As Coal Boosts Mozambique, the Rural Poor Are Left Behind

By LYDIA POLGREEN, November 10, 2012

CATEME, Mozambique — When Augusto Conselho Chachoka and his neighbors heard that the world’s biggest coal mine was to be built on their land, a tantalizing new future floated before them. Instead of scraping by as subsistence farmers, they would earn wages as miners, they thought. The mining company would build them sturdy new houses, it seemed. Finally, a slice of the wealth that has propelled Mozambique from its war-addled past to its newfound status as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies would be theirs.

Instead, they ended up being moved 25 miles away from the mine, living in crumbling, leaky houses, farming barren plots of land, far from any kind of jobs that the mine might create and farther than ever from Mozambique’s growth miracle.

“Development is coming, but the development is going to certain areas and certain people,” Mr. Chachoka said, taking a break from trying to coax enough food from his scraggly field to feed his six children.

Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world, broken by a brutal colonial legacy, a 16-year civil war and failed experiments with Marxist economic policy. But it is also one of the so-called African Lions: countries that are growing at well above 6 percent annually, even amid the global downturn.

Mozambique is poised for a long economic boom, driven by its vast deposits of coal and natural gas. Vale, the Brazilian mining company, is planning to invest $6 billion in its coal operation near here, and other coal giants like Rio Tinto will soon begin producing coal in the Tete region of northern Mozambique.

Gas projects could bring in far more, as much as $70 billion, according to World Bank estimates. Mozambique’s location on Africa’s southeastern coast means it is perfectly positioned to feed hungry markets in southern and eastern Asia. These investments mean that income from natural resources could easily outstrip the outsized contribution foreign aid makes to its $5 billion annual budget.

The country has been growing at a rapid clip for the past two decades, in fact, since the end of its brutal civil war. Yet, after a substantial drop in the first postwar decade, gains against poverty have slowed substantially, analysts say, leaving millions stuck below the poverty line and raising tough questions about whether Africa’s resource boom can effectively raise the standard of living of its people.

“You get these rich countries with poor people,” said the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who recently visited Mozambique and has written on the struggle of resource-rich countries to develop. “You have all this money flowing in, but you don’t have real job creation and you don’t have sustained growth.”

It is a problem in resource-rich countries across Africa. In a largely upbeat assessment of Africa’s growth prospects, the World Bank said in October that rapidly growing economies powered by oil, gas and minerals have seen poverty levels fall more slowly than countries without those resources.

In some nations, like Gabon and Angola, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has even increased as growth has spiked.

Most of Mozambique’s people live in rural areas, and almost all of them depend on farming. Since commercial farming scarcely exists — 99 percent of farmers are smallholders — this means small-scale, family-based agriculture is the main, and in many cases the only, source of income for the vast majority of Mozambicans.

But the new gas and coal deals are wrapped up in multibillion-dollar megaprojects that rarely create large numbers of jobs or foster local entrepreneurship, according to an analysis by the United States Agency for International Development.

“The effects of megaprojects on living standards were found to be very modest,” the report said. “These projects, over all, have created few jobs. And linkages to the public budget via tax revenues have also been small because of tax exemptions.”

The plight of the people of this tiny, new village helps illustrate why Mozambique’s rural poor have been left behind. Far from the centers of economic power, dependent on rain-fed agriculture and ignored by the government, the rural poor languish even as the country surges.

The coal deposits in Moatize represent one of the biggest untapped reserves in the world, and the Brazilian mining company Vale has placed a big bet on it. But to get to the coal, hundreds of villagers living atop it had to be moved. The company held a series of meetings with community members and government officials, laying out its plans to build tidy new bungalows for each family and upgrade public services. As the prospect of huge new investments in their rural corner of the world beckoned, villagers anticipated a whole new life: jobs, houses, education, and even free food.

Things didn’t work out that way. The houses were poorly built and leaked when it rained. The promised water taps and electricity never arrived. Cateme is too far from the mine for anyone here to get a job there. The new fields are dusty and barren — coaxing anything from them is hard.

Before he moved, Mr. Chachoka made a tidy living. He had a small vegetable patch, his wife made bricks from mud to sell in a nearby town, and he could pick up occasional work as a laborer.

Mr. Chachoka’s move from peri-urban striver who salted away extra cash to struggling rural farmer who can barely feed his family is emblematic of a problem facing Mozambique and many other resource-rich but still deeply poor nations. Strong economic growth almost completely bypasses the rural poor, and in some ways can leave them even worse off. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” Mr. Chachoka said. “That is what is happening here.”

Some resource-rich countries in Africa have managed to turn mineral wealth into broad-based development. Ghana, which recently discovered oil, has won praise for its careful planning for poverty alleviation. Botswana’s diamonds have turned what was one of the world’s most impoverished nations into a middle-income country. Mozambique says it hopes to do the same, striking a balance between exploiting its mineral wealth and improving rural farming so that all Mozambicans benefit.

“We are very optimistic,” said Abdul Razak, deputy minister of mines and the man in charge of bringing Mozambique into compliance with international standards for transparency. “The level of poverty is going to be lower and the level of well-being is going to be higher.”

The government has signed up to be part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a program set up by Britain and supported by the World Bank to ensure that governments and companies are honest about revenues. The government also says it plans to invest the proceeds of mining into antipoverty programs and to help rural farmers.

But Mozambique’s experience also shows how hard it will be to get there. Even after two decades of strong growth, the country remains near dead last on the Human Development Index, just above Burundi, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By some measures, median income has actually shrunk, not grown, since its boom began.

The events that unfolded in Cateme explain why this is the case. Earlier this year, the people of Cateme sent a letter to local government officials and Vale demanding that their complaints about the resettlement process be addressed, threatening to block the railway line that passes through their village carrying coal to the port. When they received no reply, they occupied the rail line. The police descended upon them, chasing them away and roughing up those who resisted removal.

Eventually, contractors came to begin repairs and install electricity. The buzz of handsaws and hammers replaced the whir of cicadas, and new public buses made the markets of Moatize more accessible.

“There were some problems after the relocation,” said Vale’s country manager, Ricardo Saad, adding that the company was trying to fix them. Local people, he said, should not think that mining would bring instant prosperity.

“One of the things that we have to manage very carefully are the expectations,” Mr. Saad said.

Yet all the scaffolding and newly erected electricity poles aren’t enough for many residents of Cateme. The underlying lack of access to good land and water persist. Hopes that farmers would be able to sell their produce to feed the boom in this mining area have so far not been met: much of the food is flown in. The local chapter of the national farmers’ union is working with farmers to teach new methods that can improve their crops. But that will take time, said Charlene McKoin, an expert on farming who has been working on American-financed agribusiness projects in Mozambique for the past seven years.

“Farmers are used to burning land, throwing down seeds and praying for rain,” Ms. McKoin said. “The length of time to take someone from subsistence to commercial farming can take up to a generation.”

Megan Izen contributed reporting.

Excerpt from "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell on Socialism

"I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilised life -- snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. -- had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class- division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. . . One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all . . . In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. . ."

DANIEL SINGER'S PRIZE FOR 2011

This year’s question: “In some Western countries, right-wing populism has been able to channel much of the anger caused by the financial crisis and its effect. Why has the Left been marginalized? How can this be overcome?”

Preparing the ground: Left strategy

 beyond the apocalypse

Richard Swift

It is a deeply ingrained article of faith on the Left that a serious economic crisis provides political opportunities to challenge and maybe even overthrow the system. This belief in the radical potential of crises is deeply ingrained, despite a long history of critical literature debunking or at least showing the political limits of much ‘crisis theory’. Such literature makes the case that not only is capitalism remarkably resilient but that it uses such crises (natural as well as economic) to reinvent itself and open new avenues of profit. The economist Joseph Schumpeter’s legendary phrase about capitalism’s capacity for ‘creative destruction’ underlines this point.

Still, there is a certain logic to the idea that, when hedge-fund managers and bank executives cause speculative bubbles and make outrageous bonuses while at the same time creating economic instability that costs people their homes and jobs, popular disgust should ensue. Yet the economic crises since 2008 have not led to much in the way of gains by either the electoral or the popular Left in OECD countries. On the contrary, there have been conservative electoral successes in many countries (the UK, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Canada) and the rise of populist movements that are anti-immigrant (Europe) or anti-tax (North America). The Right seems at least as likely as the Left to benefit from chronic destabilizing crisis. What gives?

There are many answers to this question. Some have to do with the unpromising terrain on which the battles have been fought; others with miscalculation of the nature of populist movements and their appeal. But a central problem involves the way the Left has evolved in the post-Soviet period. It has split itself between a kind of tame Centre-Left mainstream and an extra-parliamentary movement that rallies around single issues and identity politics, usually within an overriding framework of anti-globalization.

Two Lefts

These two strains exist, by and large, in separate universes. The anti-globalization movement is heavily counter-cultural and militant but detached from and in opposition to the mainstream political culture. It is widely vilified by the media and mostly speaks to its own youth and minoritarian constituencies using its own media, particularly new technologies. It organizes around local projects as a basis for confronting repressive state policies such as cutbacks, pro-developer planning, fiscal manipulations and the assault on the economic and political rights of the marginalized. It comes together for major confrontations with the authorities (at times bringing tens of thousands into the street) to protest the major events on the calendar of the international political class—the G8, G20, the WTO, Davos, and the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF. It also comes together in the Social Summit movement born under the tutelage of the local Brazilian Workers Party in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil. Today, such summits move around the globe and have regional variations on most continents.

It is fair to say that the political orientation of this movement is anarchist, as seen in both its practical politics and its theory. On the streets and in the communities, it is a politics of anti-statist refusal—suspicious of any collaboration that could undermine (or integrate) the oppositional integrity of its politics. In confrontations, the anarchism appears most dramatically in the militant tactics of the ubiquitous Black Bloc, which engages in violent confrontation with police and low-level sabotage such as car-burning or window-breaking. This is not anarchism in the classical tradition but a kind of constantly recreated anti-authoritarian politics, drawing urgency from a sense that the human species is approaching a point of no return if the gospel of growth and domination continues. The mainstream, particularly since the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, has treated the extra-parliamentary Left as a kind of low-level terrorist threat.

This Left beyond professional politics has to be credited with keeping the dream alive. Its activists have been able to sustain the idea that there is a coherent alternative to the global market and its winner-takes-all ethos. The mainstream Left no longer believes in such an alternative and restricts itself to humanizing the worst ravages of the system. But the anti-globalization Left has evolved as a kind of ghetto politics cut off from the mainstream of the societies from which it arises. In this way it is not dissimilar to the counter-cultural New Left of the 1960s. This is partly the result of a kind of gap that manifests itself in everyday culture: dress, sexuality, music, food, habits of living, choice of drugs, concentration in particular neighbourhoods and so on. While such a gap is far from absolute, it is influential enough to curtail the movement’s popular sway. Elements of the movement can play into this through a rigid sectarianism used as ‘protection’ from the corrosive influence of mainstream culture. Tactics, too, can alienate those who feel insecure about their livelihoods. This can manifest itself, for example, in a lack of sensitivity in dealing with a whole range of workers whose incomes are tied to militarism and the carbon economy. Violence is also a key issue that scares off the confused and the fearful. These problems need to be much better thought through rather than dismissed as part of the ‘diversity of tactics’ argument that presently short-circuits debate in the movement.

The current Occupy movement can be seen as an extension of the anti-globalization movement. It is, in some ways, an advance on that movement in that it speaks more directly to the concerns of workers and middle-income people over the insecurities in their lives created by speculative finance. This is reflected in transnational polling that sees significant majorities of people sharing a sympathy with the Occupy protests. But the tactic of ‘occupying’ has a limited shelf life due to both participant and observer weariness and state repression. So today Occupy stands at a crossroads. Can it localize protests so it can draw strength by embedding itself in different communities? Can it move beyond a symbolic politics of outrage (the politics of anger at which the Right excels) to a coherent set of proposals for making people’s lives better? Can it overcome the fragmentation of issues (familiar to anyone who has attended Occupy protests) to focus public unease on such proposals?

Whatever the internal issues, the main reason for the ghettoization of the anti-globalization and Occupy resistance is the way it is framed by the media establishments of the various countries in which it operates. Some of this is ideologically inspired by the Murdoch world and its various clones. Elsewhere, it is lazy media scripts and frames that have been built into journalistic practice and portray resistance cultures as variously weird and deviant, threatening or amusingly esoteric. The notion of ‘political correctness’, promoted by media punditry, leads to a series of code words used to reinforce stereotypes of ‘pie-in-the-sky’, ‘impractical’ and ‘dangerously idealistic’ proposals that endanger ‘our way of life’. The use of low-level street violence by the movement is easily manipulated in the era of the ‘war on terror’ to strengthen the ghettoization of radical opposition.

It is hard to overestimate the political cost of this ghettoization. Potential constituencies for radical solutions are definitely growing: those who lose jobs and homes; those victimized by cutbacks in the publicly financed security net; those looking forward to unpromising lives or a dismal old age; parents who witness public education systems deteriorating; those shocked by the plunder at the top or alienated by the prostitution of public power to corruption and wealth. But such groups are easily pushed away from radical solutions by this ghettoization. Instead, they embrace the diverting solutions of the populist Right—anti-tax, anti-politics, anti-immigrant—or fall into a cynical apathy. The young, particularly males from poor and minority communities, may join street gangs that provide a pseudo-identity channelling resistance into street crime. Such gangs have grown exponentially, particularly in the most unequal of societies (the US, South Africa and Brazil are good examples).

The Centre-Left, in the meantime, in a desperate search for respectability and a share of power, has moved into the centre of the mainstream consensus. Such a consensus involves commitments to all the basic premises of the neoliberal order as it tries to ‘manage’ its way out of the crisis:

1) Prop up the banks and other economic predators who blew up the speculative bubbles that resulted in the 2008 financial meltdown;

2) Recast the fiscal structure of the state to pay down debt at the cost of social provision; and

3) Allow free rein to the coercive apparatus in the face of street resistance.

Both democracy and the welfare state are sacrificed in this process. This is perhaps most visible in Greece, where restructuring is being presided over by the Centre-Left PASOK party of the Papandreou clan. Resistance has been particularly fierce in Greece but this cycle of resistance and repression shows signs of spilling over into other debt-challenged economies such as those of Ireland and Spain (where the austerity regime is also presided over by the Centre-Left). Here is a potential source of both danger and hope. So far this resistance speaks the language and exhibits the values of the Left. But, with frustration and capitulation by the Left political class, this could shift.

The process of taking over responsibility for managing the crisis has taken different forms, depending on the political balance of forces and the electoral system that prevails. In Anglo-Saxon first-past-the-post systems, social democratic and left-liberal parties are transforming themselves into the ‘responsible’ option: managers of the system trying to distinguish themselves as a more ‘balanced’ alternative for administering the post-collapse austerity regime. Their values have become those of fiscal prudence and good taxpayer value, all within the context of some vague notion of ‘fairness’. In this camp we find New Labour in the UK, the New Democratic Party in Canada and the Australian Labor Party.

In proportional representation systems, this more frequently takes the form of a coalition politics of the Centre-Left, sometimes including Greens and various remnants of the former Communist Parties who ally themselves with more conventional mainstream parties. Italy’s Olive Tree coalition is a good example. They strive to distinguish themselves from their Centre-Right opponents with whom they rotate in and out of office. The distinction between Right and Left becomes ever more blurred for alienated voters who sense that something fundamental is wrong and needs changing—although they are not sure quite what.

Hollowing out democracy

The Left of professional politicians has become, in the eyes of much of the public, simply part of the establishment. Its language is often virtually indistinguishable from its rightwing rivals—austerity, balanced budgets, national security, the family, law and order. Its attempts to distinguish itself are dictated more by the daily news cycle than by any programmatic anchor. There is a perpetual search for a ‘gotcha’ moment that reveals the hypocrisies, double-dealing or, better still, corruption of opponents. It has ceased trying to lay the groundwork for any notion of a different society based on different values. The politics of personality and celebrity hold sway as it searches for that magic leadership personality with the charisma to win the popularity sweepstakes. This reflects internal changes within the mainstream electoral Left where the party membership—in conventions, in trade union affiliates, and even in the caucus of elected representatives—has less and less say over either party or government policy. In their place has grown up an inner circle that surrounds the leader—pollsters, advisors, key cabinet members, political consultants of all stripes—who provide insulation from popular pressure.

These changes go hand-in-hand with other long-standing tendencies in the political systems of ‘advanced’ societies. There has been an increasing centralization of power in the executive branch that plays itself out, whether in a parliamentary or a presidential system. The tendency towards a kind of ‘elected’ court system surrounding a celebrity leader reduces the points of popular pressure—or indeed of any input at all. There is a rotating class of professional politicians, varying from the Centre-Right to the Centre-Left, and often drawn from the same social circles, even the same families. This amounts to a profound hollowing out of democracy.

The result is a sense of dis-ease with politics as usual. This is referred to in political-science literature as ‘a crisis of legitimacy’. The symptoms are myriad, with the most obvious being the decline in electoral participation—a kind of ‘don’t vote, it only encourages them’ phenomenon. Trend lines for five major countries—Germany, the US, the UK, Japan and India—show (with some episodic interruption) steadily falling electoral participation between 1960 and 2010. This is replicated almost everywhere. There is a vast literature on the whys and wherefores of this crisis and on proposed solutions (better civics education, compulsory voting, e-voting) that seldom get to the root of the problem.

The underlying truth is that people feel unrepresented by their representatives and that there is little at stake for them in the electoral process. Even an election in which there are stark divisions must overcome a growing backlog of public cynicism and apathy. A popularly held view is that the fix is in and, no matter what the electorate wants, powerful interests behind the scenes will hijack policy and shape it in favour of their own interests. Much of this is a fairly accurate perception of a situation where the power of financial institutions and corporations amounts to a de facto veto over economic policy. The current fiscal restructuring and cut-back regime has the potential to cause unprecedented public outrage as tax money is used to bail out the main predator banks and financial institutions that caused the crisis. Everyone else is meant to pay for these bailouts through cuts in services, lost homes, layoffs and tax increases. While there have been a few sacrificial figures from the financial Žlite, as a whole it has been coddled and protected by the political class. Instead a politics attacking ‘special interests’ has diverted attention to the usual suspects—immigrants, refugees, unions, undeserving retirees, criminal youth and the marginalized who are dependent on welfare provision for their well-being.

The politics of anger

There was and still is genuine popular shock and anger that is by no means confined to the Left. By and large, the Centre-Right has proved more successful than the Centre-Left in mobilizing this alienation. Through the deployment of attack ads and dog-whistle politics (sending racially tinged or similarly socially unacceptable messages using code words), it has been able to mobilize a kind of ‘don’t get mad, get even’ message that disguises itself as a genuine challenge to politics as usual. This is largely sleight of hand—a kind of anti-politics run by and for professional politicians. It taps into the large reservoir of popular anger with real causes and diverts it into its own anti-tax, anti-spending, anti-immigrant, anti-crime message. The mix varies, depending on national circumstances and political cultures—more anti-tax in North America and more anti-immigrant in Europe.

The Centre-Left’s message of a ‘responsible’ and ‘balanced’ approach to managing the economic crisis is proving a poor match for the Right’s politics of anger. People intuitively realize the necessity of radical solutions to a profound ecological and economic crisis but end up settling for a sham radical rhetoric fashioned to speak to their anger. The Centre-Left finds its own ‘responsible option’ rhetoric turned against it and finds it is painted as being ‘responsible’ for a wasteful ’ tax-and-spend’ politics as usual (and, by default, business as usual). It is sadly ironic that the Centre-Left is now tarred with responsibility for the priorities of a system it came into being to oppose.

The populist far Right has undergone a still fairly modest but alarming rebirth by playing on similar themes and pointing out that their Centre-Right rivals aren’t really serious about stemming the immigrant tide, about overcoming the supposed’ Islamization’ of national cultures or, in more Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions, about reducing the size of the state. This last theme is a major trope of the US Tea Party movement, which seeks major surgery of government programmes. There has been an increased vote for the more classic fascist formations such as the National Alliance in Italy (12-15 per cent of the national vote) and the Front National in France, led by Marine Le Pen. Both of these are trying to reinvent themselves as modern populist parties, distancing themselves from their fascist roots. Both combine the immigrant/crime trope with a vague analysis of an unaccountable system where shadowy figures manipulate behind the scenes.

Surprisingly, the most successful of these far-Right movements have grown up in the northern European societies that helped pioneer the welfare state and where that state has reached its highest expression—the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Belgium. Interestingly, parties such as the True Finns or the Netherlands PVV (Party of Freedom) combine their anti-immigrant xenophobia with a much stauncher defence of the welfare state than the capitulation offered by the mainstream Centre-Left. The Centre-Left’s bankruptcy in this regard is starkly exemplified by the fact that one of their own (the controversial Dominique Strauss-Kahn) was appointed to head the International Monetary Fund, the main international enforcer of neoliberal discipline. DSK was, until recent philandering scandals, the French Socialist Party’s best hope to challenge Nicolas Sarkozy for President.

The European populist Right also draws electoral sustenance from its opposition to the way in which the unelected bodies of the European Union have run roughshod over popular votes against the EU Constitution and the Treaty of Lisbon. This is not just nationalistic, anti-European kneejerk but represents a widespread doubt about putting economic policy in the hands of the bureaucrats of a European Council and Central Bank so well insulated from the desires and needs of the European citizenry.

The Left faces a crisis of the ‘hollowed out’ in both the economy and the polity of ‘advanced’ societies. Production has been hollowed out by the shift of manufacturing to Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. The conditions of the working population in rich countries have been badly degraded. The decades-long stagnation of wages dates from the early 1980s and the galloping inequality that has accompanied it have scarred most Western societies. Back in the day when Henry Ford showed United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther his new mechanized assembly line and proclaimed proudly that he would no longer need UAW members to produce cars, Reuther’s response was simple—‘Who will buy your cars then, Henry?’ Reuther’s question not only remains unanswered but these days reverberates across the industrialized economies. Part-time employment and underemployment in the service sector (the ubiquitous McJob) as well as increasing actual unemployment are becoming the norm, particularly for young workers.

A crisis of demand and overproduction lurks beneath the surface. Over recent decades this has been masked by flooding the economy with credit, to the point that household debt has become unsustainable. In European societies, in particular, this hollowing out has been muffled by social spending. But this too is becoming unsustainable as public debt mounts and the equity of tax systems are eroded by the political influence and use of tax-avoidance strategies by top-tier income earners. Wealth has become securitized as well as globalized, as finance capital and institutional investors continue to play Russian roulette by blowing a series of speculative bubbles: first the high-tech industry, then real estate and now food supply are being manipulated in this way. Overlay this with a series of dire but mostly accurate predictions about the fate of the global ecosystem and what emerges is a perfect storm of instability.

The one thing that many, perhaps most, people have lost in this process is a sense of personal security—along with any real optimism about the future. For many people it’s a life under pressure: living on credit and holding down more than one job. Pension entitlements in both public and private sectors are under attack, making old age a potential nightmare. Addictions, family breakdown, unstable communities and the rise of religious cults—the list of symptoms of insecurity is sadly familiar. The World Health Organization continues to predict an epidemic of serious depression, estimating that 121 million people currently suffer from depression that is often related to issues of personal insecurity. Every year nearly 10 per cent of the US population aged 18 and over are diagnosed with a serious depressive disorder.

The political contenders and movements that offer some kind of renewed hope for a secure future are the ones most likely to hit a resonant chord. The danger here is that the politics of nostalgia will take hold. Such notions have purchase across the political spectrum. Many on the radical Left still fantasize about a night of the barricades to settle all accounts or a return to traditional working-class politics. Others dream of a centrally planned state socialism. For the US Tea Party and others of the libertarian Right, it is the return to a simpler time of small government and pure market relations that of course never existed. For the European populist Right, it’s a reassertion of national cultures and identities besieged by an influx of criminal immigrants who will work cheap. Thoughtful politics is further impeded when political cultures infantilize their citizenry and promote strong ‘father figure’ leaders as the hope for salvation. An underlying appeal in all of these is the security of a return to the familiar—a golden past which is largely mythical but still potent.

For political contenders who reject the current consensus of ‘tough love’ neoliberalism but realize there is no past utopia to return to, addressing popular insecurity is a serious, maybe the most serious, issue. They propose sustainability, participatory democracy, community empowerment, an economy not based on growth, reductions in production and consumption of commodities. Yet it becomes difficult for citizens to see past all this and feel a sense of hope in a future that is, at best, a set of loose ideas. People’s fears are more easily bent in a conservative direction, as George Bush understood when, at the dawn of the ‘war on terror’, he boldly proclaimed that ‘our lifestyle is not up for negotiation’. Yet that is exactly what needs to be done—we must renegotiate how we live with each other and our relationship to nature.

It is here that the ghettoization of the anti-globalization and other radical movements is proving so costly. It cuts the Left’s potential connection with those who live in the suburbs and shop in malls, whether it’s Walmart outside St Louis or Carrefour on the edge of Lyon. Our movements can’t afford to be cut off from the anxieties of the depoliticized, even if they are drugged by passive entertainments and consumer addictions. We cannot allow a cultural divide that prevents us from speaking to the worries of parents whose concern for the future does not extend beyond their own children. We cannot ignore the distress of workers facing layoffs from industries which are polluting and produce junk we don’t need. And we cannot dismiss those who are obsessed with public safety and who are willing to scapegoat anyone different as a threat to it. These people are not fascists but they are the potential supporters of a politics of fear and anger tapped by both Centre-Right politicians and rightwing populist movements. The culture of opposition too easily slips into a disdain for the mainstream that belittles people’s everyday problems as irrelevant to the big issues of species survival. Revolutionary Žlan (and easy arrogance) and an understandable anger sometimes blind radicals to the sources and potentials needed to make revolt successful.

Security—the Left can’t miss the boat

How to bridge such a gap? Aside from developing the obvious political sensitivities and antennae that would help to deghettoize radicalism, it might help to offer some simple programmatic ideas that have some chance of gaining popular traction. What is particularly needed is a way to address people’s sense of insecurity in a meaningful way. One of these, simple and easy to understand, is the notion of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) to provide for the basic needs of every person in the world. Amounts would, of course, vary depending on the cost of living in particular regions. National proposals for a basic social wage have been widely debated, particularly during the period of relative prosperity following World War Two. Such discussions have gone out of fashion since the 1980s and the rise of neoliberalism shifted the emphasis away from welfare and onto the disciplines of the market. There is not the space here to rehash the annual income discussion beyond making the observation that more than enough wealth is produced globally to achieve this goal—provided there were equity in distribution and the elimination of waste such as runaway spending on armaments, useless consumer production and speculative excess. BIG would not stand alone but would be a key part of an overall social wage that would also provide basic collective goods such as healthcare, education, affordable housing and healthy food. A recent champion of BIG was the late British political economist Andrew Glyn, who concluded his persuasive case with the following:

‘The fundamental point is that if the scheme discourages moderately the total amount of formal sector work, as well as sharing it out more equally, then these effects are wholly to the good. For many formal-sector jobs as presently constituted are loaded with severe “negative externalities”. They crowd out time for personal relationships and other activities which people find intrinsically satisfying, in contrast to the alienating aspects of much formal-sector work, and much of the consumption they finance imposes a heavy toll on the environment’ (Capitalism Unleashed, Oxford University Press, 2007).

Glyn realizes that BIG is a reform in the sense intended by AndrŽ Gorz (in other words, one that has the structural potential to fundamentally alter power relations) as it mounts a challenge to market-driven jobs and the growth paradigm that underpins the current model of domination and command. Gorz, in his Critique of Economic Reason, develops a convincing case focusing on the implications of BIG’s ecological impact:

‘Our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet-unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact…’(Critique of Economic Reason, Gallile, 1989).

On a more prosaic level, BIG offers a possible antidote to the insecurities that plague modern life. Debt-ridden consumerism could be replaced by a more relaxed existence where quality and reflection weigh heavier than quantity and addiction. Democracy too would benefit if the politics of fear and anger on which the Right feeds were diminished and there were more time for a thoughtful and engaged citizenship. Reducing the centrality of jobs in our lives would also curtail the influence of the authoritarian culture of wage labour and the anger and sense of loss many bring home at the end of the working day. Capital’s devil’s bargain has had us trading freedom for commodities. A significant social wage would allow us to regain some of that freedom. It has the potential to become a rallying demand for radical movements, allowing them to approach the hard-pressed mainstream with an attractive alternative to stagnant incomes and growing personal debt. The universality of the programme would help undermine the way in which the populist Right rallies support against means-tested piecemeal welfare targeted at groups such as poor immigrants and people of colour.

Any renewed radical politics needs to be one of common dreams that moves beyond the particularist claims of identity and other partial causes, no matter how important it remains to address these. In recent years a few candidate movements have shown staying power and popular resonance because of their promise not just to stop existing evils but to stake a claim for something better—the slow food movement and the persistence of advocacy for the Tobin tax spring to mind.

Whatever the programme, the Left must rethink its relationship to power. For the electoral Left, this means avoiding taking power at whatever opportunity presents itself. The gains by the radical Right should make it clear that there is a large and growing reservoir of anger and discontent with politics as usual. When the Left takes over or even has substantial influence on government in a situation of dire economic crisis, it is simply taking responsibility for managing a crisis that it has only very limited means to influence. The Centre-Left is probably beyond redemption in this regard, having committed itself to a programme of limited humanization of the management of the business cycle. This is a fatal political error, particularly in a situation like that in Anglo-Saxon political cultures where public opinion has been carefully shaped to believe in a ‘naturalization’ of the market (in other words, that the market is a pre-existing condition of life in which human intervention should be at best minimal). Such an approach sets the Left up for ‘tax-and-spend’ charges by free-market libertarians. The electoral Left that still believes in social transformation needs to use the political arena to maintain a steadfast opposition and put forward clear ideas of an alternative without any illusions of being able to impose them from above. It must abandon the statist inheritance that hangs on from Bolshevik and Social Democratic days in favour of fostering a thoroughgoing cultural and social change in opinion. In this endeavour, electoral organizations committed to social transformation (the Anti-capitalist Party in France, the Left Party in Germany, the European United Left, QuŽbec Solidaire to name but a few) need to make common cause with radical social movements in framing a popular programme that reaches out rather than restricts. It is a long game—but most short games are being won by the Right at this point.

If capitalism, as Marx implied, is the most radical of all social systems—with its Schumpeterian tendency towards a creative destruction constantly destabilizing people’s lives in order to create new avenues of profit—then perhaps it is a mistake to try to ‘out-radicalize’ it. Relying on apocalypse and doomsday scenarios rather than possibility only plays to the merchants of insecurity. In a world where people are starved for security, maybe a better approach is to knit together an alternative that has a chance of providing it. A simple message needs to come across: ‘your life should and can be better’.

For the Left to popularize a vision of radical democracy and an eco-economy geared to people’s actual needs would be a huge step towards undermining the consensus of hopelessness and cynicism that neoliberalism has installed at the heart of popular culture. Uniting around a straightforward and easily understood proposal like that of a Basic Income Guarantee could give us a wedge issue that might break the current logjam and open up a number of other radical possibilities. Whatever the exact formulation, what is needed is a consistent message that is made over decades until it is established in the popular mind as a real alternative to the rule of Capital.

Nonviolence versus US imperialism

Jørgen Johansen, Brian Martin and Matt Meyer

Published in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 47, No. 38, 22 September 2012, pp. 82-89

Jørgen Johansen (johansen.jorgen at gmail dot com) is a freelance academic and activist and editor of Resistance Studies Magazine; Brian Martin (bmartin@uow.edu.au) is professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia; Matt Meyer (mmmsrnb@igc.org) is an activist, author, and editor, working with Africa World Press and PM Press, and a frequent contributor to WagingNonviolence.org andNewClearVision.com.

For valuable comments on drafts, we thank Sharon Callaghan, Erica Chenoweth, Jack DuVall, Janne Flyghed, Yasmin Rittau and Stellan Vinthagen.

Abstract

Challenges to US imperialism based on armed struggle have been largely unsuccessful. A much more promising strategy is nonviolent popular action, which has only begun to be taken seriously for its potential long-term effectiveness. Six case studies - the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, East Timor, Iraq, Puerto Rico and the so-called Arab spring - illustrate the potential of popular unarmed resistance to facets of the US imperial system. This approach warrants further development.

Introduction

The United States today has the world's most powerful military and until recently a successful economic system. The US government is able to impose its will on other peoples of the world far more than any other government. Some see this as a good thing, because of US traditions and practices of representative government and free markets. Others, though, see a dark side to US military, political and economic power   - they see it as a modern form of imperialism, of unprecedented scope. Both these views can be justified. The "US Empire" has very different qualities from the "US Republic".

Our aim here is not to argue about the nature of imperialism or whether the US fits one definition or another of imperialism or empire, but rather to look at challenges to forms of domination associated with the exploitative US military, economic and political power. That US culture includes a number of good qualities is without doubt, some of them being inspirations for resistance movements around the world. The US struggles for the abolition of slavery, universal voting rights, and civil rights for African-Americans are all important parts of the global struggle against injustice. Authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr. are still essential reading for resisters globally.

Three key features of US imperialism are military force, capitalism and ideology. The US military is by far the most powerful in the world, built on nearly half of the world's military spending. Nuclear weapons provide dominance in the global balance of nuclear terror. Advanced chemical, biological, and conventional explosives with sophisticated delivery systems are the most lethal ones available. US non-lethal weapons and surveillance technologies are tools of social control.

From the point of view of US political and military leaders, US military power provides necessary protection of democratic freedoms and the "free world." From the point of view of many people in the rest of the world, though, US military force is used to protect US interests, including via attacks on countries (Blum 1995, 2000; Buchheit 2008), support for client regimes and protection of US foreign investment.

Then there is the system of capitalism, infiltrating every facet of daily life through jobs and the market, with privatisation and corporate globalisation extending the reign of private property and market relations. Key elements in exploitative capitalism include sophisticated and brutal marketing, monopolistic dominance, private control over public goods such as water, trade controls under the guise of "agreements", slave-like working conditions, obedient consumers, anti-union policies and relentless attacks against cooperative forms of organising social life (Jawara and Kwa 2003; Klein 2001, 2007).

Another key element of US imperialism is ideology: the standard package of beliefs about the way the world should be organised. This includes acceptance of hierarchy in the workplace with the system of owners, managers and workers, the encouragement of consumerism and associated acquisitiveness, the acceptance of social inequality as inevitable, and the belief in the necessity of armed force to protect against threats from internal and external enemies. These beliefs are most powerfully inculcated through experiences in day-to-day life and are reinforced through the style and content of mass media and Hollywood productions. This has been so successful that many consumers of products from exploitative workplaces hardly reflect on their place in the chain of profit making, pollution, and modern slavery.

Military dominance, capitalism and hegemonic beliefs are three of the key elements for understanding the place of the United States in the world. Should this package be labelled "imperialism"? There are debates about the relevance of the concept of imperialism and also about whether it is appropriate to call the United States an empire (Ferguson 2004; Hobsbawm 2008; Todd 2003; Wallerstein 2003). We are not too concerned about the exact label - for our purpose, it would be satisfactory to refer to a US-centred system with imperial elements. Our interest is in ways to challenge the exploitation and repression associated with this system.

We focus here on US imperialism, with the understanding that it is only one of the problems in the world, though one of the more serious and influential. There are other systems of imperialism. Some are subordinate to US imperialism, for example Australian government domination of small countries in the south Pacific. Others are independent of or antagonistic to US imperialism, such as Chinese government support for other regimes.

Then there are systems of domination other than imperialism. Male collective domination of women is a separate system of oppression, with some links to imperialism but not reducible to it: patriarchy and imperialism are each worthy of attention. Likewise, racial domination, subordination of people with disabilities, and environmental exploitation - to name a few - can be considered systems of oppression that are important in their own right and separate from imperialism, though with some overlaps, synergies and tensions.

We focus on US imperialism in part because of its significant impact on people's lives and in part to emphasise that people's resistance is potentially one of the greatest challenges to it. Much of the attention to US imperialism has come from left-wing critics who assume that armed struggle is, in the end, the only way to make an effective challenge. There is a growing amount of evidence to question this assumption.

People's resistance to imperialism occurs at every point, from workers' struggles to antiwar activism. The question is, what are the most effective ways both to resist the imperial system and to lay the foundation for a just and equal society?

We argue here that the most potent challenges to US imperialism have involved people's direct action, without using physical violence. This is commonly called nonviolent action, civil resistance, or people power. It involves much more than the usual image of mass rallies or well-choreographed civil disobedience. A host of techniques and strategies can be used, including non-cooperation and setting up alternative political and economic systems.

We first give a general rationale for unarmed popular resistance to US imperialism. We then provide six case studies, each showcasing the successes achieved through the use of nonviolent direct action. The key to each of these cases is mobilising mass popular support, hence undermining the military, economic and ideological pillars of imperialism. Several of these case studies involve challenges to US military power and the economic exploitation enabled by this military power. All of them represent a serious dent in beliefs about the inevitability and benevolence of US imperialism.

The rationale for popular unarmed resistance

The US military has an overwhelming superiority in the use of force, including weapons, intelligence and training in how to kill (Grossman 1995). There is little disagreement that armed resistance to US forces is, at best, an exercise in asymmetric warfare: the raw strength of the US military machinery makes direct engagement a losing proposition. The most effective guerrilla struggles have been ones that rely upon political mobilisation to gain popular support for liberation, so that military assaults create greater support for the resistance - often as a result of civilian casualties (Joseph 1981; Meyer 2012). Even strong adherents of people's war or foco-ism agree that mass mobilization is at the focal point of any winning strategy (Ely 2009).

Armed struggle has almost always been carried out in more limited arenas of struggle, with smaller numbers of adherents taking part in the struggle (Howes 2010). Firstly, direct participation in armed engagement is usually predominantly led by fit young men, with women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities less well represented. Secondly, armed resistance provides a rationale for overbearing US military reaction; armed struggle often solidifies popular support for US policy, especially in the United States. Members of the public interpret challenges more according to their most extreme methods than by their formal goals (Abrahms 2006). Rulers highlight violence by opponents to justify their own massive use of force against all opposition, including peaceful activists. Thirdly, armed struggle involves engaging with empire at its strongest point.

The practice of unarmed political resistance (Sharp 1973) avoids direct engagement with the US armed forces. Instead, it acts in ways that make US imperial violence counterproductive, by spotlighting the injustices of empire. Focusing on the overwhelming armed superiority that the imperial power holds, and on the inequities inherent in imperial rule, this practice seeks to turn the empire's violence against itself. There are several reasons why strategic nonviolent action is ideal for making such a challenge. Firstly, it allows and requires widespread participation: everyone can join a boycott. Secondly, it does not threaten the lives of civilians or soldiers and hence has greater potential for winning them over. Thirdly, when violence is used against peaceful protesters, this often causes public outrage and ends up being counterproductive for the attackers (Martin 2007).

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011) carried out an analysis of 323 struggles against repressive regimes or occupations or in favour of secession, systematically comparing armed and unarmed campaigns. Their conclusion is that civil resistance is far more likely to be successful in achieving the aims of the struggle, and that success using civil resistance occurs just as frequently against the most repressive regimes as against softer opponents. The clear message is that nonviolent action can be effective against even the harshest opponents. Among the anti-dictator, self-determination and anti-occupation struggles they studied, Chenoweth and Stephan did not separate out those that were anti-imperialist, but it is reasonable to expect that their conclusions apply to this subset of their cases.

Chenoweth and Stephan also found that successful people power movements are more likely to result in stable democratic governments, whereas successful armed struggle is more likely to lead to repressive successor states (see also Johnstad 2010). In summary, civil resistance is more likely to succeed and, when it does succeed, creates better prospects for a stable free society. The keys are widespread mobilisation and campaigners' strategic acumen. (See also Karatnycky and Ackerman 2005; Stephan and Chenoweth 2008).

Some critics argue that violence should remain in the activist toolkit and that to remain nonviolent is play into the hands of the state (Gelderloos 2007). Others, like Meyers (2000: 1), argue that nonviolence "encourages violence by the state and corporations." However, these arguments have been limited to a critique of rigid and absolute pacifism, and have been shown to be narrow at best in their understanding of the diverse meanings and uses of unarmed action (Meyer 2008). They give insufficient consideration to the greater capacity for popular mobilisation using nonviolent methods (Martin 2008) and cannot account for the findings that civil resistance has been more successful than armed struggle against repressive opponents.

Here we describe six examples of popular nonviolent resistance to elements of the US imperial system. In each of these, military, economic and/or ideological aspects of the system have been restrained and transformed. These and other such struggles have made US imperialism ever more susceptible to popular challenge.

The Vietnam War

Complaints about US war policy in Vietnam started in the early 1960s. As the 1960s went on, university campuses became crucibles of anti-war protest, as students came to protest an unjust war, campus bureaucracy, and a graduation that would make male students eligible for the draft. Because conscription loomed over male students' futures and provided an avenue for direct resistance to war on an individual level, much student activism was concerned with the draft. Beginning in 1964, students began burning their draft cards as acts of defiance (DeBenedetti and Chatfield 1990; Hall 2012; Howlett and Lieberman 2008). Manuals were written about how to avoid the draft (Shapiro and Striker 1970).

In late July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the number of young men to be drafted per month to go from 17,000 to 35,000, and on 31 August signed a law making it a crime to burn a draft card.

The movement included well known people. Senator Edward M. Kennedy objected to the Selective Service Act of 1967 and argued against the bill in support of conscientious objectors.

In 1967, the world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to be conscripted into the US military, based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. He was arrested, found guilty on draft evasion charges, and stripped of his boxing title. He was not imprisoned, but did not fight again for nearly four years while his appeal worked its way up to the Supreme Court, where it was successful.

In 1969, presidents of student bodies at 253 universities wrote to the White House to say that they personally planned to refuse induction into the military, joining the half million others who would do so during the course of the war (Baskir and Strauss 1978: 68).

It became clear that the war had less and less support. The younger generation convinced their parents that this war could not be justified. Many were willing to go to jail or into exile in order not to be part of the "war machinery". No candidate for President and few candidates for Congress could be elected if they did not oppose the war in Vietnam. The mass mobilizations, nonviolent civil disobediences, and moratoria to end the war grew in size and breadth over the course of a few short years.

The Pentagon could have continued its military campaigns against Vietnam and Southeast Asia for many years beyond 1973, ever-escalating its use of weaponry. Though Vietnamese military action undoubtedly played a significant role, one key strategy signalled their own approach to winning the fight against the giant US military apparatus: popular engagement with both US soldiers and the essentially nonviolent US anti-war movement (Dellinger 1975, Hunt 1999). As the war intensified, so did resistance tactics - including property destruction through breaking into draft offices and burning or pouring blood on files relating to the war. A few US anti-war activists, most famously the Weather Underground, initiated a series of late-night bombings of symbols of the war, to challenge its continuation and "bring the war home." While some credit these actions with causing greater government repression and discrediting or limiting the movement, even the staunchest of former Weather members and supporters understand that the need now, as before, is to "take the greatest care to respect life and minimize violence as we struggle to end violence." (Gilbert 2012). The caricatures of crazy, gun-toting revolutionaries, like those of anti-war activists spitting on returning veterans, have largely been the fabrication of reactionary, pro-war media.

The truth about the Vietnam War is that it became politically untenable to continue sending troops, getting more and more body-bags in return. Domestic opposition to US policy in Vietnam made it impossible for the US government to continue its imperial war.

Nuclear aspirations

During World War II, the US military poured enormous resources into developing nuclear weapons and then in August 1945 used them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even though the military rationale for this was questionable (Alperovitz 1966). Nuclear weapons have held a central place in US military preparedness ever since; nuclear power has developed along similar lines, with similar aspirations for the proliferation of weaponry (Bunn 2007).

During the cold war, the Soviet government developed and tested nuclear weapons. The nuclear arms race led to the production and deployment of tens of thousands of weapons on both sides, plus hundreds by several other countries.

On numerous occasions, US political and military leaders contemplated using nuclear weapons, for example during the Vietnam war and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, but always held back (Burr and Kimball 2006; Kauzlarich and Kramer, 1998). The usual explanation is nuclear deterrence: US decision-makers were afraid of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and vice versa. But there is another, complementary, explanation: popular deterrence.

Lawrence Wittner (1993-2003), in his comprehensive history of protest movements against nuclear weapons, draws on internal government documents to show that the key factor restraining nuclear developments has been mobilised popular opinion. When there was little protest, nuclear arms races accelerated; when there was much vocal protest, arms races abated.

More generally, government leaders know that there would be a huge public backlash should they use nuclear weapons. The annual protest actions on Hiroshima Day reveal how long-lasting popular concern can be. There are numerous actions against nuclear weapons production, transport and deployment, for example Ploughshares direct actions in which protesters are willing to risk months or years in prison to make a moral statement (Herngren 1993), the women's action at the US nuclear base at Greenham Common in Britain (Hopkins 1984) and the campaign against the neutron bomb (Auger 1966; Wittner 2009). The many actions and protests against US nuclear missiles in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s were crucial for creating a strong opposition against these deployments. These sorts of actions have, over the decades, comprehensively stigmatised nuclear weapons in the public eye. Furthermore, the direct action campaigns of the late 1970s largely curtailed the US nuclear power industry, through use of affinity group-based activities and intensive trainings in nonviolence (Epstein 1993; Sheehan and Bachman 2009).

US military strategists have tried to overcome these public attitudes by developing miniature nuclear devices that are scarcely more powerful than the largest conventional weapons such as fuel-air explosives. But protesters and the public continue to see a qualitative difference between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons and power, and continue to call for resistance (Schell 2007). This has been a crucial factor in restraining the use of the nuclear arsenal in support of US imperialism.

Indonesia and East Timor

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1979) in The Political Economy of Human Rights, their classic analysis of US imperialism, described a vast system of authoritarian client states that they characterised as sub-fascism. The US government propped up numerous Third World regimes that kept their populations subjugated.

One of the key client states was Indonesia. In 1965, left-wing president Sukarno was overthrown in a military operation involving genocidal violence throughout Indonesia (Cribb 1990), in what Chomsky and Herman called "constructive terror" because it served the interests of US capital and foreign policy. The new president, Suharto, maintained a repressive rule that was receptive to international capital and US military operations.

In 1974, after the collapse of Portugal's fascist government, popular movements in former Portuguese colonies asserted their independence. One of them was in East Timor, located on half an island in the Indonesian archipelago. In 1975, Indonesian military forces invaded and occupied East Timor (Budiardjo and Liong 1984). Chomsky and Herman gave this case special attention.

Fretilin, the leading movement in East Timor, used arms to resist the occupation but, in the face of superior Indonesian forces, soon was forced to retreat to mountain areas. The armed struggle had a disastrous effect on the population through killings and starvation, with a significant proportion of the civilian population dying over the next decade.

In the late 1980s, Fretilin reconsidered its strategies, pulled back from armed attack and shifted to civilian resistance in urban areas (Fukuda 2000). The turning point was on 12 November 1991, when Indonesian troops opened fire on peaceful protesters in a funeral march in the capital Dili, just as they were entering Santa Cruz cemetery. The massacre was witnessed and recorded by Western journalists. They managed to smuggle photos and videos out of the country. The story of the massacre galvanised the international support movement for East Timorese independence, laying the groundwork for independence a decade later (Nevins 2005).

The Indonesian military's killing of hundreds of peaceful protesters in Dili did more for the independence movement than a decade of armed struggle. That is because the armed phase of the resistance was seen internationally as a struggle between two competing armed groups, despite the huge disproportion in their capabilities and in lives lost. The Dili massacre, on the other hand, aroused international condemnation precisely because, as a case of violence versus nonviolence, it was seen as unjust.

The struggle in East Timor was a prelude to political change in Indonesia in 1998. Following the economic downturn of the Asian financial crisis, popular protest surged. When soldiers used force to crack down on student protesters, this only increased the level of protest. There was some rioting, but there was no armed challenge to the government. The popular pressure was enough to cause Suharto to resign, and free elections followed (Aspinall et al. 1999). Civil resistance was the key to transforming Indonesia from a "subfascist" client state to a society with a more vibrant and independent public sphere.

The invasion of Iraq

In 2002, President George W. Bush and other US political leaders began publicly preparing the ground for an invasion of Iraq. The reasons were complex and included Saddam Hussein's defiance of US government demands, Iraqi oil and the strategic role of Iraq in the Middle East. Bush, US Vice President Dick Cheney and others manipulated public opinion by falsely claiming that the Iraqi government possessed or was developing nuclear weapons and that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Rampton and Stauber 2003).

In response to these war preparations, people around the world protested, including in massive demonstrations on 15 February 2003, with perhaps 10 million participants worldwide, the largest antiwar protest in history. Despite the massive opposition, the invasion proceeded the next month.

Many peace activists think that because the invasion went ahead, therefore they failed and protest was not enough. This perspective has an element of truth, but it misses something important: the protests put a serious constraint on US imperial designs and indeed were a major setback for US neoliberal-military visions for the future. It also misses that fact that, like with the Vietnam war and the anti-nuclear movements, it is official US government policy to deny that demonstrations make any difference - though Presidential memoirs and declassified documents prove that numbers are always counted and large demonstrations have always prevented greater warfare (Wittner 1993-2003).

The protests both triggered and reflected massive disillusionment with US plans for military conquest. Following the invasion, public support for US policy declined around the world (Pew Global Attitudes Project 2003).

It is important to remember that in 2003, the US government was still basking in international sympathy and support in the aftermath of 9/11: the US was seen as the victim of an outrageous attack. As a consequence, the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan had widespread popular support, despite the fact that most of the 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia and that the bombing of Afghanistan caused significant civilian casualties (Herold 2012).

If the invasion of Iraq had proceeded with little popular opposition, it is quite possible that Bush, Cheney and crew might have proceeded to further invasions, such as of Syria and Iran. Indeed, for years there has been a concerted effort to demonise the Iranian government and lay the groundwork for undermining it. The huge protests against the invasion of Iraq gave a taste of the likely response to further imperial adventures in the Middle East.

Resistance to colonialism in Puerto Rico

One of the earliest US acts of empire-building took place in 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American war, when US Marines landed on the shores of San Juan, Puerto Rico to take over this island territory which had just signed a treaty of autonomy with Spain less than six months earlier. Though acts of the US Congress ratified Puerto Rico as a part of the "mainland," there was always resistance to US colonialism, often linked to anti-military mobilisation (Lopez 1999).

The Nationalist Party's first major campaigns involved support for a successful strike by sugarcane workers in 1934 and a nonviolent parade in 1937, fired upon by Puerto Rican police and members of the National Guard in what came to be known as the Ponce Massacre. Student strikes at the University of Puerto Rico and non-cooperation campaigns amongst the general population have met every major attempt of US corporate privatization of Puerto Rican services or suggestion of increased imperial control, from the late 1960s to the current period (Nieves Falcón 2002). Since the United Nations Decolonization Committee first recognized Puerto Rico as a non-self-governing territory in 1972, nonviolent demonstrations involving the Puerto Rican population (including Puerto Ricans living in the US) have been a common feature of periodic calls for referendum, votes, and United Nations reviews - including several widespread anti-electoral stay-at-home efforts (FAE, 1989; Torres and Velázquez, 1998).

The struggle for an end to US Navy occupation and use of the Puerto Rican islands of Culebra (1939-1975) and Vieques (1941-2003) became symbolic of the larger struggle against colonialism and imperialism. From the human blockades staged by scores of displaced fishermen to permanent encampments built on land controlled by the Navy, to massive occupation of the Navy firing range, the decades of protest included some of the most creative uses of civilian resistance techniques. As a growing number of Puerto Ricans demonstrated willingness to put their bodies in the way of the bomb testing and navy operations, more intentional and intensified nonviolence trainings were conducted. By 2003, the campaign had spanned across the entire spectrum of Puerto Rican social, religious, and political society (from left to right and beyond), and the US Navy was forced into a complete withdrawal, amidst on-going calls for US government clean-up and reparations.

The Vieques demilitarization campaign won its demands shortly following and in the context of another anti-imperialist victory within the larger Puerto Rican movement. Widespread educational efforts and door-to-door organizing characterized more than ten years of work on behalf of fourteen jailed Puerto Ricans widely recognized internationally as political prisoners. Despite the fact that the political prisoners were part of armed clandestine organizations growing out of the militancy of the 1970s - many of whom, upon capture in the early 1980s, declared themselves combatant prisoners of war - the movement for their freedom grew closer in form and ideology to nonviolent campaigns as the campaign developed. Well-planned civil disobedience actions in front of the White House and Pentagon throughout the 1990s drew on solidarity and collaboration with the War Resisters League and Catholic Worker movements, and educational efforts and study tours (held in conjunction with the Vieques campaign) were formulated with the assistance of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR 1992). By 1999, a dozen Nobel recipients had signed on to the Call for Amnesty, including Coretta Scott King and Archbishop Desmond Tutu - both mentioned by President Clinton when he announced a clemency offer to many of the Puerto Rican prisoners later that same year.

The struggle for an end of US colonial rule over Puerto Rico is not yet complete. But the US government desires for unchecked economic exploitation matched with unlimited political containment and repression has not been possible; US military plans, using Puerto Rico as a base of aggression against the rest of Latin American, have been largely rolled back. With coordinated mass mobilizations across many decades and diverse issues, the Puerto Rican anti-imperial momentum has been carried forward utilizing many tactics, the vast majority of which were unarmed. In addition, as the decolonization movements have gained increasing strength reaching greater numbers of the Puerto Rican population, the explicit use of nonviolent actions and strategies has grown. Moving from one victory to the next, many Puerto Rican leaders originally convinced of the necessity of armed struggle have now shifted emphasis, recognizing the efficacy of nonviolence against empire (Meyer 1999; WRI 2002).

The not-just Arab Spring

The government in Washington boasts it actively promotes democracy and freedom across the globe. But democracy export is only for "unfriendly" regimes. Little or no government support is offered for most opposition movements in "friendly" dictatorships like Chile (in the 1980s), Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Most Western governments are ready to support democracy only when friendly or acceptable groups are voted into power; others are labelled "terrorists" even when they win free and fair elections, such as in Algeria in 1990 and Palestine in 2006 (Johansen 2011). Like the unarmed civilian resistance movement in Chile which forced out dictator Augusto Pinochet (installed after the Central Intelligence Agency-supported 1973 coup against democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende), resistance to empire does not always deal blows directly against the US structures themselves, but against the puppets, clients, and allies of the US government who do its bidding in strategic regions.

This is part of the background to the so-called Arab Spring (Cook 2012; Gardner 2011; Sowers and Toensing 2012). In late 2010 and early 2011, when ordinary people in Western Sahara, Sudan Somalia, Cameroon, Nigeria, Cote D'Ivoire, the Gambia, and most famously Tunisia and Egypt escalated demonstrations, strikes and vigils against their own governments, they were well aware that this was also against the elite in Washington, which for years had supported these regimes with money, military equipment, intelligence, and beneficial trade deals (Aswany 2011; Filiu 2011; Gardner 2011).

Western powers, and the US government especially, had long spoken about the "need for stability," a code for supporting dictatorships. In 2009, the Obama administration pumped in $1.7 billion as annual support to the Mubarak regime. As the anti-Mubarak protests gained increasing sympathy inside Egypt and worldwide, elements within the US administration gradually moderated their support for the regime (Zunes 2012).

The origins of these uprisings were genuinely domestic and based on experiences from Arab history. It is no secret that academics and activists from Western states, the US included, had contributed with nonviolence trainings, making manuals available in Arabic, and giving seminars on nonviolent strategies. But the claims from left and right of the political spectrum that these revolutions took place because of or based upon these trainings and seminars is an Eurocentric/Orientalist notion which implies no agency, consciousness, initiative or leadership on the parts of the Tunisians, Egyptians, and others involved.

Recruitment, mobilisation and organising were vital to the success of these movements. With modern means of communication they were able to get sufficient protesters together to make it hard for the state to ignore them. They had the patience, strength and courage to stay in the streets for weeks. The value of avoiding armed resistance, even when protesters were attacked with brutal force, was understood and followed so every act of violence from the police or military generated greater support for the opposition. After some time, quite dramatically, even parts of police and the military changed their loyalties for a time, and joined the opposition. The protesters were able to bring their countries to near standstills, forcing Washington policy makers to do an about-face and scramble for newly-approved figureheads to help manage their neoliberal agendas.

Conclusion

US military technology and training are so advanced that armed resistance is increasingly futile. Despite significant training, years of study and experience, and untold human, fiscal, and natural resources devoted to armed struggle, armed movements have been repeatedly unable to provide a sustained challenge to US military and economic power. For 70 years, Communist states and insurgent armed movements did prove to be a powerful short-term challenge to world capitalism. By 1989 however, as Eastern European communist governments collapsed in a process where people power played a major role (Randle 1991), how to best take on the centres of imperial power became a central strategic question.

To tackle an opponent on its strongest point is illogical at best; foco-ist attempts to inspire mass participation have met with less than enthusiastic response. Urban guerrillas stand as little chance of ongoing success against missiles, global surveillance, drones and soldiers prepared for battle with the latest training techniques as did cavalry making a charge against machine guns in World War I. Furthermore, armed opposition provides an easy pretext for counter-attack, and often leads to increased militarism throughout society.

An alternative way to challenge US imperial might is through civil resistance: masses of people using a variety of techniques of protest, non-cooperation and intervention. The six case studies illustrate how popular unarmed resistance can help restrain arms races, challenge authoritarian client states, undermine the political capacity for military interventions and change political agendas. These case studies do not prove that US imperial power can be contained by unarmed resistance, but do give an indication that people power offers a potent challenge whose full capacity has yet to be fully developed.

Ideally, an alternative to imperialism should reflect, through its methods and processes, the goal to be achieved, namely a more democratic, egalitarian, and just society, without domination and exploitation. Far more than armed struggle, popular unarmed resistance, with techniques such as rallies, occupations, boycotts and setting up parallel social institutions, enables widespread participation and internal democracy. Interestingly, civil resistance can be considered to be an unarmed version of guerrilla warfare (Boserup and Mack 1974). Rather than using arms, the challengers use a variety of other techniques that undermine the will and power of the opponent (Burrowes 1996).

The idea of revolution is often associated with armed uprising against a dominant power, but this is only one model. Civil resistance offers a different model of revolution, involving popular unarmed mobilisation and a more gradual process of undermining the legitimacy and operations of the prevailing system (Lakey 1985; Martin 1993). Armed struggle has been tried and repeatedly failed; it is time for an equivalent effort to be directed towards nonviolent approaches. It is time now for people power to be used against the US imperial project.

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