others.
Poor Americans simply do not live in the Les Miserables world.
> Violence is never the answer is easy to say when it's not happening to you. Its also easy to say while you stand by as violence is done to others.
What violence are you even referring to?
The violence against him, in contrast with the nonviolence stand, made it stand out.
History obviously shows that that "moral audience" was certainly the minority then.
MLK was already forcing that confrontation and by most accounts was succeeding slowly-but-surely. But it wasn't until his assassination that people were forced to confront the contrast he had been trying to illuminate all along.
Even his disciplined non-violence he was met with brutal force (as were the peaceful protesters) and this forced some sort of moral reckoning for those who had deferred or were complicit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKnJL2jfA5A&feature=youtu.be
Now, give people two options with one of them seeming much better it becomes a choice.
Violence is 100% an answer, it's just very rarely the best answer that can be provided.
I have read very many people claim this and exactly zero reasons provided by them why I should believe it is true.
It seems to me like basic common nature that if you see proponents of a cause behaving in a manner you find objectionable, that will naturally bias you against the cause. And I have, repeatedly, across a period of many years, observed myself to become less sympathetic to multiple causes specifically because I can see that their proponents use violence in spreading their message.
I've tried very many times to explain the above to actual proponents of causes behaving in manners I found objectionable (but only on the Internet, for fear of physical safety) and the responses have all been either incoherent or just verbally abusive.
> making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This would only make sense if social change required action specifically from people in power, who in turn must necessarily act against their best interest to effect it.
If that were true, there would be no real motivation to try nonviolence at all, except perhaps to try to conserve the resources used to do violence.
> You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective
First, no, that makes no sense. If that were true, formal debate would never occur and nobody would ever actually try to convince anyone of anything in good faith. The premise is flawed from the beginning; you cannot apply game theory here because you cannot even establish that clearly defined "players" exist. Nor is there a well-defined "payoff matrix", at all. The point of nonviolent protest is to make the protested party reconsider what is actually at stake.
Second, in practice, violence is never actually reserved as a credible threat in these actions; it happens concurrently with attempts at nonviolence and agitators give no credible reason why it should stop if their demands are met. In fact, it very often comes across that the apparent demands are only a starting point and that ceding to them will only embolden the violent.
could you share some sources where people have discussed this? i'd like to understand their reasoning better
can you recommend any sources that discuss this idea?
-- Thomas Jefferson
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
Malcolm X and others are already fading from memory.
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...
You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence. Further, less violent movements are more likely to end up more democratic / less authoritarian.
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence. So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
The book is 'minorly academic', but it's an easy read and probably more geared toward the general public.
(The studies/book recognize that "violence" exists on a spectrum. The book also talks about generally non-violent movement(s) that have factions that attach to them that want to use violence, and various other scenarios.)
Admittedly having not read the 400-page study, I don't think that's a causation that is necessarily supported by the correlation. It would be extremely surprising if the prior of "how likely is this movement to succeed" were not a determining factor in whether a movement tends to use violence, with the a priori less-promising movements being more likely to take violent action.
C.F. the difference between me demanding you give me an apple or your car.
It is not a 400-page study: it is a 400-page book that goes over the research available at the time and summarizes it. The book leans slightly academic, but it's a fairly easy read.
A movement's success is (partly?) determined by its size and how much of the general population gets on board with the original (presumably) small group that started it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence.
So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
[Edited GP post to add some of this comment.]
If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
The book covers such scenarios: where you are non-violent but the Powers That Be are violent towards your movement.
This study (and the one about 3% of the population being sufficient to enact a change) comes up constantly when you hang around leftists, and I've been known to quote it myself when I was younger, but it always felt too good to be true and uncomfortably aligned with liberal sensibilities.
It's strange to me that this isn't obviously true to everyone.
> [Chenoweth and Stephan] have gone out of their way to correct people who treat it like a cheat code, and to caution against overreading any success of non-violent oppostion.
The rebuttal is against those arguing that 3.5% is a "magic number", that treat(ed) it like an 'absolute', when we're actually dealing with probabilities and likelihoods and odds.
The formulators of the "3.5% rule" do not treat it as an absolute, and neither do I: my GP post talks about "odds" and likelihoods.
Resistance has always been violence/sabotage towards oppressors, if nonviolence actions were effective you'd see more armed forces bashing skulls at no kings protests.
I did: he talks about the 3.5% is "just" walking and chanting down the street, but about structure changes 'behind the scenes'.
But the video is generally irrelevant to the point being made in the comment, as Stoermer (video creator) recognizes the people who came up with the rule are criticizing some who are putting it forward certain ideas about.
Stoermer is putting forward the idea that the 3.5% needs to be done in a certain way to actually be something meaningful, which doesn't disprove the rule nor the originating comment: that you'll be more liekly to get to a critical mass of movement supporters by eschewing violence.
And it turns out killing and punching people is sometimes the worst option of to play the long game. This is why nation states often twist themselves in bretzels to manufacture consent so they can go elsewhere and punch and kill people over there. If you don't have that consent, you will lose the popular support and that can mean that even if you won the battle, you lose the war.
Many people fail to consider second order effects. Offensive violent actions to address violent threat may seem like the natural solution, but a second order effect is often that it runs a wedge between the general population and those willing to use violence, shrinking the support. Another second order effect is that the other side will also use more violence and then the whole thing spirals into open weaponized conflict. A thing you should only provoke if you have the numbers, support and means to actually win it. So don't just scratch where it itches, think about the side effects and what psth it leads you down.
Non-violent opposition hinges on the fact thst many of the second order effects are positive. The non-violent side has usually more sympathies within the population, non-violent opposition can be really easy to get into, it could be as simple as a mail man strategically losing a letter, a sysadmin accidentally leaving a api exposed, a wine-mom building networks with others to keep open tabs on the neighbourhood, a peint shop not forgetting who printed a certain flyer when the state authorities show up and so on. Wherever you are, there is probably a way to resist. And if there are enough people normal operations of the regime become hard to sustain.
And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
It is actually 'interesting' in that it is one of the few examples where a non-violent movement ended up with an authoritative regime after "success": it's (almost?) unique in that regard per the author. Most non-violent movements end up in a democratic system.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Invalid counter-argument: the survey in question looks all sort of movements, both those that succeeded and failed.
"original" is doing some heavy lifting here - the Iranian revolution was not non violent. By the state or by the revolutionaries.
It's also impossible to talk about the regime without also bringing up the formative events in the early years of the Iranian state, namely the Iran-Iraq war.
Without agape, political activism is more zero-sum and utilitarian. Non-violence becomes a gambit that is only appealing as long as it is making obvious gains against the current winners, and there is little motivation to remain nonviolent after becoming winners.
in my understanding some people use 'non-violence' to describe the more utilitarian version, and 'noniovlence' for that which exits the entire 'domination paradigm'
Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.
We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works.
This is definitely true to some extent, especially when non-violence has been used in the more distant past.
But in recent history, the non-violent approach creates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties, who find violence against non-combatants to be unpalatable. You can turn the world against an enemy by putting the enemy's asymmetric use of force on display. This doesn't work in a lower empathy society.
Only if you have good advertising for your cause.
Violence is typically good advertising, most news is simply salivating to cover it.
Which means in any non-violent group seeking a goal, it is optimal to have a small violent 'unassociated' group cause just enough problems to get noticed in the global media.
Some subscribe to a soft pacifism where non-destructive violent resistance like disarming the defector or disabling the defector using less-lethal technologies like a tazer would be fine. Pure pacifists who don’t believe in any kind of physical resistance whatsoever are almost exclusively religious practitioners who don’t ascribe a high degree of value to life in this world because they believe non-resistance will bear spiritual fruit in the next world.
I happen to hold this philosophy under different words.
MLK chose nonviolent shows of force, whereas Malcolm X chose more direct forms of violence.
Governments could save face by negotiating with MLK, as he used nonviolent means. They couldn't negotiate with Malcolm X because thats the whole "we cannot negotiate with criminals and terrorists".
MLK wanted a non-violent showing of force as to stay "legal", but a strong implicit threat of "well, you know, theres a LOT of us. We're peaceful for now". The bus boycotts almost bankrupted down in Atlanta, so money attacks also work.
But now, we have No Kings and 50501. The whole idea of mass protest as a 'nonviolent but imminent threat' is completely gone. Protests were a prelude to something to be done. Now, its more of a political action rally, with not much of anything to follow up the initial energy.
Which is also why the protests; pussy hat rebellion, 50501, No Kings - they've all failed. Theres no goals. Its just chanting and some signs.
It's absolutely not realistic. Every right we have was fought for and people died trying to get it. This is especially true in America where a fifth of the population was enslaved at inception. Nothing has never been given to us it had to be taken from abusers of power and there have always been abusers of power in this country.
I mean Trump is no different than Washington. Washington routinely ignored laws, he tried to have his lackeys go get his "property" from free states while never willing to go to court (a provision of the fugitive slave act).
John Adam's called Shays's Resistance terrorists because they had the audacity to close down courts to stop foreclosures of farms (fun fact, that was the first time since the revolution where Americans fired artillery at other Americans (and it was a paid mercenary army by Boston merchants killing over credit)).
You can go down the list, it's always been there but luckily there were always people fighting against it trying to better society against those that simply dragged us down.
The important part is that the violence mostly doesn't start until someone tries to hurt those who are there peacefully. Good was there peacefully so retaliation is becoming a possibility.
[citation needed]
There are multiple studies and books that go over how the less a movement uses violence the more likely it is to be successful:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...
The above book has a chapter about how if a movement is non-violent, but a contingent/faction wants to use it, various ways to handle it.
You just said it out loud. Are you one of "them"?
Whether you want to be a guerilla group, terrorists, or take a peaceful approach the first step is always going to involvefinding confederates.
So many complaints about government have the form "I'll hit my breaking point and then I'll shoot a bunch of people".
No plan to join a militia, no plan to engage in coordinated action before that. Just a plan to commit a mass shooting and then be gunned down as another statistic. And probably kill a bunch of people who have nothing to do with whatever the problem is.
Violence, particularly civil war, is utterly destructive to a society, completely tears apart the social fabric and creates wounds that never really heal.
That said, when you look at America, India, both movements required the threat of violence to succeed. MLK had the Black Panthers, and whilst Ghandi himself preached non-violence he did so against a background of riots in which thousands of British officers were killed and wounded.
The social reforms Western Europe and America saw in the post-war period were an capitulation to the implicit thread of violent communist revolution.
Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I remember reading an argument along those lines at the time that resonated. Perhaps not the Black Panthers? Or am I just totally wrong here and there wasn't a shred of political violence in the background?
Do you still want to sustain your argument or retract ?
Otherwise your comment above still stands with false information + made worse by a flimsy appeal to authority (peace “degree”)
How can you know that they wouldn't have succeeded otherwise, or even been successful faster?
I have a feeling you probably should have put a bunch of caveats for both like "if you're willing to wait a few generations for your aims to be met".
When talking about both the American civil war, one side had engaged in violence for antiquity and had the force of the state which came to state that violence was the expected behavior. This violent behavior was very profitable, and the people profiting from this realize they were in a weak position so they started propagandizing was what they were doing was "in the name of god", "is good for the common man", etc. It moves the conversation from one looking at the violence of slavery to "Why do you hate god and country".
Simply put the US civil war was a temporary increase of violence that preceded the war with slavery and followed the war in neo-slavery.
This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.
This is a fundamental problem.
It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.
When the British outlawed slavery and made their moral arguments against it, it seems to me that that worked pretty well everywhere except the US. I mean, sure, they might have had to invoke military force against other Europeans, but the idea spread within Britain easily enough, and they didn't lack sympathetic ears elsewhere (e.g. in Canada; the Underground Railroad was possible for a reason).
The reason for abolishing slavery was that it was a backwards system that prevented the super exploitation that came naturally for the proletariat.
The abolition of slavery was the proletarization of slaves. It absolutely was economic in nature. There was no economic need for slavery anymore, it didnt end racism tho, which was the ideological weapon that permited slavery.
Racism was simply repurposed for the black (and other) proletariat.
Industrialization killed slavery not morality.
Where is the goodness?
You have an idealist conception of history.
How would this allow superexploitation?
When capitalism becomes more productive than the market can handle it just shuts down the factories or when it gets more efficient it just gets rid of workers. Try doing that with slaves.
Proletarization created a pool of unemployed and a labor makret that benefited capitalists.
And industrialization enabled slavery in the US rather than killing it, thanks to the Jevons paradox; the cotton gin allowed for land previously seen as unsuitable for cotton production to be bought up by slaveowners, increasing the demand for slaves (https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent ; see section "Effects of the Cotton Gin").
I don't recognize your concept of "superexploitation" in the first place.
Not saying things are ideal in the US by any stretch of the imagination, but the mere presence of people making threats online is not itself deeply indicative of a population ready to get into it.
It may be that no individual report is damaging enough to be censor-worthy, but the total effect is massively radicalizing, so that a huge group of people are primed to eventually interpret even true news stories in the maximally negative light and may even see their own eventual jump to violence as being justifiable self-defense given what they believe has preceded it.
We've collectively gotten pretty good at this in the last decade.
This seems like an unfair burden to place on Stanford or any other institution of higher learning. We can attribute as much blame to Stanford for Messrs Brin and Page as we can to Wharton for President Trump's actions.
And what about positive actions? Forward secrecy would not be possible without Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Both Diffie and Hellman hail from Stanford. Not to mention Ralph Merkle (of Merkle trees), Alan Kay, Paul Klipsch (of the speaker) and Barbara Liskov among others. Should the school get the credit for their achievements?
Iran (1953) - overthrow of the Shah by the CIA
Guatemala (1954) - overthrow of an elected government on behalf of US corporate interests
Cuba (1961) - invaded Cuba via proxy forces, attempted to assassinate Castro (Bay of Pigs)
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (1955–1975)
Chile (1973) – overthrow of Salvador Allende
Nicaragua (1980s) - overthrow the Sandinista government (Contra war) without international authorization
Panama (1989) - invaded and overthrew the government without international without international authorizationauthorization
Iraq (2003) - invaded and overthrew the government without international authorization
Serbia (1999) - airstrikes without international authorization
Libya (2011) - exceeded authorization by UN to effect regime change
Syria (2014–present) - US military occupation and oil seizure is ongoing
There are many more, these are the more notable ones
That was never controversial. What was controversial was the unstated implication after that statement: "and people don't think they do". When your slogan is a false accusation against people in general, they aren't going to take it well. Approximately zero people in the US think black lives don't matter, so they aren't going to appreciate you coming at them with that accusation even if it is left unstated.
Good faith question here, I’m not American… Why was “all lives matter” controversial?
No one things that all lives don't matter, but the statement "black lives matter" is used to highlight specific social problems in the US. It would be like if you cut your finger and asked for a bandaid for your finger, and someone kept saying, "But ALL your fingers are important."
Again, not an expert. But, are we talking per police interaction, or per capita, or of all police homicides?
Pretty sure when I saw, far more unarmed white people were killed than unarmed black people per year, which per capita makes sense, right? But, isn’t total police interactions more inportant?
I'm not really interested in defending some sort of per se percentage of unjust police killings, anyway. I think there is ample enough evidence that racism is still a pretty big issue in the US that the slogan "black lives matter" is at worst harmless and at best communicates something important.
He murdered her, said "fucking bitch" and walked away. His colleague then prevented a doctor from treating her.
Nowedays ICE men reference her murder to threaten protesters.
Regardless of all other facts of that incident, she chose to hit the gas, like her wife chose to yell DRIVE BABY, DRIVE DRIVE. That’s kind of rude to do an officer.
> BREAKING: The ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.
That’s just CBS reporting hearsay from non first party sources in an admin that’s been caught directly lying about the events cutting local authorities out of the investigation.
> I am not expert, but I can tell you with certainty I would have expected no different outcome in my country.
Don’t know which country it is, but it sounds like a shithole country if you’d expect government agents to execute people against their own training, and accept government lies about it.
I don’t know if you are ESL if you aren’t American but the capitalization I used matters and it’s difficult to explain the context of hearing a sentence vs a slogan. That’s also before you get into people specifically trying to conflate them so they can do a sort of motte and bailey type argument by claiming they weren’t saying “All Lives Matter” just that “All lives matter, so they can uno reverse you as the bigot
Which has prevented another world war, but not regional conflicts, a cold war, and whatever the history books decide to call the current social media driven conflict.
For just one example, see his response to the Massacre of Jallianwalla Bagh, which happened around the time of the end of WWI.
https://www.mkgandhi.org/storyofg/chap18.php
Non-violence formed a backbone of the Indian independence movement until independence was achieved at the close of WWII in 1947.