By David Rovics
June 7th, 2020
What I am saying here is familiar to many people with a knowledge of
actual history, rather than the fantasy version in the textbooks. But
actual history is a hidden thing, and therefore frequent reminders are
necessary. Here’s my effort in this regard for today. We can call it
an editorial.
Trump wants riot police and soldiers to “dominate,” one of his favorite
words as well as pastimes. While there is certainly wanton police
brutality happening every day against demonstrators and other people
across this country, many people are observing the more nuanced
strategies some city leaders are attempting to employ in quelling the
unrest — keeping riot police hidden in basements until their services
are judged to be needed, and making sympathetic noises with regards to
police brutality, current and historic racism, and police reform.
Where the advocates of domination and those with a less confrontational
approach tend to unite is around what kind of protest is acceptable, and
therefore defined as “nonviolent,” and what kind of protest is
unacceptable and therefore “violent.” Who controls this narrative, in
my humble opinion, will determine whether any social movement in the US
has any chance of succeeding.
To cut to the chase, the reason is this: according to any reasonable
definition of the term “violence,” the definition of “violence” used by
the overwhelming majority of media outlets and politicians of both
parties has nothing to do with the dictionary, and everything to do with
what is acceptable to them. What makes it acceptable is that it is
both legal, and ineffective. What they call “nonviolent” is people
standing in a park with signs, or marching along a prearranged route,
with a permit, and a police escort, so there is no possible disruption
to traffic.
What quickly becomes defined as “violent” is pretty much anything else
people might do, such as any of the typical tactics employed by
widely-praised, popular leaders like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. My
point is not to argue that people need to copy MLK or Gandhi’s tactics
of boycotts, strikes, mass nonviolent civil disobedience, and mass
marches — although this is a powerful combination of methods. But if
they are to be widely used tactics, it’s crucial that marching in the
streets, blocking streets, blocking bridges, and occupying buildings be
understood as classic tactics in the arsenal of nonviolent civil
disobedience. To say that marchers taking over the streets or taking
over a bridge are behaving in some way that is violent or inviting
violence is to accuse Martin Luther King and Gandhi of being organizers
of violence, to be very clear. Also, to be very clear, the kinds of
tactics employed by Martin Luther King, namely illegally and
nonviolently marching in city streets and occupying them, are exactly
the kinds of tactics that are currently bringing on the violent wrath of
armies of riot police across this country, causing permanent injury to
many civilians.
The kinds of tactics that have frequently caused social movements to be
victorious, and even for governments to fall, are myriad. They
generally involve a wide variety of tactical threads, but tend to be
remembered for certain ones, whether it be explicitly violent armed
struggle of the sort that ultimately ended colonial domination in most
former colonies of European powers, from Haiti to Mozambique, or
sustained takeovers of cities by massive and overwhelmingly unarmed
civilian populations, such as the protests last fall that won an end to
the new fuel tax in Ecuador, or similar protests that the French labor
movement initiates now and then to defeat a particularly onerous new
attempt at neoliberal reform there, where workers shut down the entire
country for weeks on end. Or the massive, sustained gatherings that
brought down governments in eastern Europe circa 1989.
Nowhere in the history of the world, to my knowledge, will you find a
movement whose tactics were limited to writing letters to politicians or
holding permitted protests and marches, that accomplished anything.
This is exactly why such tactics are acceptable to the powers-that-be,
and why they are thus dubbed “nonviolent.”
Trump is right about the need to dominate the streets of every city
across this country. That’s exactly what needs to happen. We can also
call this occupying the streets, liberating the streets, taking to the
streets, reclaiming the streets, dancing in the streets, or all of the
above. Whatever we call it, whether we like words like “domination” or
“nonviolence” or not, this is one of the main tactics that has, in the
past, in many different countries including this one, been effective in
winning real reforms, and sometimes in toppling governments.
If we don’t collectively reject the narrative that there is something
“violent” about illegally occupying roads, bridges and buildings — if
we allow the media and the political elite to successfully equate
“legal” with “nonviolent” — then we’ve already lost. Only if we’re
able to collectively reject this reformulation of the narrative of the
history of the Civil Rights movement, and collectively embrace the
widespread breaking of not only curfew laws, but also traffic laws, and
many other laws — only when taking to the streets really means taking
over the streets, and holding onto them until we win — might a movement
of protesting in parks and marching with signs become something
potentially transformational.
David Rovics has been called the musical voice of the progressive movement in the US. Since the mid-90’s, Rovics has spent most of his time on the road, playing hundreds of shows every year throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Japan. He has shared the stage regularly with leading intellectuals, activists, politicians, musicians and celebrities. In recent years he’s added children’s music and essay-writing to his repertoire. More importantly, he’s really good. He will make you laugh, he will make you cry, and he will make the revolution irresistible. Check out his pamphlet: Sing for Your Supper: A DIY Guide to Playing Music, Writing Songs, and Booking Your Own Gigs
