On non-violence: An Arendtian perspective on recent political movements

Abstract

This paper borrows from Arendt's analysis in her 1969 essay ‘On violence’ to make an intervention in the debates about violence that have arisen in relation to new political movements such as Occupy Wall Street. While Arendt was writing against a tendency to overestimate the political value of violence, this paper argues against a current tendency to overvalue non-violence in the same manner. In both cases the point turns on Arendt's argument that the true source of political power is not to be found in one strategy or another, but rather in collective action as such. The ultimate value of Arendt's account of politics as collective action is that it shows how freedom can be operative in conditions of constraint, which is particularly relevant for contemporary movements facing state repression.

Keywords:

• violence
• Arendt
• politics
• protests
• Žižek

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Maxwell Tremblay, Nick Driedger and Christian Stahl for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as Marek Hrubek and María Pía Lara for the invitation to first present these ideas at the Conference of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Prague, in May 2012.

Notes

¹This is the corollary of the view that political order is maintained through violence – that sovereignty is a monopoly on the use of force within a given territory. This is also a view that Arendt rejects, as will be discussed in the next section.

²Invoking the Greek polis, Arendt (1969, 40) remarks that ‘if it were true that nothing is sweeter than to give commands and to rule others, the master would never have left his household’.

³The main websites were occupywallst.org and nycga.net. The most-followed twitter accounts were @OccupyWallSt and @OccupyWallStNYC, each with well over 100,000 followers.

⁴This was done by various individuals, and usually broadcast on globalrevolution.tv and ustream.tv. One of the more celebrated independent journalists to emerge was Tim Pool, who was profiled early on in Time magazine.

⁵These varied from the academic to the journalistic, with writings by both activist members of OWS and established intellectuals. Some titles include the Occupied Wall Street Journal, Tidal, the Occupy Gazette, and the Journal for Occupied Studies.

⁶New York, Oakland, Portland, Denver, and Salt Lake City were all evicted within hours of one another, leading some to speculate that some coordination had taken part. See, for example, Denvir (2012).

⁷Hedges controversially identified the Black Bloc as a distinct political group with a given membership, rather than a mere tactic deployed at various times by various people.

⁸This comment was recently posted on a Facebook page organizing a gathering on 17 September, the one year anniversary of OWS: ‘When they begin to arrest you – sit down and politely refuse to comply. Loudly say that you are not resisting … Expect agents provocateur to cause trouble. Isolate them, and make it known they are not part of Occupy’, https://www.facebook.com/events/374004669301652/permalink/383554718346647/.

⁹Many of the spaces occupied in New York were privately owned public spaces – a fact that had nothing to do with their targeting by protestors, who only discovered this afterward. The spaces – both indoor and outdoor parks and plazas – were owned by building developers, but mandated to be open to the public, as part of a deal brokered with the city in exchange for greater development rights (colloquially referred to as ‘air rights’). Because they were privately owned, the owners had some leeway in terms of what kinds of rules they could impose in the spaces. One area, an indoor plaza on Wall Street that was favoured by Occupiers as a meeting place once Zuccotti was evicted and the weather turned colder, soon bore a sign banning ‘loitering’ and the ‘excessive use of space’. Occupiers did respect those regulations that actually had some concrete meaning, as when they began using the people's microphone in response to a ban on amplified sound, as noted earlier.

¹⁰At a march in New York on 30 May 2012 in solidarity with striking students in Montreal, one protestor attacked another for tipping over orange traffic pylons (author's own eyewitness testimony).

¹¹Even the Egyptian revolution involved massive strikes in response to economic reforms. The protests in Tahrir Square were largely organized by the April 6 Movement, which was named for, and grew out of, a 2008 strike in El-Mahalla El-Kubra.

¹²These were the recommendations of the ‘National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform’, which was created by executive order rather than a congressional vote. The commission's recommendations were not, in the end, implemented all-at-once, although the policy direction of the Obama administration has been made clear.

¹³I am not claiming that no one who objects to austerity is participating in official politics anymore (we saw the contrary with the election results in Greece and France on 6 May 2012); I am just describing what is behind the street protests.

¹⁴The woman in question was Amanda Hiscocks.

¹⁵This was Arendt's nightmare, insofar as she wished to keep the realm of politics separate from the realm of ‘necessity’, in which she included economics. I address this towards the end of the paper.