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The Merits and Limitations of Peaceful Protest

By Gerasimos Karavitis

The recent RNC related demonstrations invite us to revisit the question of whether it is strategically preferable for the political Left in the United States to continue staging entirely peaceful protests.

Obviously, the merits of the peaceful mode of protest are many, too many to list in an article of this size. Nonetheless, three stand out from a purely tactical perspective. First, a peaceful protest is likely to draw a greater number of people than its violent counterpart would, since the likelihood of sustaining a physical injury while participating in it is relatively low. On the one hand, the potential for gathering a larger crowd means that a greater number of people can be politically socialized while attending the protest. And while it is true that the people who attend the Left’s protests have—more often than not—already been socialized to support its political agenda, their participation in a protest makes them aware of the fact that they are not alone, and thus deepens and strengthens their convictions.

On the other hand, the potential to draw a larger crowd can translate into outcomes easily interpreted as political victories. Consider the following. If the number of people marching in the August 29th protest had been twice as large as what it actually was, then the official decree that prohibited the protesters from entering Central Park en masse after the march, and the police barricades that constrained the march within a predetermined course would be de facto nullified: the number of people at the protest would simply be too great for the police to enforce the aforementioned constraints at a low political cost to the city’s authorities.

Secondly, though peaceful protest is not the morally superior mode of protest by definition, it is represented as such in American public discourse, and, presumably, perceived as such by most Americans. Morality is a word that the careful observer of life looks upon with vigorous suspicion, because what is moral is—more often than not—difficult to determine. However, despite its theoretical elusiveness, morality’s political use is an undeniable fact: representations of good and evil are careful considered by all political factions, because all political factions recognize that by associating themselves with the most commonly espoused representations of good, and by disassociating themselves from the most commonly espoused representations of evil they increase their capacity to recruit new supporters and consolidating the convictions of their existing ones. When the Left employs the peaceful mode of protest, it invests itself wisely in the conquest of moral terrain.

Thirdly, a peaceful protest permits for the bottom-up socialization of the police officer by the protesting masses. Many activists view the police officer as an automaton, a robotic organ of a headless system, a being incapable of receiving messages from anyone other then his or her superiors in the institution he or she serves. This perception is not totally groundless. It reflects the type of subject that the figures with decisionmaking authority in policing institutions wish to construct, and often succeed in constructing, as the continuum of inhumane acts perpetrated by police officers suffices to show. However, the figure of the sadistic robo-cop is generalized at the risk of facilitating the production of sadistic robo-cops. The fact of the matter is that humane police officers who look beyond the strictures of their institutions and follow their own understanding do exist, and it is of central importance to the Left that these individuals are not alienated. Such alienation is likely to be effected, if individuals of this type are subjected to acts of violence during political protests, or if they come to feel that the uniform they wear is desecrated.

In addition to its merits, the peaceful mode of protest has some serious limitations. First, it does not directly question structures of political authority, or the institutions which underlie configurations of power is a society. Those of us who marched in the spaces designated by the city authorities gave our tacit consent to the status quo relation between state and society in this country. In so far as this status quo helps people like the President and his wanton entourage to kill, steal, and lie with impunity, we fell prey to an important contradiction, as we failed to confront what is perhaps the most significant set of forces behind the unjust political outcomes we profess to oppose. I do not wish to imply here that the Left could deal these forces a blow through any repertoire of vandalism or violence, but only to illuminate the fact that it cannot do so through peaceful protest.

Secondly, contrary to what recent appearances of the movement might suggest, the marches staged in the past few years have not yet amounted to the formation of a counterhegemonic block. I sense that an effort is being made to transform the Left’s variegated mass into a more coherent and empowered whole, but no counterhegemonic block worthy of the name can be said to exist in the US today. The existence of a counterhegemonic block requires the existence of a unitary political imaginary among the overwhelming majority of critical factions, a unity which in turn requires the existence of a discourse that is extensive and penetrating enough to confront the hegemonic discourse which hypostatizes—albeit in different forms and degrees—both the Republican and the Democratic party’s political agendas. We can begin to speak of the formation of a counterhegemonic block only when we begin to see the multitudes of protesters acting as a united front, and not as a large set of units, seemingly united, but actually fragmented in the face of a status quo that is protected by both of the major parties.

Finally, there is an ecological issue with regard to the peaceful protest, one that is not often discussed. Looking at the photos shown by the large New York newspapers, I was both impressed by the sight of the recent protests and disturbed by how much paper we wasted in the construction of signs—most of which were simply discarded on the streets after the protest. As ecologically conscious members of society we should condemn the waste that results during our protests, and seek to minimize it. Of course, I understand that it is not possible to have a colorful protest, or any protest for that matter without some waste. But the movement should invest more energy in devising and employing methods of protest that are ecologically more conscientious; methods of protest that utilize the natural resources of the body (e.x. the voice, the hands, the feet, physical presence itself) in more creative ways, and for the production of symbolic effects that are superior to those produced by sign raising. Other than by the force of sheer numbers (which, nonetheless, denotes only a potential), fear is struck in the ranks of the political Right and capitalist-state’s engineers of repression by the knowledge that the political Left has the capacity and the willingness to act as a united front. Gestures such as locking arms to form enormous human chains, or the coordination of footsteps in blocks of thousands, or periods of protracted silence, or the formation of a giant words, or massive sit-downs would convey this capacity and willingness in ways that the ecologically unconscionable and highly personalistic practice of sign raising does not.

For all its problems, the peaceful path alone is currently open to the American political Left. When certain factions of the anarchist Left in this country challenge the state’s violence with a violence of their own, they act to satisfy the commendable itch of a heavy conscience, the peculiar neurosis of infantile militancy, and the condemnable desire for masochistic annihilation, but they do not act with the intent of winning a victory over injustice. Victory requires good strategy, and strategy requires a good understanding of capacities. The political techniques—vandalism and violence—that certain factions of the American far Left have invested their faith in are useless in challenging a state that does not run out of time, or money, or resources, or the political will required to counteract them and to destroy their agents.

Thus, the leaders of U.F.P.J., A.N.S.W.E.R. and other such organizations are correct in consistently choosing the peaceful path, despite the intense feeling of futility that many of their supporters—including myself—might feel upon the completion of the protests that they organize. In a country where a realistic and well cultivated understanding of political violence absents from the popular consciousness, self-control is the strongest card that the political Left has in its hand. The Left in the US must challenge its opponents by using the advantages it enjoys over them (i.e. members who are more willing to act politically, a culture of higher intelligence and sensitivity, international support), and by using the weight of the capitalist-state against itself by appealing to the latter’s human foundations and exposing its moral emptiness.
The progress that accrues from following the peaceful path is incremental, for sure, and the path as a method tests the individual’s activist’s capacity to work patiently (with conviction over time) more than his or her physical valiance (although it can do this as well), but it is in this commitment to patience that the Left’s new technology of power resides.