Watching the movie  Selma raised the question for me of why non-violence works – or worked – as a political strategy. The obvious answer is that it reveals the violence embedded in the political system without legitimating it. Some of our most famous images of protest have this at their heart: the famous Chinese protestor sitting in front of the line of tanks in Tianamen Square, or the American anti-Vietnam War protestor presenting flowers to the unsmiling ranks of the National Guard. And the “obvious” answer begs more questions. if this is true, why should it be true? And if it was true in the past, is it still true? It may be that the moment when it worked has passed. No obvious spoilers, by the way.

The monopoly on violence

So let’s start with Selma, and for the purposes of this post I’m going to largely put to one side the arguments about whether Lyndon Johnson was misrepresented in the movie (though he clearly was) and the copyright curiosity that speeches given by Martin Luther King in public places are apparently owned by Steven Spielberg.

Part of the story lies in the fact that in the modern state, the state has a monopoly on violence, as Weber observed. And clearly, one of the things that non-violent protest does, at least when met with violence by state representatives, is to call into question the legitimacy of the purposes to which that state violence is being put.

The alternative is a world in which protestors challenge the state with violence. Immediately official violence becomes justified – precisely because the state has a monopoly on violence. And so when one looks back over the arguments about the Bloody Sunday demonstration in Derry, when 14 demonstrators were killed by British Army soldiers, part of the Army’s defence (though given short shrift in the Savile Inquiry) was that it had been fired on by IRA gunmen.

Constructing an audience

On its own, though, non-violence isn’t quite enough. It needs some more elements.

• The first is that it needs to construct an audience.
• Second, it needs to be able to convey to that audience the reasonableness of the claims that are being made.
• Third, it needs to be able to channel this into a political process in which political actors respond to pressure.
• And fourth, it needs to be able to call on people who are willing to be hurt, or to die, in the line of protest.

So let’s go back to Selma. As is well known, and as the film was made clear, Selma was chosen for the voting rights campaign precisely because it had a sherriff who who could be counted on to over-react in the face of black protestors demanding that they be allowed to register to vote. (The previous campaign, in Albany, Georgia, had failed because the Sherriff was subtle in his response to the protests.)

By 1964, Martin Luther King was famous enough to be able to command media attention, already a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and this is represented in the film by the presence of the New York Times correspondent and later the live CBS coverage of the protest on the bridge.

The demand was simple: the the right to vote, part of the US Constitution, should not be blocked by the devices and stratagems of county-level officials. And there’s an echo here of the earlier Freedom Rider protests, where the protestors were clear that all they were asking for was that the Attorney General of the United States enforced Federal law.

Getting hurt

The political process was open to persuasion. The actual story of the exchanges between LBJ and Martin Luther King is that Johnson wanted to bring a voting bill to Congress, but he needed non-violent protests to be staged, and seen in American media, because the clamour would give him the leeway to push through the legislation.

And King had people who willing to be hurt in the pursuit of the vote, although one of the memorable elements of the film is the way it portrays his discomfort with putting protesters in the firing line, sometimes literally.

To some extent, then, non-violence is a product of the media age, although it doesn’t necessarily require television. Gandhi’s salt march succeeded on the strength of newspaper coverage, as they exposed the particular economic interest of the British Raj in India and the costs it imposed on Indians.

‘An entire army down there’

The reason that violence works less well are portrayed well in Selma, in a couple of different places. The first is after the attack by State troopers on the bridge, when one of the protestors says he’s going to go home and get his gun. One of the organisers counsels against:

How many guns you think they got down there? That’s an entire army down there. What you got? A couple of .32s? A .38? … And how many of us you think they gonna kill in retaliation? With their 12-gauge pump-actions, their Colt automatics, their Remingtons, their helicopters, their tanks! We won’t win that way, and I ain’t talking about the Bible. … I am talking facts. Cold, hard facts!

The later march to Montgomery, protected by National Guard troops, evokes this when you see a helicopter overhead, protecting the marchers.

The second moment is when King sits down with members of SNCC, the younger black movement that is getting impatient with non-violence. SNCC eventually splintered, and one of the parts became the Black Panthers, whose leaders were systematically hunted down and killed by the FBI. In the process, of course, a generation of talented political thinkers and organisers were wiped out, which must have had long-term costs for Black politics in America. As Mark Kurlansky writes of the Weatherman, a (largely white) group that started non-violently but became violent,

Both the movements and their enemies underst00d that if violence could be planted in a group, it would spread and eventually destroy thr movement.

Unreponsive politics

In his book The Unconquerable World, Jonathan Schell is optimistic about the growth of non-violence. I’m not so sure: not because violence would be better (it wouldn’t be), but because the third condition – a functioning and responsive political system – doesn’t seem to hold any longer. In the wake of the financial crisis, political elites have become more concerned about their own survival than about the purpose of politics, and the gap between what they say and what they do, between speech and meaning, becomes wider all the time.

So, for example, the Oakland cop who pepper sprayed a student protestor at close quarters has not been disciplined, although the footage circulated widely and he acted outside of the regulations. During Occupy Wall Street, much of the violence was done off camera. As David Graeber remarks, police routinely broke the fingers or even wrists of protestors.

‘Laws for the 21st century’

In Britain, the Metropolitan Police is trying to prevent peaceful protest by declining to police demonstrations, trying to throw security costs onto the organisers, although London’s politicians have so far told them to do it. (This may actually be a dispute about budget cuts rather than a political response.)

In Spain, where activists have been successful in delaying and preventing foreclosures through non-violent protests and monitoring, the right of centre PP government is pushing through a law that makes such actions illegal, along with many peaceful demonstrations.

“It’s a law for the 21st century,” Spain’s interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, said recently. “It provides better guarantees for people’s security and more judicial security for people’s rights.”

Favouring the regime

Security is justice, and justice is security, as George Orwell might have said. The theologian Helder Camara, in his short book Spiral of Violence, foresaw this situation in 1971: “

[A]uthoritarian regimes easily take control under the pretext of safeguarding the social order’ from attack by subversive elements or communists. Moreover, the press, radio and television only transmits what favours the regime and it is obvious that it will not venture to reflect liberating moral pressure.

That all sounds kind of familiar. Camara, perhaps optimistically, thought that this would be a problem only in what he called “underdeveloped” countries.

So what’s the underlying story here? There is quite a long discussion of some of this in David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules, in which he focuses on the nature of “structural violence” implicit in capitalist societies (p69). I’ve written before similarly that capitalism is “frozen violence.”

Bureaucracy and violence

His book is about the role of bureaucracy in maintaining and managing the modern state, and suggests that the purpose of bureaucratic rules is to push this implicit or underlying violence into the bsckground.

And on this reading, the function of non-violence is to make visible the gap between what is said and what is done, by cutting through the public and procedural superstructure to show the explicit power relationships sitting below.

One of the big increases in employment in the last decade has been the increase in private security personnel, and this have gone hand in hand with the increasing privatisation of public space and increasing authoritarianism about access. As Graeber suggests in a flourish early on, a grad student sitting in a university library reading Foucault and thinking about the symbolic nature of violence should consider that if he’d attempted to enter the library without a student ID, he’d have been swarmed by cops.

Rice pudding and cottage cheese

In other words, as inequality becomes more extreme, and the underlying violence keeps breaking through, the stakes become higher and the authorities become more adept at changing the law and the rules to limit protest.

But just as I was depressing myself, I picked up the recent book Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic of the Serbian group Otpor! He suggests that non-violent protest has to respond to this tightening of the political landscape with imagination and with fun: “laughter was our greatest weapon against the regime.” In the book he writes about rice pudding parties, cottage cheese boycotts, street theatre, and using ringtones to bypass rules against protests imposed by repressive authorities. As with the US Yippies in the 1960s, this new generation of non-violence becomes a form of performance – a subversion of spectacle – that cuts through the official discourse, rendering absurd the use of power.

Related post: In harm’s way

Breathless about change

I have a theory as to why this view has so much traction at the moment, based on the work of Carlota Perez. (Yes, I’ve written about her before). Her model of technological change sees a series of 50-60 year surges, in which new infrastructure platforms are first installed (e.g. rail, electricity, roads, internet) and are then normalised in a “deployment” phase. In terms of the rate of change, infrastructure change is fastest and most fundamental during the investment/infrastructure phase, but it is less visible, and social, cultural and regulatory change doesn’t accelerate until the platform hits the mass market, towards the middle of the deployment period and after. (In terms of ICT: about now).

Breathlessness of tone about the speed of change is actually a sign that the platform is approaching social and financial saturation. The second idea that’s embedded in this trope is a version of “this time is different”. Obviously I could riff on this at some length, although it doesn’t seem necessary to make the point. Enough here to observe that commentators as different and the American economic historian Robert Gordon and the Swedish geographer Hans Rosling both observe that in terms of everyday life, and everyday living conditions, the period from the 1870s to the 1930s was transformational in a way that the last 50 years have not been.

The slow cancellation

Reading Mark Fisher’s new essay collection Ghosts of My Life, though, I got a sense of something deeper: that the combination of the neoliberal ethos that has dominated since the 1980s and the emergence of ubiquitous ICT had closed down our ideas of the future. Fisher is a leftist cultural critic and academic based in London, and one of the better writers about the pieces left in the street in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The first essay in the book, “The Slow Cancellation of the Future”, named after a phrase of Franco Berardi’s, sets the tone.

Berardi suggests that this cancellation dates back to the ’70s and the ’80s, when the brakes were applied to the idea of “progressive modernity” that had shaped Western worldviews for at least a century, or possibly two. Fisher, from his cultural perspective, contrasts the cultural energy of the 20th century with the languors of the 21st:

While 20th Century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st Century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st Century has started yet. [p8]

Retrospection and pastiche

Of course, it’s not as if nothing has happened in those years of the cancelled future. There has been sweeping economic, technological, and political change. One result, as Fisher suggests, is that “there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.” [p9]

And from this, Fisher makes an argument about why. The first element is consumption:

Why did the arrival of neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism lead to a culture of retrospection and pastiche? … Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-established and the familiar? [p14]

And the second, of course, is production, and in particular the production of culture:

It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished. [p15]

Technological promise

Readers might recognise in all of this some connection to the argument made by David Graeber in The Baffler, and now published in a recent Baffler collection. There’s not space to do his argument justice here, but in summary he argues that the 50s and 60s promised us all sort of exciting technological futures, from space exploration to flying cars, and we we ended up with … computers. “Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment.”

But wondering about the 1970s, and the long squeeze on social democracy, is not an exercise in nostalgia. Fisher again:

What should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised. (p27, emphasis in original)

One of the themes that sits inside Fisher’s argument is is the way that, just as neoliberalism declared economic war on working class institutions such as trades unions, so at the same time identity politics (race, gender, sexuality) has made huge gains. If the ’70s was the most equal decade in terms of income (certainly in the UK), the level of prejudice it was willing to tolerate was astonishing. It’s as if power structures can only manage one variable of political desire at a time. As you repress one, the others balloon out between your fingers. Indeed, there is some prescient writing on this from the ’70s, notably Beyond The Fragments.

No future

It’s worth also positioning this in the context of the idea of futures work. The long emergent history of futures, in the days before it became a body of practice in the 1950s and 1960s, going back to – say – Comte, H.G. Wells, and William Ogburn, is essentially an Enlightenment project, a progressive idea about human development, an idea that came juddering to a halt in the 1970s. This moment is perhaps exemplified by the publication of the widely misunderstood Club of Rome report in 1971, but other marginal voices maybe got the idea faster than political and business leaders.

To expand on this idea: when Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history he was also declaiming the end of the future, in the sense of multiple possible futures. For, in the neoliberal world, there is only one future. Actually existing capitalism, to borrow the notion of my sometime colleague Ian Christie, turns out to be every bit as totalitarian as actually existing socialism was.

Re-opening

Of course, people have been queuing up, pretty much since around the millennium, to declare that the future is still open, in Seattle, in Genoa, in Zucotti Park. So far, it has had an effect only at the edges. But perhaps, slowly, the future is re-opening. The cracks are appearing. In the UK, the only parties that are putting on members are those that aren’t neoliberal (Greens, UKIP, SNP), while much of the Labour Party’s problem is the New Labour neoliberals still holding it tighly around the ankles. As David Runciman has observed, British political crises come around every 40 years. The ’70s crisis closed down the future. The next one, which we’re seeing the early signs of now, should open it up again.

There’s an engaging review of Ghosts In My Life at the Year In The Country. I’ve also borrowed the image of the cover of the book from there, with thanks, because it was more interesting visually than the usual publisher’s cover shot.