Image by Lynn Friedman via Flickr
The Essays of The Man From the North by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
January 6, 2019
The tools of nonviolent action and the skills of struggle are as vital to these times as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Training to use them is as essential as learning how to use a computer. The ability to boycott and strike is as important as the ability to drive a car. Every citizen who knows how to use email should also know how to protest, walk-out, shut-down, occupy, blockade, and more. This is the only way the power of the people can hold the power of oligarchs in check.
Before the oligarchs concluded that the study of civics was detrimental to the longevity of their rule, every elementary student learned about checks-and-balances. Theoretically, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government were supposed to hold each other in balance. It was a reassuring fairy tale for the average citizen, but it never served the average citizen. This system of checks-and-balances merely held one oligarchic faction in check with the other. Nothing in the arrangement guaranteed that the government would be responsive to the ordinary peoples’ needs.
When oligarchs are the only ones who sit in Congress, occupy the Oval Office, and wield the judge’s gavel, then it is a government of, by, and for the oligarchs, responsive only to their elite interests … not to ours. This has been the case since the earliest days of the formation of the United States. The Founding Fathers must have suspected that the slogan, “a government of, by, and for rich, white men” wouldn’t produce the revolutionary fervor they needed to overthrow King George’s colonial rule. The phrase “of, by, and for the people” sounded far more inspiring to the thousands who waged struggle with mass acts of noncooperation, importation boycotts, civil disobedience of unjust British laws, and collective refusal to pay the Stamp Tax. Many more fought and died for an illusion of inclusion in the definition of “We, the People”. The history of the United States has been one long struggle for inclusion that continues to this very day.
If we learn nothing else from our history, we should know this: the tools of nonviolent struggle should never lose their edge, gather dust, or fall from active use among the people. To gain — and maintain — a true government of, by, and for the people, all 100% of us must grasp the considerable power of collective non-cooperation, disruption, and intervention. We must do so with regularity and with ferocity. Our own history of social justice illuminates this truth: women’s suffrage was only gained through the direct action of women, African-Americans gained functional rights and equality only when they organized; workers achieved wage increases only when unions and movements went on strike.
Maintaining the common use of the tools of nonviolent struggle can be aided by adding the legal right to use them to our laws. We need a second Bill of Rights that preserves not just the right to Speech, Assembly, and Petition, but also the right to organize, to strike, to form unions, to boycott unjust businesses, to engage in collective disobedience of unjust laws, and more. Such a Bill of Rights would make evident that the demonstrated “will of the People” is respected and viewed as a legitimate political force.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen. Oligarchs are unlikely to enshrine anything that limits their power. However, the lack of such laws should not stop the populace from using nonviolent struggle. Indeed, in the history of global movements for change, the banning or prohibition of movement activity and dissident organizing has not stopped people from rising up for justice. Many movements have circumvented the laws in order to mobilize for change. Even in places where the knowledge of nonviolent struggle is banned, people have circulated important literature and workshops on how to wage struggle. In Chile, citizens met in small groups to train to overthrow the Pinochet regime. In the Philippines, the Catholic Church hosted the trainings. In other places, banned pamphlets were shared at great personal risk. In Soviet Bloc nations, hidden presses printed literature about nonviolent struggle clandestinely. As long as knowledge of nonviolent struggle is essential to social, political, and human rights, people will find ways to access it.
In the end, it is the people’s willingness to learn and use nonviolent struggle that ultimately liberates them. The absence of our willingness to use nonviolent struggle is what keeps us disenfranchised, disempowered, chained to the corrupt system, floundering for savior figures, and failing to achieve most of our social justice goals.
Currently, the US populace views nonviolent action as something unusual and out-of-the-ordinary. “Activists” are distinct from citizens. But if boycotts, strikes, walk-outs, and shut-downs became as common as calling your senator or signing a petition, we would rapidly and effectively win major social justice advances. Nonviolent struggle is not about pleading with politicians to do “the right thing”. It is not about voting the “right” people into power to do the right thing. It is about grasping the ability to non-cooperate, disrupt, and intervene in the activity of a society in pursuit of tangible changes for social justice.
Nonviolent struggle empowers the people to hold all aspects of their society accountable. Nonviolent action’s capacity to withdraw support, or disrupt systems of oppression, and intervene in injustice can target any institution, business, social practice or group, political party or policy, and cultural behaviors and beliefs.
Every meaningful advance for equality and justice in our nation’s history, beginning with our struggle for independence, has won because it mobilized mass numbers of people to cease their participation in life-as-usual. If we wish to see meaningful changes in our lifetime, we, too, must find the willingness to pick up the tools of nonviolent struggle and construct the world of our dreams.
Author/Actress Rivera Sun syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and the sequel, The Roots of Resistance. Website: http://www.riverasun.com
The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection and the sequel, The Roots of Resistance. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here.
From the archives:
Chris Hedges: The Issue Before Us is Death
To Love This Broken-Hearted Country
The Time Is Up–The Time Is Now
The Openly Plutocratic Domination of U.S. Politics by Paul Street
Shifting Systems With Nonviolent Strategy + Think Outside the Protest Box by Rivera Sun
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I think that The Man From the North (or Rivera Sun, or whoever these ideas should be attributed to) is getting closer, but still doesn’t have it quite right.
Take for instance that “Second Bill of Rights.” What is being proposed here, apparently, is that in the never-ending struggle against the oligarchs, the people should have some right to fight fairly. But the idea that the oligarchs will ever permit us to have such a right is absurd. As long as there are oligarchs, they will not fight fairly. They will never willingly relinquish their unfair advantage over us. And any “rights” they have granted us will only be temporary. If we only seek to make armistice with the oligarchs, then they will never end their war upon us. We will never be safe in our own homes.
The alternative that I prefer is to end the oligarchic class altogether. Yes, that is possible. The existence of oligarchs is not an inevitable fact of nature, nor do oligarchs arise by random accident. But we have to ask ourselves, how do oligarchs arise? How must we change our culture so that it no longer generates oligarchs?
Though I cannot “prove” it, I am convinced that oligarchs stem from any concentration of power. I can describe two such concentrations:
(a) Power stems from hierarchy and “representative” government. Thus we must end all hierarchical organizing of our activities. We should be governed by mutual friendship and horizontal networking, not by hierarchy.
(b) The market concentrates wealth, because trade favors the trader who is already in the stronger bargaining position. Thus we must end all markets, replacing them with sharing.
Both of these changes may seem utterly alien, because our culture has been immersed in hierarchy and property for 10,000 years. But for 200,000 years before that we shared as equals, and a few tribes of indigenous people still follow that practice.
To share everything, to never personally own anything, may seem a tremendous loss of freedom to most people in our present culture. But it really just means acknowledging the fact that we are interdependent. If you want to stop having the oligarchs rule over us, then you must also end our ruling over each other and feeling separate from each other. Every homeless beggar on every street corner is a visible reminder that we have not cared about each other enough.
What is freedom, anyway? If you carry it to absolutes, it becomes self-contradictory, like the theoretical omnipotence of the deity. (Can God create a rock so big that even God can’t move it?) We are social animals, and we will not be happy without the friendship of our fellow human beings. Thus what we really want is not freedom from others, but a harmonious relationship with them.
Hi Lefty Math Prof,
Thanks for your usual thoughtful response. Again, I agree with your points. Though alternatives to oligarchic rule are not the main thrust of this particular essay, they are themes I explore in other places and often return to.
In regards to your comment about the oligarchic class not relinquishing power, I completely agree. That is why this essay makes this comment: “Don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen. Oligarchs are unlikely to enshrine anything that limits their power. However, the lack of such laws should not stop the populace from using nonviolent struggle.”
I do feel that asserting, discussing, and advocating for a broader legal framework for the right of the people to organize and use the tools of nonviolent struggle is not a utopian, futuristic notion. It is a current discussion, as the recent attempts to outlaw BDS (Boycott, Divest Sanction) indicate. It is also a historic issue – from which we gained our First Amendment to the Constitution as well as an entire framework of legal and philosophic thinking about the right to revolution, the right to protest, the right to organize, the right to self-govern, etc. These ideas have traveled from revolutionary statements into legal frameworks, been removed or restricted, seen court arguments reinstate their power or strip the teeth from them, been expanded by further waves of revolutionary or resistance struggles, back and forth like waves and tides.
All of this has happened under the context of oligarchic rule. None of it has occurred with the naive thinking that the oligarchs will simply step aside. However, we cannot simply wait for a moment of utopia to voice the concept that we have a right to struggle. We must articulate this right even when their adoption seems impossible, when their validity is questioned, when their legality is challenged. Then we must use the power of struggle outside of the established system to weaken oligarchic rule and assert the power of the people to create a world that serves us all (and the Earth).
Armistice with oligarchs is never my objective. This essay discusses the means toward the goals (some of which you articulated), not the goals themselves. Each discussion has its place.