July-August 2004:
The RNC & Pacifist Strategy
Sovereignty, U.S. Style
Billions for Arms
Youth & Counter-Recruitment
Where to Go During the RNC
Letters

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

After the Conventions
What’s Our Strategy?

By Joanne Sheehan

undreds of thousands of people will be in New York at the end of August to protest, confront and/or disrupt the Republican National Convention, which will run from August 30 to September 2.

Specifically, the antiwar movement will use the opportunity of the RNC to come together and visibly and dramatically express our opposition to the country’s ongoing war. The woman-initiated Code Pink campaign says we’ll be there to “tell the Republicans we’ve had enough of Bush’s lies and cover-up, war and occupations.” The broad antiwar coalition United for Peace and Justice is declaring, “The world says ‘No!’ to the Bush agenda.” And WRL’s own call for civil disobedience says, “Our aim is to confront the administration with the death and suffering for which they are responsible.”

Necessary but Not Sufficient
At the same time, we know that protest isn’t enough. Demonstrations alone do not end a particular war. Massive protests didn’t end the continuing war on Afghanistan or the war on Iraq and haven’t ended the “War on Terror.” Protest alone didn’t even end the Vietnam War, although the antiwar movement of the time was the most visible and successful ever.

The Indian activist-writer Arundhati Roy spoke of this dilemma at the opening of the World Social Forum in Mumbai last January: “It was wonderful that on February 15 last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people on five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15 was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don’t stop wars.” (See her entire speech at www.warresisters.org/merchants_ death.htm) Protest and persuasion are not enough to end even one war, let alone dismantle the militaristic structures that feed and are fed by war and replace them with a just and peaceful world—WRL’s ultimate goal.

Protests may not be enough, but they are necessary. So, as a pacifist organization that believes that all war is wrong, WRL will of course be on the streets during the RNC, and I will be adding my voice to the voices of protest. Yet I am also asking “What is our strategy? How do these actions fit into our work against militarism? While we are saying ‘No!’ to war, greed, hate and lies, how do we say ‘Yes!’ to justice and peace, equality and truth? How do we create justice, peace and equality, and what’s the place of actions like these in that creation?”

The Elements of Change
Because WRL is specifically committed to nonviolent action for social change, we often turn to the example of Mohandas Gandhi, who, from within the British Empire, fashioned the most far-reaching philosophy and strategy for nonviolent change ever articulated. Gandhi described the three elements of social change as personal development, constructive work to create the new society and political action to resist direct and structural violence. (See “Toward a Nonviolent Economics,” NVA, May-June 2001, for more on those three elements.) His preferred political action was not protest, but noncooperation: Under his leadership, many Indians stopped doing what the British wanted them to do. Noncooperation was one of many tactics within a campaign with specific goals; it was a component of the constructive program as well. Using the spinning wheel while refusing to buy British imported cloth gave Indians not only cloth, but a sense of community and self-sufficiency.

The key example of a campaign of noncooperation in which everyone could participate was Gandhi’s salt march. It was a campaign to challenge the British tax and monopoly on salt, a necessity of life. It was also a campaign to mobilize a maximum number of participants: Anyone and everyone could act as they gathered or purchased Indian salt, or boycotted or picketed shops that sold British goods. “Gandhi’s salt march was not just political theater,” said Roy in Mumbai. “When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real.”

‘Our Salt’
I’ve facilitated several strategy workshops where people have asked “What is our salt? Is there one thing we all need that we can resist?” I don’t know if there is such a thing in the present context, and I am concerned that a quest for “our salt” becomes a search for the magic pill that makes everything better. If everyone who opposes this war refused to pay for it, for instance, that would be a direct strike at the economic underpinnings of the American Empire; yet it would not be the end of the struggle. The salt march awakened the Indian people to their power, which was a crucial step toward independence and a clear goal of Gandhi’s in the campaign—but 17 years elapsed between the march and the British departure from India.

In other words, there is no short cut to social change; there is no easy way to stop war, greed, hate and lies. It will take time, and it will take creative, strategic thinking, and it will take sacrifice. It won’t be done, as Roy reminds us, through “holiday protests” (or even mid-week protests for which we have to take a few days off). While peace activists are in New York to say “No!” to the Bush administration, pacifists should also be there to create a climate that encourages people to want to listen to our perspective. In many successful campaigns of the civil rights movement it was understood that while they were confronting an immediate opponent, they were speaking to a larger audience. Nonviolent action confronts those least likely to change, but the confrontation itself sparks a dialog with people less diametrically opposed to the action’s aims. WRL needs to include that dialog in our strategy.

The antiwar movement also needs a win. As Roy said at the Social Forum, “This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It’s not enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it’s important to win something.” This is a basic principle of organizing: Winning something builds momentum by developing empowerment—and by showing power. Community organizers understand that; Gandhi understood it; the strategists of the civil rights movement understood it.

Peace movement activists, however, have not so clearly understood that basic requirement. And within the peace movement, WRL and other groups that oppose all war and want radical change have had an even more difficult time with strategic thinking, as if the radical nature of the change we want stood in the way of identifying concrete, short-term, measurable goals that move us toward that change.

The ABCs of Strategy
Yet the most inspiring and effective nonviolent campaigns have been those where people were working for radical change. Preparing students for the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Rev. James Lawson was clear the objective was to eliminate segregation, an extremely radical goal in the South. Desegregating lunch counters was a step towards a more comprehensive desegregating of society.

Feminist author and activist Charlotte Bunch wrote in “Understanding Feminist Theory” about the process we need to go through to develop strategies: describe, analyze, develop a vision and then develop a strategy that grows from the vision. This is the basis for creating goals.

In this country we too often go from recognizing a problem to picking a tactic, a problem the peace movement has not been immune to. Or we suffer from the “paralysis of analysis”, educating ourselves and others, but never getting to action. Without going through that process of describing the problem, analyzing why it exists, creating a vision of what we want and a strategy to get there, we can’t get there. We are products of the microwave culture, thinking we can change things quickly, forgetting the determination and patience of successful nonviolent campaigns and movements.

I am frequently reminded of that gap when talking to people about the listening projects I’ve been involved in. Listening Projects Community Surveys help activists to look deeper at an issue, develop a connection between those being interviewed and those listening and gathers information to base future strategy on. While activists often show great interest in the power of listening projects, they rarely pursue them after they hear how much organizing a listening project takes. Instead, they remain part of small groups of local activists who sponsor vigils and forums and wonder why so few people come, why things don’t change, and why more people don’t want to get arrested with them.

That’s because in the absence of good analysis, activists can take our own rhetoric for deeper truths. The antiwar movement marched in February 2003 to “stop the war.” When we failed to do that, much of the movement felt so disempowered that people didn’t know what to do. We had been working so frantically, there was not a strategy for what to do when the war started (except in a few notable places like San Francisco). We lost some of those who stood with us February 15 because they were silenced by the call to “support the troops,” intimidated by the patriotic fervor that comes with war. We had seen that phenomenon before, during the first Gulf War; yet where was our pacifist analysis and strategy to address it?

The Vision Thing
It is difficult to create a vision of what we want if we are stuck on focusing on what we don’t want. Without a vision, our actions are simply reactions, protests that can easily be disregarded. We spend little time and energy setting our own agenda. Perhaps some of the problem is that we want different things. Do we want reform or revolution? What is our vision of a world with economic justice? Do we want to end this war or all wars? What changes are we willing to make in our own lives to create a just and peaceful world? Gandhi’s constructive program began the process of creating a new society - communal unity, economic equality, creation of healthy living environments, opportunities and empowerment for those treated unequally, etc. People are doing a lot of constructive work, on anti-racism, alternative energy and economic justice, for instance. But there needs to be a clearer, common vision and programs that bring people together to work toward that vision, and an understanding of the links between the components.

We agree with Martin Luther King, Jr. that “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism.” He understood we cannot get rid of one without working on all.

From Analysis to Strategy
To develop an effective nonviolent strategy we need to develop strategic thinking skills. The first step is learning about earlier effective nonviolent campaigns (but remember that case studies are not blue-prints but inspirations). Organize a discussion group to study some (possibly using the resources named below); describe and analyze the present situation; and discuss what might work here and now.

Note that we need to develop those skills and those strategies together—first within our organization, then as a movement. It’s not effective if individuals just develop their own analyses; to build a movement we must develop a common analysis as well as a common vision to work toward.

And finally, of course, we must develop a common plan. In Roy’s Mumbai speech she suggested, “We have to become the global resistance to the occupation. Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for the Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons.” (As we know in War Resisters League, there are many forms resistance and noncooperation can take, including war tax resistance,) Roy goes on to suggest that “we choose by some means two major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq and shut them down. … It’s a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It’s a question of our desire to win.”

But “the desire to win” must be translated into the nuts and bolts of a nonviolent campaign: setting goals, developing creative strategies and employing a variety of tactics. A campaign is more than a group of projects strung together, or doing the same thing over and over (as we do in too many leafleting “campaigns”). The power of a nonviolent campaign comes in the creative combination of the components—research, education, training, working with allies, presenting alternatives and, finally, organizing actions ranging from the legislative and electoral through demonstrations and civil disobedience. A campaign should take people through processes of empowerment—the individual empowerment of the participants and the collective empowerment of the organizing groups. A progression of campaigns can move us toward social empowerment that leads to the social transformation we are working for. WRL’s current programs—both “Stop the Merchants of Death” and our youth counter-recruitment program —are efforts to develop just that kind of strategy. “Stop the Merchants of Death” seeks to build a campaign to resist the warmakers based on Dr. King’s call to oppose racism, materialism and militarism. Our counter-recruitment program engages the young people most targeted by military recruiters in a campaign to stop the recruiters in their tracks.

As we create campaigns, we have to be careful not to set goals that are so broad and shallow that they will not amount to change just to get more people on board. While pacifists can be quick to criticize goals they feel are too compromising to our beliefs, we have not been good at developing goals where we can experience victory and move forward. We must work to find that balance.

However, we are missing something important in our tool box. We need to learn to organize as well as mobilize. The peace movement does more mobilizing than organizing (organizing vigils, demonstrations and educational forums is not the same as organizing a movement). We mobilize the people who already agree with us; we have not developed real community organizing skills. Organizing brings people together to progress toward a political goal. To do that, we need to reach out to people, build relationships, listen and engage in real dialog. When people understand how they are affected by a problem, they are then more able to struggle against it. Organizing means bringing people together in that struggle. The most successful nonviolent campaigns find ways for those who feel affected to exercise their power.

So to organize against the Bush administration war, we need to provide opportunities for people to describe how the war affects them; we need to engage people in that discussion, that consciousness-raising process. And when they get to the point of realizing they can do something about it, a campaign should provide opportunities for involvement.

The Challenge
Howard Richards, a professor at Earlham College, addressed this challenge in a letter to recent graduates:

“I hope that as peace studies graduates you will not be tempted to focus too much on what the public is most ready to hear, but rather will use what the public is most ready to hear as hinges opening doors to transformation. People are ready to hear that the war has been mismanaged. They are ready to hear that some people are making private profits at the expense of other people’s deaths. As a somewhat non-resident academic idealist, I hope that the Peace and Global Studies graduates of 2004 will resist the temptation to focus exclusively on complaints like these against the government. They can be readily understood within the limits of paradigms that offer no solutions.”

That is our challenge, to find those hinges.

Joanne Sheehan, Chair of War Resisters’ International, is on the staff of WRL New England.