that I interviewed, many of them have been active in Occupy Wall Street, in Black Lives Matter, were at Standing Rock. So this is basically just a cross-section of the American radical Left. I just wanted to quickly address a couple of the other interesting points that David made. I think we should distinguish between civility as a dictionary definition and its political usage. I’m not arguing for being a jerk; I’m just arguing that people who support separating migrant families shouldn’t have a moment of peace on Earth, that’s all. And also, stop signs are not obviously violent, but if you run through one and you get a ticket, and you don’t pay the ticket, and then a collection agency comes and you refuse to pay that ticket, you will find state violence eventually. So that was sort of my broader analysis, but point taken that stop signs are really useful. Just talking about violence. ... DB: I’m aware the last question was not addressed to me, and I’ll be brief, but there is a history of resistance to fascism which is itself complex. There were street fights in pre-Nazi Germany between the Communists and the Nazi Brownshirts. That was a part of the organized enthusiasm of Germany preceding January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor. There was a doctrine then current among the Communist Party of Germany, called the theory of social fascism, which said that the moderates of the time, the socialists, those who were not revolutionary communists but merely what we would now call social democrats, were “objectively” on the side of the Nazis, and therefore it was important utterly to disdain and reject their help and to fight them as hard as one fought against the uniformed Nazis already in the street. This was so disastrous a miscalculation that it prompted Trotsky, who wrote some very good pamphlets about those street battles, to say that the theory of social fascism seemed to have been invented by Stalin for the mere purpose of gumming up our brains. I’m no friend of the establishment of the Democratic Party at this moment, but to suppose that every officeholder is someone you should fight against, and every governor who’s trying to maintain the rule of law is somebody you should fight against, just as intensely as you do against the right-wing crowd—that’s a dangerous argument, and tactically it’s going to lead to unhappy results. Street fights will lead to a police crackdown; and if you think the result of a police crackdown is going to be greater strength for the insurgency, you might want to look at the kind of popular support that exists on the other side, too. So I want say: there is a prehistory to the theory of spontaneous action against actual fascists, and the prehistory is not altogether encouraging.
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that radical simply means grasping things at the root. How would each of you define radical or radicalism, and how or when do you think radicalism is useful? MB: I like that definition. Yes: “at the root.” So what you consider to be radical has everything to do with what you think the root of an issue is. In terms of how it’s used in the left spectrum, a radical left would be in some way or another anticapitalist for starters. Others would just say that’s sort of a precondition for actually left, in a meaningful sense. But again, these are kind of ongoing debates. For me, though, I love that definition of being at the roots, so I think that’s a good point of departure; and then everyone can kind of take it where it takes them. DB: I gave the floor to Mark just now because I’m not quick to identify a single radicalism. There can be radicalism of so many kinds and in so many areas that I would first want to have a sharp definition. I would say of myself that in some sense I am “radical,” but it is not a political conviction that names any present tendency. It comes under another heading. I am radical against arbitrary power, which means unchecked power; and I’m radical against impeding the telling of truth, which I think is one of the most difficult things human beings do. I won’t go so far as “the truth shall make you free,” but without truth nothing that I could call freedom will ever come about. So those are two thoughts—I prefer the adjective to the noun: radical opposition to arbitrary power, radical support for the freedom to tell the truth. And: I think that we don’t have any better protections than (in the case of freedom) the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights and (in the case of truth) the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. If anybody asks, I have it in my pocket, and I’ll be glad to read you the wonderful words. KD: Maybe if we have time.
KD: I think in public discourse we hear the terms “radical” and “radicalism” thrown around a lot. My favorite definition is from Angela Davis, which is
Q: I just wanted to make a comment that I’d like you to comment back, because I don’t know exactly how to phrase this as a question. But movements that we tend to think of as nonviolent in a way have been sanitized after they’ve been successful. So the liberation of South Africa did not come entirely as a result of nonviolence. There were mass demonstrations, there were boycotts, and there was also an armed wing that committed what would today be called terrorist acts. The civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., was not nonviolent in the sense that we would define it today, that is, as the common parlance would define it today. In the civil rights movement, people who worked in the South armed themselves. They had self-defense units because people knew that they would be attacked. And I can tell you from knowing civil rights workers who worked in the South that at night they
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Q&A: Violent and Nonviolent Protest
Citizenship and Civil Disobedience
Mark Bray and David Bromwich
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