Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution

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.
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