[Peace-discuss] "Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House: No Room for Violence in the Occupy Revolution"

[Stuart Levy]

[from the ufpj-activist mailing list]

> *Subject:* *Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House:*
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> *Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House:*
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> *No Room for Violence in the Occupy Revolution*/Rebecca Solnit/
>
> *Violence Is Conventional*
>
> Violence is what the police use. It's what the state uses. If we want 
> a revolution, it's because we want a better world, because we think we 
> have a bigger imagination, a more beautiful vision. So we're not 
> violent; we're not like them in crucial ways. When I see a New York 
> City policeman pepper-spray already captive young women in the face, I 
> am disgusted; I want things to be different. And that pepperspraying 
> incident, terrible though it was for the individuals, did not succeed 
> in any larger way.
>
> In fact, seen on Youtube (704,737 times for one posted version) and 
> widely spread, it helped make Occupy Wall Street visible and 
> sympathetic to mainstream viewers. The movement grew tremendously 
> after that. The incident demonstrated the moral failure of the police 
> and demonstrated that violence is also weak. It can injure, damage, 
> destroy, kill, but it can't coerce the will of the people, whether 
> it's a policeman assaulting unarmed young women or the US Army in 
> Vietnam or Iraq.
>
> Imagine that some Occupy activists had then beaten up the cop. That 
> would have seemed to justify him in the eyes of many; it would've 
> undermined the moral standing of our side. And then what? Moral 
> authority was also that young Marine veteran, Shamar Thomas, chewing 
> out thirty or so New York cops in what became a Youtube clip viewed 
> 2,652,037 times so far. He didn't fight them; he told them that what 
> they were doing is wrong and dishonorable. And brought the nation 
> along with him. Which violence wouldn't do.
>
> *Violence Is Weak*
>
> As Jonathan Schell points out in his magnificent book /The 
> Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the 
> People,/violence is what the state uses when its other powers have 
> failed, when it is already losing. In using violence the state often 
> loses its moral authority and its popular support. That's why 
> sometimes their visible violence feeds our victory, tragic though the 
> impact may be. It's also telling that when the FBI or other government 
> agencies infiltrate a movement or an activist group, they seek to 
> undermine it by egging it on to more violence.
>
> The state would like us to be violent. Violence as cooptation tries to 
> make us more like them, and if we're like them they win twice -- once 
> because being unlike them is our goal and again because then we're 
> then easier to imprison, brutalize, marginalize, etc. We have another 
> kind of power, though the term nonviolence only defines what it is 
> not; some call our power /people power/. It works. It's powerful. It's 
> changed and it's changing the world.
>
> The government and mainstream-to-right media often create fictions of 
> our violence, from the myth that protesters were violent (beyond 
> property damage) in Seattle in 1999 to the myth of spitting in 
> returning soldiers' faces in the Vietnam era to generally smearing us 
> as terrorists. If we were violent, we'd be conventionally dangerous 
> and the authorities could justify repressing us. In fact, we're 
> unconventionally dangerous, because we're not threatening physical 
> violence but the transformation of the system (and its violence). That 
> is so much more dangerous to them, which is why they have to lie about 
> (or just cannot comprehend) the nature of our danger.
>
> So when episodes of violence break out as part of our side in a 
> demonstration, an uprising, a movement, I think of it as a sabotage, a 
> corruption, a coercion, a misunderstanding, or a mistake, whether it's 
> a paid infiltrator or a clueless dude. Here I want to be clear that 
> property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks 
> the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks 
> the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break 
> her. It's violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the 
> animate.
>
> Quietly eradicating experimental GMO crops or pulling up mining claim 
> stakes is generally like the firefighter. Breaking windows during a 
> big demonstration is more like the husband. I saw the windows of a 
> Starbucksand a Niketown broken in downtown Seattle after nonviolent 
> direct action had shut the central city and the World Trade 
> Organization ministerial down. I saw scared-looking workers and knew 
> that the CEOs and shareholders were not going to face that turbulence 
> and they sure were not going to be the ones to clean it up. 
> Economically it meant nothing to them.
>
> *We Are Already Winning*
>
> The powers that be are already scared of the Occupy movement and not 
> because of tiny acts of violence. They are scared because right now we 
> speak pretty well for the 99%. And because we set out to change the 
> world and it's working. The president of Russia warmed at the G20 
> Summit a week or so ago, "The reward system of shareholders and 
> managers of financial institution should be changed step by step. 
> Otherwise the 'Occupy Wall street' slogan will become fashionable in 
> all developed countries." That's fear. And capitulation. And New York 
> Times columnist Paul Krugman opened a recent column thus: "Inequality 
> is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street".  We have 
> set the agenda and framed the terms, and that's already a huge victory.
>
> This movement is winning. It's winning by being broad and inclusive, 
> by emphasizing what we have in common and bridging differences between 
> the homeless, the poor, those in freefall, the fiscally thriving but 
> outraged, between generations, racesand nationalities and between 
> longtime activists and never-demonstrated-before newcomers. It's 
> winning by keeping its eyes on the prize, which is economic justice 
> and direct democracy, and by living out that direct democracy through 
> assemblies and other means right now.
>
> It's winning through people power direct-action tactics, from global 
> marches to blockades to many hundreds of Occupations.It's winning 
> through the creativity of the young, from the 22-year-old who launched 
> Move Your Money Day to the 26-year-old who started the We Are the 99% 
> website. And by tactics learned from Argentina's 2001 revolution of 
> general assemblies and /politica afectiva/, the politics of affection. 
> It's winning by becoming the space in which we are civil society: of 
> human beings in the aggegate, living in public and with trust and love 
> for one another. Violence is not going to be one of the tools that 
> works in this movement.
>
> *Violence Is Authoritarian*
>
> Bodily violence is a means of coercing others against their will by 
> causing pain, injury, or death. It steals another's bodily integrity 
> or very life as property to dispose of as the violator wishes. Since 
> the majority in our movement would never consent to violent actions, 
> such actions are also imposed on our body politic against our will. 
> This is the very antithesis of anarchy as an ideal in which no one is 
> coerced. If you wish to do something the great majority of us oppose, 
> do it on your own. But these small violent bands attach themselves to 
> large nonviolent movements, perhaps because there aren't any large 
> violent movements around.
>
> As Peter Marshall writes in his history of anarchism, /Demanding the 
> Impossible/, "Indeed the word violence comes from the Latin 
> /violare/and etymologically means violation. Strictly speaking, to act 
> violently means to treat others without respect".A violent revolution 
> is therefore unlikely to bring about any fundamental change in human 
> relations. Given the anarchists' respect for the sovereignty of the 
> individual, in the long run it is non-violence and not violence which 
> is implied by anarchist values. Many of us anarchists are not 
> ideological pacifists; I'm more than fine with the ways the Zapatistas 
> rebels in southern Mexico have defended themselves and notice how 
> sadly necessary it sometimes is, and I sure wouldn't dictate what 
> Syrians or Tibetans may or may not do. But petty violence in public in 
> this country doesn't achieve anything useful.
>
> *Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory*
>
> In downtown Oakland, late on the evening of November 2 after a 
> triumphant and mostly nonviolent day of mass actions, a building near 
> Occupy Oakland's encampment was seized, debris was piled up as if to 
> make barricades that were only show barricades to set afire, not 
> defend, trash cans were set on fire, windows broken, rocks thrown, and 
> then there were altercations with the police. If the goal was to seize 
> a building, one witness pointed out, then seize it secretly, not 
> flamboyantly. The activity around the seizure seemed intended to bait 
> the police into action. Which worked; police are not hard to bait. 
> Activists and police were injured. What was achieved?
>
> Many other activists yelled at the brawlers because they felt that the 
> violence-tinged actions did not represent them or the Occupy movement 
> and put them in danger. It was appalling that the city of Oakland 
> began, a week earlier, by sending in stormtrooper police before dawn 
> rather than negotiating about the fate of the Occupy Oakland 
> encampment. But it was ridiculous that some people tried to get the 
> police to be violent all over again. And it was tragic that others 
> bore the brunt of that foray, including the grievously injured veteran 
> Kayvan Sabeghi -- another veteran, a week after Scott Olson.
>
> Earlier this fall, the publishing group Crimethinc issued a screed in 
> justification of violence that's circulated widely in the Occupy 
> movement. It's titled "Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists," 
> though most anarchists I know would disagree with almost everything 
> that follows. Midway through it declares, "Not everyone is resigned to 
> legalistic pacifism; some people still remember how to stand up for 
> themselves. Assuming that those at the front of clashes with the 
> authorities are somehow in league with the authorities is not only 
> illogical". It is typical of privileged people who have been taught to 
> trust the authorities and fear everyone who disobeys them."
>
> If nonviolence/people power is privilege, explain this eyewitness 
> account from Oakland last Wednesday, posted on the Occupy Oakland site 
> by Kallista Patridge: "By the time we got to the University building, 
> a brave man was blocking the door screaming "Peaceful Protest! This is 
> my city, and I don't want to destroy it!" He cracked his knuckles, 
> ready to take on an attack, his face splattered in paint from the 
> Whole Foods fiasco [in which downtown Oakland's branch of the chain 
> store was spraypainted and smashed up based on a rumor that workers 
> were told they'd be fired if they took the day off for the General 
> Strike]. Behind the doors were men in badges. I was now watching a 
> black man shield cops from a protest. The black flag group began 
> pointing out those attempting to stop them, chanting 'The peace police 
> must be stopped,'and I was, personally, rather disgusted by the 
> strategy of comparing peacefully pissed people to police"."
>
> This account is by a protestor who also noted in downtown Oakland that 
> day a couple of men with military-style haircuts and brand new clothes 
> put bandannas over their faces and began to smash stuff. She thinks 
> that infiltrators were part of the property destruction and maybe 
> instigated it, and Copwatch's posted video seems to document police 
> infiltrators at Occupy Oakland. One way to be impossible to sabotage 
> is to be clearly committed to tactics that the state can't coopt. If 
> an infiltrator wants to nonviolently blockade or march or take out the 
> garbage, well, that's one more of us. If an infiltrator sabotages us 
> by recruiting for mayhem, that's a comment on what those tactics are 
> good for.
>
> *What Actually Works*
>
> The language of Crimethinc is empty machismo peppered with insults. 
> And just in this tiny snippet, incoherent. People who don't like 
> violence are not necessarily fearful or obedient; people power and 
> nonviolence are strategies that are not the same as the ideology 
> pacifism. To shut down the whole central city of Seattle and the World 
> Trade Organization ministerial meeting on November 30, 1999,or the 
> business district of San Francisco for three days in March of 2003, or 
> the Port of Oakland on November 2, 2011 -- through people power -- is 
> one hell of a great way to stand up. It works. And it brings great joy 
> and sense of power to those who do it. It's how the world gets changed 
> these days.
>
> Crimethinc, whose logo is its name inside a bullet, doesn't actually 
> cite examples of violence achieving anything in our recent history. 
> Can you name any? The anonymous writers don't seem prepared to act, 
> just tell others to (as do the two most high-profile advocates of 
> violence on the left). And despite the smear quoted above that 
> privileged people oppose them, theirs is the language of privilege. 
> White kids can do crazy shit and get slapped on the wrist or maybe 
> slapped around for it; I have for a quarter century walked through 
> police lines like they were tall grass; people of color face far more 
> dire consequences. When white youth try to bring the police down on a 
> racially diverse movement -- well, it's not exactly what the word 
> solidarity means to most of us.
>
> Another Occupy Oakland witness, a female street medic, wrote of the 
> ill-conceived November 2 late-night antics, "watching black bloc-ers 
> run from the cops and not protect the camp their actions had 
> endangered, an action which ultimately left behind many mentally ill 
> people, sick people, street kids, and homeless folks to defend 
> themselves against the police onslaught was disturbing and disgusting 
> in ways I can't even articulate because I am still so angry at the 
> empty bravado and cowardice that I saw." She adds, "I want those kids 
> to be held accountable to the damage that they did, damage made 
> possible by their class and race privilege." And physical fitness; 
> Occupy Oakland's camp includes children, older people, wheelchair 
> users and a lot of other people less ready to run.
>
> As Oakland Occupier Sunaura Taylor put it, "A few people making 
> decisions that affect everyone else is not what revolution looks like; 
> it's what capitalism looks like."
>
> *How We Defeated the Police*
>
> The euphemism for violence is "diversity of tactics," perhaps because 
> diversity has been a liberal-progressive buzzword these past decades. 
> But diversity does not mean that anything goes and that democratic 
> decisionmaking doesn't apply. If you want to be part of a movement, 
> treat the others with respect; don't spring unwanted surprises on 
> them, particularly surprises that sabotage their own tactics -- and 
> chase away the real diversity of the movement. Most of us don't want 
> to be part of an action that includes those tactics. If you want to 
> fight the police, look at who's succeeded in changing their behavior: 
> lawyers, lawmakers, police watchdog groups like Copwatch, 
> investigative journalists (including a friend of mine whose work just 
> put several New Orleans policemen in prison for decades), neighborhood 
> patrols, community organizers, grassroots movements, often two or more 
> players working together. You have to build.
>
> The night after the raid on Oakland, the police were massed to raid 
> Occupy San Francisco. About two thousand of us stood in and around the 
> Occupy encampment as helicoptors hovered. Nonviolence trainers helped 
> people prepare to blockade. Because we had a little political revolt 
> against the Democratic money machine ten years ago and began to elect 
> progressives who actually represent us pretty well, five of our city 
> supervisors, the public defender, and a state senator -- all people of 
> color, incidentally-- stood with us all night, vowing they would not 
> let this happen.
>
> We stood up. We fought a nonviolent battle against four hundred riot 
> police that was so effective the police didn't even dare show up. 
> That's people power. The same day Occupy Oakland took its campsite 
> back, with people power, and the black bloc kids were reportedly part 
> of the whole: they dismantled the cyclone fencing panels and stacked 
> them up neatly. That's how Occupy San Francisco won. And that's how 
> Occupy Oakland won.
>
> State troopers and city police police refused to break up the Occupy 
> Albany (New York) encampment, despite the governor's and mayor's 
> orders. Sometimes the police can be swayed. Not by violence, though. 
> The master's tools won't dismantle the master's house. And they sure 
> won't build a better house.
>
> *People Power Shapes the World*
>
> Left violence failed miserably in the 1970s: the squalid and futile 
> violence in Germany and Italy,the delusional Symbionese Liberation 
> Army murdering Marcus Foster, Oakland's first black school 
> superintendent, and later gunning down a bystander mother of four in a 
> bank, the bumbling Weather Underground accidentally blowing three of 
> its members up and turning the rest into fugitives for a decade; all 
> of them giving us a bad name we've worked hard to escape.
>
> Think of that excruciating footage in Sam Green's /Weather Underground 
> /documentary of the "days of rage," when a handful of 
> delusions-of-grandeur young white radicals thought they'd do literal 
> battle with the Chicago police and thus inspire the working class to 
> rise up. The police clobbered them; the working class was so not 
> impressed. If you want to address a larger issue, getting overly 
> entangled with local police is a great way to lose focus and support.
>
> In fact, the powerful and effective movements of the past sixty years 
> have been almost entirely nonviolent. The Civil Rights Movement 
> included the Deacons for Defense, but the focus of that smaller group 
> was actually defense -- the prevention of violence against nonviolent 
> activists and the movement, not offensive forays. Schell points out 
> that even the French and Russian Revolutions were largely nonviolent 
> when it came to overthrowing the old regime; seizing a monopoly of 
> power to form a new regime is when the blood really began to flow.
>
> I think of the Sandinista Revolution of 1979 as the last great armed 
> revolution, and it succeeded because the guerrillas with guns who came 
> down from the mountains had wide popular support. People power. People 
> power overthrew the Shah of Iran that year, in a revolution that was 
> hijacked by authoritarians fond of violence. In 1986 the Marcos regime 
> of the Philippines was overthrown by nonviolent means, means so 
> compelling the army switched sides and refused to support the Marcos 
> regime.
>
> Armies don't do that if you shoot at them, generally (and if you 
> really defeated the police in battle -- all the police, 
> nationwide?--you'd face the army). Since then dozens of regimes, from 
> South Africa to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland to Nepal to 
> Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Tunisia have been profoundly 
> changed through largely nonviolent means. There was self-defense in 
> the Deacons for Defense mode in the Egyptian uprising this year, but 
> people power was the grand strategy that brought out the millions and 
> changed the country. Armed struggle waspart of the ongoing resistance 
> in South Africa, but in the end people power and international 
> solidarity were the fulcrom of change. The Zapatistas used violence 
> sparingly as a last resort, but "our word is our weapon," they say, 
> and they used other tools in preference, often and exquisitely.
>
> The powerful and effective movements of the past sixty years have used 
> the strategy of people power. It works. It changes the world. It's 
> changing the world now. Join us. Or don't join us. But please don't 
> try to have it both ways.
>
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