[ Establishment pundits love to cite Martin Luther King as a way
to delegitimize militant protests and shame unruly protesters. But to
him nonviolent action could coerce ruling elites into conceding to
demands for justice.] [[link removed]]

MARTIN LUTHER KING KNEW THAT THERE’S NOTHING PEACEFUL ABOUT
NONVIOLENCE IF YOU’RE DOING IT RIGHT  
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Alexander Livingston
June 10, 2020
Jacobin
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_ Establishment pundits love to cite Martin Luther King as a way to
delegitimize militant protests and shame unruly protesters. But to him
nonviolent action could coerce ruling elites into conceding to demands
for justice. _

Martin Luther King Jr addresses a crowd from the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial during the August 28, 1963, march on Washington, DC.,

 

Political repression in the United States is at once spectacular and
banal. We’ve seen both in recent weeks, as militarized police
forces conduct
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campaigns
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US civilians and brutality is paired with calls for protesters to
remain peaceful.

When ruling elites call for peace, they are demanding docility. When
they cynically cite decontextualized Martin Luther King Jr quotes and
invoke the rights of “peaceful protesters” while denouncing
actually existing protests, they announce that no effective protest
will ever be peaceful enough to meet their approval. Ruling elites,
pundits, and police use the rhetoric of nonviolence to discipline
protesters and shift responsibility for state violence onto its
victims.

We shouldn’t fall into their trap. There’s nothing peaceful about
nonviolence if you’re doing it right.

Nonviolence is not about playing by the rules, working within existing
institutions, or keeping protests unthreatening. Nonviolent direct
action is _direct action_. It’s not saintly self-sacrifice or
high-minded moralizing but a theory of power and a repertoire of
tactics for using it. Effective nonviolence is about wielding
collective action to disrupt the normal workings of society.

Martin Luther King Jr knew this
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than most. While the pundits are right that King regularly rejected
rioting as a tactic, he defended rioters themselves as expressing
justified anger against a racist, capitalist order that had left
inner-city black residents brutalized, exploited, and abandoned. To
him, rioting was anger burning hot; the kind of radical reconstruction
of American society he envisioned required it to burn long.

It’s true that King thought nonviolent direct action, militantly
pursued, was morally superior to rioting — but more important, he
thought it represented a more promising path to directly confronting
the American state. Nonviolence, as he came to conceptualize it by the
end of his life, was a means of channeling popular rage into a
fighting force that could pose a more direct threat to the Johnson
administration.

To articulate this vision of “mass civil disobedience,” King
looked to the labor movement. In his 1966 president’s report to the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
[[link removed]], King cited the
strike
[[link removed]] by
thirty-five thousand airline workers that summer as an example of
nonviolent power in action. Bosses and politicians, he insisted, had
to be coerced into concessions. Airline workers leveraged this kind of
coercion through coordinated and disciplined non-cooperation, winning
the first multi-carrier contract.

King’s report embraced United Automobile Workers (UAW) president
Walter Reuther’s definition of power as “the ability to make the
largest corporation in the world, General Motors, say yes when they
want to say no.” Workers force managers to do what they don’t want
to do by interfering with their ability to profit. It is labor that
keeps the machines running, and when workers refuse to work, the
machines don’t run. Strikes wield power over employers by disrupting
employers’ power at its source.

Mass civil disobedience, as King came to envision it in the Poor
People’s Campaign
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was a similar program of nonviolent coercion, forcing the federal
government’s hand in pursuit of a radical transformation of American
society.

The ongoing wave of protests is a testament to the fragility of state
power when people collectively withhold their cooperation. President
Donald Trump’s calls to “dominate” the protests have proven
futile, as intensifying repression further delegitimizes the current
system. The police riots have made the protests spread like wildfire.
Even property destruction and looting haven’t stoked a backlash.
Quite the opposite: polls register wide support for the Black Lives
Matter movement’s goals.

The pandemic has clearly created the opening for this nonviolent
insurgency. The attack on public health, the abandonment of poor
people and people of color, and massive unemployment have thrown the
pathologies of the US political system into stark relief. Millions of
jobs lost and furloughed are keeping protesters on the street, and the
shutdown’s prior disruption has likely lowered
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of constant agitation. This confluence of factors has made it possible
to forge collective rage into multiracial solidarity for truly massive
civil disobedience.

Elites are desperate to delegitimize this anger, again by invoking
King and the myths of nonviolence. Civil, pacified protests are what
they want. But while King relied on a Christian language of love to
translate Gandhian _satyagraha_ into the political vernacular of the
black social gospel tradition, he never doubted that anger could
become a creative force. There is solidarity to be found in
recognizing anger, and power in using it to sustain collective
resistance in the face of violence. What he cautioned against was
anger that clouded judgment and descended into the kind of reactive
lashing out that the state thrives on.

Holding anger without violence, then, isn’t about speaking in a
civil tone; it means using anger to energize collective resistance
without being consumed by it. As Barbara Deming has argued
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a fantasy of spiritual _purity_; it is a means of angrily fighting
back against violence with _poise_.

Reflecting on the lessons of the airlines strikes, Martin Luther
King remarked [[link removed]]:
“Influence and moral suasion may continue to prepare the climate for
change, but there must be present an actual power for change if we are
to achieve our purpose.” The challenge posed by King’s vision of
mass civil disobedience is how to convert outrage and anger into
power. Facing up to this challenge today shouldn’t be an occasion
for liberal moralizing or lecturing activists; it is a provocation to
acknowledge what peace really demands.

The peace that nonviolent struggle aims for isn’t found by
accommodating ourselves to the status quo, playing by the rules, or
abiding by the norms of liberal propriety. Peace can only be won in
struggle against “the triple evils
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and militarism at the foundation of the rule of violence.

_Alexander Livingston is an associate professor in the department of
government at Cornell University and the author of Damn Great
Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism._

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