I quite enjoy reading politics, today i’ve written about passive resistance in politics. It’s quite long, hope you find it interesting.
Nearly all authors of modern political thinking belong to the western tradition. Almost all are dead white men or dead white women in some cases. Even Marx and Engels who wanted to overturn the entire social order of their societies, were doing it from within the intellectual tradition that had created that order. For them, the Scientific Revolution, a series of ideas during the 17th, 18th and 19th century, had built a world that they wanted to sweep away.
Mohandas Gandhi born in British India lived a life that was a long way removed from the kinds of lives of western political thinkers. His thoughts and ideas are also just as far removed from many of the rationalist mechanical modern ideas that run through many Western thinkers. But even Gandhi does not come from completely outside the world the he is about to come to reject. Gandhi was a lawyer, he trained to become a lawyer at UCL in London. He was called to the bar at the inner temple. Gandhi was widely read in Western literature, including ancient literature, his starting point was Plato. He supplemented all of those things he was going the bring outside of the West, to a deep understanding of the West itself.
In 1909 during a sea voyage from London to South Africa, Gandhi wrote ‘Hind Swaraj’. In it Gandhi laid out his political ideas. He tried to warn people involved in the various different movements pushing for different forms of Indian independence from British Imperial rule, not to fall for he saw as the great lie.
Gandhi saw modern political life as the organisation of modern societies through politics, as inherently double, two faced. He didn’t think you could compromise with an idea that had two faces to it because he thought inevitably bad would drive out the good. What Gandhi was warning against was attempts to compromise with the British.
British imperial rule was absolutely that two faced version of modern politics. It was coercive, oppressive, exploitative dressed up in the language of law, the law in which Gandhi himself was trained. British ideas of the common law and the rule of law. Imperial British brutality was dressed up in the language of representation, it was dressed up in the language of security and freedom.
The British imperialists liked to believe of their imperial rule, that it was, on some level, good for the people over whom they were ruling. This good was expressed in the familiar language, of the good side of modern politics which for Gandhi was a lie. Trying to cherry pick bits of British rule that might work better if the British could be got rid of, to construct a hybrid Anglo-Indian form of politics that took the best of Indian civilisation and Indian traditions and married them to best of British politics and British rule wouldn’t work. The hybrid wouldn’t work because the hybrid itself was a manifestation of what was wrong with modern ideas of politics, mainly the mechanical and artificial nature of politics.
The double-ness wasn’t dissimilar to Hobbs-ian double-ness. It was having constructed something artificial, with a deliberate purpose which was coercion and then presenting it as though it was something organic, or natural, or true. Gandhi rejected it.
Gandhi had a sense of the power of that mechanical, artificial society. The world that had been brought into being by the marrying of the power of the modern state with the power of modern productive industry.
For Gandhi politics was not about class, it was about the individual. In the Marxist idea of politics, the individual is always transcended by the class to which he/she belongs. For Gandhi the individual was the transcendent unit of political life. And we were as individuals at some level responsible for our fate. For Gandhi the idea of Indian independence rests on an idea of personal independence and personal self-sufficiency. Politics is nothing for Gandhi, if it can’t be rooted in what individuals decide themselves.
At the same time Gandhi was not a deep internationalist, he contrasted what he saw as the virtues and values of Indian civilisation against what he saw as the defects of Western civilisation, which was artificial and mechanical. Indian Civilisation, for Gandhi, which at least had the possibility of being something else. He did reject the idea that political representation, the foundational idea of the modern state, is the basis for a sustainable model for modern politics. But his rejection of it was explicit, because it was too mechanical.
Gandhi rejected political representation because it was a lie on who we are as individuals. The representative in parliament by definition was living a lie. Because that that representative could not be true to him/herself, because that representative had come to serve what Gandhi had some to know as, the party machine. Politics itself had become mechanical, politics itself had become a kind of clanking machine. And it was therefore in its own terms no different from the other kinds of machines, that Gandhi thought detached people from their true selves. Gandhi was suspicious of modern conceptions of the law and the rule of law in which he was trained. It was all detached from genuine human experience because it was all a kind of representation of an artificial form of life of which politics stood at the apex.
Gandhi thought that political representatives were equally either deceived or self-deceived. They either knew but they didn’t believe what they were saying, and therefore couldn’t be trusted. Or they didn’t know, and they didn’t believe what they were saying, in which case they truly were fools.
For politics to be genuinely sustainable, there had to be some way to emancipate it from those forms of political representation which were a lie. Politics for Gandhi needed to be honest, it needed to be truthful, ideally it needed to be grounded in face to face human interactions. Politics could not function if individuals’ hand over their judgement to representatives to take decisions on their behalf, therefore politics could not function on Gandhi’s terms on the basis of the modern state.
Above all Gandhi believed in non-violence. He believed in the possibility of uncompromising political change, he believed in a possibility of overturning an established order and replacing it with something which could be true to itself and therefore in its own terms was quite new. He believed in the idea of Indian independence which would be in its own terms, a kind of revolution. But he did not believe that the way to get there was to take the force, power of the state, its coercive power and turn it against your enemies. He did not believe in violent revolution.
Gandhi’s idea of non-violent change, sometimes called passive resistance, what we today call civil disobedience, was integral to his thought because it integrated the different parts of his thought.
The goal was not to turn the coercive power of the state against itself or against your oppressors. The goal was to invite the coercive power of the state to reveal itself for what it really is. It was to remove the veil that’s overlaying the power of the state in the name of liberal or other freedoms and reveal its coercive heart; and then to see if the coercers can live with that. It doesn’t matter if they are either deceivers or self-deceived, either way, if you can show them what it is that they do in such a way that it is no longer possible to hide it’s true character, you put the question back to them. If this is politics, if this is the power of the state, how can you live with it?
It was a completely different understanding of politics from its western traditions. Hobbs, Constant, Marx and Engels all accepted that at the heart of politics there was some form of coercion. In rejecting the double-ness of the modern state, one of the things Gandhi rejected was the idea that coercion can coexist with any higher or nobler ideals and not contaminate them. He didn’t think it was possible to separate out the means and the ends. You couldn’t for instance have terror in the name of peace, or fear to drive out fear, or force to produce security and order. Because the means will contaminate the ends and the terror, fear, force will always be present in whatever it is that they produce.
The only genuine sustainable forms of political change have to make sure that the means match the ends. If the ends are independence, autonomy, both for a society and for the individuals who live in it, then the means have to reflect independence, autonomy, both on the part of the movement and the individuals who make up that movement. People have to do it for themselves and they have to do it in a way that does not replicate the thing that they are trying to replace. So passive resistance means allowing the state to do its worst and accepting it, welcoming it, in some respects, bringing it on to yourself in order to show it for what it is.
Gandhi came to embody that kind of politics. In his own life this was through hunger strikes, marches, in which he put his own body on the line, in which he was himself oppressed, but in which his followers were also oppressed, beaten, killed, arrested, jailed.
He was also embodying a different kind of political representation. This was not leaderless politics, Gandhi was the leader of a movement, he was one of the most important leaders of the 20th century. But this was not leadership by representing decisions in behalf of others by making choices in the name of the people who have decided, for whatever reason, that they don’t want to make those choices themselves. This was representation in the form of living the life that you expect other people to live too. It was the literal embodiment of the movement, to be Gandhi and to represent, meant to do what you expected other people to do in the hope that they would do what you showed yourself capable of doing. That is nothing like Hobbs-ian representation, that is nothing like parliamentary representation, that it nothing like our understanding of representation.
Gandhi’s politics was profoundly political, it had a fundamental political goal, Indian independence, and it worked. If a political movement is tested against its effectives at meeting its goals, this was one of the most effective political movements of the modern age. The British, not exclusively because of Gandhi, he was not sufficient, but he was almost certainly was necessary. The British eventually quit India after a decade long campaign the wasn’t limited to, but included, widespread campaigns of passive resistance and civil disobedience led by Gandhi. This had the effect of revealing to the perpetrators the oppression, what they would have to do to maintain that oppression and put to them the question of whether it was worth it.
It was extraordinarily effective, but it also had its limits. It is political all the way through, but you can’t do all politics through passive resistance. This is not because politics has to be violent, but there are certain forms of violence that tend of overwhelm it. Gandhi discovered that at the end of his life, when Indian independence was achieved, simultaneously unleashing enormous amount of violence. The violence surrounding partition which Gandhi deeply regretted, which he tried stop by personal example through his final hunger strike. He tried to use his own body as a weapon against the violence and it wasn’t enough. At the same time the state born after independence was a Hobbs-ian state. It conformed to the pattern of modern states, having at its disposal extreme instruments of coercion. It was there to keep the peace, it fought wars, it defended India and it embarked on the traditional modern state path of development and modern state production and economic growth.
Gandhi had a vision of a different kind of state. Borrowing on some western ideas, some modern, some ancient and marrying them with some non-western ideas. To produce something new, not something hybrid, not something double but a notion of a kind of politics which could be more local, more individual, more face to face, would be concentric, smaller communities feeding into larger ones in which the representation would not be double but would move up through the chains of communication and human experience.
Gandhi’s politics reached its limits towards the end of his life. However, it’s also had a life of its own that’s lasted after him. Gandhi has been influential in many political movements in the second part of the 20th century. He was the inspiration for Martin Luther King and for his campaign of passive resistance and civil disobedience against Jim Crowe in the American South, and it worked. Gandhi was in part, one of the inspirations for Nelson Mandela. Mandela was not an advocate for non-violence, the ANC advocated violence against its oppressors. But when Mandela was jailed, one of the lessons he took from Gandhi was that it really matters how you took to your punishment. Not to welcome or bring the punishment on yourself, but to resist it, and accept it, when it comes. If you can accept your punishment with a sort of dignity, if you can endure it in a way that shows your oppressors just what it is that they’re doing to you. In a way that reveals the true nature of the power you are facing, you can win. Mandela did win, and he won, in part, because of the ways in which he lived his punishment.
Gandhian politics is on display in movements around the world today, his words and ideas live on. But Gandhian politics doesn’t always work. The fundamental political relationships that underpin successful campaigns of civil disobedience are three way not two way.
Passive resistance is not just about the relationship between the oppressed and their oppressors. It’s not just about what happens when a group of people march on a line of policemen, confronting those policemen not with arms but just with their bodily presence and then if necessary, invite the police to attack them. There’s a third party in all successful campaigns against civil disobedience and they are the watchers or the audience. For a campaign to be successful you need a relationship between the oppressors, the oppressed and the people looking on. It is often the people looking on who are the crucial actors, they are the ones whose minds have to be changed. What is being revealed is not necessarily to the oppressors that they are oppressors. Because they may know that, but often reveal to the people, the audience. The audience are often the people, particularly in the complex representative relationships of the modern states, in whose name this is being done. People who would not like to think that they are involved in the business of raw coercion or physical coercion. People who would not like to think that political order is ultimately built on a lie because the lie is that it’s not actually about the rule of law, it’s not actually about rights and benefits and freedoms, it’s just about who has the stick and who is willing to use it. It is those people watching on, the audience, the people in whose name this is being done, who can be shamed and be shocked, and can be forced to face up to the fact that their comfortable illusions do not stand up when people march peacefully in the face of people with guns, sticks and dogs.
In the case of Gandhi and the British, it was in part to try and shock the British in India, but it was at least as much to shock the British in Britain, the people in whose name this empire was being ruled. It was to shock the people on whose behalf these choices were being made and to let them know that the only way they could sustain this rule would be to give up on the lie and to ask them if they were willing to sustain that.
In the case of Martin Luther King and his campaign against racial oppression in the American South, it was only in part designed to shame people in the South and to make them realise just what it is that they had brought into being by allowing this system to survive for decades. Only in part because it seems unlikely that so many of them were deceived to live in that system, to run it, to operate it, is probably to know how it works. Martin Luther King’s campaign was also designed to let people in the North know what kind of country they lived in, because it was one country, at least in theory, if not in practice. People in the North, people who voted in congressional and presidential elections alongside within the same state as people from the south, they were in part responsible for this order persisting too. The pictures that came from the American South, they were broadcast on TV, of just what was necessary to uphold that form of racial segregational order was so powerful because of the shame that they produced in watchers in the North.
In the case of Nelson Mandela, his dignity was powerful in South Africa for his followers, but it was most powerful in the international community. It was global opinion, the international audience, people who thought the arphitaid regime didn’t have much to do with the that made the national campaign the free Mandela and international one. It was inspired by his character and dignity and made people outside of South Africa feel the shame.
In the end it can be the pressure of the audience, the watchers that moves the oppressors. It doesn’t move them in feeling, it moves them in practice. They can’t withstand it, they have too much to lose. Modern movement such as occupy movements show that three-way relationship is hard to maintain as the movement becomes broader and its goals become wider. Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela wanted to overturn an oppressive political order and replace it with something that for the people who had to live under it was emancipation. Unless you can separate out the oppressed, the oppressors and audience passive resistance finds it much harder to achieve it goals.
As a model of politics, passive resistance become harder to achieve the broader the goals, the wider the groups of people who are caught up in it and harder it is to tell who is playing which part.
What’s interesting is what happens when passive political movements fizzle out and the people within those movements become increasingly disillusioned with centre line politics instead seeking seek alternative far left or far right ways of trying to achieve their goals or making their voice heard.
Caronalog 