{"id":138145,"date":"2019-07-22T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2019-07-22T11:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=138145"},"modified":"2019-07-20T12:32:58","modified_gmt":"2019-07-20T11:32:58","slug":"will-the-real-gene-sharp-please-step-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/07\/will-the-real-gene-sharp-please-step-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Will The Real Gene Sharp Please Step Forward?"},"content":{"rendered":"

16 Jul 201 – Recent criticisms calling the founder of nonviolent theory a Cold Warrior are way off the mark. To rightly evaluate him, we need to understand the role he chose for himself. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Gene Sharp at the 2005 Celebrating Nonviolent Resistance conference in Palestine, where he gave a key note address.
\u00a0(Damon Lynch)<\/p><\/div>\n

In a recent interview with <\/a>Jacobin<\/a><\/em>, lawyer and political activist Marcie Smith expands on an essay she wrote<\/a> earlier this year calling Gene Sharp \u2014 the late founder of nonviolent theory \u2014 \u201cone of the most important Cold War defense intellectuals the U.S. has produced.\u201d Unfortunately, the interview, much like her essay<\/a>, miss him by a mile.<\/p>\n

To be fair, I\u2019ll admit that Gene \u2014 a mentor and friend from when we were both young adults \u2014 was not an easy guy to figure out. Both his role and his project puzzled many. Peace studies academics expected him to join them, but couldn\u2019t understand his obsession with conflict and the fact that he hardly mentioned peace. Pacifists knew he\u2019d been in prison for refusing military conscription, but were puzzled by his reluctance to identify with them. And while he was a trained sociologist who researched social movements, that wasn\u2019t the right niche for him either.<\/p>\n

Read also: <\/em><\/strong>Gene Sharp \u2014 the lonely scholar who became a nonviolent warrior<\/a> <\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nevertheless, Sharp made a global impact on political movements \u2014 something Marcie Smith knows and understands. But she didn\u2019t know him personally, and she makes a guess about the role he chose. There\u2019s no suggestion that she interviewed his colleagues, who are easily available \u2014 and that got me wondering why Jacobin<\/em> would turn to her as an authority on him.<\/p>\n

Smith assigns him the role of a public intellectual, then criticizes him for not doing what he \u201cshould\u201d have done: jumped into the arena of left politics and acted like a movement thought leader. With a tone of accusation she demands, \u201cWhat is your\u00a0affirmative\u00a0program? What are your ideas about how the economy should be organized and are they historically informed?\u201d<\/p>\n

Was Sharp a \u2018Cold War intellectual?\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Smith calls Sharp a Cold Warrior, lining him up with Harvard\u2019s Thomas Schelling, who consulted with the Department of Defense. Her evidence is that nonviolent struggle was used to hasten the unraveling of the Soviet empire. While that is true, nonviolent struggle has also been used to overthrow regimes that were part of the U.S. empire \u2014 most notably the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Additionally, Sharp\u2019s advances in nonviolent theory have been used by Palestinians in their revolt against the occupation of U.S. ally Israel.<\/p>\n

Because Smith doesn\u2019t understand the role Sharp actually played, she gets confused about the nature of his project, which was to amplify the power of nonviolent struggle for whoever chooses to try it instead of using violence. Some groups did choose civil resistance instead of armed struggle to elude the grasp of Russia. Others chose it to abolish apartheid in U.S.-allied South Africa. It is available for all.<\/p>\n

Believing it is actually leaders of movements who need to devise a specific strategy, Sharp tried to be helpful by explaining how the technique of nonviolent struggle works, when it does.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As someone who detested violence, Sharp believed that political actors should know about an alternative way to fight their battles that didn\u2019t bring the terrible suffering of war.<\/p>\n

A real Cold Warrior would give his weaponry to one side and deny it to the other. He would keep it secret and, in that way, make it all the more powerful. Sharp, of course, prodigiously published his work<\/a>, translated it into many languages and media, and encouraged everyone else to do the same.<\/p>\n

My own fight with Sharp over the question of strategy <\/strong><\/p>\n

Referring to Sharp\u2019s conceptualization of nonviolent struggle, Smith demands, \u201cHas this strategy been developed with any awareness of the reality of class struggle?\u201d<\/p>\n

For one thing, Sharp did not offer a \u201cstrategy.\u201d Believing it is actually leaders of movements who need to devise a specific strategy, he tried to be helpful by explaining how the technique of nonviolent struggle works, when it does. It was on the leaders to create strategy for their people and circumstance.<\/p>\n

If Smith actually understood his role she would see why Sharp didn\u2019t write about the topic of class struggle even though he researched labor and peasant struggles relentlessly and his three-volume masterwork is chock full of them. His purpose was simply other than Smith\u2019s \u2014 he wanted to learn about working people\u2019s choice to differ sometimes from the conventional wisdom that to become powerful it is necessary to be violent. Those working people who chose nonviolent struggle were (and are) innovators, something that was of abiding interest to Sharp.<\/p>\n

In the early \u201870s, we had quite a passionate argument when I published a book with the title \u201cStrategy for a Living Revolution.\u201d [Now available under the title \u201cToward a Living Revolution.\u201d] It was sponsored by an academic think tank and introduced important new concepts like \u201cthe dilemma action.\u201d It was also full of evidence-based knowledge that supported a revolution in our country.<\/p>\n

Because Sharp had mentored me for so long, I was upset that he wasn\u2019t pleased. Finally, though, he got through to me a subtle but important distinction that had to do with my being known in academia as a nonviolent researcher. He worried that the then-fledgling field of nonviolent theory wouldn\u2019t get the space it needed to develop if it got distracted by books that wrapped nonviolent studies into the author\u2019s radical politics.<\/p>\n

Sharp deliberately chose not to become a political leader. It makes no sense to criticize his not acting like one.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sharp wanted to develop theory focused on a technique of struggle, free of my book\u2019s questions of \u201cWhich side are you on?\u201d If he could prevent his theoretical work from getting \u201ccaptured\u201d by any one political stance, he reasoned, theory would develop more fully and become more useful to diverse movements with a variety of goals.<\/p>\n

While I doubted that my book was dangerous in that way \u2014 since it wasn\u2019t polemical, and I believed our new field was not that fragile \u2014 I came to understand Sharp a little better. He saw himself as a scientist building theory that would lend itself to applications that others could figure out how to use in their contexts. He wanted me to continue theory-building with him.<\/p>\n

Of course Sharp had opinions of his own regarding political issues. Some of these showed up in his writing. For starters, he loved democracy, self-determination and power from below \u2014 so he judged negatively the Soviet model and its variations, along with the variety of imperialisms. Nevertheless, Sharp deliberately chose not to become a political leader. It makes no sense to criticize his not acting like one.<\/p>\n

Who, then, was he?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The best metaphor I can think of is to imagine a botanist who, as a young man, discovers that the jungles of the world are a fantastic resource for human health and survival. Even though jungles may be out of sight and out of mind for city-dwellers, he becomes fascinated with how much he\u2019s finding that was previously not known.<\/p>\n

Almost none of his peer botanists \u201cget it\u201d \u2014 they are busy with research in known varieties of plants and possibilities of hybrids. But our lonely botanist plugs away, exploring distant jungles and making finds that dramatically extend what has been known. He sees he needs to make a taxonomy of his own, then finds it steadily growing.<\/p>\n

Sharp gave himself the (probably hopeless) task of asking people to identify conflict behaviors like botanists identify plants, asking about their characteristics and function rather than their worthiness.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bit by bit his published work gets known and medicines are made from the \u201cnew\u201d plants. Major money gets made, but he doesn\u2019t see it, busy exploring a yet more distant part of the jungle. He is learning about jungle ecology and daring to guess its larger contribution.<\/p>\n

Finally, our botanist\u2019s lifetime achievement coincides with a new urban consciousness of need. The planet is about to choke itself to death from carbon overload. The botanist celebrates the awakening realization even in the cities that jungles are the lungs of the world.<\/p>\n

Civilization will never look at jungles the same way again. The botanist\u2019s hunch has led to a paradigm change.<\/p>\n

Is \u2018nonviolent\u2019 Sharp\u2019s god-term?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In casting Sharp as a political thought leader, Smith makes a common error: imagining him offering us moral guidance, as political leaders do, defining \u201cnonviolent action\u201d as an ethical term rather than simply behavioral.<\/p>\n

Sharp gave himself the (probably hopeless) task of asking people to identify conflict behaviors like botanists identify plants, asking about their characteristics and function rather than their worthiness. His taxonomy invites us to put aside our rush to moral judgment for a moment in order to agree that when we see a group of people moving back and forth repeatedly in front of a store, we\u2019re seeing \u201cpicketing\u201d and that it\u2019s a method of \u201cnonviolent action.\u201d<\/p>\n

White people have picketed to support racial segregation; in our field we still call their method \u201cnonviolent action,\u201d even though morally deplorable. Making definitions that make such observations possible is what sociologists do.<\/p>\n

It is possible to make such observations with reasonable accuracy \u2014 something we found at Swarthmore College, where Sharp\u2019s taxonomy is used for the Global Nonviolent Action Database<\/a>. Because of the database\u2019s operational need for a description, we used a variation of Sharp\u2019s definition of \u201cviolence,\u201d again emphasizing observable phenomena.<\/p>\n

While knowing there are linguistic difficulties lingering under the surface, we found it easy to get agreement on observations among student researchers, and since definition is about communication, agreement among observers is the bottom line.<\/p>\n

For Marcie Smith, on the other hand, definitions based on observable behaviors is not the bottom line \u2014 morally-based political judgments are. (She projects Sharp, after all, as a political leader.) The taxonomy is not a useful sociological device for her. Instead, she sees it as a dramatic reveal of just how subtly Sharp plays his role as a neoliberal Cold Warrior.<\/p>\n

In just a few words, what can I say? For many of us leftist anti-imperialist revolutionaries, Sharp\u2019s taxonomy works just fine, and we understand it is there for good reasons of scholarship.<\/p>\n

Is Sharp\u2019s theory anti-state?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIn Sharp\u2019s schema, the state is not something to contest for, the state is not something to try to take over. It is something to dissolve and destroy.\u201d This assertion of Smith\u2019s actually contradicts her view of Sharp as Cold Warrior \u2014 since Cold Warriors very much wanted to support the security of their state.<\/p>\n

That being said, I happen to agree with Smith\u2019s concern about overthrowing dictatorships with no preparation for the aftermath. In fact, that concern was a major motivation for my 1973 book on revolution. In those pages, I pointed out that precise deficiency, citing some of the spontaneous nonviolent insurrections that had occurred years earlier. I also offered a model of stages through which a grassroots revolutionary movement could prepare, so it could enter the power vacuum it generated already having a new political and economic order \u201cgood to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s \u201canti-state\u201d assertion actually flies in the face of a significant part of Sharp\u2019s work. At Sharp\u2019s invitation I participated in the 1964 Civilian Defense International Study Conference at Oxford University. I was surrounded by people on very friendly terms with their national governments, including the famous Captain B.H. Liddell-Hart, who made his living consulting with ministries of defense.<\/p>\n

Yes, Sharp influenced politics in the world. We cannot rightly evaluate him, though, until we understand him, his choice of role and his life project. <\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There were also activist-academics like me present. What drew us together was the idea of applying nonviolent struggle to the problem of national defense. We commonly assumed that, in case of an aggression by another nation, it would be the state that led the people in a nonviolent defense, as had happened after World War I when French and Belgian troops invaded Germany and the German state led the nonviolent resistance.<\/p>\n

Sharp continued to develop civilian-based defense, or CBD, for years \u2014 even consulting with Baltic and other governments that were investigating that policy for their own defense. Neutral Sweden and Austria did incorporate some elements of CBD into their planning. Later in his career he published a book called \u201cThe Anti-Coup<\/a>,\u201d which was meant to help states use nonviolent means to defend themselves. All of this contradicts Smith\u2019s assertion that Sharp was keen to undermine all state authority.<\/p>\n

Where does her charge come from? A close reading suggests a fear that people power might prevail over the military power of a state she supports. If governments she supports do get overthrown nonviolently, she\u2019s clearly ready to lay that at Sharp\u2019s door, even though people have been nonviolently resisting governments long before anyone ever heard of him.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly her privilege to have opinions about, say, Zimbabwe\u2019s Mugabe, Venezuela\u2019s Maduro and others who over the years are subjects of debate among us on the left. Some, for example, may deplore much about a government and still consider it the lesser-of-two-evils, the greater evil being domination by an imperialist power.<\/p>\n

Marcie Smith wants to force Sharp to weigh in on such questions, teasing out inferences from his writings, but he was interested in quite a different question: \u201cIf the people decide to overthrow their government, would you want them to consider using nonviolent direct action to do it?\u201d Sharp said two things about that question for as long as I knew him: While it wasn\u2019t his job to tell people whether they should change their government, it was his job to develop a sound theory \u2014 so that they could create a nonviolent strategy, if that was their desire.<\/p>\n

Yes, Sharp influenced politics in the world. We cannot rightly evaluate him, though, until we understand him, his choice of role and his life project.<\/p>\n

His choices were both modest and bold. He was modest about telling people what to do \u2014 that\u2019s why Smith\u2019s picture of him is so off the mark. His boldness was in daring to find and assemble nonviolent tools that empowered others, whatever their decision, to act.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>George Lakey<\/em> has been active in direct action campaigns for six decades. Recently retired from Swarthmore College, he has facilitated 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national and international levels — most recently with Earth Quaker Action Team. Among many other books and articles, he is author of<\/em> \u201cStrategizing for a Living Revolution\u201d in David Solnit\u2019s book <\/em>Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His 2016 book is<\/em> Viking Economics, and in December 2018 Melville House released <\/em>How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 wagingnonviolence.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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