Social Change Requires the Threat of Violence
A Podcast Piece by Musa al-Gharbi.
This is a polished excerpt from the transcript of our podcast with . In that episode, titled “The Passion of the Elites,” Musa joined and to discuss his new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. You can listen to the episode here.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
: There’s this narrative — and you see it everywhere. You saw it trotted out in response to a lot of the student protests about Gaza recently. On the one hand, some of the specific tactics they were using and slogans and stuff were probably not super useful. But then on the flip side, a lot of the people criticizing them also had this kind of nonsense, ridiculous understanding of how social change works. Namely, if you just show up and you don't disrupt anything, you don't interfere with anything, and you just hold hands and sing “Kumbaya,” then the people in power go, “Oh, you're right. I never thought of it that way. Let me abandon my position, interests be damned.” That’s a ridiculous understanding of how social change happens. It has never happened that way. It didn’t happen with Martin Luther King, for instance. They sang “kumbaya,” but they also did things like bus boycotts and other tactics to shut down industries, hit people at their pocket books. And they amassed a whole bunch of people in vaguely menacing ways.
I wrote a piece on this for Salon called, “There’s No Social Change without Coercion.” The point in this essay is that even “nonviolent” movements usually relied, in a deep way, on violence or the prospect of violence. For instance, one of the things that helped Martin Luther King Jr. is the fact that there was this other set of really militant civil rights activists out there who were saying, “we’re not going to wait for the white people to come around. We’re going to burn stuff down. We’re going to overthrow stuff. We’re going to return violence with violence.” This gave MLK Jr. some leverage. He could assemble a whole bunch of angry people on powerful people's doorstep and say, “right now they're listening to me when I'm telling them not to get violent. But, you know, if I keep walking away empty handed, there's this other guy over here. I don't like this guy. I don't think you like this guy. But they’re going to start liking this guy.”
Nonviolent leaders say things like this all the time. A highfalutin’ version of this but, basically, “look, we’re doing nonviolence right now. But, you know, people are maybe not going to be content with nonviolence forever if the system keeps squashing us.” There’s an implicit threat in assembling tons of really angry, disenfranchised people on the doorsteps of the powerful — especially when there's this other movement out here who’s not so “kumbaya.”
I mean, Martin Luther King Jr. had a gun. He kept that gun to defend himself. A lot of the people who participated in civil rights movements willfully exposed themselves to violence — but usually when there were cameras around, reporters, and other third-parties. This was the point. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t going to allow himself to get shot in an alley or something like that. He was armed to help prevent that. “Nonviolent” activists publicly expose themselves to violence. And by refusing to reciprocate violence in turn, they establish a moral high ground. But they typically only expose themselves to violence in that particular context — to state violence, to mob violence — when they could actually advance their ends by experiencing high-profile violence. They weren’t like, “just shoot me and beat me up randomly in the street, stab me in a dark alley, and I’m just going to let you do it outside of the context of the social movement.” And even while taking part in a protest activity, exposing yourself to violence in this kind of very public, high-profile way, assembling yourself before people who are going to mistreat you, sitting down at a lunch counter when you know they were going to be sticking dogs on you and hitting you with fire hoses and dragging you out of the buildings — to call that nonviolent is strange. Their whole social movement was continued on violence, on other people’s violence, but violence nonetheless.
When you do MLK-style stuff, when you actually exert leverage on the system, when you exert pressure on the system, when you expose ugly people for their ugliness, for instance, by exposing yourself to violence in high-profile ways like — it doesn’t tend to make you popular.
At the time King was killed, he was deeply unpopular, super unpopular. Like 70% of Americans or so disapproved of him. Before, when he was popular, especially among symbolic capitalists and in the North, it was because he was active in the South and affirming our prejudices about “those people.” People who lived in places like New York and Chicago didn’t have any skin in the game. But then, when he started the Northern campaign for instance, when the movement started moving black people into white neighborhoods in Chicago, and Northern, highly educated people started to realize, “Oh shit, racial justice also means I would have to change my life and my aspirations.” Then, all of a sudden, King became very unpopular and the movement started to face a lot of resistance. I walk through this in Chapter 2 of We Have Never Been Woke.
When we tell this ridiculous sanitized story about King, we completely lose sight of the fact that his message was deeply unpopular. His tactics were deeply unpopular. Doing the kind of work that King did is very messy. It involves leveraging coercion. It involves violence, either the implicit threat of violence on others or willfully bringing violence upon yourself. It’s not pretty doing this kind of social change work.
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