‘In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist: in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifism is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity.’ The words of US radical pacifist AJ Muste, who lived an astounding life of commitment, in 1928.
This powerful statement about pacifism and nonviolence comes from Muste’s classic September 1928 essay, ‘Pacifism and class war’. A radical Christian pacifist, Muste warned against the assumption that ‘violence is solely or chiefly committed by the rebels against oppression, and that this violence constitutes the heart of our problem.’
Instead, Muste pointed out: ‘the basic fact is that the economic, social, political order in which we live was built up largely by violence, is now being extended by violence, and is maintained only by violence.’
According to Muste, the foremost task of the pacifist, of someone committed to nonviolence, is therefore: ‘to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil – material and spiritual – this entails for the masses of people throughout the world; and to exhort all rulers in social, political, industrial life, all who occupy places of privilege, all who are the beneficiaries of the present state of things, to relinquish every attempt to hold on to wealth, position and power by force, to give up the instruments of violence on which they annually spend billions of wealth produced by the sweat and anguish of the toilers.’
Muste went on to write: ‘So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this 90 percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the 10 percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression.’
These words, in my view, laid the foundation for the revolutionary nonviolence tradition.
Let’s start with what the classic version of revolutionary nonviolence is not.
In the mainstream of revolutionary nonviolence, thinkers and activists like Muste have not urged us to pile up barricades in the streets today and to try to overthrow the government tomorrow.
The classical thinkers and activists of revolutionary nonviolence brought their radical ideas to here-and-now struggles for much smaller changes.
Here are some thoughts from radical activist and author Noam Chomsky which should be taken seriously by all kinds of revolutionaries in the West.
Back in 1969, during an upsurge in revolutionary feelings, Chomsky warned that if there was a ‘revolution’ in the US at that time, it would be ‘a move towards some variety of fascism’.
The problem was that ‘not even the germs of new institutions exist, let alone the moral and political consciousness that could lead to a basic modification of social life.’
We don’t have even the beginnings of the kinds of organisations needed to replace our current political and economic systems. Also, Chomsky has said repeatedly that a condition for revolutionary change is that ‘it has to have dedicated support by a large majority of the population, people who have come to realize that the just goals that they are trying to attain cannot be attained within the existing institutional structure because they will be beaten back by force.’
People with revolutionary goals, instead of launching into pointless ‘revolutionary’ confrontations, whether violent or nonviolent, should focus for now on trying to ‘expand the floor of the cage’, a phrase taken by Chomsky from rural workers’ organisations in Brazil.
“The economic, social, political order in which we live was built up largely by violence, is now being extended by violence, and is maintained only by violence”
In this image, the state is the cage which oppresses us as well as shielding us.
Chomsky argues that popular movements should protect the cage (defend government programmes and powers that are valuable) while expanding the floor of the cage (increasing democratic control over the state, improving government programmes and public services, and increasing the freedom of the people in relation to the state): ‘You have to protect the cage when it’s under attack from even worse predators from outside, like private power. And you have to expand the floor of the cage, recognizing that it’s a cage. These are all preliminaries to dismantling it.’
Rather than focusing on a possible revolution in the future, Chomsky has urged radicals to focus on the steps we can take today to help build a powerful radical movement which might one day be capable of creating revolutionary change.
Before we can build a mass radical movement, Chomsky argues, we will need a mass reform movement: ‘a movement for social change with a positive programme that has a broad-based appeal, that encourages free and open discussion and offers a wide range of possibilities for work and action.’
This movement, Chomsky suggested in 1971, ‘will be devoted to badly needed reforms, anti-imperialist and anti-militarist, concerned with guaranteeing minimal standards of health, income, education, industrial safety and conditions of work, and overcoming urban decay and rural misery.’ Today, we might add ‘creating a Just Transition out of the climate crisis’ among other minimum goals.
Within such a mass reform movement, Chomsky suggests, there will be greater opportunities for ‘a variety of more radical movements’ to explore the possibility of dismantling both state and corporate power, and to ‘organize and experiment to these ends.’
It will then be up to the radicals to persuade the larger movement to take on a more revolutionary analysis and agenda for change.
For Chomsky, this is how a mass revolutionary movement could develop without falling into the trap of Leninist vanguardism, with a small group of leaders imposing ‘the truth’ and ‘the right strategy’ on the movement.
After those words of caution, it still seems worthwhile talking about revolutionary nonviolence, if only to help defend against Leninist and liberal fantasies about how to make revolution.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as radicals grew frustrated at the unavoidably slow pace of social change, it seemed to many that they could accelerate that change with the ‘more effective’ methods of Marxism-Leninism or Maoism.
New waves of frustration with current forms of nonviolence must not be channelled into similar dead ends.
In recent issues of Peace News, we’ve sampled some of the contributions of a few classic nonviolent revolutionaries: Dave Dellinger (PN 2668), Barbara Deming (PN 2667) and AJ Muste (PN 2666). We’ve printed some of their thoughts, and brief sketches of their rich lives of action and sacrifice.
Longtime readers know we’ve republished Barbara Deming’s brilliant essay, ‘On Anger’, several times over the years.
Back in 2012, we reprinted George Lakey’s book, Toward a Living Revolution: a five-stage framework for creating radical social change (originally published in 1973), as well as a long interview with George (PNs 2544, 2545, 2547 – 2548).
That same year, we also republished Making Nonviolent Revolution, a very different take on the same topic by the late, great Howard Clark, a driving force within Peace News for many years.
There have, of course, been many other takes on revolutionary nonviolence, including a vigorous Left-Marxist work by Bart de Ligt, an anarcho-pacifist with a dash of Gene Sharp to him. His major book’s French title, Pour Vaincre sans Violence (To Conquer without Violence, 1935), fits the contents better, I think, than the less militant English title: The Conquest of Violence (1937) (emphases added).
“You have to protect the cage when it’s under attack from even worse predators from outside, like private power”
I would say that Dellinger, Deming, Lakey and Muste produced the classics of nonviolent revolution, with Howard Clark providing an important alternative perspective.
This essay considers two more recent (academic) books which add to the conversation around nonviolent revolution. The first is Revolutionary Nonviolence: concepts, cases and controversies (Zed, 2020), which has five editors: Richard Jackson, Joseph Llewellyn, Griffin Leonard, Aidan Gnoth and Tonga Karena, all connected to the Peace and Conflict Studies Centre at Otago University in New Zealand/Aotearoa.
The other book is On Revolutions: unruly politics in the contemporary world (Oxford University Press, 2022), co-written by six academics from different fields and different countries: Colin J Beck, Mlada Bukovansky, Erica Chenoweth, George Lawson, Sharon Erickson Nepstad and Daniel P Ritter. For reasons that will become clear, I will call them ‘the “small r” team’.
On Revolutions covers all kinds of revolutions, but shines a spotlight on the unarmed variety. Revolutionary Nonviolence aims to be more focused.
One of the puzzles of Revolutionary Nonviolence is that, among the 11 essays, no one, not even the editors, clearly defines ‘revolutionary nonviolence’ – or explain how it is different from non-revolutionary nonviolence. (The closest thing to a definition comes in a chapter by Brian Martin on ‘social defence’, as we’ll see.)
The index for the book lists only ‘pragmatic’ and ‘principled’ nonviolence. It has seven kinds of pacifism (including ‘absolute’, ‘liberal’ and ‘nuclear’ pacifism) but not ‘revolutionary’ pacifism.
I was also surprised to find little mention of the classic thinkers of revolutionary nonviolence. The index has as many mentions (7) for the non-nonviolent postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault as for Clark, Dellinger, Deming, Lakey and Muste combined. (Actually, Barbara Deming gets all seven mentions in the index.)
I was shocked to discover that AJ Muste is mentioned only once in the book, by postmodernist Timothy Bryar, who offers us a mangled version of the quotation at the start of this article.
Most of the mentions of the classic nonviolent revolutionaries come in the opening essay by editor Richard Jackson. However, his quotes from Deming and Dellinger are used not to explain the meaning of revolutionary nonviolence, but to criticise violent revolution and suggest the potential for nonviolence in general.
Not a revolution
The largely nonviolent overthrow of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986 is officially known there as ‘the EDSA People Power Revolution’.
EDSA stands for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the major highway around Manila, on which millions of Filipin@s gathered in February 1986 to nonviolently protect anti-Marcos soldiers from military attack. This peaceful resistance led to the rest of the military also disobeying and Marcos having to run away.
Despite the official name of this peaceful uprising, I don’t believe that ‘toppling a dictator’ is the same thing as ‘a revolution’.
Under Marcos’ successor, Cory Aquino, land inequality in the Philippines remained stubbornly high, with nearly two-thirds of people in the countryside living in poverty.
The US newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor commented later: ‘Aquino pledged a sweeping land reform program early in her term, though her “comprehensive agrarian reform program” [CARP] was finally gutted by the House of Representatives, whose members, like Aquino, are large landowners.’
Walden Bello and Joe Collins wrote in New Internationalist: ‘Peasant groups were angry, but they were not surprised to see that CARP had turned out to be, in the words of the Philippine Peasant Movement, “a document of surrender to landlord and big business interests”.’
The first draft of the CARP land reform bill said no one would be allowed to own more than 17 acres of agricultural land, which would have broken up huge plantations and given landless people a chance of a decent life.
The big landowners leaned on the politicians and removed that limit on land ownership.
‘Revolution’ must mean more than replacing the head torturer. What was needed was not just a new face at the top, but a redistribution of economic power and resources, sharing land out fairly, dismantling the torture chamber.
The anti-Marcos eruption in the Philippines in 1986 was the first in a line of ‘people power’, mostly-nonviolent, uprisings that have challenged and sometimes overthrown authoritarian rulers across the world.
“One can not arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it”
The authors of On Revolutions think that ‘small r’ revolutions like Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, or the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in 2004, are just as much real revolutions as the ‘big R’ Revolutions in France (1789), Russia (1917) and China (1949).
They write that the ‘big R’ Revolutions were violent, class-based social revolutions, while more recent (mostly-nonviolent) ‘small r’ revolutions ‘aim to oust their opponents but often without a clear vision for how this step is to lead to radical social transformation’ (p4, emphasis added).
Recent ‘small r’ revolutions tend to ‘have more modest goals’ (p4), and may only achieve ‘regime change or, in some cases, executive leadership change’ (p12).
This raises two questions. (1) Isn’t ‘radical social transformation’ necessary for revolution? (2) What counts as ‘radical social transformation’?
For the ‘small r’ team, the answer to (1) is ‘No’; and one answer to (2) is: ‘liberalism’.
For them, ‘liberalism’ means ‘constitutionalism, individual rights, republicanism, and nationalism’, ‘mechanics of popular representation, and restraints on executive authority’, ‘the rule of law, representative government and the separation of powers’ (pp191, 192, p193).
In many countries, establishing these democratic institutions would be a dramatic political transformation, but they wouldn’t count as a radical social transformation.
If we go back to the Philippines in 1986, we see that the Marcos dictatorship was replaced by a liberal democratic political system – but the quality of life of most Filipin@s did not improve much, because there was no change in the social and economic system.
Crucially, there was no redistribution of land, meaning that large landowners continued to control the political system.
At the end of Cory Aquino’s six-year presidency, 20 percent of the population still owned 80 percent of the land, and two-thirds of agricultural workers remained without any land of their own.
Afterwards, between 1988 and 2000, poverty in the countryside remained almost exactly the same (around half of rural families), according to the Asian Development Bank.
Measured by the international poverty line of $1 a day, poverty in the Philippines rose from 18.3 percent of the population in 1990 to 45 percent in 2000 (if we take inflation into account).
The New York Times went to one of the shanty towns around Manila in June 1992 to ask people living there how they felt about Cory Aquino leaving office.
Olivia Oracoy told the paper she was happy to see Aquino go: ‘Mrs. Oracoy’s 15-month-old son died of malnutrition and diarrhea last year, a frequent cause of death in her garbage-strewn neighborhood, less than two miles from a sparkling new strip of shopping centers and fast-food restaurants. The Government gives her two gallons of milk a week to keep her four children alive; a fifth has already been placed in an orphanage. On a good day her husband comes home with $3 earned at construction sites.
‘“I’m happy that there is democracy,” the 27-year-old Mrs. Oracoy said the other day, balancing her children as they crawled up the wooden ladder of her one-room shack, made of boards from old crates and burlap bags. “But it hasn’t made much difference to me. Cory said she would bring down the price of food, and she didn’t.”’
Free and fair elections choosing members of a national parliament and the separation of powers, meaning judges providing a check on government action, had not improved Olivia Oracoy’s life, or the lives of millions of poor Filipin@s like her.
Liberalism and radicalism
For the ‘small r’ team, liberalism is revolutionary (p191), and it follows that liberal societies do not need any further revolution.
They write that liberal democratic capitalist societies ‘insulate’ themselves from revolution in two ways: ‘by “solving” the social question through a mixture of growth and redistribution, and by institutionalizing points of contact between those with grievances and those in positions of authority’ (p194).
For the ‘small r’ team, the ‘social question’ has two faces: ‘the question of mass misery and poverty’ (p135) and economic ‘inequality’ (p196).
According to On Revolution, a liberal democratic capitalist society solves both these problems through economic growth (there are more jobs and higher wages, meaning less poverty and less concern about inequality).
Liberal democratic capitalist societies also solve these economic problems by sharing out (redistributing) income and wealth. The usual ways are through the tax and benefit systems, and through government funding of public services that benefit everyone, whatever their income (for example, public health services).
Revolution is also headed off, according to the ‘small r’ team, because liberal democratic societies make sure that poor people, and other oppressed people, are heard by those in authority – through ‘institutionalised points of contact’.
After 1986, the Philippines was a liberal capitalist democracy (though the military tried to take over the government several times). There wasn’t much economic growth for half the population, though, and not much redistribution either.
Let’s go back to the earlier two questions.
For me, ‘radical social transformation’ is a necessary part of revolution. This means that most, if not all, the ‘small r revolutions’ should not be called revolutions.
If people want to use the ‘r’ word for these kinds of events, let’s add a label to make clear that they don’t involve radical social transformation: ‘people power revolution’, ‘political revolution’....
What does count as ‘radical social transformation’?
Earlier, I said that the closest thing to a definition of ‘revolutionary nonviolence’ comes in a chapter on ‘social defence’ by Brian Martin.
Martin writes (on p97): ‘In practice, nonviolent action can be used for various goals, including
- defending the status quo, such as when opposing military coups (Roberts 1967),
- pushing for reforms as in many environmental campaigns,
- challenging repressive regimes (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011), and in
- fundamentally changing social relationships and institutions.
‘What can be called revolutionary nonviolence is in pursuit of this latter goal, which can include challenging and building alternatives to patriarchy, capitalism, the state and other systems of inequality and hierarchy (de Ligt 1937; Dellinger 1970; Lakey 1973; Martin 1993). Unlike the idea of revolution as capturing and wielding state power, revolutionary nonviolence rejects both violence as a means and the capacity to use violence as an end point.’
So, Martin says revolutionary nonviolence is ‘nonviolence action aimed at fundamentally changing social relationships and institutions’, and these institutions might include ‘patriarchy’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘the state’.
According to this definition, almost the entire global women’s liberation movement could be classified as revolutionary nonviolence, because almost all feminist action up to this point has avoided the use of physical force against people, and all that action has aimed at getting rid of male domination (patriarchy) in one way or another.
This seems uncomfortable.
Looking back, both the suffragists and the suffragettes would qualify for the label, according to this definition, because they both used nonviolent means and they both wanted to fundamentally change a major institution (parliamentary democracy) as well as social relationships between women and men.
My guess is that there are parts of the feminist movement that would see themselves as revolutionary, and parts which would not.
Sylvia Pankhurst was an anti-Leninist communist and revolutionary. Her mother Emmeline, co-founder of the key direct action suffragette group, the Women’s Social and Political Union, was equally militant in action, but she was a nationalist, not a revolutionary. After helping to win the vote for women, Emmeline Pankhurst toured the United States rallying support for the British empire.
Wage-slavery
My guess is that one of the things that many self-identified revolutionary feminists felt marked them out from the non-revolutionary women’s movement would be their opposition to capitalism.
Capitalism is mentioned by Martin in his definition as one of the possible targets of revolutionary nonviolence.
What exactly is ‘capitalism’? It’s a word that crops up a lot in both Revolutionary Nonviolence (the authors are mostly hostile to capitalism) and in On Revolution (the authors are generally okay with capitalism). There is no definition of the word in either book.
(Before we go on to capitalism, let’s define ‘capital’ as financial wealth used for business purposes.)
Often, the word ‘capitalism’ is used very loosely, and partly accurately, to mean an economic system based on greed, or on seeking profit.
In the introduction to Revolutionary Nonviolence, the editors sum up one of the book’s chapters, where they say that Timothy Bryar argues that ‘no viable alternative to capitalism has yet taken hold’ in Western societies: ‘global inequality continues to rise, the fate of workers is more precarious, and the environment sits on the brink of collapse’ (p13).
This is, I believe, as close as the book gets to defining capitalism or saying what is wrong with capitalism: inequality, job insecurity and damage to the environment.
Strangely, this is almost exactly what the authors of On Revolution, the ‘small r team’, write about capitalism: ‘For many, the central issue is inequality.... Inequality has, in turn, fostered insecurity’ (p196).
Focusing on inequality as the core issue actually distracts us from the real problems of capitalism. You might even say that it is pro-capitalist propaganda.
On this point, Chomsky quotes the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker: ‘In the prison, in the [nuns’ or monks’ ] cloister, or in the barracks one finds a fairly high degree of economic equality, as all the inmates are provided with the same dwelling, the same food, the same uniform, and the same tasks.’
Capitalism would still be fundamentally wrong, even if inequality was massively reduced and jobs were secure for a lifetime.
The central point was put by the Guild Socialists just over a century ago:
‘The fundamental basis of the revolutionary case against Capitalism is not that it makes the few rich and the many poor – though this is true; not that it creates social conditions which are a disgrace and an amazement in a civilised society – though this is also true; not that it brutalises the rich by luxury, stifles beauty, and frustrates the hope of craftsmanship for the worker – though, indeed, it does all these things; but that it denies and degrades the character of [woman and] man by the operation of a wage-system which makes the worker of no more account than a machine to be exploited or a tool to be bought and sold’ (Maurice B Reckitt and CE Bechhofer, The Meaning of National Guilds, 2nd ed 1920, p3).
In other words, there is something fundamentally wrong, there is something deeply violent, in treating a human being as a thing, as a tool.
Owners and managers decide how they want to generate profits and then they buy or rent various tools, including human ‘labour’, to carry out their plans.
Chomsky points out that this kind of criticism of capitalism has its roots in classical liberalism.
In 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau based his radical Discourse on Inequality on the idea that ‘the essence of human nature is human freedom and the consciousness of this freedom’ (Chomsky’s summary).
In his essay on ‘Language and Freedom’, Chomsky quotes another 18th-century European liberal. When the Terror took place during the French Revolution, with the execution of over 30,000 people, half of them by guillotine, some critics pointed to this as evidence that the masses were not ready for the privilege of freedom.
In defence of the revolution, German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued in 1793 that: ‘[O]ne can not arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it; one must be free to learn how to make use of one’s powers freely and usefully. The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority.
‘However, one can achieve reason only through one’s own experiences and one must be free to be able to undertake them....
‘To accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under one’s control and that one has the right to refuse it to them forever, is an infringement on the rights of God himself, who has created [woman and] man to be free.’
Chomsky also refers to the thought of another German Enlightenment thinker, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who inspired John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.
Like other classical liberals, Humboldt argued for strict limits on state action and for the freedom of the individual. This was based on how he saw human nature: ‘The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.
‘Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential – intimately connected with freedom, it is true – a variety of situations.’
Like Kant and Rousseau, Humboldt believed that ‘nothing promotes this ripeness for freedom so much as freedom itself’. If you don’t understand that people need freedom in order to learn how to be free, Humboldt suggested, you ‘may justly be suspected of misunderstanding human nature, and of wishing to make [women and] men into machines.’
Chomsky quotes a long passage from Humboldt that is important for understanding the fundamental problem of capitalism (sexist language has been reversed in this case):
‘... woman never regards what she possesses as so much her own, as what she does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits....
‘In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftswomen might be elevated into artists; that is, women who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, thought beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it....
‘But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences.
‘Whatever does not spring from a woman’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into her very being, but remains alien to her true nature; she does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.’
Chomsky sums up, and then quotes from Humboldt: ‘If a woman acts in a purely mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction rather than in ways determined by her own interests and energies and power, “we may admire what she does, but we despise what she is”’ (sexist language has been reversed).
On the basis of such insights, Humboldt built his case for limiting the powers and actions of the state, which tends to ‘make woman an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking her individual purposes’.
Chomsky argues that these kinds of classical liberal ideas develop naturally into radical criticisms of capitalist economic relations and of corporate capitalism.
It is anti-human to force someone to be ‘an instrument’ to serve the arbitrary goals of a corporation, overlooking that person’s own ‘individual purposes’.
We have a right to a democratic say in our ‘economic’ lives as workers – as much as we do in our ‘political’ lives as citizens. We have a right to self-government and freedom at work as well as in our non-work lives.
As workers, we have a right to make the big decisions about what products or services we should create together, the conditions that we work in, who our managers are (if we have any), how we relate to the communities that our work has an effect on, where we get our raw materials from, and so on.
The fundamental problem of capitalism is that it depends on the majority of people in society being excluded from wealth and power, and having to rent themselves out to the owning classes. To quote the Guild Socialists, the worker is ‘of no more account than a machine to be exploited or a tool to be bought and sold’.
Power relations in the typical company are extremely authoritarian; Chomsky points out that they would be called fascist if they were carried over to the political sphere. You obey, or you’re out. That’s why old-time socialists and anarchists used to talk about capitalist work as ‘wage-slavery’.
Neither Revolutionary Nonviolence or On Revolution give any sign of being aware of this deep authoritarianism in capitalism, or the central problem of turning-human-beings-into-tools.
The authors of On Revolution do not seem to be aware that their version of ‘liberalism’ is very far adrift from classical liberalism.
The ‘small r team’ lean to the view that, ‘tragically, revolution only brings more oppression’ (p192) and that it is not ‘a major stretch’ to seek liberation instead ‘in the sustenance and extension of liberal institutions’ (p193), meaning the rule of law, representative government, the separation of powers, and so on.
This is a long way from Kant in 1793.
Revolutionary nonviolence has been grounded in an opposition to capitalism on these kinds of grounds, because the authoritarian relationship of owner to employee is anti-human and institutionally violent.
Another way of saying this is that revolutionary nonviolence, unlike liberal nonviolence, is aware of, and fiercely opposes, the deep harms caused by oppressive class relations, in addition to poverty, inequality and job insecurity.
Missing class
Curiously, one of the most revolution-friendly chapters in Revolutionary Nonviolence, a 24-page essay on the Zapatistas by Sean Chabot and Stellan Vinthagen, has a lot to say on women’s rights within Zapatista-controlled areas in Mexico, but does not have a single word on land rights.
This is particularly striking because the 1994 Zapatista uprising was in large part over land.
Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican constitution, which laid the basis for redistributing land from the rich to the poor, had been weakened in 1992. The changes also removed a ban on foreign corporate ownership of ‘the lands and waters’ of Mexico.
Many peasants had fought in the original Mexican Revolution (1910 – 1920) because they wanted to regain their communal village lands. These had been privatised and turned into large plantations (haciendas) in the 19th century, leaving many indigenous people landless and destitute.
After the revolution, the state began land reform, which meant seizing haciendas and allowing peasants to farm them (or public land) collectively, each set-up being an ejido (‘eh-hee-dough’). Typically, some of the land would be communal, some would be parcelled out to individuals.
Over half the territory of Mexico was turned over to the ejido system, with 28,000 ejido farms by the 1990s.
Ejido land was still owned by the state, which meant that, after the weakening of the constitution in 1992, the state could rent or sell the land to other users, including foreign corporations.
This was a serious threat to indigenous collective forms of tenure (meaning ‘the conditions under which land or buildings are held or occupied’).
The threat grew even greater with the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which abolished legal protection for collective land tenure, and allowed individual farmers to sell ‘their’ slice of ejido land to foreign corporations.
This threat to peasant livelihoods was a major factor in the Zapatista uprising on 1 January 1994, the day that NAFTA came into force.
As soon as the uprising had stabilised and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (‘EZLN’ in Spanish) had established armed control of their areas, they began negotiations with the Mexican government.
US political geographer Alvaro Reyes writes that these negotiations ‘from the very beginning centered on the EZLN’s demand for the reintroduction of the de jure [legal] protection of collective land tenure that had been eviscerated as a condition of Mexico’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).’
There is a lot of valuable material in Chabot and Vinthagen’s thoughtful essay on nonviolence and women’s liberation within the Zapatista revolution, but their silence on the issues of class and land, which are central to life in Mexico, is very puzzling.
Collective control over land is at the centre of the Zapatista struggle.
Similarly, in industrial societies like Britain, collective control over the workplace is a central revolutionary question.
Unlike Mexico, we have no recent history of collective ownership or control of factories and offices, as Mexico’s peasants did with land, in 1910 and still in 1994. For Mexico’s peasants, ‘revolutionary’ change was in an important sense conservative and traditional.
It will be much, much more difficult for the British public to inch towards a revolutionary state of mind.
What revolutionaries of all kinds in Western societies need is ‘non-reformist reform’, pushing for ambitious changes that press to the limits of the current system, that allow ordinary people to grow in confidence and skill in exercising power.
That might be as patients and health workers in the health system; it might be as young people and school workers in the education system; it might be as neighbours in a neighbourhood....
The Guild Socialists argued about 100 years ago that the critical goal for the labour movement should be to advance the ‘frontier of control’ exercised by workers in their workplaces, to steadily win decision-making powers from management.
Syndicalists in the South Wales Miners’ Federation argued in 1911 that managers should be elected by workers: ‘The men who work in the mine are surely as competent to elect [mine officials], as shareholders who may never have seen a colliery. To have a vote in determining who shall be your fireman, manager, inspector, etc., is to have a vote in determining the conditions which shall rule your working life. On that vote will depend in a large measure your safety of life and limb, of your freedom from oppression by petty bosses, and would give you an intelligent interest in, and control over your conditions of work.’
The Austrian-French New Leftist André Gorz (who invented the phrase ‘non-reformist reform’) argued in 1967 that unions should aim to increase their ‘autonomous power’ with a wide-ranging programme. They should demand a ‘collective output bonus’ for all, rather than bonuses for individuals.
They should aim to be in a position to negotiate, among other things, the speed and rhythm of work, and the qualifications required for a job.
They should control training schools ‘to ensure that they do not train robots, mutilated individuals with limited horizons and a life burdened by ignorance, but professionally autonomous workers with virtually all-sided skills, capable of advancing in their jobs at least as fast as technological development.’
It should be obvious that these ideas have many implications for how we organise our movements for peace and justice, both in what we demand and in how we organise.
A genuine movement of revolutionary nonviolence today will be grounded in the work of our pioneers, firmly anti-capitalist, aware of the many dimensions of oppression we are struggling with, committed to collective liberation, modest and ambitious at the same time, bold and cautious at the same time, dedicated to building a mass movement of deep reform and to expanding the floor of the cage – while preparing in our own small ways to dismantle it.
