Nonviolence

[Orange Juche]

What do you all think of nonviolence?

It worked against fascist Pinochet
It worked in Nazi controlled Norway until it turned violent

It can, and has work. I am curious to your opinions on it.

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18 2004, 06:07 AM
What do you all think of nonviolence?
I think it's a noble endevous but I think you have to anyalse what it is you want to achieve? Destroying capitalism and creating communism will not happen through non-violence.


It worked against fascist Pinochet

How? The workers in Chilie could have kept hold of their gains had they not listend to Allende's pacifist rhetoric, and Pinochet would never have happened in the first place.


It worked in Nazi controlled Norway until it turned violent

The second world war ended the occupation of Norway and the Norweigns never resisted Nazi occupation peacefully. There was a resistence in Norway.


It can, and has work.

It has worked to achieve some things, but not what I, as a communist, want.

[Orange Juche]

Originally posted by The Anarchist Tension+Nov 18 2004, 06:58 AM--> (The Anarchist Tension @ Nov 18 2004, 06:58 AM)
[email protected] 18 2004, 06:07 AM
What do you all think of nonviolence?
I think it's a noble endevous but I think you have to anyalse what it is you want to achieve? Destroying capitalism and creating communism will not happen through non-violence.


It worked against fascist Pinochet

How? The workers in Chilie could have kept hold of their gains had they not listend to Allende's pacifist rhetoric, and Pinochet would never have happened in the first place.


It worked in Nazi controlled Norway until it turned violent

The second world war ended the occupation of Norway and the Norweigns never resisted Nazi occupation peacefully. There was a resistence in Norway.


It can, and has work.

It has worked to achieve some things, but not what I, as a communist, want. [/b]
1) Why will socialism/communism not come under nonviolence? Explain in depth WHY.

2) I dont know much about how, I just iknow it worked

3) Actually, yes, they did resist peacefully in Norway.
http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/nvww2...ce_norway3.html (http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/nvww2/ww2_nonviolence_norway3.html)


Why do you not want it? Why would you not rather reduce death, and use peace as a means of change? Why is violence so NECCISARY in your mind?

[rainyday]

As a non violent person I have been reading and reading and reading.........
About non violent ways to take back this country
Ive seen some pretty good ideas but I really doubt any will actually work
How can a non violent group overtake a violent one without a fight?
I dont want to believe it isnt possible but I havent found much encouraging evidence that is is.

[Orange Juche]

http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/nonvi...e/st_nonv1.html (http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/nonviolence/st_nonv1.html)

First the violent ones laugh at you, then they arrest you, then they abuse you, then you win. It just kind of works out that way.

[rainyday]

Thanks for the link
Ill go read it now
While I drink my coffee and continue my search for a way out of the way things are with the least amount of bloodshed.
Really tho
Ive read and read and read about nonviolent ways
As much as I want to
I dont see it happening

[Non-Sectarian Bastard!]

As I have said it before. Non-violence is fine and probaly the best mothod, utnill the cops fire the first shot of the revolutions. Then we grab our guns :)

[rainyday]

I have never been anti gun in the sense that I think people shouldnt be able to possess them but I have taught my children (I have 3 sons) that guns are bad, killing is bad, pretending to kill is bad etc.

I have never allowed even a squirt gun or a cap gun in my house
I have never owned a gun
I shot one once when I was only 12 and a girl lost a toe

I have always felt very strongly about raising my kids in the least violent way possible and about teaching them respect for ALL life (yes even deer)

I am currently struggling with what I thought were my concrete beliefs about violence and guns

My search for nonviolence is met with violence at every corner.
They WILL shoot at us
They WILL arrest us
They will KILL us

I have to now rethink my beliefs
What will I do?
Will I just stand by and quietly watch the lives of my sons be taken because I have taught them not to fight back?

Well of course the answer to that is a great big FUCK NO!
But can I really fight?
Can I really teach them to fight?

I dont know

So I continue my search for a nonviolent way to overtake a violent power
While I reinvent myself to fit into what the world in which I live has become

And I feel sad

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18 2004, 01:31 PM
1) Why will socialism/communism not come under nonviolence? Explain in depth WHY.
Those who control society have a vast monopoly of power. They control the army, the police, missiles. They have an air force, a navy and they are never going to want to allow us to get rid of them without using those things to try and stop us, regardless of how peaceful we are.

As soon as the workers threaten their interests they use violence to stop it. They use violence even when youre demonstrating. Imagine what will happen when we demand control.

When they use violence against us we have a choice. Either we allow them to crush us, or we defend ourselves. I would rather choose to defend ourselves, because laying down in the road and singing "we will not be moved" is not going to stop them from winning.


Why do you not want it?

When did I say that? I would love to achieve communism through non-violent means, but I know it isnt going to happen.


Why would you not rather reduce death, and use peace as a means of change?

I would rather use peace as a means for change, but im being realistic. People like George Bush, Rupert Murdoch et al, are not going to simply hand over there power to us, just because we ask them.



Why is violence so NECCISARY in your mind?

Because unfortunatly, its the only way we will achieve anything viable. Thats the nature of capitalism. Thats what it forces us to do.

[rainyday]

Those who control society have a vast monopoly of power. They control the army, the police, missiles. They have an air force, a navy and they are never going to want to allow us to get rid of them without using those things to try and stop us, regardless of how peaceful we are.

This is what saddens me the most
I wrestle with my own thoughts
I am not a violent person
BUT
We have to do what we have to do when faced with violence
I am coming to terms with this

[ComradeChris]

My own personal belief is that of relative pacifism. I don't think fighting is necessary except in extreme examples. I mean if I was peacefully protesting peacefully, and a cop started shooting or beating me, I'd fight back to defend myself and my friends.

[Palmares]

Take a look at this (http://www.che-lives.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=29987) thread.

[Djehuti]

Non-violence is good in theory, but it does not work in reality. ;)
Violence is very effective in many ways, and we should use it when we benifit from it.
Iam a pretty calm guy, I do not get angry easy and I do not fight specieally often.
But really, pacifism is stupid. Some times it is good to use violence, and sometimes we will even have to use violence or fall. Our enemies wont give us hugs and flowers you know, when the class struggle grows intense and the bourgeoisie grows scared, we cant just light a candle, smoke som weed and sing John Lennon you know.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Personally, I am opposed to all agressive violence - and I believe the goals of the revolution can, and historically have been accomplished non-violently. However, I believe self-defence is a necessity, and believe that, when confronted it will be necessary to defend ourselves and our gains with violence - again, there is historical precedent.

Instituting workers-control at, well, work can be perfectly peaceful until the pigs show up . . .


(Defending our comrades is also a necessity - if the police have their boot on the neck of, for example, local non-white communitees, and we stand idly by, then we are complicit in pig violence.)

[rainyday]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19 2004, 07:23 AM
Non-violence is good in theory, but it does not work in reality. ;)
Violence is very effective in many ways, and we should use it when we benifit from it.
Iam a pretty calm guy, I do not get angry easy and I do not fight specieally often.
But really, pacifism is stupid. Some times it is good to use violence, and sometimes we will even have to use violence or fall. Our enemies wont give us hugs and flowers you know, when the class struggle grows intense and the bourgeoisie grows scared, we cant just light a candle, smoke som weed and sing John Lennon you know.
I have come to this very same conclusion

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by Virgin Molotov [email protected] 19 2004, 07:38 AM
Personally, I am opposed to all agressive violence
You wouldn't class self defence as "agressive violence"?


I believe the goals of the revolution can, and historically have been accomplished non-violently.

When?


Instituting workers-control at, well, work can be perfectly peaceful until the pigs show up . . .

And they invariably will...

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

When? From the Diggers forward, the actual business of revolution has been relatively peaceful - it's reactionary forces that create violent situations. It's my belief that revolutionary goals - collectivising industry in the hands of the working class, and abolishing the abstractions of capital and state are, inherently non-violent; contrasted with non-revolutionary goals which are, themselves, violent not only in their means, but their ends. How many guns does it take to organize a worker's council? None! How many to defend that workers council?

*Click-click* (That's a shot-gun noise . . . hopefully we won't be armed with just shot-guns.)

It is to this end that I see our cause to be legitimate.

[Orange Juche]

"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him."
- Martin Luther King Jr

[Wiesty]

its a great idea, but it cant be, if we ever plan to stop america, or any other capatilist pigs. they'res gonna be some violence. violence will always be around

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by [email protected] 20 2004, 08:25 PM
"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him."
- Martin Luther King Jr
I'm sorry but its idealist nonsnese. Unfortunatly for us, we live in the real world. And for your information, black oppression still exists.

[BuyOurEverything]

If an idea can never work in practice, I fail to see how you can classify it as 'good in theory.' If you truly belive in non-violence as the only (or even a viable) means to acheive our goals, you are either truly naive and delusional, or have very different goals than the rest of us.

No truly significant change will ever occur through non-violence, as the ruling class will always be against significant change and will not hesitate to use violence to supress rebellion.

[commiecrusader]

If you can persuade Bu$h, Cheney, Rumsfeld and 'Condi', or any other Western leader, to relinquish their power without the use of violence, then I'm surprised you aren't also knitting straw into gold and making frogs into princes.

It's a noble, but fantastical idea to suggest Communism, Socialism, or any left-wing ideologue will be achieved without the use of violence.

[Orange Juche]

Originally posted by The Anarchist Tension+Nov 20 2004, 06:01 PM--> (The Anarchist Tension @ Nov 20 2004, 06:01 PM)
[email protected] 20 2004, 08:25 PM
"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him."
- Martin Luther King Jr
I'm sorry but its idealist nonsnese. Unfortunatly for us, we live in the real world. And for your information, black oppression still exists. [/b]
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one ;). And yes, black oppression does still exist, but MLKs nonviolent efforts made huge progressions foward in the rights movement for blacks. Nonviolence is an ideology of respecting all human life... a similar goal of socialism, to provide for and nurture human life. In my mind socialism and nonviolence go hand in hand.

[Orange Juche]

Originally posted by [email protected] 20 2004, 06:28 PM
If an idea can never work in practice, I fail to see how you can classify it as 'good in theory.' If you truly belive in non-violence as the only (or even a viable) means to acheive our goals, you are either truly naive and delusional, or have very different goals than the rest of us.

No truly significant change will ever occur through non-violence, as the ruling class will always be against significant change and will not hesitate to use violence to supress rebellion.
Augusto Pinochet was overthrown using nonviolence... significant change CAN come. It WILL be difficult, no doubt, but not IMPOSSIBLE.

[Orange Juche]

"If you truly belive in non-violence as the only (or even a viable) means to acheive our goals, you are either truly naive and delusional, or have very different goals than the rest of us."

Let me define my goal, first. My goal is a democratic socialist society (like the SP-USA advocates) in which the workers democratically control business and industry from the bottom up. Is it viable? Yes. Through mass boycotts, etc, and education of the people and eventually the electoral process, yes, it is nonviolently possible to achieve socialism. Look at Chavez in Venezuela... he was ELECTED. He didnt kill his way into power.

[redtrigger]

Non-violence will get you far. I believe that violence should be used as a last resort only. But as humans we are beasts, in the beggining we were violent to survive, we have not fully shed that and any movement against thise in power will end in violence. You can look at history and prove my point. 20 out of the last 22 Roman emperors were assasinated. In the entire span of the Roman empire there was only one emperor who abdicated his crown. The Christians for 200 years tried to resist Roman law, and for 200 years Rome executed them by the thousands. Revolution is condemned to bloodshed, there is no way around it.

[Palmares]

Non-violence is good as a virtue, but certainly not as an absolute.

Using non-violence as a means to achieve our collective goals can work, and has in the past, but what must be understood is that there may be circumstances in which non-violence will not work.

Take this example: you are walking down the street with your partner when suddenly your partner's "ex" seizes them and holds a gun to their head. You stand there trying to reason with them while slowly your partner's "ex" counts down from ten to 0 to shoot your partner in the head. You can either continue trying to reason with them, or you can try other means to save your partner's life.

Of course I think we should be peaceful as long as possible, but the point is, if you can concieve a situation where violence may be neccessary, then that means in any given situation it will always be an option. And given this, I believe (absolute) pacifism is nothing more than counter-revolutionary.

[Anti-Empire]

OK, here goes my first foray into the "Che-Lives Community". I've been looking through these forums over the last couple of months and have learned a great deal about things that... well, let's just say that these aren't commong topics of discussion, at least among the people I interact with on a daily basis. To make a long story short, I firmly believe that this country is quickly going to hell in a hand basket and most people don't even realize it. Something needs to be done and the answer does not lie within the current socio-political system here in the US. In light of this I've been trying to familiarize myself with alternatives by becoming a bit more educated and reading any and evetything I possibly can, no matter how disparate. Earlier this summer I read Anderson's biography of Che and I was totally captivated by this man about who I probably knew more than the regular person off the street, but not nearly as much as a lot of you here. Being an Argentine (since transplanted to the US) I felt that perhaps this book would offer some insight into Che's life, his ideas and his achievements and failures. I was pleased to find that it did all these while at the same time giving me an impromptu lesson on the socio-political history of Latin-America - a topic that, despite my background, I knew almost nothing about. Now to the point of this thread - while I've come to admire many things about Che, the one thing I have a hard time coming to grips with is the idea that change can only come about through force. I've been a "peacenik" since I can remember and my fundamental issue is this:

If you use force to unite a people in order to achieve a common goal - in this case the goal being to overthrow capitalist tyranny - what happens if you succeed? What are you left with when that very effort is based on violence if you see violence as being in direct conflict with an otherwise civilized society?

I'm curious to hear others' opinions on this, some of which I can already extract from this thread. Anyway, that's my dilemma in a nutshell. Kudos to everyone here for putting together a great "alternative thinktank" for us curious folk. I'm sure I'll have many more questions... :D

[pedro san pedro]

Those who control society have a vast monopoly of power. They control the army, the police, missiles. They have an air force, a navy and they are never going to want to allow us to get rid of them without using those things to try and stop us, regardless of how peaceful we are.

As soon as the workers threaten their interests they use violence to stop it. They use violence even when youre demonstrating. Imagine what will happen when we demand control.

When they use violence against us we have a choice. Either we allow them to crush us, or we defend ourselves. I would rather choose to defend ourselves, because laying down in the road and singing "we will not be moved" is not going to stop them from winning.


it is because of the vast monopoly of power that those who control society possess that we must be non-violent. any violent struggle at this point in time is going to be crushed faster than you can say peanut butter. we simply do not have enough popular support at this point in time for a violent revolution to be successful, particualy in the west.

instead, our focus should be upon gathering this support to us, so that a revolution can occur in the future.

of course, if we are able to get to this point, we will have enough support to be able to resist nonviolently

[redtrigger]

If you use force to unite a people in order to achieve a common goal - in this case the goal being to overthrow capitalist tyranny - what happens if you succeed? What are you left with when that very effort is based on violence if you see violence as being in direct conflict with an otherwise civilized society?

That my friend is called Machiavellian politics. He said in his pamphlet "The Prince", that people do not follow government out of love or loyalty, but out of fear. It is the doctrine that has been used by almost every dictator since it was written in the 1400's I think. If that is not the right date date someone please correct me. In any case we are left with the question after we unite and fly our banners over the capital of our enemy how do we convert without exerting force. To punish is tyrranical, to let them dissent and gather is incompetent. If we were to expell them from our borders seems the most logical. But Chaka Zulu said that "If you do not defeat your enemy when you have the chance, he will rise again to defeat you." So our long-term predicament is not how do we win the revolution but how do we control those we defeat.

[synthesis]

Originally posted by [email protected] 20 2004, 01:25 PM
"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him."
- Martin Luther King Jr
That's even worse. There are a lot of people out there who need to be hated.

[leftist resistance]

Nonviolence should be the foremost course of action.

Resorting to violence should only be used to counter violent oppression.

[Vallegrande]

I think that both extremes are inseparable, like yin-yang. Some choose the one, and others, the other. We all make our own decisions based on ourselves and environment.

Violence, overall, does only create destruction after its done. Perhaps it is a minor evil in exchange for a major good.

[redtrigger]

There are a lot of people out there who need to be hated.

Maybe I am making a mistake by going toe to toe with a mod, but I feel there is never a validation for hate. By hating, we lower ourselves to the level of our enemies, we become no better then those who this discussion board was formed to oppose, we become the bigots. I am not saying you are a bigot, but nothing will ever prosper from hate. I will step off my soap-box now.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

It depends on our understanding of hate - is it right to hate inequality, injustice, coercion, violence and the like? Is it right to hate individuals who impose these upon us? To harbour a seething disgust and contempt for another human being? I don't think so it is right or good, BUT, I've never been raped, or deprived in by another human being in a really meaningful sense.
I think freedom from hatred is, ultimately, a reflection of privilage . . . once we've established a society based on love, it will, hopefully, be a privillage which everyone can share.

[/flake]

[Edward Norton]

Augusto Pinochet was overthrown using nonviolence... significant change CAN come. It WILL be difficult, no doubt, but not IMPOSSIBLE

Gen. Pinochet was NOT overthrown!

He gave up power when capitalism in Chile was in a 'secure' position again. Basic marxism will state that capitalism will appear 'democratic' when there is NO threat of a workers revolution or social unrest, however when people go out on the streets, the workers go on strike and revolution looks like a possibility, 'democracy' goes out the window and the ruling class call out their hired thugs in the military or from far-right/fascist parties.

Pinochet handed over power to a right-wing 'christian-democrat' gov. and there were strict guidlines post 1990 Chile had to obey, these being:

*All members of the dictatorship were given immunity and no threat of prison.
*All parties were to accept basic 'neo-liberal'/free market policies that the junta put in place.
*Chile was to remain firmly in the US camp.

To say that Pinochet was 'overthrown' and that Chile built a REAL democracy are not true, I wish it were that way, but it wasn't!

Also you mention the Black freedom struggle in the US. Well M.L. King was such a popular figure that the US gov. could not of arrested/shot him in an open manner. They had to tolerate him even if they hated him. But his basic demands of ending segregation and one man one vote were actually demands the ruling class in America could go along with. By the 1950s the ruling class no longer saw any reason to keep segregation as ghettos and cheap labour are the new method by which the ruling class oppresses blacks, not to mention the use of mainly black slave labour in prisons in the US today.

Always remeber that the ruling class like to use the most EASY method of oppression and exploitation, thats why sweatshops have replaced slavery etc...

Open racism would cause to much rebellion in the US, so now they employ more discreet (in the eyes of the media/average US citizen) methods of oppression.

But M. L. King did NOT change the fundamental power structure of US society as his demands were not revolutionary, but reformist and his methods were in the bounds of 'legality', he did not 'rock the boat' hard enough.

The Black Panther Party did 'rock the boat' in thier demands and methods and the state replied in the way it always does to movements which really challenge their power, state terrorism.

[Vallegrande]

Always remeber that the ruling class like to use the most EASY method of oppression and exploitation, thats why sweatshops have replaced slavery etc...

That's true, and I would like to simply state that as a "Euphemism", which is basically the Bible for the government agencies.

Such as:
"DaisyCutters" (They should be called Human Cutters) used to bomb

"PTSD" (which was first known as "Shell Shock" from relentless bombings

"Collateral Damage" (for the accidental death or destruction of bystanders)

"MOAB" (Why the hell would they call it a Mother of All Bombs? I mean, aren&#39;t they shaped like penises to penetrate? <_< ) Anyways,

These are a few Euphemisms that U.S. people get bombarded with everyday from the media. :angry:

[I want to be an anarchist.]

Damn man.

Violence is a result of ignorance.

Ignorance of the fact that life is sacred, ignorance of the fact that the person you are bieng violent agaisnt is alive and breathing and has the capacity to feel.

The primary &#39;weapon&#39; (for lack of a better word <_< ) against violence is teaching.

Everyone can be taught in some way or another. Sometimes people wont listen though, some people choose to remain ignorant. And what right have i to stop them. I can only try to help, which leads me to my second weapon.

Acitive pacifism. Refusing to retaliate.

This is possibly the most startlng thing you can do to an aggressor. On a number of times i have been threatened and on on a number of occasions i have been subject to physical violence. But i have never, well in the last few years at least, retaliated.

In the words of jesus: "Turn the other cheek"

Only by example will people, and i stress this, choose to do the right thing. If at any point you resort to violence and are a socialist, you are a hypocrite.

Any obstruction or hinderence or act of force against someone is a form of violence. Any form of violence is an expression of a power and hence induces a hierarchy.

Violence and socialism are incompatible.

[Wurkwurk]

By the way, GREAT thread&#33;
I myself am a socialist, and a buddhist (therefore, pascifist&#33;) Though I agree in extreme cases some violence is necessary, I believe it to be a personal absolute for me not to harm anyone.
All that happens through harming is more harm in return, even if many people benefit from it. There are better ways. aka...GANDHI&#33;&#33; He acheived more than Che ever did (even though I still admire that revolutionary), but never rased a finger. He gained a large pacsifist gathering, who was able to garner amazing international support for their cause, and viola....800 million people released from the bondage of Imperialism.
And I agree with the people who say violence ans socialism are incompatible.

[Vallegrande]

Yes Gandhi did in such ways with nonviolence. So did Martin Luther King. One of the things common among these two courageous people were that they both studied Henry David Thoreau&#39;s Civil Disobedience. He was really first to practice nonviolence against his country. He didn&#39;t pay his military poll taxes so he got sent to jail.

Both Gandhi and King new their days were ending. Gandhi&#39;s last words were "Oh no." to his killer, not in regards for his own life but in regards to his assassin&#39;s own future karma. King didn&#39;t say anything but new his time was done. Che Guevara would not have killed these magnificent people. He would have actually protected them violently had he had the chance.

That&#39;s why violence and nonviolence are inseparable. One person may be nonviolent, but that person will attract many others who will defend him/her by any means possible, be it violence or no.

[Sabocat]

So much confusion in one post.



I myself am a socialist

From your signature:


Pro-Kerry Activist

You&#39;re either seriously confused, or have no idea what socialism is.


I believe it to be a personal absolute for me not to harm anyone


Anti-war

And yet in your own words, you&#39;re a "Pro-Kerry activist", thereby supporting a bourgeois politician that was committed to sending 40,000 more troops to Iraq to do what exactly? Swat flies?


Though I agree in extreme cases some violence is necessary

John Kerry thought Iraq was one of those cases.

You are anti-war, and want socialism through pacifist means. Then you state that sometimes in extreme cases violence is necessary. Isn&#39;t the emancipation of the working class and the elimination of a class society one of those instances that "in extreme cases some violence is necessary? If not for that cause, then what cause in your mind could possibly warrant violence?


GANDHI&#33;&#33; He acheived more than Che ever did (even though I still admire that revolutionary), but never rased a finger. He gained a large pacsifist gathering, who was able to garner amazing international support for their cause, and viola....800 million people released from the bondage of Imperialism.

Well it certainly wasn&#39;t that cut and dried for Gandhi was it?

In one protest 1500 people were gunned down. In the "Salt March" how many were shot and killed? 10-20,000? How many were arrested? 100,000? It doesn&#39;t sound like no violence to me. Sounds like a lot of people got killed, beaten and imprisoned without fighting back. Yes, England left India, but what became of India afterwards? Are the poor fed? Do they recieve a free education and medical care? The literacy rate in India isn&#39;t even remotely comparable (65%) to Cuba&#39;s. How did Gandhi do more than Che? Please provide examples.

You say Gandhi accomplished more than Che, but Che, Fidel, Camilo and the rest overthrew an oppressive regime with a peasants army, and incorporated Socialism on Cuba. Whose society today is more Socialist? India or Cuba?

To think for a minute that the capitalists, politicians and the rest of the ruling class are going to " go gently into that good night" is naive.

[Orange Juche]

Ive come to the conclusion that nonviolence should always be the first option, and when that does not work, violence must be used. Whatever reduces the loss of life the most, is what should be used, based on the situation.

[Wurkwurk]

Originally posted by [email protected] 6 2004, 03:00 PM
So much confusion in one post.



I myself am a socialist

From your signature:


Pro-Kerry Activist

You&#39;re either seriously confused, or have no idea what socialism is.


I believe it to be a personal absolute for me not to harm anyone


Anti-war

And yet in your own words, you&#39;re a "Pro-Kerry activist", thereby supporting a bourgeois politician that was committed to sending 40,000 more troops to Iraq to do what exactly? Swat flies?


Though I agree in extreme cases some violence is necessary

John Kerry thought Iraq was one of those cases.

You are anti-war, and want socialism through pacifist means. Then you state that sometimes in extreme cases violence is necessary. Isn&#39;t the emancipation of the working class and the elimination of a class society one of those instances that "in extreme cases some violence is necessary? If not for that cause, then what cause in your mind could possibly warrant violence?


GANDHI&#33;&#33; He acheived more than Che ever did (even though I still admire that revolutionary), but never rased a finger. He gained a large pacsifist gathering, who was able to garner amazing international support for their cause, and viola....800 million people released from the bondage of Imperialism.

Well it certainly wasn&#39;t that cut and dried for Gandhi was it?

In one protest 1500 people were gunned down. In the "Salt March" how many were shot and killed? 10-20,000? How many were arrested? 100,000? It doesn&#39;t sound like no violence to me. Sounds like a lot of people got killed, beaten and imprisoned without fighting back. Yes, England left India, but what became of India afterwards? Are the poor fed? Do they recieve a free education and medical care? The literacy rate in India isn&#39;t even remotely comparable (65%) to Cuba&#39;s. How did Gandhi do more than Che? Please provide examples.

You say Gandhi accomplished more than Che, but Che, Fidel, Camilo and the rest overthrew an oppressive regime with a peasants army, and incorporated Socialism on Cuba. Whose society today is more Socialist? India or Cuba?

To think for a minute that the capitalists, politicians and the rest of the ruling class are going to " go gently into that good night" is naive.
First and foremost, Kerry is a peice of shit. But then again, Bush was a &#39;fucking motherload of ass shitting cock molesting raping shit shitty shit shit&#39;, put it in short terms. Anyone but Bush, but then again, how COULD 59,790,345 people be so dumb <_< ? Hope that answers your personal offense on me, which was unwarrented :angry:

Btw, I&#39;m not in support of diminishing class society, rather, FAR narrowing the gaps in between each class. Thats called a socialist (ahem...dumbass...ahem) :D

Though the British did slaughter thousands of Indian protesters who never rasied a finger, think of the bloodshed if the whole population rose up against the british. That would be talking of casualties in the millions, mate.

And Gandhi helped release 800 million from the bonds of IMPERIALSIM, note the word, while Che and Fidel did so for 10 million. Not that that&#39;s bad or anything.

Having India being socialist is another issue, mate&#33;

Au revoir

And may peace be with you&#33;

[Sabocat]

First and foremost, Kerry is a peice of shit. But then again, Bush was a &#39;fucking motherload of ass shitting cock molesting raping shit shitty shit shit&#39;, put it in short terms. Anyone but Bush, but then again, how COULD 59,790,345 people be so dumb dry.gif ? Hope that answers your personal offense on me, which was unwarrented mad.gif

First, you did not say you supported Kerry, you stated you were a pro-Kerry activist. No socialist would support a pro war, pro business, bourgeois ruling party candidate. In the U.S., there were at least 3 and probably more Socialist candidates running. If you truly had socialist leanings, you would think that at very least you would have voted that way.


Btw, I&#39;m not in support of diminishing class society, rather, FAR narrowing the gaps in between each class. Thats called a socialist (ahem...dumbass...ahem)

No...that&#39;s called liberal reformist bullshit, but thanks for making it clear what kind of "socialist" you are. I have included Websters definition of Socialism below. Strangely, I don&#39;t see anything here about the maintenance of class devisions with slight narrowing of gaps.

Main Entry: so·cial·ism
Pronunciation: &#39;sO-sh&-"li-z&m
Function: noun
1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done


Though the British did slaughter thousands of Indian protesters who never rasied a finger, think of the bloodshed if the whole population rose up against the british. That would be talking of casualties in the millions, mate.

And Gandhi helped release 800 million from the bonds of IMPERIALSIM, note the word, while Che and Fidel did so for 10 million. Not that that&#39;s bad or anything.

The point I was trying to make, was that it was a one sided nonviolence. To me the idea that anyone would ask anyone else to stand and wait to be slaughtered is dispicable. Violence should be met with violence. If an entire population of 800 million had risen up to drive the British out violently, do you honestly believe that Britain would have stuck around?

Yes, Gandhi released them from British imperialism, and delivered them straight into the hands of the Indian bourgeoisie oligarchs, and a disgusting caste system. Do you think to most people in India, there was really any appreciable difference in their lives after the British left? I&#39;m not saying the British should not have been kicked out of India, but the realitiy is that for the lives of everyday people in India, their lives didn&#39;t change much. Gandhi for the most part brought nationalism and nothing more. Fidel and Che endeavored to not only rid Cuba of an oppressive regime, but also institute socialism to emancipate the working poor and illiterate and give them the same advantages that previously were available to only the bourgeoisie. They completely changed the lives of the poor on Cuba, and not by "narrowing the gaps"

[pedro san pedro]

Im not entirely sure that this what Ghandi achieved is that relevant to this thread Disgustapated, but more the means by which he achieved his goals. this is after all, a discussion on non-violence,

Ghandi wasnt trying to abolish class structure, he was fighting for independence, which he achieved non-violently.

Whether or not he should have continued fighting and strived to abolish the caste system is irrelevant to this thread.

I&#39;ve heard this arguement before from leftists - Ghandi still achieved a huge amount for one man, and contributed hugely to the therioes of nonviolence and civil disobedience.

[Wurkwurk]

Originally posted by pedro san [email protected] 8 2004, 12:24 AM
Im not entirely sure that this what Ghandi achieved is that relevant to this thread Disgustapated, but more the means by which he achieved his goals. this is after all, a discussion on non-violence,

Ghandi wasnt trying to abolish class structure, he was fighting for independence, which he achieved non-violently.

Whether or not he should have continued fighting and strived to abolish the caste system is irrelevant to this thread.

I&#39;ve heard this arguement before from leftists - Ghandi still achieved a huge amount for one man, and contributed hugely to the therioes of nonviolence and civil disobedience.
THANK YOU pedro san pedro&#33; You put my thoughts in perfect words.

Talking of socializing India and whatnot is irrelavent in this disscussion. Disgustapated, if you want to start a post raving about why Gandhi was such a bad man, feel free. I will simply continue your argument there.

Gandhi is a perfect example of how things can be achieved in peaceful ways. If British violence was met with Indian violence, many hundreds of thousands may have unnessecarily died. And still, after that bloody struggle, the oligarchy would still rule. I have respect for life above all...have you?

[Vallegrande]

Wasn&#39;t there a time that people rebelled (a short time that is) while Gandhi was still practicing non-violence? I watched that "Gandhi" movie and when violence broke out in a region, Gandhi was depressed and all that he had taught was vanished in one day. However, his practice is still achieved to this day, through protests, petitions, anything imaginable. It just sucks that non-violence takes a long and hard road to travel. It almost seems endless when confronting the same things over again. But that&#39;s what Gandhi endured.

One event that reminds me is when Gandhi led thousands (possible hundreds of thousands) to the shore to make their own salt from the sea. That should be the same here in America. If anyone has a plan to help the people through food, education, etc. without requiring them to pay money, that would be a very good form of non-violence. Destroy the monopoly by creating value. Violence would be meaningless when people are not living in poverty.

[Sabocat]

One event that reminds me is when Gandhi led thousands (possible hundreds of thousands) to the shore to make their own salt from the sea.

This is the point I&#39;m trying to make. The Salt march resulted in 10&#39;s of thousands killed, and as many as 100,000 arrested.


It just sucks that non-violence takes a long and hard road to travel.

And accomplishes little substantive long lasting results. Ever.


Talking of socializing India and whatnot is irrelavent in this disscussion. Disgustapated, if you want to start a post raving about why Gandhi was such a bad man, feel free. I will simply continue your argument there

This is a leftist board. Elimination of class is what we discuss here. A discussion about non-violence should be centered around it&#39;s usefulness towards that end. Who cares if a particular country achieves independence but the peasant and working class are still exploited and starving?

You were the one that said that Gandhi accomplished more than Che. I pointed out that Che and Fidel accomplished Socialism in Cuba. In fact I&#39;d be willing to wager that their revolution cost less lives than Gandhi&#39;s "non-violence" and actually benefitted the peasant and working class.

Also, I did not say Gandhi was a bad man, I&#39;m only pointing out the fact that his tactic of non-violence resulted in 10&#39;s of thousands of deaths and really did nothing for the working class. So in essence, it is not really non-violence when thousands of people are killed. Perhaps if the working class of India had risen up in violence against the British, thousands more would have been killed, but perhaps they would have achieved something other than national independence which does nothing to feed the poor. If you&#39;re going to use Gandhi as an example of non-violence then you&#39;re going to have to expect someone to debate the merits of his actions and what they actually achieved.

Perhaps a better demonstration with regards to non-violence protest/action would be to give one example when non-violence has resulted in the emancipation of the working class, or fed the poor or resulted in better working conditions. What I&#39;m trying to demonstrate to you is that Gandhi only achieved patriotic independence from England.


I have respect for life above all...have you?

No I don&#39;t. I have no respect for Nazi&#39;s or Capitalists. If they want to change and work with us, fine. If they don&#39;t, then they should only expect the worst. In my opinion, "the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few".

[Wurkwurk]

Disgustapated:

This is the point I&#39;m trying to make. The Salt march resulted in 10&#39;s of thousands killed, and as many as 100,000 arrested.

In fact, there were very few deaths; of the 2,500 that marched on the Dhrasana Salt Works, almost all of them where injured. But not dead. 60-70,000 where arrested by smuggling salt from the sea to the inland to use after following Ghandi&#39;s example, but where soon released.

And [non-violence] accomplishes little substantive long lasting results. Ever.

Guess what? India is a hegemenous, independent state. To this day, not another country even threatened the takeover of it. And sixty years IS long lasting.

This is a leftist board. Elimination of class is what we discuss here. A discussion about non-violence should be centered around it&#39;s usefulness towards that end.

Not necessarily. Look at the other topics on the boards: "Did Che smoke marijuana?" and "Reality vs. Conception" are not topics disscussing the emanicpation of the people, yet I don&#39;t see you *****ing over there. Please, stop it.

And the foremost thing all has to realize is, back in the 1930&#39;s and 1940&#39;s, there was no popular notion of marxism or socialism sweeping India. If the people rose up and &#39;violently&#39; deposed the British as you suggested, a free, capitalist India would have come into being, just like it was under Gandhi. Except under Gandhi, there were not needless hundreds of thousands killed in a useless uprising you so supported, and he also garnered international awe and support that also would have been seen as bad if an uprising occured.

India IS NOT SOCIALIST&#33;&#33; No matter how hard it is to admit, they never had a major CHANCE or URGE of being socialist, not up till today at least. Gandhi did a GREAT thing, and if you deny that, then I shall forever more regard you as an imperialist, a rascist, or both.

Cheers,

Wurkwurk

[Sabocat]

As a Socialist, as you proclaim to be, your interest in independence and hegemony should be a serious contradiction to your ideology. Nationalism isn&#39;t important, ending wage slavery should be. When that nationalism does NOTHING for the peasant and working class, you should seriously question it&#39;s worth. Gandhi&#39;s non-violence did nothing for India except keeping the INDIAN ruling class firmly in place. So what was it&#39;s benefit?


And the foremost thing all has to realize is, back in the 1930&#39;s and 1940&#39;s, there was no popular notion of marxism or socialism sweeping India


The Communist Party of India (CPI), founded in 1925


No matter how hard it is to admit, they never had a major CHANCE or URGE of being socialist

Patently false. The only thing keeping the working class and peasants from rising up was the bourgeois agenda that Gandhi kept pushing, assuring the Indian bourgeoisie would retain their factories and class devisions.

Your knowledge of socialist and class struggle is frighteningly sparse. I suggest as a "socialist" as you claim to be, you spend some time reading this, as it is written from a Socialist perspective of what Gandhi actually attained. Read it carefully.


Gandhi and the Politics of Nonviolence

By Meneejeh Moradian and David Whitehouse


THE IDEAS of Mahatma Gandhi have had a lasting impact on the left, from the civil rights movement of the 1960s right through to the movements against corporate greed and racism that are developing today. Many see Gandhi as the embodiment of politically-effective pacifism.

The success of his nonviolent strategy, however, is largely a myth.

The most common version of the Gandhi myth is the simple assertion that a struggle based on pacifism forced the British out of India. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed this view many times when explaining the methods of the Civil Rights movement he led:

This method was made famous in our generation by Gandhi, who used it to free his country from the domination of the British Empire.1

King believed that

Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore Gandhi at our own risk.2

This view of Gandhi&#39;s contributions has lent credibility to the principle of nonviolence in the fights against injustice around the world since then.

But the Indian revolt against British rule was anything but nonviolent. Gandhi&#39;s tactical ideas, moreover, had serious limitations as a guide to struggle. Movements that began under Gandhi&#39;s sponsorship often ended in premature retreats or escalated into physical confrontations. And the final ouster of the British in 1947 can&#39;t be counted as a victory for Gandhi&#39;s methods, since India&#39;s independence came as the movement was shoving Gandhi and his nonviolent philosophy to the political margins.

Gandhi, nevertheless, did make major contributions to the movement. Most crucial was his success in leading masses of people into struggle against British rule--something he did better than any other Indian leader. But while Gandhi&#39;s political leadership was the spark for these struggles, it was not their cause. The struggles arose from real, deep grievances against British rule, and the masses, once mobilized, showed repeatedly that they were willing to adopt militant tactics when nonviolent ones didn&#39;t work.

To understand the grievances and the struggles they inspired, we have to look at the background of British colonial rule.

"India must be bled"

To the British conquerors, India was a source of profits and a base for military operations--using Indian troops--from Africa to Indonesia. From the early stages of conquest in the late eighteenth century, the British began setting up taxation to finance their presence and to send money home.3 As early as 1765, the British East India Company also set up monopolies on common necessities like salt in the lands it controlled.4

These monopolies bred resentment and rebellion in the next two centuries. But the British innovation that brought misery to millions was the imposition of market relations--the cash economy--in agriculture.

The first step in introducing cash relations was to tax all the land. As the British replaced the crumbling Mughal empire, they took over and greatly expanded the Mughal system of land-revenue, which had been based on local tax collectors known as zamindars. The British generalized the system where it existed and allowed zamindars to help themselves to ten percent of the revenues. Elsewhere, the British instituted direct taxation.5

Peasants now needed to sell a portion of their produce on the market to raise cash to pay the taxes. By 1860, this market began to spread throughout British India, facilitated by a new railway system that carried cotton, food grains, and indigo out of the country to Britain and other markets.6

The effect on the villages was to shift power to the moneyed classes, including zamindars and moneylenders who, backed by British legal guarantees of their property rights, began to buy up large tracts of land. Ownership allowed them to charge rent to peasant cultivators on top of the taxes they extracted.7

Dispossessed peasants became agricultural day laborers, a class that grew from almost nothing in 1852 to 18 percent of the rural population in 1872.8 By the mid-twentieth century, agricultural proletarians--those who owned no land, or so little land that they had to work for others to survive--constituted half of the rural population.9

So market relations shuffled wealth into the hands of Indian landowners, a process that Marx had dubbed the "primitive [i.e., initial] accumulation of capital" when it happened in England. But dispossessed Indian peasants could not seek out industrial jobs as English peasants had. England&#39;s head start in industry was allowing it to flood the Indian market with factory goods, and these imports began to crush India&#39;s skilled handicraft industries, including metalworking and, especially, cloth production.10

The result was to trap the peasants into rural misery and to further expand the rural proletariat with unemployed spinners and weavers.

British rule thus marked a dramatic setback in the material welfare of most Indians. Before conquest, India suffered an average of one major famine every 50 years, but famines or scarcity gripped some part of India for 20 out of the 49 years in the period 1860-1908.11 The reserves that peasants formerly held to tide themselves over through periods of low rainfall were now routinely being sold to pay rent and taxes--and shipped out to be consumed overseas.

Lord Robert Salisbury, British Secretary of State for India, summed up British aims in this period by declaring that "India must be bled."12 Karl Marx put some numbers to it:

What the English take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the Hindoos, pensions for military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc. etc.--what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, speaking only of the value of the commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually to send over to England, it amounts to more than the total sum of income of the 60 millions of agricultural and industrial laborers of India&#33; This is a bleeding process, with a vengeance&#33;13 [Marx&#39;s emphasis.]

Resistance before Gandhi

Indians did not merely accept this situation. The history of the British raj (that is, British rule) is marked by different forms of resistance, including local uprisings of peasants and "tribal" groups.

Up until 1857, however, no movement connected local grievances into an all-India effort to expel the British. Indians were divided from each other by caste, class, religion, language, and region. At the time, the only all-India force that could stand up *o the British were the soldiers--known as sepoys--in the army. When the sepoys rebelled in 1857 against racial and religious abuse, they sparked and linked up to peasant rebellions in north, central, and western India.14

The revolt was nearly national in scope, but it was not nationalist in consciousness. The revolt&#39;s demands were to expel the British and to return power to local princes--the only legitimate authority the rebels could conceive.15

The rebellion broke down in the face of British repression. As a spontaneous uprising, it lacked planning and coordination. What&#39;s more, the nearer the movement got to the goals of "local control," the weaker and more divided it was bound to become against British terror.

Thus, although the Sepoy Mutiny was anti-imperial, it was backward-looking. The classes and the consciousness that could carry a truly nationalist movement in the future were only in embryonic stages at the time.

Nationalist politicians arose in the following decades from a new middle class of Indian lawyers and civil servants. To the extent that this class existed in 1857, its members stood aside from the Sepoy Mutiny. They saw their own future connected to modernization, and thus would sooner strive for acceptance as equals in the British raj than put their fate back into the hands of the princes.

But the nationalist middle class was motivated by more than ambition. In the first place, they saw that the racism that held them back professionally fell even more brutally on other Indians:

For the less fortunate, racism took cruder forms of kicks and blows and shooting "accidents" as the "sahib" disciplined his punkha coolie or bagged a native by mistake [while hunting]... No less than 81 shooting "accidents" were recorded in the years between 1880 and 1900. White-dominated courts regularly awarded ridiculously light sentences for such incidents, and a glance at contemporary Indian journals or private papers immediately reveals how important such things were for the rise of nationalism.16

The middle class could also see the poverty inflicted by British rule--in contrast to the prosperity of England, where many Indian lawyers and civil servants went to school. Many of the students became attracted to the ideas of the nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji, who was living in England and is best known for promoting the "drain of wealth" theory of Indian poverty--the anti-imperialist complement to Salisbury&#39;s "India must be bled."

In 1885, many of these former students founded the Indian National Congress to press the interests of Indians under the British raj.17

Congress&#39; methods in its first decades were confined almost entirely to petitioning the administration behind closed doors. Even as some nationalists became radicalized enough to demand swaraj (home rule), Congress remained an elite affair--a yearly conference dominated by lawyers and professionals. Although Congress became known for increasingly radical speeches, it did not have roots in other classes--or much concrete achievement to show for itself. In fact, it barely existed between its annual conferences.

By the time Gandhi arrived in 1915, Congress was moving in two directions. One faction kept up the usual method of petitioning. Others who had become impatient with this ineffective "mendicant" (begging) method became known as "Extremists" and moved toward individual terrorism. But both were still elite strategies, separated from popular movements of resistance.

One important breakthrough did occur in this period to connect the official national movement to popular struggle. In 1908, when Congress "Extremist" Balgangadhar Tilak was sentenced to prison for publishing an article sympathetic to Bengal terrorists, workers in Bombay struck in protest. They mounted a six-day strike, one day for each year of Tilak&#39;s sentence. The strike affected 76 of 85 Bombay textile mills and a railway workshop.18

This strike marked the appearance of the working class as a force in politics. Only at this time was India&#39;s trend toward de-industrialization beginning to turn around, with the appearance of major Indian-owned enterprises. By 1921, the working class in industry and on big plantations would reach 2.7 million and exercise disproportionate influence in a country of 300 million.19

Just as important was the growth of the Indian bourgeoisie, segments of which became solidly nationalist as they chafed under British control of currencies and tariffs.

Practically every class had grievances against British rule: lower and middle peasants, workers, the professional middle class, and the bourgeoisie. It was a matter of time before enough of these sections of society would unite to throw off British rule. The real question was which sections would coalesce into an alliance to lead the rest--and with what ideas about the shape of post-independence India.

Gandhi, more than anyone else, would pull together the leading alliance of forces. His political vision put a stamp on the direction of the movement at crucial turns. Ultimately, though, social forces stronger than Gandhi&#39;s personality were to shape the outcome.

Gandhi&#39;s approach to politics

Mohandas K. Gandhi was born in 1869 in the Indian province of Gujarat. His family was in the commercial bania caste that produced, along with the Brahmins, much of the middle class. As a young man he went to England to receive legal training. He would end up abandoning his profession, however, and adopting the lifestyle and dress of the Hindu peasantry, using traditional Hindu symbolism to relate to villagers.

His deep religious convictions, however, did not come from orthodox training in childhood but from adult studies that he began as a political activist in South Africa. Upon his return to India from England, he had had a rough start as a lawyer and accepted an offer in 1893 to work on a commercial case in South Africa. He ended up staying, with brief returns to India, for more than 20 years.20

In South Africa, racism was even more intense than in India, and Gandhi became an advocate and leader of the Indian immigrant population. Struggles for Indian rights escalated over his stay in South Africa, and Gandhi had to teach himself skills that would make him unique upon his return to India, including how to overcome caste, class, and religious divisions to build a base for dramatic mass actions. Far from being unworldly, Gandhi also learned the fundraising and accounting skills necessary to sustaining mass politics.21

In the process, Gandhi&#39;s religious development increasingly influenced his politics. In the writings of Leo Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded, and the writings of social theorist Robert Ruskin, Gandhi found a philosophy that--along with an idiosyncratic reading of Hindu scripture--diagnosed modern oppression as arising from industrialism and proposed nonviolent political action as a cure.22

He believed that the search for truth was the goal of human life, and since "no one could ever be sure of having attained the ultimate truth, use of violence to enforce one&#39;s own necessarily partial understanding of it was sinful."23

By 1907 he had worked out the basic strategy of nonviolent resistance, which he called satyagraha. It consisted of training a core of volunteers who helped to lead mass marches and mass violations of specific laws that resulted in intentional mass arrests.24 Three satyagraha campaigns in the next seven years, along with a growing body of articles and pamphlets, made him famous in India even before he returned.

While still in South Africa, Gandhi wrote about India in his 1909 pamphlet, "Hind Swaraj" (Indian Self-Rule), and targeted what he thought was the real enemy, industrial civilization:

It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than the American Rockefeller.... India&#39;s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past 50 years or so. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper class have to learn to live consciously and religiously and deliberately the simple life of a peasant.25

This vision of Indian society going backwards in time was, of course, unrealistic, especially given the new growth of an Indian working class and bourgeoisie, and it found no real support among the leading elements of the national movement--Indian intellectuals and industrialists.

It was utopian particularly in upholding the idea that the "so-called upper class" would willingly give up its privileged position to live like peasants. Far from this scenario, the Indian upper class increasingly wanted the British out of the way precisely to become the new "Indian Rockefellers."

Although Gandhi&#39;s anti-industrial vision had little appeal for India&#39;s rising urban classes, it struck a chord among India&#39;s larger masses--especially the poor peasants and unemployed weavers and spinners--who had been crushed by their connection to Britain&#39;s industrial system.

Gandhi was to put the anti-modern current of his thought into practice through the village social workers who organized self-help among the rural poor.26 Although this "constructive work" made little real headway against poverty, it was later to create mass support for the Congress Party--and mass bases from which to launch future campaigns.27

Despite the evident oddities of Gandhi&#39;s philosophy, his strategy of mass nonviolent action seemed to provide a way forward for the resistance movement at both the elite and popular levels. When Gandhi arrived in India in 1915, Congress militants had been committing individual terrorist acts which didn&#39;t really change anything, and the masses had mounted local uprisings that were brutally suppressed--to be followed by everyday submission to oppression. Gandhi&#39;s ideas presented an alternative to these unhappy options.

The appeal of Gandhi&#39;s strategy was two-fold. It appealed to masses of villagers because it was a collective way to resist, to try to rise above all the violence and show the dignity of their cause. It also appealed to the wealthy merchants, landlords, and small-holding peasants who supported Gandhi because it offered the hope of getting rid of the British while not threatening to destroy their property or endanger their economic and social position.28 Gandhi pitched his methods of struggle to the more conservative Congress leaders as a way to win leadership back from the militants:

The growing generation will not be satisfied with petitions... Satyagraha is the only way, it seems to me, to stop terrorism.29

India finds a mass leader

Gandhi returned to India and joined the Indian National Congress in the midst of the First World War. The war was bringing an economic and political crisis for the British, and space opened up for Indian textile bosses to get a greater share of the home market. A growing section of them was impatient with British control of the market, and many became fervent supporters of the nationalist movement.30

They were particularly drawn to Gandhi&#39;s promises of a nonviolent removal of British rule. Through Gandhi&#39;s appeal, Congress began to receive funding from many of the biggest industrial concerns, including the Sarabhais textile magnates in Gujarat and the Birlas, the second largest industrial group in India. They became Gandhi&#39;s regular consultants throughout his political career.31

For ordinary people in India, the war also awoke new aspirations. Indian soldiers fought for the British in a war they had no stake in and returned home wanting to be treated as equals. As Eqbal Ahmad described the situation,

On the battlefield they were every day recognizing that they were equals, but they were also experiencing patterns of racial discrimination. Therefore they came back from World War I burning with anger. They and their relatives gave the push to the nationalist movement.32

The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a radicalizing impact on oppressed people throughout the world, and India was no exception. Wrote one historian:

In the post-war years--what is repeatedly evident is a combination of multiplying grievances with new moods of strength or hope: the classic historical formula for a potentially revolutionary situation.33

The aftermath of the Russian Revolution saw a growing militancy among workers and peasants that erupted into massive struggles. Gandhi tried to play the role of mediator and acted as a restraint on the movement.

In 1918, a dispute broke out at a textile factory in Ahmedabad when the owner tried to end a system of bonuses that he had introduced during a devastating plague. The mill owner was actually a contributor of Gandhi&#39;s, and his sister was a Gandhian disciple who set up night schools for mill workers. Gandhi intervened to convince the workers to drop their demand for a 50 percent wage hike down to 35 percent and forbade militant picketing in favor of a hunger strike.

He advocated a labor philosophy of peaceful arbitration of disputes and argued that bosses were "trustees" for the workers.34 This message of class collaboration cloaked in the language of nonviolence would be Gandhi&#39;s continued approach as the class struggle intensified. His position on strikes was clear:

In India we want no political strikes... We must gain control over all the unruly and disturbing elements... We seek not to destroy capital or capitalists, but to regulate the relations between capital and labor. We want to harness capital to our side. It would be folly to encourage sympathetic strikes.35

This was an unfortunate position, since the power of the strike, in factories and on the railroads, could economically cripple the British in India--and permit workers to pose a concrete alternative to the exploitation over which the British presided.

The potential exploded in 1919. Mass agitation against repressive British legislation, the Rowlatt Act, which sought to extend war-time restrictions on civil rights, coincided with a strike wave by mill workers.

Gandhi&#39;s approach to the Rowlatt Act was to launch a satyagraha to channel people&#39;s anger in a nonviolent direction. He called for mass demonstrations nationwide, but called them for a Sunday so as not to encourage work stoppages.

Gandhi made special efforts to include Muslim groups in the campaign. In the province of Amritsar, for example, there were massive peaceful marches of Muslims and Hindus. The British officials were particularly alarmed by the breakdown of divisions they worked so hard to maintain. Scenes of Muslims and Hindus drinking from the same cups in public frightened them terribly.36

The British resorted to sheer savagery to put down the movement. The massacre known as Jallianwallabagh was an assault on unarmed villagers in an enclosed area, not to disperse the crowd but to produce a "moral effect," as General Dyer put it.37 At least 400 people were murdered, and a wave of repression followed, including random arrests, torture, and public flogging.

In the city of Lahore, peaceful demonstrations of Hindus and Muslims escalated into clashes with police as news of the Amritsar events spread. Factory and railway workers struck, and the British withdrew their forces from the city. A mass rally elected a People&#39;s Committee that ran the city for four days. Middle class members of the committee tried to call things off unsuccessfully until the British attacked and imposed martial law.38

Mass marches and strikes broke out in many other cities, and the middle class started to fear the militancy of workers and peasants. Gandhi expressed this concern by condemning the violence that had broken out on both sides, though it was far from equal. The Rowlatt disturbances left 4 whites dead and at least 1,200 Indians dead and another 3,600 wounded.39

Gandhi said he had committed a "Himalayan blunder" in calling for mass civil disobedience without enough organizational and ideological control over the movement.40

But the next mass movement, the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1921-22, also unleashed forces beyond Gandhi&#39;s control, and he called the campaign off when a crowd in Chauri-Chaura responded to police beatings and gunfire by killing 22 cops. The Congress Party later raised no protest when 19 Indians were hanged for their act of retaliation.41

The fact that Gandhi could call an all-India movement--and then call it off when it got too militant for his taste--shows how crucial he had become to the national movement. It also exposes the lack of an alternative revolutionary leadership in the potentially revolutionary situation of 1919-22.42

It was clear by the early 1920s that Gandhi brought two elements to the anti-imperial struggle that had been missing since the Sepoy Mutiny. His political skills, plans, and charisma drew a mass base into the first all-India struggles since 1857, and the struggles themselves connected popular grievances against aspects of British rule to the final goal of ending British rule. Neither the "mendicant" or terrorist traditions in Congress had been able to do these things, and Gandhi&#39;s success made him into the Congress Party&#39;s preeminent--and indispensible--leader.

In the course of these struggles, Gandhi remolded Congress from an organization of intermittently-active nationalist clerks and lawyers into a genuine mass party. Although to the mass of peasants he was known as a Mahatma (a "great soul" or holy man), Gandhi was also a shrewd political organizer and infighter. In 1920, he insisted on reorganizing Congress into a hierarchy of committees built up from the villages to the district level, reworking provincial committees on a linguistic basis, and creating a 15-member Working Committee as an ongoing executive to oversee the whole party&#39;s work.43

Leading and limiting the struggle

Despite his skills and the powerful influence of his personality, Gandhi kept igniting forces that got beyond his control. The basic pattern could be seen again in the Civil Disobedience Movements of the early 1930s, which began with the famous campaign to violate the British salt monopoly.

The salt satyagraha escalated quickly. Mass marches to the coast to break the British salt monopoly led to mass arrests. News of Gandhi&#39;s arrest sparked a strike by textile workers in Maharashtra who attacked police outposts, law courts and other official buildings. In the Central Provinces, a satyagraha to violate restrictions on the use of forests escalated into attacks on police pickets and mass illegal cutting of wood. And throughout the country, peasants who had refused to pay their land taxes physically resisted police attempts to seize their property.44

Though he emphasized the plight of peasants, Gandhi&#39;s attitude towards their class demands was not unlike his attitude towards workers&#39; struggles. When the Moplah uprising in Malabar occurred back in 1921, Congress was downright hostile. Some of the peasant strikes hit tea plantations owned by Congress members, who did everything possible to stop the revolt. Gandhi gave a speech in which he declared that the objective was to "turn zamindars into friends."45 He made it clear that he

deprecated all attempts to create discord between landlords and tenants and advised all the tenants to suffer rather than fight, for they had to join forces against the most powerful zamindar, namely the Government.46

He went so far as to reassure the landlords that,

I shall be no party to dispossessing propertied classes of their private property without just cause. My objective is to reach your hearts and convert you so that you may hold all your private property in trust for your tenants and use it primarily for their welfare. But supposing that there is an attempt unjustly to deprive you of your property, you will find me fighting on your side.47

Peasants, who were becoming increasingly radical, felt betrayed. In one village, the same people who had showered him with garlands later refused him food.

Gandhi was always trying to reconcile class divisions, and his commitment to nonviolence was one way to keep the struggle reigned in. The refusal to endorse selective use of physical force virtually ruled out strikes as a method of struggle. As one Bombay mill owner remarked about strikes in 1929, "peaceful picketing does not really exist," since the point of picketing is to prevent scab workers from getting into the mill.48

Despite Gandhi&#39;s efforts, class divisions could not be smoothed over, and Gandhi&#39;s campaigns would continually move beyond the boundaries he tried to impose. This was because, in order to build up a mass base, he would deliberately tap into people&#39;s real grievances, which often had a class aspect.

When those he mobilized met with repression, they felt justified in using any means necessary to get what they felt they deserved. What&#39;s more, civil disobedience campaigns led their participants to draw natural conclusions about resisting all unjust laws, such as those laws that defended the landlords&#39; rights to crushing rents.

Gandhi, who in 1930 had promised a "fight to the finish" for Indian self-rule, wound up the massive Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-31 after extracting only token concessions--disappointing even close collaborators like Jawaharlal Nehru, who remarked in T.S. Eliot&#39;s words, "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."49

Then, in May 1933, when Gandhi abruptly suspended a second Civil Disobedience Movement that he had begun the year before, his party comrades were furious. Said Nehru:

After so much sacrifice and brave endeavor, was our movement to tail off into something insignificant? I felt angry with him [Gandhi] at his religious and sentimental approach to a political question and his frequent references to God in connection with it.50

Subhas Chandra Bose, a Congress militant, was scathing about Gandhi&#39;s retreat:

Today our condition is analogous to that of an army that has suddenly surrendered to the enemy in the midst of a protracted and strenuous campaign. And the surrender has taken place, not because the nation demanded it, not because the national army rose in revolt against its leaders and refused to fight...but either because the commander in chief was exhausted as a result of repeated fasting or because his mind and judgment were clouded owing to subjective causes which it is impossible for an outsider to understand.51

Class struggle vs. communal strife

Gandhi refused to take up class demands on moral grounds, and his party&#39;s bourgeois backers certainly weren&#39;t interested in supporting class struggle. As a result, the Congress Party, the main force for India&#39;s national liberation, passed up the chance to forge a bond of common class interests among Hindu and Muslim peasants and workers. Such a bond would have counteracted India&#39;s second most powerful political trend after nationalism: communal politics.

Communalism, the politics that posed religion as India&#39;s key division, led Hindus and Muslims to attack each other in bloody riots. Communalism tended to grow in the years of nationalist ebb tide, as in late 1920s, when people&#39;s grievances did not get channeled into mass campaigns. Thus communal struggle is not built on rising expectations, but instead taps into disappointed hopes--and channels people&#39;s bitterness toward scapegoats. Although their professed enemies are those who belong to a different religion, communal organizations actually serve to discipline lower-caste and lower-class Indians to the authority of elite members of their own religion. As one study argues,

Organized Hindutva ["Hinduness"] emerges right from the beginning as an upper caste reaction to efforts at self-assertion by downtrodden groups within the Hindu fold....

The RSS [a Hindu fascist group founded in 1925], from its inception down to today, has been overwhelmingly middle class Brahmin or Bania in composition, drawn together on the basis of a fear psychosis directed against other social groups: Muslims, most overtly, but by implication also lower caste Hindus.52

The Muslim League, formed in 1906 by middle class Muslims, never developed a street-thug type of organization like the Hindu RSS. The League&#39;s ongoing politics were reactionary, however, as they professed concern about the vulnerable status of worker and peasant Muslims while holding them back from class and national struggles--which would inevitably involve alliances with Hindus.

The Communist Party of India (CPI), founded in 1925, was an effective antidote to communal divisions in the places where it grew. Building unity on the basis of class, the CPI had the most success in organizing unions like the Girni Kamgar Union, which was strongest in Bombay. In 1929 the CPI had 42 workers&#39; committees in the textile mills and had led a successful industry-wide strike for higher wages.53 Communists were gaining influence among railway workers and oil workers as well.

Unfortunately, by 1930 the labor movement and the Communist Party were being beaten back. Fierce repression from the British combined with the disastrous twists and turns of the CP&#39;s strategy to weaken the only organized working class alternative to communalism and bourgeois nationalism. In 1928, the CPI adopted Stalin&#39;s policy of attacking relatively left Congress leaders. As a result, the CPI removed itself--and, tragically, removed most workers--from the next wave of nationalist struggle, the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-31.54 Their later support of Stalinist Russia in the Second World War, and thus, of the British war effort, would also remove them from the Quit India Movement of 1942.

Despite the bizarre twists of CPI policy, their class-unity position remained the only counterweight to communal division in the countryside--where "the failure of Congress leaders to espouse agrarian radicalism even in Depression conditions, encouraged Muslim peasant movements to develop increasingly on separatist lines."55

Independence, partition and communal bloodbath

A combination of factors pushed the British to finally accept that they could no longer hold India. Some factors operated outside India, including broad pressures to decolonize--both from national movements and from the U.S., which had demanded that Britain open its colonial markets to postwar American penetration in return for its lend-lease military support.56

It was clear that the empire was crumbling. Japanese forces had swept through British colonies in Asia with little difficulty, showing Indians that the mighty British could be defeated. Inside India, Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement in 1942, which became the biggest revolt since 1857.57

But after the war, when Britain was negotiating terms of departure with Congress and the Muslim League, the revolt continued without Congress sponsorship. In 1946, nearly 2 million workers, more than half of the working class, went on strike. They earned the condemnation even of Nehru on the Congress left, who was headed toward being India&#39;s first prime minister and did not want to inherit an undisciplined workforce.58

The CP called general strikes in Calcutta and Bombay that saw the unity of students and workers, Hindus and Muslims, battling the police together in the streets.

Even more spectacular was the the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946, which was also founded on Hindu-Muslim unity. The mutiny sparked sympathy strikes of 300,000 in Bombay--and was also condemned by Gandhi and Congress.59

At the same time, with Congress having left the field of mass action, upsurges of united struggle periodically gave way to gruesome communal violence--inspired both by the Hindu right and by the Muslim League&#39;s campaign for a separate Pakistan. In general, mass politics after the war was a patchwork of communal bloodletting and its opposite--united class revolt.

In the end, Congress agreed to partition off Pakistan because the party was not prepared to support the only real alternative--class struggle on an increasingly leftist basis. In this way, the refusal to polarize the struggle along class lines virtually guaranteed a bloodbath along communal lines. The British, for their part, were eager for Congress to take over, since they realized that an Indian government could more easily put down the wave of strikes and mutinies than they themselves could.60

Sumit Sarkar describes the ramifications of the final deal:

For far too many Muslims in India and Hindus in Pakistan, freedom-with-partition meant a cruel choice between the threat of sudden violence and squeezing of employment and economic opportunities, or a forcible tearing out of age-old roots to join the stream of refugees.61

In 1947, millions celebrated the independence that they had won through decades of struggle. But the year was also marked by a holocaust of violence and ethnic cleansing that accompanied Partition. Seventeen million people were forced to migrate and 1 million people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of corpses littered the streets of cities like Calcutta and Delhi. There are descriptions of train cars arriving full only of dead people.62

Gandhi, now in his late seventies, personally journeyed to areas where communal violence had broken out and did his best to persuade people to stop, walking barefoot through the riot-torn slums and threatening "to fast unto death."63 His moral authority was able to stop the violence sometimes, but when he left, all the social and economic problems that led people to see another religious group as their main enemy were still in place.

Gandhi was disgusted with the opportunism he saw in Congress, and up to his death he displayed a principled anti-communalism. While riots raged in Punjab, Gandhi told a leader of the Muslim League:

I want to fight it out with my life. I would not allow the Muslims to crawl on the streets in India. They must walk with self-respect.64

Gandhi died for upholding Muslim equality, assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu fascist. The killer, Nathuram Godse, had been trained as an organizer in the RSS in the 1930s.65 It is appalling to note that, just two days ago as we write this, president Clinton (whose insistence on sanctions against Iraq has killed more than half a million children) dedicated a statue of Gandhi in Washington, D.C.--assisted by India&#39;s prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who belongs to the RSS.

Moral force and class forces

Gandhi&#39;s principle of nonviolence, whose moral force propelled several mass movements forward in their initial phases, repeatedly held back the struggles at key moments. As a result, privileged groups in the urban centers and countryside were able to detach the struggle for political independence from the struggle for radical social change--and thus thwarted Gandhi&#39;s own goals of social justice. The British were gone, but the bureaucracy and police they built up still functioned with little change--and continued to repress workers&#39; and peasants&#39; uprisings. Gandhi&#39;s will had been strong, but class forces proved stronger.

And Gandhi never promoted the class force--workers--that could have helped him in his final struggle to unite Hindus and Muslims. Only class struggle could have achieved what Gandhi&#39;s purely moral mission attempted.

The movement didn&#39;t have to turn out in such a mess. Potentially revolutionary situations existed in the periods 1919-22 and 1946-47, but no mass party with revolutionary goals had been forged to steer the movements to victory.

In the post-Second World War movement, the same social forces that had overthrown the Russian Tsar in 1917 were at the center of the upsurge--the industrial working class, along with peasants and workers in uniform. But in India&#39;s case, the country&#39;s only mass party saved the British from being overthrown by taking power "peacefully" themselves--at the price of leaving the class rebellion to be consumed in the fires of communalism.

Different alignments of class forces were possible, since most classes opposed British rule. The independence movement would have produced a different outcome if industrial workers and the agricultural proletariat had been able to form a revolutionary socialist party--and drawn the middle class and small-holding peasants behind their class-struggle leadership. Instead, Gandhi&#39;s party reversed these relations, with the bourgeoisie included in the leadership with the middle classes of village and city.

Gandhi&#39;s life was history&#39;s longest experiment in nonviolent political action. The result of the experiment is fairly clear: An exploitative class structure cannot be broken without violence somewhere along the way. Property rights, defended by state violence, have never yielded to the peaceful pressure of the exploited class. Put in other terms, no exploiting class has ever left the stage of history without being pushed.

But moral force is, in fact, necessary to help draw together even a socialist movement. In some ways, our methods must indeed foreshadow a society that is more humane than the current one. Carpet-bombing civilian targets, showering thousands of anti-personnel weapons into rice paddies, or inflicting a starvation blockade upon an entire population, to take three examples, have been characteristic tactics of bourgeois war. Indeed, their use is a good reason to overthrow the bourgeois order. Conversely, it&#39;s hard to conceive of them as tactical options in a movement that aims at the liberation of ordinary people.

Moral force alone, however, cannot win a struggle against a class whose interests are inherently antagonistic to ours. Violence has to be part of the movement&#39;s arsenal. In a society founded on a violent class antagonism, our political aim cannot be like Gandhi&#39;s--to win over the whole of society. We must learn, instead, to draw the right battle lines.

-----------------------------------------------

Meneejeh Moradian is a member of the International Socialist Organization in New York, and David Whitehouse is reviews editor of the International Socialist Review. This article benefited from the authors&#39; conversations and correspondence with Ganesh and Deepa Lal, Pranav Jani, and Alpana Mehta.




1 Martin Luther King Jr., "The Current Crisis in Race Relations," in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., James M. Washington, ed. (United Kingdom: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1986), p. 86.

2 Quoted from <http://www.engagedpage.com/gandhi.html> as of September 18, 2000.

3 Sam Ashman, "Indian: Imperialism, Partition and Resistance," International Socialism 77, Winter 1997, p. 82.

4 Anthony Read and David Fisher, India&#39;s Long Road to Independence (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 227.

5 Ashman, p. 82, Sarkar, pp. 32-33.

6 B.M. Bhatia, Famines in India (Delhi: Konark Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1991), p. 16.

7 Bhatia, pp. 18-20.

8 Bhatia, p. 18.

9 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 368.

10 Sarkar, pp. 28-30.

11 Bhatia, p. 8.

12 Quoted in Dadabhai Naoroji, "India Must Be Bled," in 100 Best Pre-Independence Speeches 1870-1947, ed. by H.D. Sharma (New Delhi, HarperCollins Publishers India, 1998).

13 Karl Marx, letter to N.F. Danielson, February 19, 1881, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 46 (New York: International Publishers, 1992).

14 Ashman, pp. 83-84.

15 R.C. Majumdar and P.N. Chopra, Main Currents of Indian History (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1994), pp. 149-50.

16 Sarkar, p. 22.

17 Sarkar, p. 88.

18 Sarkar, p. 134.

19 Sarkar, p. 174.

20 Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 28.

21 Brown, pp. 46-48.

22 Brown, pp. 78-81.

23 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India (Macmillan India Limited, 1983), p. 179.

24 Sarkar, p.179.

25 Quoted in Sarkar, p.180.

26 Sarkar, p. 181.

27 Sarkar, p. 230.

28 Sarkar, p.180.

29 Quoted in Ashman, p.91.

30 Ashman, p. 89.

31 Alec Kahn. "Gandhi--hero or humbug? How nonviolence failed in India" (Australia: International Socialists, 1982), p. 2.

32 Ahmad, p. 8.

33 Sarkar, p. 169.

34 Sarkar, p. 186.

35 Sarkar, p. 208.

36 Sarkar, p. 190.

37 Sarkar, p. 191.

38 Sarkar, p. 192.

39 Sarkar, p. 192.

40 Sarkar, p. 194.

41 Sarkar, pp. 224-25.

42 Sarkar, pp. 225-26.

43 Sarkar, pp. 197-98.

44 Sarkar, pp. 286-296.

45 Ashman, p. 91.

46 Siddharth Dube, In The Land Of Poverty: Memoirs of an Indian Family 1947-1997, (New York: Zed Books, 1998), p. 36.

47 Dube, p. 55.

48 Sarkar, p. 280.

49 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1996), p. 259. First published 1936.

50 Quoted in R.C. Majumdar and P.N. Chopra, Main Currents of Indian History (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1994), p. 197.

51 Subhas Chandra Bose, "The Fickle Leader," in 100 Greatest Pre-Independence Speeches.

52 Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993), pp. 16-17.

53 Sarkar, p. 271.

54 Sarkar, p. 297

55 See Sarkar, pp. 302, 323, 354, and 364.

56 Sarkar, p. 386 and Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), pp. 249 and 286.

57 Sarkar, p. 391.

58 Sarkar, p. 429.

59 Sarkar, pp. 423-25.

60 Sarkar, p. 431.

61 Sarkar, p. 453.

62 Ashman, pp. 97-98.

63 Sarkar, p. 437.

64 Quoted in Sarkar, p. 437.

65 Khaki Shorts, pp. 23-24.

Link (http://www.isreview.org/issues/14/Gandhi.shtml)




Look at the other topics on the boards: "Did Che smoke marijuana?

Yes, that topic is in Chit Chat. Class Struggle is not the focus of Chit Chat, Graphics or the Lounge. What is your point. Politics, Opposing Ideologies, History, Philosophy, Theory are all sections of the board that are to be for serious leftist discussion. If they were not, we would allow all the capitalists in OI to post all over the board. We don&#39;t.


I shall forever more regard you as an imperialist, a rascist, or both.

Whatever you say sweetheart. I suggest you start a poll somewhere on the board then, and try and have me banned for racism, as it is a serious bannable offense. Good luck to you.

[Wurkwurk]

"Did che smoke marijuana" is in the Che Guevara section. Not Chit Chat.

You also very much misinterpreted my comments. I am not a nationalist, but niether am I an imperialist. You seem to ignorant to even realize that the British imposed their imperialism on India, simply never mentioning that as if it never was.
Imperialism is bad. You SHOULD agree (and if you change your mind ont his one I&#39;ll laugh in pity). This, as well, is no serious infringment on being a socialist, rather, it is a core belief. It should be yours too, as well, but you seemed far more intrested at falsifying great men and killing people if in doing so nothing large will be gained.

Answer this question for me: Do you think Gandhi was a great man? Yes or no.

Now to your posted thingy:
QUOTE: Gandhi was always trying to reconcile class divisions, and his commitment to nonviolence was one way to keep the struggle reigned in. The refusal to endorse selective use of physical force virtually ruled out strikes as a method of struggle.
He was the one that BEGAN the salt march and the strikes against the British salt monopoly....dumbass.

QUOTE: Despite the evident oddities of Gandhi&#39;s philosophy, his strategy of mass nonviolent action seemed to provide a way forward for the resistance movement at both the elite and popular levels. When Gandhi arrived in India in 1915, Congress militants had been committing individual terrorist acts which didn&#39;t really change anything, and the masses had mounted local uprisings that were brutally suppressed--to be followed by everyday submission to oppression. Gandhi&#39;s ideas presented an alternative to these unhappy options.

AH HA&#33;&#33;&#33; Violence was used there, Disagupatated. Violence, the form you so supported, was commited. And what happened? It was quote-BRUTALLY SUPPRESSED, and it qoute-DIDN&#39;T REALLY CHANGE ANYTHING. So much for your &#39;violence being the only way&#39;.


QUOTE: It was clear by the early 1920s that Gandhi brought two elements to the anti-imperial struggle that had been missing since the Sepoy Mutiny. His political skills, plans, and charisma drew a mass base into the first all-India struggles since 1857, and the struggles themselves connected popular grievances against aspects of British rule to the final goal of ending British rule. Neither the "mendicant" or terrorist traditions in Congress had been able to do these things, and Gandhi&#39;s success made him into the Congress Party&#39;s preeminent--and indispensible--leader.

Furthers my previous comments about nonviolence being the superior way, and that violence for over 200 years has failed to oust the British out of India AT ALL. The gathering of India&#39;s people and the unity of India was far greater under Gandhi than under any radical militia or rebellion, all of which ended in death and suffering.

Thank you, sir, for furthering my argument with your delectable little article&#33;

Au revoir

[A_Devious_Mind]

i am from india and i know what Gandhi has left us with,he is just over hyped.....he never did anything great,he dint have the balls to give his life for freedom and look what he left us...Nehru, our first prime minister dint even win the elections fairly...just because gandhi sided with him...people blindy voted for him and then his family controlled the nation for half a century&#33; the system they made is higly inefficient and corrupt and we are not even free.....they ban books that speak against gandhi&#33; is that freedom? dont we have the right to express or read what we like?
and they call our country a secularist country.....and they give special concessions to minorities....what the hell? and gandhi sided with the rich indian industrialists who exploited more than the birts&#33;

he is responsible for what has become of our nation.

[Wurkwurk]

A Devious mind- are you saying you PREFER imperialism? What kind of communist ARE you&#33;?

[Dyst]

I believe the goals of the revolution can, and historically have been accomplished non-violently.


When?
When ever has the true goals of the revolution been accomplished, violently?

I am no diehard (no pun intended) pascifist though, just for the record.

[Sabocat]

"Did che smoke marijuana" is in the Che Guevara section. Not Chit Chat.

Are you really this stupid, or are you just being argumentative for arguments sake? That thread was posted in the Che forum and instantly removed to Chit Chat days ago. See the little arrow next to the thread? That means it has been MOVED.

With regards to your nonsense about Imperialism. Where did I say I was in favor of Imperialism? We are not debating Imperialism. You started a thread extolling the virtues of Gandhi&#39;s actions of non-violence in India. I am pointing out that all the non-violence accomplished was a nationalistic goal. In the context of leftist struggle, removing the British from India did little or nothing to improve the lives of the poor and working class. Realistically, the British were probably going to divest themselves of India anyway. Why can&#39;t you understand this? Why is nationalism so important to you? What does nationalism accomplish?


Answer this question for me: Do you think Gandhi was a great man? Yes or no.

No. I would have thought my answer to this would have been obvious to you.

Congratulations by the way for missing the entire meaning of that article and picking an choosing the more irrelevant parts. In the hopes that you&#39;ll finally understand the point I&#39;m trying to make about Gandhi&#39;s non-violence and his ideology.


He advocated a labor philosophy of peaceful arbitration of disputes and argued that bosses were "trustees" for the workers34 This message of class collaboration cloaked in the language of nonviolence would be Gandhi&#39;s continued approach as the class struggle intensified. His position on strikes was clear:

In India we want no political strikes... We must gain control over all the unruly and disturbing elements... We seek not to destroy capital or capitalists, but to regulate the relations between capital and labor. We want to harness capital to our side. It would be folly to encourage sympathetic strikes.35


Gandhi refused to take up class demands on moral grounds, and his party&#39;s bourgeois backers certainly weren&#39;t interested in supporting class struggle.


Gandhi&#39;s principle of nonviolence, whose moral force propelled several mass movements forward in their initial phases, repeatedly held back the struggles at key moments. As a result, privileged groups in the urban centers and countryside were able to detach the struggle for political independence from the struggle for radical social change--and thus thwarted Gandhi&#39;s own goals of social justice. The British were gone, but the bureaucracy and police they built up still functioned with little change--and continued to repress workers&#39; and peasants&#39; uprisings. Gandhi&#39;s will had been strong, but class forces proved stronger.

And finally...


Gandhi&#39;s life was history&#39;s longest experiment in nonviolent political action. The result of the experiment is fairly clear: An exploitative class structure cannot be broken without violence somewhere along the way. Property rights, defended by state violence, have never yielded to the peaceful pressure of the exploited class. Put in other terms, no exploiting class has ever left the stage of history without being pushed.

So for one last time. Please provide and example of when non-violence actually liberated the oppressed class. I&#39;m not talking about national independence. I&#39;m talking about social change, not cartography.



When ever has the true goals of the revolution been accomplished, violently?

Hmmm...how about Russia 1917, Cuba 1959....

[Dyst]

They have all gone to hell. Allthough the revolution might have been "successfull", still real communism didn&#39;t last very long.

[Sabocat]

Abrogation of the revolutionary goals and ideals after the fact are irrelevant to the conversation. They happened through violent uprising.

Some would argue that Cuba has not quite "gone to hell". They are still providing free education to all, free healthcare to all, etc. etc. Regardless of the current situation in Cuba, the people there are infinitely better off than they were before the Revolution and Batista.

Neither Cuba nor Russia were ever Communist. They were and are Socialist.

[sickdiscobiscuit]

change must come from the barrel of a gun

[Dyst]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13 2004, 06:55 PM
change must come from the barrel of a gun
Ok... and...?

[Wurkwurk]

QUOTE (kezia): They have all gone to hell. Allthough the revolution might have been "successfull", still real communism didn&#39;t last very long.
True there :D

QUOTE: Are you really this stupid, or are you just being argumentative for arguments sake?
Dude, you where the one first *****ing about me being a pro kerry activist. Stop being such a hypoctrite&#33;

QUOTE: With regards to your nonsense about Imperialism. Where did I say I was in favor of Imperialism? We are not debating Imperialism.
We&#39;re not debating socializing India&#33; We&#39;re debating nonviolence&#33; Stop being such a hypocrite&#33;

QUOTE: I am pointing out that all the non-violence accomplished was a nationalistic goal. In the context of leftist struggle, removing the British from India did little or nothing to improve the lives of the poor and working class. Realistically, the British were probably going to divest themselves of India anyway. Why can&#39;t you understand this? Why is nationalism so important to you? What does nationalism accomplish?
I definetly am NOT supporting nationalism, but I OPPOSE imperialism. I never said I supported nationalism, ever.

QUOTE: So for one last time. Please provide and example of when non-violence actually liberated the oppressed class.
If you think that Imperialism in not oppressive, you can go to hell. By the way, if you hadn&#39;t already noticed, a good example is FUCKING INDIA&#33;&#33;&#33; :lol:

QUOTE: I&#39;m not talking about national independence. I&#39;m talking about social change, not cartography.
Again, this disscussion is about nonviolence and our thoughts on it. I know, we both are getting off topic :). But seriously, its FAR more than simple cartography, its the EVILS OF IMPERIALISM.

But the foremost thing to remember is that, even with a violent rebellion, India would be the capitalist nation it is today. Violence, in the sense of India, would have achieved nothing more than Gandhi save needless hundreds of thousands of lives against the well-trained British army, trained and hardened from the recent end of WWII.

Sorry about my misunderstanding of the &#39;moved&#39; phrase :) .

One last thing....QUOTE: No
Im disgusted :angry:

[RedAnarchist]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13 2004, 12:46 PM


Neither Cuba nor Russia were ever Communist. They were and are Socialist.
Russia Socialist? Under Putin they are slowly moving back to the right-wing totalitarian mess they were in under the Soviets&#33;

[Sabocat]

Are you implying that Russia was never Socialist or do you think I was intimating that they still are?

What I meant by the statement...


Neither Cuba nor Russia were ever Communist. They were and are Socialist.

..is that Russia was and Cuba is Socialist. I was no way implying that there was any trace of Socialism in Russia today.

[Deus_Chaotica]

non-violence can work but it needs to happen on a large scale of all people refusing to fight for thier respective governments :che:

[MKS]

In regards to India.

You have to first realize Ghandi was not the only leader of the independence movement. Neruit was also instrumental in accomplishing the goal of independence.

Ghanid did push for the abolition of the caste system, but like all leaders he sought compromise in order to realize the greater good (whether that is good or bad is your opinion). The masses of India gained nothing from independence, excpet their own flag. Sure there was more freedom, freedom used by the upper castes to oppress the lower castes.

I remember a trip to India with my friend. We passed a horrible shanty town and when I asked why these people could not find jobs. He stated because they are untouchable, they are not of the right caste. If that is freedom than I dont want to know what oppression is. Britain didnt even create the caste system Indian&#39;s did. Instead of fighting the English the Indian masses should have revolted against there Brahman oppressors.

Ghandi died not from a forigen assasin but by the hand of a Hindu extremist. Violence always prevails over non violence.

The problem with non violence is it is always one sided. I would rather die fighting than laying down.