activists need deeper understandings.
With this background on nonviolence, chapter 3 looks at capitalism. Some of the obvious problems with capitalism are outlined, such as exploitation of workers, but only briefly.
The main part of the chapter describes three central aspects of capitalism that are specially relevant for developing a nonviolence strategy. The first is the most obvious: capitalism’s link with systems of violence, including government, the military and police. Without the ultimate sanction of violence, capitalism would not survive. But this reliance on violence is hidden through the routine operation of the market and needs to be brought into brighter view. Nonviolent action is ideally designed to challenge and undermine systems based on violence, so the key here is to design nonviolent actions that tackle the violent underpinnings of capitalism.
But although capitalism depends ultimately on violence, for most of the time it is sustained by belief systems and everyday behaviours, including those associated with consumerism, property, entitlement, individualism and selfishness. Challenging such beliefs and behaviours is a difficult task. Nonviolent action offers one approach, but not just any action will serve. Careful examination of options and alternatives is needed. It is in the area of beliefs and behaviours that the most effort is needed, especially because capitalism has an unparalleled capacity to coopt ideological challenges.
A third central aspect of capitalism that is specially relevant for developing a nonviolence strategy is destruction of alternatives. In the rise of capitalism, prior systems and alternative practices, such as community- controlled production, cooperatives and collective provision, were destroyed or marginalised. One reason why capitalism seems like the only option is that alternatives have been eliminated. Nonviolence strategy in this area is reasonably straightforward: it is the building of alternatives, in the tradition of Gandhi’s constructive programme. But this is not easy in the face of the power of capital to destroy and supplant alternatives.
Chapter 4 deals briefly with conventional anticapitalist strategies, especially Leninism and socialist electoralism, examining them through the lens of nonviolence theory. None of them has succeeded in permanently replacing capitalism with a better system, though it can be argued that social democracy has limited many of the worst capitalist excesses. From a nonviolence perspective, a central problem with these strategies is that they rely on the use of violence, namely the power of the state, for bringing about change. The existence of a system of violence means that it can be, and often is, used to support the powerful and repress challengers. Thus, these anticapitalist strategies have given only a limited amount of power to the people, retaining much power in the hands of a ruling group, whether it is communist party elites or politicians and bureaucrats in a social democratic government.
Taking note of these failed and flawed challenges to capitalism is especially relevant because some of the greatest hostility to nonviolent alternatives has come from socialists. It might be concluded that the collapse of communism has opened a tremendous opportunity. A nonviolent challenge to capitalism now has better prospects because the alternative socialist road, based on violence, is largely discredited.
Chapter 5 looks at nonviolent alternatives to capitalism, spelling out some possible principles for organising society without the capacity for organised violence. It turns out that there are not many comprehensive visions of society that are explicitly constructed on a nonviolent foundation. To illustrate possibilities, four models are outlined: sarvodaya, anarchism, voluntaryism and demarchy. By examining these, it becomes apparent how little of the current capitalist system is viable without the ultimate sanction of violence.
One of the features of nonviolence is that it is self-consistent: it incorporates its goals within its means. In other words, nonviolent methods are used to help attain a nonviolent society. Looking at models of a nonviolent society is part of the process of developing and refining this self-consistency.
With a background of method, critique and alternative, it is time to examine strategies. This is the task of chapters 6 to 12. Chapter 6 discusses principles for assessing strategies and proposes a short check list for assessing campaigns, including questions such as “Is the campaign resistant to cooption?” This check list is used in the following chapters to assess a range of actual and possible campaigns.
Chapter 7 examines workers’ struggles, including campaigns for better wages and conditions, for jobs, workers’ control, green bans and whistleblowing. Some campaigns, such as workers’ control, provide a potent challenge to capitalism whereas others do not. It is noted here and later that even if a campaign does not challenge capitalism as a system, it may still be very worthwhile for other reasons.
Chapter 8 looks at sabotage, an approach on the border of nonviolent action. Chapter 9 probes environmental activism, in particular campaigns against pesticides, nuclear power and local developments. Chapter 10 analyses social defence, which is nonviolent community resistance as an alternative to military defence, as a means to undermine capitalism. Chapter 11 addresses three campaigns challenging corporate globalisation: the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the campaign against genetically modified organisms and the development of free software. Chapter 12 assesses several economic alternatives — community exchange schemes, local money systems and voluntary simplicity — as strategies against capitalism.
Chapters 7 through 12 illustrate how to use a check list, developed through a nonviolence analysis, to assess strategies for their potential to challenge capitalism. The assessments given here are not definitive. What is important is for activists to decide on their own check lists and choose their campaigns and methods according to their own goals. Finally, chapter 13 discusses the relation between campaigning and the more subtle process of cultural change.
2. Nonviolence
For many purposes, nonviolence is easier to explain through examples than definitions or theory.[1] And what better example than Gandhi’s famous march to Dandi in 1930? India was then under British rule and ruthlessly exploited. The British claimed a monopoly on the manufacture of salt, taxed it and arrested any Indians who made it. Gandhi decided illegal production of salt from sea water would be a good form of civil disobedience. To maximise the impact of this act, he marched with his followers for 24 days on the way to the small coastal village of Dandi, telling about the planned act along the way and picking up hundreds of adherents. By the time the march reached Dandi, it had already served as a powerful organising method. The salt-making and arrests then served to dramatise the injustice of British rule. Similar salt-making civil disobedience actions took place simultaneously across India.[2]
This sort of organising would not have been possible if the aim was a violent resistance. Openness would not have been possible, either in recruitment, training or action. Participation would have been limited. Finally, violent attacks often have the effect of unifying the opponents and alienating potential supporters. The march to Dandi, in contrast, did far more to undermine support for the British and win sympathy from observers.
The US civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s made excellent use of nonviolent action.[3] In the US South, slaves had been freed in the 1860s but blacks[4] continued to be oppressed by the practice of segregation, with denial of equal opportunity and retribution for those who bucked the system. In 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, civil rights activist Rosa Parks sat in the white section of a bus, in planned defiance of the segregation laws. After she was arrested, blacks in the city boycotted the buses, many of them walking long distances to work.
The civil rights movement picked up momentum, with additional boycotts, “freedom rides” (blacks and whites on buses together travelling through the South), sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters, marches through segregated cities, road blockades and rallies. The civil rights movement made enormous strides especially through the early 1960s.
The peace movement worldwide has made extensive use of nonviolent action. There is a long tradition of war resistance, namely men refusing to go to war or to be in the army. In war after war there have been men who have gone to prison for refusing military service; in some countries they are persecuted or even killed. Others claim exemption from military service as conscientious objectors or emigrate to avoid conscription.
Many creative actions are used by peace activists to protest against wars, arms production and export, weapons systems and military support for repressive regimes. At Greenham Common in the UK, women protested against the US military base in numerous ways. They maintained a presence for years, held rallies, repeatedly
