In this paper, I examine several arguments that justify property destruction as a form of civil disobedience. These arguments stress that the question about the use of violence in social protest is not a moral one, but a strategic one; that is, about the most efficient means to achieve political goals. I then rely on César Chavez’s conception of nonviolent civil disobedience to demonstrate why these arguments fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics of power and violence. Chavez argues that advocates of property destruction threaten to reduce struggles for social justice to power politics by ignoring moral guidelines for strategy, fail to consider how state repression against violent protests harms the most poor and vulnerable members of society, and confuse a violent shift in the balance of power with the creation of a more just, democratic, and equitable society.
On August 1999, a small crowd in the French town of Millau descended upon a McDonald’s restaurant under construction. Under the eyes of local police, the crowd proceeded to dismantle the pre-fabricated building, loading pieces of the walls, roofing, and electrical outlets into the backs of trucks. The crowd then paraded to the police headquarters in a festive mood. They unloaded the materials and then proceeded to the outdoor cafes. One of the leaders of the crowd, José Bove, claimed that the dismantling was in response to two issues (Bove 2001, 3-18). First, the action was a protest against American tariffs levied against French cheese because of the European Union’s refusal to allow entry to American beef with growth hormones. The tariffs had essentially priced Roquefort cheese out of the American market, adversely affecting French farmers. Second, the protest was directed at the globalization of "malbouffe", or bad food, as represented by the menu at McDonald’s.
As a result of the protest,
Bove was convicted of vandalism and gained international notoriety. He was invited to speak at the protests of
the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999. He gave his speech at a downtown McDonald’s
and then punctuated his visit by eating a Roquefort cheese sandwich in front of
it. During the course of the rioting
that marred the Seattle protests, that restaurant was vandalized. When he was later asked to reflect on his
protest in Millau and the property damage in Seattle, Bove said that one must
differentiate between different kinds of violence. He distinguishes between indiscriminate violence, which he
criticizes, and an act of property destruction that "has a direct relationship
to the problem." (Jeffress, 2001) As an example of the latter, he mentions the
case of French wine growers that destroyed a shipment of imported wine that
they believed was eroding their market share.
Bove claims that the destruction of the wine is appropriate as a form of
civil disobedience, and points out that violence is sometimes needed for social
change, citing the Boston Tea Party and the storming of the Bastille, as
examples.
Almost two years after
Seattle, tens of thousands of anti-globalization activists gathered together in
Genoa, Italy in response to the meeting of the G-8 nations. At that meeting, small groups of protestors
clashed with police and Carlo Giuliani, a 23- year old anarchist, was shot
twice in the head at close range by police.
Officials quickly cracked down on the protest leaders in order to quell
any further violence. An investigation
later revealed that the local police planted explosives in the headquarters of
the protestors and lied about being attacked in order to justify the mass
arrests. (FAIR 2003)
Bove’s responses and the events in Genoa raise important questions about the role of violence in modern civil disobedience: Are certain forms of violence legitimate as social protest today? If so, what kinds and what are their limits? Is violent civil disobedience strategically prudent for social movements today, given the kind of repression that they may unleash? This paper attempts to offer answers by drawing on Cesar Chavez’s conception of nonviolent civil disobedience. I begin by examining several arguments that justify property destruction as a form of social protest against corporate economic globalization. These arguments stress that the question over the use of violence in social protest is not a moral one, but a strategic one, that is, about the most efficient means to achieve political goals. I then rely on Chavez’s idea of nonviolence to demonstrate why these arguments about the strategic use of violence in social protest fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics of power and violence. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Chavez adheres to absolute nonviolence. Yet, for years, Chavez was a hardnosed community organizer before he founded the United Farm Workers union (Griswold Del Castillo and Garcia, 22-40). Those experiences taught him that nonviolent civil disobedience is the best form of social protest, not only from a moral point of view, but strategy-wise as well, and that the costs of violent protest clearly outweigh the benefits for any movement dedicated to social justice.
Shortly after the WTO
protests, Rachel Neumann criticized those nonviolent activists who disparaged
the property damage in Seattle as merely an expression of "adolescent
rage." Rage, she writes, is not an
inappropriate emotional reaction toward institutional injustice. Part of the harm inflicted by institutional
injustice, such as colonization, and in Neumann’s view corporate globalization,
is that it "refuses people their own emotions and natural reactions" by
substituting foreign or artificial values and ideas that disrupt ways of life
and belittle people’s feelings of loss and injury. (Neumann, 89) Thus, to
"condemn the rage by judging those who express it, without acknowledging the
larger context of systematic state violence is to strengthen the
opposition." (Neumann, 90) Instead of concentrating on the moral
appropriateness of rage, she maintains, we ought to concern ourselves with
developing political strategies for channeling it in progressive ways. Property destruction, in Neumann’s view,
need not be ruled out as a way to do this.
Indeed, the emotional energy behind such anger can be used to develop
more creative forms of civil disobedience beyond the usual rallies, sit-ins,
and orchestrated mass arrests that have come to be the hallmarks of most
instances of nonviolent protests today.
Proponents of absolute
nonviolence usually dismiss property destruction, according to Neumann, because
they rely on very broad and abstract definitions of violence and
nonviolence. First, absolutists fail to
make a distinction between violence
toward property and violence toward
human beings and, then, assume that the former almost always leads to the
latter. However, there are historical
examples that show this escalation does not always occur: "The Luddites smashed machinery, the
Wobblies closed mills and mines, the English suffragists broke windows, and
Earth First activists tinkered with engines and tires of logging trucks—all
without injuring other human beings."
(Neumann, 90) Second, proponents
of nonviolence also fail to distinguish between different kinds of
property. Here, Neumann cites from a
communiqué of the ACME collective, one of the anarchist groups in Seattle, that
makes a distinction between personal property,
"the things we own that have worth because they are dear to us (books,
photos, the homes we have worked on)" and private/corporate property "that
exists solely at the expense of others and with the purpose of generating more
capital." (Neumann, 91) ACME believes that property destruction is
not violence unless it kills or injures human beings in the process. They direct violence toward
private/corporate property in order to "destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy
that surrounds private property rights" and to "exorcise the set of violent and
destructive social relationships which has been imbued in almost everything
around us." (ACME Collective) Thus, from the standpoint of Neumann and the
anarchists, those who disparage property destruction as a form of civil
disobedience fetishize property rights.
Absolutists fail to appreciate how the production of private property in
our world systematically violates human rights. Once we can recognize that violence toward things is not the same
as violence toward people, and that not all property rights deserve respect,
especially if it is property that is created and sustained through the
exploitation of human beings, then property destruction can be classified a
form of civil disobedience rather than as a crime.
Such reflections, according
to Neumann, move the issue of violent civil disobedience from morality into the
realm of political strategy. Strategic
issues deal with the question of command and control: When is it appropriate to
engage in nonviolent protest and when is violence called for? Howard Zinn
provides a set of criteria for the strategic use of violence. (Zinn, 109)
First, violent civil disobedience preferably ought to be directed at
property rather than at human beings.
Second, violent civil disobedience must be limited and not
indiscriminate. Violence should be used
"surgically" to remove injustice.
Finally, violence must be aimed directly at the source of
injustice--those officials or institutions perpetuating harm. Under these conditions, rampaging mobs
randomly attacking people or property are not engaged in civil disobedience
since they are not concerned with the "deliberate [and] organized use of
power", that is, with ensuring that the violence they set free is controlled,
directed at those people or places responsible for injustice, and in a manner
that will inhibit the officials or institutions from harming to the
public. (Zinn, 108)
Zinn offers these criteria
as both moral and pragmatic regulative ideals.
He recognizes that violence is an evil that should be used only as a
last resort in order to defeat a greater evil.
Moreover, indiscriminate violence on the part of protestors can turn the
public against a cause. These
considerations, however, are not enough to make the case for principled
nonviolence. Like Neumann, Zinn finds
absolutists politically foolish. It is
morally appropriate to work to reduce violence in the world, in his view, but
this does not entail that certain political circumstances will never arise that
make it necessary to consider violence as a method of achieving some important
social end. The proponent of absolute
nonviolence refuses to acknowledge that there are values other than peace, such
as justice, for instance, and that "it is possible to conceive of situations
where a disturbance of the peace is justifiable if it results in some massive
improvement of the human condition for large numbers of people." (Zinn, 106)
His argument does not entail that violence is always the most
appropriate response to injustice. Like
Neumann, Zinn thinks that the use of violence ought to be guided by circumstances,
not moral principle.
An absolutist might respond
that there are very good strategic reasons for not engaging in violent forms of
civil disobedience, namely, the possibility of massive state repression. Violent protest should be avoided because it
invites retaliation and occasions official corruption. For Zinn, history does not establish that
violence only begets violence. Shay’s
Rebellion, for example, deeply impacted the deliberations at the Constitutional
Convention, violent union struggles in the 1930s brought about significant
labor reform, and the urban uprisings of the 1960s drew to the conditions of
the ghettos. He observes: "Independence, emancipation, labor
unions—these basic elements in the development of American democracy all involved
violent actions by aggrieved persons."
(Zinn, 111) Thus, again, the
question about the use of violence must be weighed and evaluated carefully by
experience and circumstance. Zinn
concludes: "I insist only that the
question is so open, so complex, that it would be foolish to rule out at the
start, for all times and conditions, all of the vast range of possible tactics
beyond strict nonviolence." (Zinn, 111)
Chavez, like other
absolutists, would insist that the question about the use of violence in civil
disobedience is not merely about strategy.
Moral principles are always at the center of social struggles against
injustice and it is misleading to think that one can completely abstract them
away. Neumann, the ACME collective, and
José Bove, hope that by making distinctions between different types of violence
and property the moral arguments against material destruction will appear
illegitimate. The absolutist will turn
out to be backing the forces of injustice by valuing all property rights more
so than human life and well-being. Yet,
this argument is disingenuous; it too relies on a moral principle, namely, that
one ought to value human life and well-being over things.
Chavez thinks that it is important
for social justice movements to acknowledge such moral principles at their
core. Otherwise, strategic thinking can
foster habits that negatively transform the character of a movement. Chavez dedicated most of his adult life to
the struggle against the dehumanization of farm workers by California
agribusiness. He knew the history of
farm worker struggles over the past century and understood all too well that
growers were willing to rely on violence to maintain their power and keep farm
workers in subordinate positions. The
UFW was created to stop the misery of farm work and alleviate the worker’s
poverty by forcing agribusiness to respect their dignity as human beings. At the center of the UFW struggle,
therefore, is a conception of human beings as autonomous and rational agents,
capable of planning and making their own life choices. The growers commit injustice by maintaining
a system that treats workers as "agricultural implements or rented slaves"
instead of rational agents. (Chavez
1969, 35) A violent response on the
part of the workers would undermine the UFW struggle by weakening their
commitment to this ethical ideal of humanity:
If I were to tell the workers: "All right, we’re going to be violent; we’re going to burn the
sheds and we’re going to dynamite the grower’s homes and we’re going to burn
the vineyards," provided we could get away with it, the growers would sign a
contract. But you see that that victory
came at the expense of violence; it came at the expense of injuring. I think once that happens it have tremendous
impact on us. We would lose our
perspective and we would lose the regard we have for human beings—and then the
struggle would become a mechanical thing."
(Chavez 1970)
In this passage, Chavez worries that allowing any violence
as an option leaves open the possibility that people could be injured or
killed. This option permits a kind of
utilitarian calculus to pervade the movement; one that weighs the cost of
violence against the possible benefits for the movement. Such strategic thinking considers individual
human beings as disposable pieces in the struggle toward a noble end.
Chavez is concerned about
this kind of mentality seeping into the farm worker struggle precisely because
it is the mindset with which the growers conceived of the farm workers. To agribusiness, farm workers were fungible
resources that had to be accounted for in calculating profit, not as individual
human beings who deserved proper treatment and respect. Chavez constantly reminded both his
supporters and detractors: "if to build
our union require[s] the deliberate taking of life…then I choose not to see
this union built," because it was the attitude that separated the UFW from
agribusiness. Without this foundation,
the UFW would simply become another business union, "mechanically" concerned
with its own power, stability, and prestige, and not a movement dedicated to
upholding the dignity of farm workers.
Therefore, in Chavez’s mind, acknowledging moral principles as limits to
political strategy prevents instrumental thinking from compromising a social
movement and corrupting its commitments into power politics.
Neumann and Zinn could
concede that ethical evaluation might be called for when considering violence
toward people, but still hold that ethical restrictions are inappropriate when
dealing with the issue of property damage.
Objects do not deserve moral treatment.
The real issue is how best to target property and damage it in such a
way to halt injustice. Chavez would
respond that the idea of criteria for the use of property destruction is
misleading because it fails to understand the dynamics of state power and
violence. Violence is not a force that
can be neatly controlled. Even if a
group can limit their own violence and surgically apply it, they cannot control
the wake of violent retaliation and repression that may follow. A group might control their own actions, but
they cannot control the situation, which includes the reactions of other
agents, that their actions engender.
Chavez believed that the
use of violent protest by the farm workers in their struggle for collective
bargaining contracts would only bring a backlash from the growers. Property destruction, in Chavez’s view,
would only perpetuate a cycle of violence that had been underway for decades
rather than shift the balance of power in favor of the workers: "The important thing is that for poor people
to be able to get a clean victory is something you don’t often see. If we get it through violence, then the employers
will just wait long enough until they can get even with you—and then the
workers will respond, and then…"
(Chavez 1970) Indeed, even when
the UFW was finally able to sign its first collective bargaining contracts in
1970, many growers quickly moved to thwart the farm workers by signing with the
Teamsters instead (Dalton, 16). This
led to competition between the UFW and the Teamsters that frequently erupted
into bloody confrontations between members of the two unions. While the two groups clashed in the fields,
the growers were able to forestall making any real improvements for the farm
workers. Chavez knew that any
deliberate use of property destruction by the UFW bring about an even more
cruel backlash upon the farm workers than the one they were already
experiencing with principled nonviolence.
Zinn acknowledges that
violent protest may lead to backlash and repression. But, as he and José Bove suggest, history also shows that
violence can sometimes shift the balance of power away from dominant groups. Nonviolence in the farm worker’s struggle
might very well be the appropriate tactic, given the willingness of the growers
to react brutally. However, that
judgment would be based on the conditions of that particular situation. Zinn would caution that we should not
generalize from the farm worker experience and decide that violence is never
appropriate, under any circumstances, because of the possibility of
backlash.
Chavez thinks that, even
from a strategic point of view, the likelihood of repression should make the
call for use of violence by subordinate groups dubious. This is because, if and when the powerful do
backlash, it is usually the poorest and most vulnerable members of the
subordinate group that suffer. Chavez
remarks:
Examine history. Who
gets killed in the case of violent revolution?
The poor, the workers. The
people of the land are the ones who give their bodies and don’t really gain
that much for it…Those who espouse violence exploit people. To call men to arms with many promises, to
ask them to give up their lives for a cause and then not produce for them
afterwards, is the most vicious type of oppression. (Chavez 1978, 97)
Chavez cites the example of revolutions in Mexico and the
rest of Latin America where the poorest members of society were the ones to
suffer tremendous loss with little improvement in the institutions that
directly affect their lives (Chavez 1970).
Thus, for Chavez, the idea that such vulnerable groups are most likely
the ones to endure the brunt of state retaliation should make activists who
espouse violence question its effectiveness as means of social justice. If by social justice, we mean a condition of
respect, fairness, and equity for all members of society, especially the most
disadvantaged, then a situation that provokes or encourages powerful groups to
further harm, marginalize, or confine the disadvantaged is clearly not
desirable as a tactic, and in fact, contributes to their oppression. We, therefore, ought to question the
commitment to social justice of those groups that are cavalier about others
caught in the web of repression, such as ACME, which brags about being able to
escape the police while other demonstrators were pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed,
and shot with rubber bullets (ACME Collective 1999).
Nonetheless,
Chavez is willing to concede to Zinn that violence can sometimes alter
society. Subordinate groups may be able
to shift the balance of power in society using violence. However, such a change is not the same as
creating more fair, democratic, or equitable conditions that will alleviate the
suffering of the subordinate group.
Indeed, Chavez maintains that victory won through violence validates the
use of force and creates a precedent for its use in any new social arrangement
that can hinder the development of stable democratic politics:
If we were to become violent and we won the strike, as an
example, then what would prevent us from turning violence against the opponents
in the movement who wanted to displace us?
Say they felt they had more leadership and they wanted to be
leaders. What would prevent us from
turning violence against them?
Nothing. Because we had already
experienced that violence awarded us victory" (Chavez 1970).
Violence, then, is not a substitute for the development of
persuasive and reasonable leadership, or for the hard work of organizing people
into self-managing groups that can protect their own interests in coalition
with other communities. Violence can
change the people in power, but it is not conducive to the formation of the
kinds of social habits, political skills, and expectations that create a
democratic civic space. In Chavez’s
estimation, only nonviolent organizing can rouse the disadvantaged and provide
them the opportunity to become agents empowered to control the processes that
directly affect their own lives:
The burdens of generations of poverty and powerlessness lie
heavy in the fields of America. If we
fail, there are those who will see violence as the shortcut to change. It is precisely to overcome these
frustrations that we have involved masses of people in their own struggle
throughout the movement. Freedom is
best experienced through participation and self-determination, and free men and
women instinctively prefer democratic change to any other means. Thus, demonstrations and marches, strikes
and boycotts are not only weapons against the growers, but our way of avoiding
the senseless violence that brings no honor to any class or community. (Chavez 1978, 97)
In this paper, using Chavez’s conceptions of nonviolence and organizing, I contend that arguments in favor of property destruction as a form of social protest fail to understand the dynamics of violence as a political tactic and how that failure mitigates the utility of violence as a strategy for achieving social justice. Violent civil disobedience, from Chavez’s standpoint, threatens to compromise the politics of a social justice movement and to unleash repression from dominant groups that disproportionately affect the most poor and marginalized members of society. And while violence may occasionally alter power relationships in society, there is no guarantee that the new arrangement will benefit subordinate groups. Indeed, there is reason to think that social change brought about by violent means will have a harder time establishing a stable system of democratic will-formation. Chavez’s experience reminds us that the struggle for social justice is about empowering and training the disadvantaged to be able to take control of their own lives and to have influence in the institutions that directly affect them. Violent protest, no matter how effective as a tactic in upsetting the balance of power in society, is not a substitute for this kind of training in democratic action. The extent to which violent civil disobedience attracts state repression is the extent to which it contributes to further oppression of the most disadvantaged members of our community.
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