violence / revolution

In their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan compare over 300 violent and non-violent struggles in the 20th century to conclude that non-violent civil disobedience is about twice as effective as armed revolution.

To say “violence has no place in politics” while ignoring systemic harm is to defend the status quo, not peace. True nonviolence would mean dismantling the conditions that make desperate, explosive violence seem like the only option left.

I have learned to take the construction work of organizing as it comes, creating things that I believe have to exist, and working with others to build containers, organizations, and projects that I believe the world needs. I am always dreaming up new ideas and making things, because the world is not transformed primarily by what we think of it.

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eople in left-leaning movements know full well that some of their own supporters are undermining message discipline and strategic imperatives.

Riots and assassinations aren’t the start of conflict — they’re the bloody finale of years of systemic harm.

We can't change the world by focusing only on dismantling, we have to really build up the alternative and show that it can work in a different way, and radicalize people, not through convincing them of the rightness of an ideology, but through their lived experience of true participation, of the collective power of livelihood in a non-capitalist... See more

Regimes don’t fall by themselves, and bullies never respond to reason. They can only be defeated by people, events and circumstances they have lost control over.

Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail—including the Women’s March and the pro–gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators—they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.