More power than we know

The
word "power" means so many different things. Sometimes we're
struggling against it, other times we're trying to grasp it. What kinds
of nonviolent power are we after? Howard Clark explores the
possibilities.

Nonviolent activists are people who put a disproportionate amount of
ourselves — our lives, our energy, our emotion — into trying to make a
difference to a situation. Osman Murat Ülke, the Turkish war resister
being imprisoned repeatedly, could probably avoid conscription quietly,
and could certainly avoid having to kill anybody. But instead he is using
all the power within him, and within his social base, to make a difference.

We don't choose a "personal solution", but seek a social
or even universal solution. And so, for instance, we get arrested and sometimes
put ourselves at physical risk to obstruct some death-dealing programme
— for just a few hours or even minutes — and we do the countless other
things we do which, when weighed in some grand balance, are socially marginal,
but which on occasions we will treat as matters of life and death.

Nonviolent action — be it civil disobedience or constructive work —
normally aims to be infectious. Ultimately we hope to be catalysts of a
more general empowerment, encouraging others not to behave as victims but
to assert themselves as active citizens, initiating a process of restructuring
social power from the bottom.

Nonviolent power is not about domination: it is the power to be and
the power to do. It combines a personal sense of power -power within
— with a will to collective action -power with - and a desire
to achieve certain ends - power in relation to.

Power within

It begins with yourself. Most people are resigned to events happening
"out there", and most also adapt to their own oppression. Whatever
leads nonviolent activists to rebel, to find their power within, and then
to keep going, can strike a chord with other people, and is worth discussing.
Our motives may combine heart and head, love and anger, frustration and
hope. Sometimes some people may find a good balance, but nonviolent activists
are not angels — we're rebellious humans, and can make life quite hard
even ~ each other. Any group would profit from brainstorming around two
questions:

• What moves us to go to such trouble?
• What keeps us going?

The personal stand — whether it's a matter of the everyday choices we
make about mundane matters such as food, clothing or transport, or an occasion
where you're risking prison or worse — is at the centre of nonviolence.
And occasions arise when we feel impelled to take a particular action regardless
of any calculation of effectiveness.

However, in working for change, our power within needs to be
accompanied by power with, joining with other people.

Indeed it can be hard to express our power within unless we
have a sense of connection with others.

Power with

The structures of a movement — and in the West I would particularly
point to the practice of organising in small groups -can play a vital part
in helping each of us find our voice, maintain our personal equilibrium,
and sustain ourselves in struggle. This means paying attention to relationships
and states in a movement. Working together we have many ways of overcoming
fear, inhibitions and other blocks to finding our power within, but
also of balancing the urge to push ourselves to the limit by caring for
each other and indeed by caring for ourselves. In hard times — when there
seems little cause for hope and we feel isolated — we need each other to
keep ourselves going. In general, movements tend to have a cyclical character:
activists get tired or stale, or have to meet other demands in their lives.
This might be inevitable, but movements can accelerate their own decline
and waste their own potential by neglecting their structures, by failing
to encourage participation at various levels and by failing to help people
adapt at times of change. For many of us, it is also important to demonstrate
alternatives to the top-down models of organising characteristic of conventional
power structures.

Identity bonds a movement, whether it's around values or around oppression.
Sometimes this takes external forms. For Indians, the wearing of handspun
clothes — khadi, what Nehru called "the livery of freedom"
— was a symbol of unity in struggle and of a self-discipline embraced willingly.
Sometimes it takes the form of self-affirmation. Slogans such as "black
is beautiful" and "glad to be gay" have had the power to
transform self-oppression. When a group of people — be it a gender or a
nation — has been marginalised and its achievements rendered invisible,
its sense of identity and of its own history and culture are vital in restoring
self-worth.

Identity can, of course, be double-edged. However, for movements based
on a philosophy of nonviolence, identity is not based on exclusion, but
on matching self-esteem with respect for others; or, in Gandhi's terms,
working for Independence while cherishing Interdependence. One source of
a movement's identity can be the ways it tries to do things, its methods
of action and modes of organising, their concern to be inclusive and participatory.

Power in relation to

In thinking about power with one must consider how we make alliances
and who with. For some, it is enough to combine power within and
power with, concentrating on building our own strength. But most
movements tend to engage in conflict: our very goals normally conflict
with ruling power structures and often with conventional attitudes.

So power with has to deal with strategic questions: from what
social base are we taking action? whose support can we enlist for particular
goals? which sites of power in society are most susceptible to pressure
for change?

Hence to power in relation to - in relation to our goals and
to the dominant power relationships. What leverage does a nonviolent movement
have against the policies of entrenched corporate and institutional power?
The classic nonviolent answer is ultimately "the power of a population
to withhold its cooperation" -and movements should never forget that
regimes rule because people obey. In the days when it was more common to
talk about "an alternative society", we would also talk about
making the state redundant — and that is still not a had perspective for
constructive action.

However, whatever validity these classic answers retain, they are too
sweeping to meet the needs of most movements. Major social change is rarely
achieved so simply. Instead there have to be combinations of methods: of
dialogue with defiance; of persuasion with pressure; of the self-organised
construction of alternatives with nonviolent resistance — and rhythms of
activity; of quiet periods with dramatic highpoints; of risk-taking with
caution.

A strategic grounding

Here it becomes vital for a movement to have a sense of its own effectiveness,
and that sense is best grounded in a shared strategy, with well-defined
themes and clear objectives.

Without this strategic grounding, it is easy to have delusions of effectiveness:

• to repeat actions or events because they "feel good", and
  then to discover that they've stopped feeling good, that you've created
  a charmed circle of people enjoying themselves but failing to reach out
  — to stretch themselves — or to make a difference to the situation;
• to rely on false criteria for evaluation, for instance quantifiable
  criteria - the number of participants, the amount of press coverage, the
  cost inflicted on one's opponent, the length of delay caused to a project,
  the funds raised;
• to get hung up on technique. There is also the opposite danger, of
  failing to recognise successes. If a movement's ultimate goal has yet to
  be gained, this does not mean that nothing has been achieved. Strategy
  needs to mark off subsidiary goals, steps in a process of change.

Movements also should be aware of the gap in time that usually separates
an action from evidence of its impact. This applies at both a micro- and
a macro-level. Movements may have declined by the time they are closest
to reaching their goals. Solidarnosc in Poland was a clear case: it had
helped set in motion a process of erosion of state power which led to the
regime stepping down later, but by that time the movement had lost its
dynamism.

We have, as Barbara Deming observed," more power than we know".
A central role for organisations such as War Resisters' International and
a paper such as Peace News is to reveal to ourselves and each other
the sources and extent of such nonviolent power — from personal through
group to the social level. And there can be few criteria more important
for evaluating a nonviolent movement than our effectiveness in unleashing
the nonviolent potential in our societies.