{"id":54943,"date":"2020-09-08T07:22:48","date_gmt":"2020-09-08T12:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54943"},"modified":"2020-09-08T07:22:48","modified_gmt":"2020-09-08T12:22:48","slug":"protest-violence-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54943","title":{"rendered":"Protest, violence, class"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2020\/09\/protest-violence-class\/\">Protest, violence, class<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Another month, another Extinction Rebellion protest, another crop of articles excoriating XR for being too disruptive and anti-capitalist, or not disruptive and anti-capitalist enough, or for not laying the blame on China, or whatever. I don\u2019t particularly feel the need to appoint myself to the defence, but I was interested in this\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/roarmag.org\/essays\/chenoweth-stephan-nonviolence-myth\/\">ROAR article<\/a>\u00a0by Peter Gelderloos, which raises some points of wider interest to me that I hope to develop further in my next post where I\u2019ll attempt to relate them more directly to my micro-niche of small scale farming. In this one, I\u2019ll restrict myself to a few remarks about his article.<\/p>\n<p>The piece mostly isn\u2019t about XR, but involves a critique of a paper that influenced its strategies and that claims to show that nonviolent forms of activism are more effective than violent alternatives. So far as I can tell, Gelderloos\u2019s criticisms are plausible. He argues instead for a diversity of tactics \u2013 including violence \u2013 to achieve political goals.<\/p>\n<p>Although embracing political violence scares some liberal hares, I find myself in Gelderloos\u2019s camp here as a matter of overarching principle. Yes, in some circumstances I think political violence is justified \u2013 a position that surely can\u2019t be too controversial across the political spectrum given the various insurgencies and counterinsurgencies fostered by governments in Britain, the USA and other countries in recent times, with minimal public opposition. Hell, there are even distinguished Stanford history professors\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/17934377-war-what-is-it-good-for\">writing books<\/a>\u00a0enthusing about the benefits of war.<\/p>\n<p>But the context in which one chooses violence surely matters. If indigenous people organize against an oil industry construction project on their land and meet the violence of the project operatives with their own resistant violence, then I find it easy to endorse their activism.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Protest, violence, class Another month, another Extinction Rebellion protest, another crop of articles excoriating XR for being too disruptive and anti-capitalist, or not disruptive and anti-capitalist enough, or for not laying the blame on China, or whatever. I don\u2019t particularly feel the need to appoint myself to the defence, but I was interested in this\u00a0ROAR [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15683,9644,23169,30272,656,9738,854],"class_list":["post-54943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-chris-smaje","tag-class","tag-extinction-rebellion","tag-peter-gelderloos","tag-protest","tag-small-farm-future","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54944,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54943\/revisions\/54944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}