https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/why-nonviolen...
Get the violent ones on your side to ultinately win. Got it.
I don't think she's making the point she thinks she's making. And yes, I read the rest of the article. It focused primarily on events taking place in places where, lets face it, there's not quite the ah... oomph in gen pop that exists in the U.S. It's ulitimately a nice thought. It's absolutely accurate in that things like generalized striking and boycotts are great preambles as well. They're also considered illegal in the U.S. to coordinate btw, because of previous run ins with said efficacy during wartime in WWII. Secondary striking was outlawed. So formal unions can't use that as a tactic. You can thank the Taft-Hartley act for that.
So... Yeah. Might want to meditate on that one a bit harder.
2) Therefore, one could say that nonviolent action is most effective and bringing about the current corporate-controlled system.
Of course, that makes sense. But let's say you want to take down a corporate-controlled system. Then violence is likely to be much more effective.
If you want to make a change where the majority (or at list the rich majority) don't want, then violence will be much more effective. For example, I think it's likely that this one killing will do more to cause a renewed vigor in revamping America's health care than any nonviolent protest, because the richest capitalists and shareowners are against it.
So you're saying violence is a morally acceptable way for a minority to force its will on a majority? This just sounds like an argument for dictatorship.
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I think whatever argument you make in favor of violence, you should anticipate that your political opponents will make the exact same argument to excuse their violence. So whatever argument you make -- be sure it's an argument you are OK with your political opponents using.
A social contract regarding the times and places where it's acceptable to use violence is actually a really valuable thing. Confucius was actually on to something.
Heck, even the mere fact that the suspect was arrested was based on state-sanctioned "violence". If the police didn't have guns and weren't allowed to use force to arrest people, no amount of non-violent actions would convince a murder suspect to voluntarily present themselves and subject themselves to trial in court.
Violence is probably generally bad overall, but the original statement that "Violence never solved anything" is just plainly false and a lie. It's not a defensible position.
> A social contract regarding the times and places where it's acceptable to use violence is actually a really valuable thing.
Right, this statement itself shows violence does work in a particular context and situation. Far from "violence never solved anything".
Degradation of the social contract and the response of those who disagree are potential problems with violence. That makes them on-topic.
>Heck, even the mere fact that the suspect was arrested was based on state-sanctioned "violence". If the police didn't have guns and weren't allowed to use force to arrest people, no amount of non-violent actions would convince a murder suspect to voluntarily present themselves and subject themselves to trial in court.
Indeed. I'm arguing that lawful violence should not, in general, be considered morally equivalent to unlawful violence.
When the state punishes a violent robber, that's not morally equivalent to me randomly punishing someone because I don't like their face. If people are able to successfully argue that these two situations are morally equivalent, expect your society to become a miserable place rather quickly.
I'm not sure why you're hung up on the specific phrase "violence never solved anything", given that it doesn't seem to appear in this comment's grandparent chain.
No, I think it's a much more subtle concept than just giving a binary yes or no. Definitely willing to discuss away from this forum though.
> I think whatever argument you make in favor of violence, you should anticipate that your political opponents will make the exact same argument to excuse their violence.
They (capitalists) already use violence to enforce their society.
https://roarmag.org/essays/chenoweth-stephan-nonviolence-myt...
Chenoweth's own subsequent research indicates the issue is far more nuanced, and that states have to some extended adapted to/exploited the strategic challenges posed by nonviolent resistance.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002234332210929... (paywalled, sorry)
I'm no health plutocrat. In fact, I've been unemployed for the past several years due to a chronic health condition. I'm currently getting private health coverage through Medicaid.
Recall that Chenoweth started out believing that violence was more effective, then changed her mind after looking at the data.
The internet's response to the CEO shooting has revealed that there is a huge appetite for violence. People with an appetite for violence appear to vastly outnumber those without on sites such as reddit. I'm seeing a lot of arguments in favor of violence, and nearly all of them strike me as quite shoddy. I wish I had the time and energy to respond to all of the bad arguments, but I don't have it.
I started reading your roarmag article (found through the internet archive), and it doesn't seem very compelling.
* The author starts from the premise that BLM succeeded through violence, which seems dubious.
* He seems to assume that "a counterhegemonic and politically radical viewpoint became perplexingly commonsensical overnight" due to violence, and doesn't seem to understand that correlation isn't the same as causation.
* He points out various issues with the study, which weaken the strength of its conclusion, but also seem sort of inescapable when doing this kind of research.
I stopped reading when it became clear to me the author was "telling the audience what they wanted to hear", to use your phrasing. ("ROAR was an online journal of the radical imagination...")
As long as we're going to assume that correlation is causation, I notice that your second link states that
"the success rate of nonviolent resistance campaigns has declined since 2001"
and also
"incidental violence by dissidents has become a more common feature of contemporary nonviolent campaigns compared with earlier cases"
Wonder if those facts are related? Nonviolence isn't what it used to be, and also it's now become less effective?
>states have to some extended adapted to/exploited the strategic challenges posed by nonviolent resistance.
Sure -- and they've adapted to the strategic challenges posed by violent resistance as well, I'd argue.
Those who've lived total commitment to violence are it's loudest opponents. I hope we can continue to listen to their stories.
Somehow people miss the fact that the difference and power to effect change resides in the context, not with violence itself.
The list of failed revolutions that left everyone worse off is far longer the the list of revolutions that resulted in the betterment of society.
Some believe King was successful in part because of the threat of violence from alternative groups like the Black Panthers.
Nonviolent protest and organizing is more dangerous because it could quickly become a populist movement. A small group of people incited into violence, is already fringe and can be quickly suppressed.
Events can have an unlimited number of necessary causes or preconditions.
Great men of History can have huge impacts, but usually ride massive tides of population level phenomenon, like economics, culture, and public sentiment.
The Zionist movement had a certain role to play in the Holocaust, didn't it? But most people would consider it a grave error in judgment to attribute blame to this movement for a certain part of Holocaust victims.
One of the big problems with the King was that he was trying to implement tax reform to pay down France's foreign debt. The revolution simultaneously aborted this effort and worsened the situation.
I think an analogous situation that is often taught in textbooks is the impact of the treaty of Versailles on Germany. One could compare the relative impact of the treaty and Hitler on the course of history. I think most historians would argue that the rise of fascism and some war would have happened with or without Hitler as a result of the treaty terms. I think Hitler's personality shaped the scope and detail of that war, and the specific intensity of internal policy. However, without him awar would still have broken out, just with a different individual at the helm.
Moving even further afield you can look at characters like Cortez or Christopher Columbus. I think it's safe to say that Discovery and colonization of the Americas by Europe would have happened 99.9% of the time without them, and in a pretty similar manner. They're essentially replaceable and colonial events were determined almost entirely by the technological differences between continents, and the prevailing social doctrine in Europe. Europeans were bound to discover the Americas, and had spent the prior several hundred years in a cage match practicing the technologies and social structures for warfare and conquest against each other.
> Moving even further afield you can look at characters like Cortez or Christopher Columbus. I think it's safe to say that Discovery and colonization of the Americas by Europe would have happened 99.9% of the time without them, and in a pretty similar manner.
I heartily recommend "Civilizations" by Laurent Binet. It's fiction, but oh so delicious. On this very subject.
I assure you, criticism of the French revolution is not a hot new take.
I just dont think mobs parading around the heads of bakers helps advance those ideals, let alone get the bread that doesn't exist for their hungry children.
"...embraced an emperor, and raped and looted the rest of Europe."
The number of years is really besides the point, which was to call out the consequences were long lasted, not just limited to the terror, and and included the wars.