Strategic Constructive Programming

Transcript

Well greetings, everyone. This is Michael Nagler with the Nonviolent Moment. For our program today, actually has a date. It was May 21st, 1930. And it was what I like to call, “The summit of the summit.” It was the climax of the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 stretching over into the beginning of ‘31 and climaxing with the appearance of Gandhi at The Second Round Table Conference in London.

And I'm going to use the nonviolent moment, which I’ll describe very briefly. You can look it up. It's in all the histories of Gandhi's satyagraha. It’s extremely dramatic, and many of you have probably seen a very accurate and very dramatic rendition of it in the film “Gandhi” by Richard Attenborough.

So, you know that there were 2000 trained, nonviolent volunteers who went to pull down the chain link fence surrounding the Dharasana salt pans. And I'm going to talk about it, not so much as a kind of military episode, as the climax of constructive program. It's constructive program that I really wanted to talk about today.

There are two wings, so to speak, of the bird of nonviolence. One is obstructive program, which climaxes for India on that occasion, May 21st, 1930. But the other wing is called constructive program. It's, I think, Gandhi's most characteristic and most important invention. And it began very quietly as early as 1893 in South Africa, where he makes a very quiet statement about their first campaign, which was very modest. They were just submitting a petition. But it was in a way earthshaking because the Indian community had never had a voice and never dared to submit a petition before.

But the sentence that I want to focus on is, quote, “Side by side with external agitation. The question of internal improvement was also taken up.” And that's the core of constructive program. Where you focus on rebuilding your own community from the inside out and creating the society that you want, or the world that you want, before or simultaneously, as Gandhi says, side-by-side simultaneously with taking down the world that you don't want.

And I have just read Lisa Fithian's book, Shut It Down about the many occupations and protests that she led. She's a brilliant organizer, and it's a very interesting book. But in the course of it, she does say, “That at one point in my career, I got tired with just being against, against, against. I wanted to be for something.”

And what one eventually discovers is that being for is actually probably your most powerful and effective way of being against. Because, as is well known, if you don't have an alternative to step on to, you're not going to step off the system that you're occupying. Be it, however, so unfair, unjust, oppressive. You've got to have an alternative.

A classic case of the absence of an alternative for me was the rebellion of the Sendero Luminoso in Peru. This is quite a ways back now. And the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, the Shining Path guerrillas – that movement collapsed because it was all obstructive program and no constructive program. The Sendero Luminoso guerrillas showed that they could assassinate policemen, but they didn't show that they could build so much as a single cabana. But the point is, counterintuitively, it's actually more powerful to build the world you want than to take down the one that you don't want.

So, in the course of Gandhi's long career, this ‘side-by-side’ that he was talking about in 1893, becomes front and center. It's interesting to note that two of his major campaigns, salt and khadi, or homespun cotton, concerned people making their own products with their own resources. And in both cases, this perfectly natural, efficient, universally available process was artificially interrupted and thwarted by the dominating regime which said, “You can't take salt from your own ocean and make your own salt. We have to do it. You can't just weave your own cotton. We've got to steal your cotton, ship it all the way to London, manufacture clothing, and send it back to you at 3 or 4 times the expense.”

And also, these two campaigns, the salt campaign, where, you know, you've probably seen a famous photograph of Gandhi bending over and picking up a handful of salt, on the beach at Dandi. And then he holds up his hand, and he says a stirring speech about ‘man needs salt as he needs air,’ and launches this tremendous campaign. I mean he was such a brilliant, dramatist, so to speak.

Between salt and khadi, you have to realize you're talking about food and clothing. So those two things, plus shelter, are the basic basics of life. And the Raj, the Hindi word for the British regime, knew if they could control those two things, they would really be able to strangle the lifeblood of India and control it completely. It was quite, quite sinister. And up until Gandhi's arrival, it was very effective. But he had the brilliance to see that this is where India was being crushed and also where the Raj was most vulnerable. 

Think of the absurdity of what they're doing. You know, it's one thing to say, “We have to defend ourselves, so we're going to shoot down anybody who crosses this line.” But it's another to say, “You can't make your own salt. You can't weave your own cotton,” which had been the glory of Asian fabrics for a millennium. “You can't do that. We're going to take it away from you.” So that's the vulnerability. The absurdity is the vulnerability.

But once you start thinking about constructive program, you realize that it has tremendous advantages over obstruction. Let me be perfectly clear – obstruction has its role. In fact, very often the ideal campaign is built on construction until that construction becomes confrontational and the powers that be try to intercept it, try to thwart it, make it stop. And it's at that point you are in a position of strength.

So, the advantages of constructive program, once you start thinking about it, it becomes quite, quite numerous. And I have to remember, with some embarrassment, to having had this conversation with Daniel Ellsberg one time and pointing out to him that I thought, for Gandhi, constructive program became the main thrust of his freedom struggle. And Dan didn't agree with me, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I was wrong or that he was wrong.

So, the most effective and positive benefit of having a constructive program is that your program becomes the scaffolding on which you're going to build a new society. We have seen many instances, unfortunately – I'm thinking particularly of Arab Spring, but there have been many others where people get very angry – justifiably so. They push off a regime effectively and successfully, and that can be done either violently or nonviolently.

But even if it's done nonviolently sometimes, as it was in Tunisia, they don't have the institutions ready to fill the vacuum. And that's a very dangerous moment because at that point there can be a backlash. The social class that was in power is more organized, has more money, more weapons, and they can then roll right back into the vacuum that you've created. A successful nonviolent regime change doesn't stop with dislodging a regime. It starts, in fact, with creating one to take its place.

If you've seen this series, the documentary series on the Russian Revolution that was on television some time ago, there is a point where the revolutionists decide that they want to build a parallel government. And it's at that point that the czar sweeps in and arrests them all and packs them off to Siberia. Because he knows that once they have that alternative ready to be in place, it can be a complete revolution.

So, what you're doing is empowering the positive force of nonviolence, which, I think, is its natural mode of operation. The inherent modus operandi of nonviolence is positive. In Martin Luther King's terms, you're balancing the non-cooperation with evil by cooperating with good. 

And when you can do both of those appropriately, knowing when to switch back and forth, and you have that flexibility of strategies, and an overall game plan, you can really create an unstoppable force. You are providing people with basic needs through their own work. And what that does is it gainsays the lie of dependency. It proves them wrong and is very effective in shattering the chains of oppression. You know, if the regime is telling you, “You can't make your own salt.” And you say to the regime, “Guess what? I just did,” they really lose their validity.

Furthermore, you can find a unity amid the diversity of actions by creating work in which everyone can participate. So, here is one of the really signal differences between constructive program and violence. As in violence, only certain people who are able-bodied, who have the right mentality or shall we say, the wrong mentality and the right weapons can really carry out an uprising. But in constructive program, practically everyone can get involved and that is super important for building community along with providing the basic resource.

So, constructive program actually trains people to live in a nonviolent world. Just as training for revolt means the use of military weapons, training for satyagraha, or in a constructive sense, means creating the materials, the institutions, the resources, and the networks that are going to be the world that you take over.

Now, there are some criteria that must be met for a constructive program to really do its work. You can't just say, “Okay, I'm” – let's see what would be the equivalent of khadi today? I've got an electric car. So, I'm creating a new revolution, not quite by yourself. You have to be concrete and constructive.

So, when you have a concrete program, it often has a symbolic resonance. But it can't be merely symbolic. And here I always like to think of Gandhi’s spinning wheel. It was a wonderful symbol. And today it's right smack dead center in the flag of the Indian nation, quite appropriately. But do remember that it actually spun cotton for people who were so stricken with poverty that they often had no other way of clothing themselves. So, there was the material lying right to hand, and the skill which they had plied for centuries just waiting to be restored.

It's also good to try to find what I like to call a stealth issue. That means it's something that you can do and won't be even noticed by the opposition until it's too late. And here's where salt and khadi, or the manufacturing of homespun cotton differed. Salt had to be confrontational almost from the beginning. But khadi, you know, you couldn't arrest a woman for spinning cotton in her home.

And so, the British failed to realize that they were spinning, as Nehru called it, the livery of their freedom. I'm thinking of that famous line of Alec Guinness in the movie – when I say, “The movie,” I almost always mean the Gandhi Attenborough movie, where he says, “Let them make their damn salt.” Not realizing that he's saying let them discombobulate the British Empire.

So, it's very good if your issue is one that doesn't arouse opposition immediately, doesn't fly in the face. This way you're able to build strength, build community, and gain a beachhead from which it's often almost secondary to dislodge the unwanted regime.

And most importantly, I think you want to tackle a keystone issue. I use that term to mean an issue which, if you succeed at it, it could undo the whole system. Nowadays, we often use the terms that were developed by Gene Sharp of Harvard, that is the late Gene Sharp, that you can undermine the oppressive power’s pillars of support. Like, what does he or she really rely on?

In the case of the Raj, while of course, it relied on military superiority, and Gandhi was making it useless. Not that he had more of the same, but he had something quite different, which made the military power of the Raj ineffective. But also, by having people spin their own cloth, even more than with the salt, he was depriving the regime of its raison d'etre. 

The regime existed, of course, partly for egotistical purposes. You loved to sit back and look at this map of the world, where it was crimson all over. But mainly you had to milk the resources of India. There was even a cartoon that appeared during this period of the world, and a huge cow bestriding the continents, eating the grass of India and its udders being milked in the UK. So, that was a very powerful symbol.

But actually, it was eventually proven by economists that the Raj was costing Britain. It was not a net gain. It was not even financially profitable. And I will be talking about this probably in a later episode, it was proven that militarism, which we think stimulates the economy, actually sidelines your economy into unproductive channels.

So, in practical terms, what do you do? I think the formula is to be constructive wherever possible, and in resistance when necessary. In other words, ideally, you could run a whole revolution on constructive program. Just constructing the material resources and the institutions that you need for your new world and never have to go to opposition. The opposition might just kind of wither away in the sight of your alternative.

You know, in the real world I'm not going to say that this happens very frequently, but what does happen frequently, that does happen universally, is what I've mentioned before. That when you have your own infrastructure, both institutional and material built, it's much easier to dislodge the regime.

It's just about impossible to ask people, for example, to do without cloth. Human decency requires that you have cloth. But you can ask them to make their own cloth and then get rid of the British cotton. So, there's my formula. Be constructive whenever possible and resistant when necessary. What you actually end up doing most of the time is have a strategic overview where you balance constructive and obstructive measures. And you can shift emphasis to one or the other as appropriate.

I need here to mention one other important factor of constructive program is that you can do it constantly. Whereas with obstructive program, you can only do it under very favorable circumstances that allow you to mobilize, allow you to protest. But you can always go back into your place and spin and do what you need to do. And that gives you continuity, which is a very great advantage in nonviolent struggles.

Now, historically, many movements often fail when they are single issue. Because either that issue is resolved, which is a good thing, or it's made irresolvable for the foreseeable future by resistance from the regime. And if the movement exists solely for that issue, the movement dissolves.

But again, here's the other dimension of continuity. We talked about continuity of behavior. This is continuity of community. Let's say one issue is something that you cannot work on anymore. And this happened in South Africa with, first of all, with voting, then with the three-pound tax, then with immigration.

If one issue is resolved, and you don't have another one to go over to, you have no more movement. But if your movement has a long-term goal of complete replacement of regime, then you can strategically graduate from issues which are the easiest to succeed at, to issues which are the hardest, gathering strength as you go along.

Now to end our program today, my last example I want to talk about something that's kind of in between constructive program and obstructive program – or at least preparation for obstructive program. And that brings me back to one of my favorite organizations, which is Nonviolent Peaceforce. Which now has something like 200 volunteers in the world who have gone into intense violent settings and used their personal third-party intervention and their good offices to seriously dampen the violence and the suffering. And it's been very successful and it's marching on. As I've mentioned before, they are getting ready to go into the West Bank and from there into Gaza as we speak.

But one of the ways that this particular organization – there are about 20 groups doing what's called unarmed civilian peacekeeping, this particular organization believes it can be most helpful right here in the US currently is to offer trainings. And Nonviolent Peaceforce is on track to train thousands of people in some form of unarmed civilian protection by the end of this year. And they are planning ahead for 2025 by offering groups training for a sliding scale fee. And there's a small documentary video about it that you can see on their website.

So, to wrap up, I would like to just leave you with this impression that inherently nonviolence gravitates more towards constructive, positive action and resorts to obstruction when it absolutely needs to. That is an ideal campaign. And that in a constructive program, you build the institutions of the world that you want so that in the case of success, you are ready to move in and occupy that vacuum and there can't be a backlash. Those are the main advantages. In addition to that, of course, the formation of community.

Now, it does sometimes happen – I should just mention this cautionary note. Sometimes the people who are the best leaders in the resistance are not the best leaders in governing. And I am thinking of Nicaragua as I say this. My daughter-in-law comes from Nicaragua.

So, one does have to be a little bit careful, and this can lead to some jealousies. You know, “I was on the front lines. I fought. My brothers died around me. And now you're saying, I can't govern the country.” So, there is, I think, to be a little bit careful about, but hooray for constructive program, the heart and soul of nonviolence and the Nonviolent Moment.

Thank you very much, until our next episode.