A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict
By Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall
Palgrave, 2000
505 pages., $35.00 (pb)
REVIEW BY JONATHAN STRAUSS
A Force More Powerful tells a lot of history: general strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, sit-ins, and civil organisation across nearly a century, from the 1905 Revolution in Russia to the movement against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. It does not tell this history well, however.
The principal argument of the book is that "nonviolent sanctions, if used effectively, can end oppression and liberate nations and peoples, and they can do so with less risk and more certainty than resorting to violent revolt or terror" — that is, such action is an effective strategic choice, not a moral preference.
To back this it presents a mountain of evidence which shows mass civil disobedience has resisted military occupation and fought for democratic rights and suggests many, perhaps even most, people will become involved in movements for change through such action.
The book fails to show, however, that if the mass of people determine on revolutionary aims, they must not also pursue these "by any means necessary" including armed defence against counter-revolution.
The two authors, Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, claim "the work of nonviolent movements in the 20th century led to independence for India, equal rights for African Americans and [black] South Africans, democracy in Poland, and the removal of dictators in the Philippines, Chile and a litany of other countries. In each of those conflicts, a relationship existed between the means of struggle and the political outcome. But never in the postwar period did a military insurrection or violent coup extend freedom to the people in whose name power was taken."
These claims, however, exaggerate both the specifically non-violent character of the struggles they celebrate and what those struggles won.
Even Ackerman and DuVall assess the results of the 1930-31 Congress campaign of civil disobedience against British rule in India as "decidedly mixed". They record that independence came only after the "mostly spontaneous and violent" Quit India popular rebellion, the popularity of the pro-Japanese Indian National Army, and opposition to continuing colonial rule from the United States during the 1940s.
In the fight against racism in the US, a more militant line extended, from Malcolm X to the Black Panthers, alongside the advocates of civil disobedience. In both South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s and the Palestinian intifadas the mass street fighting by young people sparked the broader resistance. The decisive defeat of the South African army in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale by the Cuban and Angolan soldiers and Namibian and African National Congress guerillas in 1988 was also significant in the fight to end apartheid.
Significantly, none of the struggles discussed by Ackerman and Duvall secured the economic and social freedom of the peoples involved.
India is politically independent, but it is a Third World state. Equality in legal and political rights for the racially oppressed peoples of the US and South Africa (and Australia) has not secured their social equality; these societies' racism persists.
When the Polish people cast off their bureaucratic dictatorship they did not replace it with their own power: instead they have joined the people of the Philippines and Chile in enjoying the rampant economic inequality and drive to privatisation and profit that marks the rule of international capital.
The oppression of capitalism is the black hole of A Force More Powerful: in this sense the book, only published last year and to be featured through a three-part television series to air weekly from September 23 on the ABC, is already out of date, because it is imbued with the capitalist triumphalism of the 1990s.
Hidden behind its references to "free economy" and the "great democracies" which "put an end to the rule of man over man" is its acceptance of the dominant force in the world, global capitalism.
Ackerman and DuVall offer a paean to corporate globalisation — "commerce, communications and transportation are evolving into a single world system for exchanging ideas, talent, money and resources — and that is why decisions in London or Los Angeles, and markets in New York or New Delhi [sic], can constrain government almost anywhere" — and never ask who rules this system.
For these two it is enough, and indeed all that is possible, that political autocracy and corruption are apparently under assault: in an echo of the talk of the "end of history", the two write "the cause worldwide that drew millions into the streets nearer the century's end was about more than ending something evil — it was about seizing or defending democracy".
A Force More Powerful sheds little light on the needs of the struggle for liberation from the economic compulsion and social oppression capitalism enforces on workers and peasants, on the poor and on poor nations alike.
It is blind to the political character of capitalist rule: the minority ruling class will concede various democratic forms so long as this means they continue to rule, but will mobilise its apparatus of repression to prevent the overthrow of its rule.
Such a determined and armed counter-revolution must be suppressed: in a revolution, convincing or shaming the capitalist class through nonviolent action, as the two authors suggest, is no longer possible, because its existence as a class is the issue.
According to Ackerman and DuVall, however, armed liberation movements have not produced freedom and, indeed, "the 20th century's avatars of violence never developed a systematic understanding of how their chosen sanctions — firefights, bombing, street battles, or terror — were supposed to replace the old forms of authority with new opportunities for freedom".
Citing principally the examples of Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam, they say "substituting violence by a few for participation by all" has been judged harshly by history because "arms alone are rarely a means of change".
What then are we to make of the two authors' cryptic remark: "Never mind that violent victors had not always won because they used violence"?
Marxism argues revolutionary activity must be political, in its broadest sense, rather than solely military. It intends to win a majority on the basis of their own experience to see the necessity for revolution and what revolution requires. In the course of a revolution, consciousness and organisation, not arms, are the basic and principal means of struggle.
Part of the experience of the masses in revolution, however, is of acts such as attacks by officers and exiles, and assaults by imperialist armed forces. These have helped convince working people they need to be armed as well as politically active in order to defend their interests.
The tirade of abuse and extremely selective citation of facts Ackerman and DuVall present against the Bolsheviks and the 1917 Russian revolution is no substitute for their failure to examine and compare the experiences of the Russian masses in 1905 and 1917 in order to see what they learnt from this: an armed people replaces the rule of a minority, if not yet with freedom, then with the right of the majority of the people to rebel against tyranny and decide their historical fate.