Preface
What follows is by way of an introduction to whet your appetite for the subject matter covered in our latest compilation in the Online Research Bibliographies series: Socio-Political Conflict and Nonviolence. I had originally intended to post this bibliography and essay in honor and celebration of May Day, as “the exemplum” outlines the nonviolent theory and praxis exemplified by KOR, the Workers’ Defense Committee (later: Komitet Samoobrony Społecznej KOR/Social Self-Defense Committee, KSS-‘KOR’) in Poland that played a direct “service” role in the emergence of Solidarity (or Solidarność, the first non-Communist party-controlled trade union in the Warsaw Pact countries) in 1980. Perhaps more importantly, KOR represented a new philosophy and political strategy for the democratic opposition that was at once revolutionary and reformist: the former insofar as it made a deliberate break with the primary modes of civil resistance in Polish history in its rejection of political violence and corresponding fidelity to principles of truth (cf. the idea of ‘living in truth’ that became prominent among opposition intellectuals like Václav Havel, Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik) and nonviolence (in Gandhian terms, ‘satyā’ and ‘ahimsa’). The “reformist” character of the democratic opposition refers to its means and methods (thus not its theoretical cast or social vision), which were predominantly gradual and piecemeal, including a commitment to the “self-organization” of civil society (what in Gandhi’s doctrine of satyāgraha was termed the ‘Constructive Programme’). In many and important respects, KOR incarnated the political cultural logic and virtues of what has been called Poland’s “Self-limiting Revolution.” This was the first of several nonviolent “revolutions” (e.g., the ‘Velvet’ Revolution in Czechoslovakia) that culminated in a series of roundtable talks that began in 1989 and took place in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, and Poland. The “roundtable talks” in these countries was responsible for the negotiated breakdown of (and thus peaceful transition from) Party-State Communism (as Jon Elster notes, the regimes in the GDR and Czechoslovakia were crumbling before the talks began). (In what follows, I don’t mean to slight the structural catalytic or precipitating role played by the policies and reforms initiated through Mikhail Gorbachev’s political doctrines of perestroika and glasnost.)
The “new opposition” that formed in Poland in the 1970s was not entirely novel and thus there was an historical tilling of the soil for civil resistance and nonviolent politics: from the Polish October of 1956 and the Club of the Crooked Circle (Klub Krzywego Koła, 1955-1962), to Jacek Kuroń and Karl Modzelewski’s “Open Letter to the Party” (for which they were both imprisoned) and the “Letter of 34”in 1964, and the “unstructured strike” by predominantly women workers in the textile factories at Łódź in 1971, Poland was not without its fair share of historical examples of nonviolent civil resistance and opposition politics. Indeed, vast underground publishing networks, self-education societies (e.g., the ‘Flying University’ or Uniwersytet Latający, revived in 1977), cultural clubs and networks thoughout the arts, a “second economy” with its grey-black market, all of this and more existed prior to Poland’s nonviolent (i.e., ‘bloodless,’ ‘self-limiting,’ and ‘looking glass’) social revolution. With regard to groups and events that acted as precursors to KOR in particular, we learn from Jan Jósef Lipski’s invaluable study that in addition to some of the above, we can count dissident lawyers, writers and scholars; the Club of the Seekers of Contradiction; “Walterites” (pupils of Jacek Kuroń: ‘the nom de guerre of General Karol Świerczewski, the “General Walter” of the Spanish Civil War, and thus they identified themselves ideologically with the communist tradition’); the “Commandos” (‘the name was forged in the cell of the Polish United Workers (PUWP) party at Warsaw University’); the March 1968 student protests (including the few protests that followed the invasion of Czechoslovakia); the Scouts of Black Troop No. 1 and the Band of Vagabonds; students and young university graduates associated with the Warsaw Club of Catholic Intelligentsia (KIK); Ruch (Movement); the trial of the “Tatra Mountaineers” (several young people arrested in 1969 for ‘having organized, in collaboration with some Czechs, the smuggling of copies of Paris Kultura into Poland by way of Czechoslovakia and across the Tatra Mountains’); sundry ‘minigroups’ of associates and sympathizers; the “Letter of 66” (also mistakenly known as the ‘Letter of 59’) signed by intellectuals and artists protesting changes in the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) (the Diet passed the constitutional amendments of February 10, 1976); and, as “the final act of the opposition by intellectuals before the creation of KOR was a letter of Edward Lipiński to Edward Gierek” (First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party from 1970-1980). In the words of Jan Josef Lipski, this letter, “which contained a many-sided critique of the system of governing and warned of catastrophe, became an important factor influencing the formation of a new social consciousness among the intelligentsia, and many of the ideas it contained were to enter into the standard repertoire of later attempts to forumlate a program.”
According to Lipski, KOR had a considerable impact on the course of events in Poland, an impact constrained by its numerical strength and by the “tremendous inertia of the system.” Moreover, the government “limited its repsonse to the activities of KOR to restraints and repressions,” and KOR stood out among other weaker if not smaller and less successful opposition groups (despite their ‘not inconsiderable’ and ‘on the whole positive’ achievements), so much so that “KOR created not only an original model of opposition but above all it was unrivaled in its actions, which extended from help for the workers in 1976, through the periodical Robotnik (The Worker) and the Initiating Committees of the Free Trade Unions (KZ WZZ), and eventually to Solidarity.” KOR’s “social service” role ended with the formation of Solidarity in September 1980, formally dissolving itself the following year.
KOR: An Historical and Sociological Exemplum of the Theory and Praxis of Nonviolence
In his book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995), Charles M. Payne shares Bob Moses’s understanding of the civil right movement as characterized by two forms of collective praxis and liberation: a “community-mobilizing” form and a “community-organizing” form. The latter was, and is, a necessary and but not always a sufficient condition of the former. It is not always sufficient insofar as community or social movement mobilization frequently requires a precipitating catalytic incident or event that serves as the tipping-point for people to step out of the routine of daily work and life and risk involvement in “history-making” species of collective action. Both forms of collective praxis occur on the terrain of civil society as the site of hegemonic struggles to capture the hearts and minds of individuals as part of a Gramscian (or Gramscian-like) “war of position” inspired by democratic values and principles that, ideally, rely on means and types of collective action in harmony with those values and principles and the short-term goals and long-term ends they necessitate. Those committed to the theory and praxis of nonviolence believe they’ve found the types and means of action best suited to, that is, in most harmony with, such emancipatory democratic values and principles. Albeit with some notable exceptions (e.g., Aldon Morris’ 1984 study, Origin of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communites Organizing for Change), narratives of the civil rights movement privilege “community-mobilizing,” and it is the form of collective action called to mind by “popular memory and the only part of the movement that has attracted scholarly attention,” understandable in part owing to the mass media’s focus on “large-scale, relatively short-term public events,” on historical display in “the tradition of Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington…[and] best symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King.”[1] Not in the foreground and klieg lights of mass media, but setting the stage as it were for such mass mobilization and social protest is the “community organizing” tradition that is the subject matter of Payne’s indispensable work. In this lesser-known tradition of nonviolent democratic praxis, there’s a “greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women, a tradition best epitomized” by Bob Moses himself, but also such remarkable individual as Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer.[2]
More generally, Payne informs us that “We do not ordinarily realize how much the well-publicized activism of the sixties depended on the efforts of older activists who worked in obscurity throughout the 1940s and 1950s.”[3] Similar stories can be told elsewhere, as in the case of the “Self-limiting” and Velvet Revolutions in East-Central Europe, for example the forms of nonviolent action community organizing and social resistance that took place in the nooks and crannies of civil society in Poland as a necessary condition for the eventual emergence of Solidarity as both a “trade union” and wider social movement, the principal collective actor in the country’s “evolutionary” or “self-limiting” revolution.[4] Of course that revolution cannot be explained without an appreciation of the structural role of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union that began in 1985, but the comparative success of Solidarity cannot be accounted for without an understanding of such underground and above ground phenomena as the “Flying University” (TKN) or the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), the latter founded in support of striking Polish workers in 1976. Aleksander Smolar provides us with an introduction to this Polish variation on community organizing that set the stage for the country’s nonviolent and thus “self-limiting” social revolution and from which I will quote at length, for it enables us to see what occurs when nonviolent democratic and emancipatory struggles “from below” transcend the barriers between “making history” and the living of daily life among members of the lower and middles classes of civil society. Speaking first of KOR, Smolar says
“The very creation of an organization independent from the authorities and functioning openly was a bold political act. The following months witnessed the emergence of different opposition groups, one of which was characteristically named the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO), as well as the publication of illegal periodicals and books. It is estimated that between 1976 and 1980, the opposition numbered several thousand persons. It was composed overwhelmingly of the intelligentsia and students, assisted by a few individual priests and members of religious orders; the institutional hierarchy of the Church did not officially affirm its attitude toward initiatives of this sort, either for or against. Only with time did the groups in question manage to make their way—albeit on a small scale—into the countryside.”[5]
Later the Catholic Church did play a pivotal part vis-à-vis the Party-State in Poland in protecting the social resistance and nonviolent politics coming to fruition in the fragile but expanding terrain of Polish civil society. But what I want to highlight here is the nature of revolutionary leadership and the role played by only a few corresponding organized groups engaged in both legal and illegal (yet not unethical) activities, a leadership that articulated a moral and political philosophy as the very marrow of its nonviolent political strategy. This revolutionary leadership was composed of what in Eastern and Central Europe—as well as the Soviet Union—is termed the “intelligentsia” or what we more commonly refer to as intellectuals. As Rudolf Bahro reminds us, even Lenin made his appeals in revolutionary Russia not to the workers as such, but to those capable of leading the workers, for “instead of appealing to the working class as a whole...[Lenin] appealed to the most enlightened elements in Russia, meaning the most advanced (most cultivated, most intellectualized) workers and to the minority of intellectuals and specialists inspired by the revolution. [....] The workers—individual exceptions apart—were never Marxist in the strict sense. Marxism is a theory based on the existence of the working class, but it is not the theory of the working class.”[6] Bahro elaborates:
“[I]n no known historical case did the first creative impulse in ideas and organization proceed from the masses; the trade unions do not anticipate any new civilization. The political workers’ movement was itself founded by declassed bourgeois intellectuals, which in no way means that the most active proletarian elements did not soon come to play a role of their own in the socialist parties and tend themselves to become intellectuals.”[7]
Marxist and post-Marxist writing on intellectuals tends to equivocate between (or simply conflate) the notion of intellectuals as a sociological and descriptive category and the meaning of the term in a normative sense. We’re not assuming intellectuals invariably form a united class of sorts destined for the sort of leadership role Bahro alludes to here, indeed, for it is often the case that only a very small number of intellectuals summon up the requisite moral motivation for revolutionary politics, one reason why Sartre was compelled to make his famous public “Plea for Intellectuals” in Japan in 1965.[8] Most intellectuals are not naturally inclined, given their location and status in the existing socio-economic order, to make what Sartre called a “a concrete and unconditioned alignment with the actions of the underprivileged classes.” And in outlining the central role of intellectual leadership in nonviolent revolutionary politics we need not subscribe to a strict Leninist interpretation of this “vanguardist” model of revolutionary politics, especially insofar as it clashes with democratic means and methods, but it would be foolish to deny the truths inherent in the vanguardist model in as much as it represents a recognition of the necessary role of formal and informal leadership in nonviolent reformists and revolutionary politics. In particular, we’re speaking here of the role of what James MacGregor Burns memorably described as “transformative leadership” (in contrast to the ‘transactional’ type common to conventional power politics), using Mahatma Gandhi by way of exemplifying this particular type of intellectual leadership:
“Transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both. Perhaps the best modern example is Gandhi, who aroused and elevated the hopes and demands of millions of Indians and whose life and personality were enhanced in the process. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel ‘elevated’ by it and often become more active themselves—thereby creating a new cadre of leaders [these are what Gramsci termed ‘organic intellectuals’] . [….] Leaders are taskmasters and goal setters, but they and their followers share a particular space and time, a particular set of motivations and values. [….] The problem for them as educators, as leaders, is not to promote narrow, egocentric self-actualization but to extend awareness of human needs and the means of gratifying them, to improve the larger social situation for which educators or leaders have responsibility and over which they have power. Is it too much to believe that it is ‘the grand goal of all leadership—to help create or maintain the social harbors for these personal islands?’ Gandhi almost perfectly exemplifies this…. The transforming leader taps the needs and raises the aspirations and helps shape the values—and hence mobilizes the potential—of followers.
Transforming leadership is elevating. It is moral but not moralistic. Leaders engage with followers, but from higher levels of morality; in the enmeshing of goals and values both leaders and followers are raised to more principled levels of judgment. Leaders most effectively ‘connect with’ followers from a level of morality only one stage higher than that of the followers, but moral leaders who act at much higher levels—Gandhi, for example—relate to followers at all levels either heorically or through the founding of mass movements that provide linkages between persons at various levels of morality and sharply increase the moral impact of the transforming leader. Much of this kind of elevating leadership asks sacrifices from followers rather than merely promising them goods.”[9]
Raghavan Iyer has well captured Gandhi’s own conception of social and political “transformative” leadership, of the role, if you will, of nonviolent vanguardist intellectuals. Gandhi realized that “Revolutions are the work of comparatively small groups of men who concentrate all their energies to the task:”
“Gandhi’s pleas for heroism in society involved him in the recognition of the need for inspired leadership in political and social activity and the role of small groups as pioneers and pathfinders, but also in a stout refusal to distinguish sharply between the elect and the masses. ‘All cannot be leaders, but all can be bearers,’ he declared in 1921. Courage, endurance, fearlessness and above all self-sacrifice are the qualities required of our leaders. ‘A person belonging to the suppressed classes exhibiting these qualities in their fullness would certainly be able to lead the nation; whereas the most finished orator, if he has not got these qualities, must fail.’ In well-ordered organizations, leaders are elected, he said, for convenience of work, not for extraordinary merit. A leader is only first among equals. Someone may be put first, but he is no stronger than the weakest link in the chain. And yet the true leader shows his capacity to assume heavy burdens of responsibility by taking upon himself the errors and failings of those weaker than he is, and if necessary atoning for them and using them as the basis of his own self-examination.”[10]
Owing to his introduction of the aśrama or monastic ideal into politics (which entails the moral if not spiritual ‘purification’ of conventional power politics or Realpolitik), Gandhi elaborated fairly stringent standards for any would-be satyāgrahi (that is, the practitioner of satyāgraha, literally, ‘holding on to Truth,’ therefore, one who is bound to ‘truth-force or soul-force; Gandhi importantly distinguished his nonviolent doctrine of satyāgraha from conceptions of ‘passive resistance’) including, most controversially, “the taking of vows as the necessary means to self-purification and self-discipline.”[11] And the practice of satyāgraha is further distinguished from the closely connected notions of civil disobedience and noncooperation: while it underpins his particular formulations of civil disobedience and noncooperation, it is at the same time much broader in meaning, entailing as it does the idea of a “constructive program” (In the words of a recent Egyptian activist: ‘The real politics start after the demonstrations end.’) the patient building of alternative forms of social association, instititutions, and ways of life in civil society by way of lessening dependence on the State: think here, for example, of the “co-ops, communes, and collectives” of the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States, some of which continue into our own time (e.g., food co-operatives and free clinics); of CORE, the Highlander Folk School, Citizenship Schools, and SNCC during the struggle for civil rights; of the praxis of the comunidades de base inspired by Liberation Theology in Latin America; of the aforementioned Flying Universities and KOR in Poland as well as samizdat across the countries of the Soviet bloc; of the formation of the Citizens Forum and The Public against Violence in Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution of 1989; of the new social movements (e.g., the April 6th movement), NGOs, lawyers’ associations, trade unions, the counter-cultural role of music and poetry and the arts generally, the self-discipline and self-organization of the masses in Tahrir Square[13], and the prefigurative function earlier played by the Kifaya movement, in Egypt’s recent revolution; of the Internet cafes as seedbeds and greenhouses for political dialogue and debate, the men and women marching and protesting side-by-side, in Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution.
As should be clear from Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns, satyāgraha should not be viewed simply as the political prerogative of those few individuals in possession of the requisite virtues of ethical leadership—of moral and spiritual charisma—and the uncommon capacity for self-suffering (tapas), for its efficacy, in the end, is judged by its capacity to move others, both one’s opponents as well as the public, and this occurs in circumstances in which appeals to reason simpliciter fall on deaf ears for reason often is, as Hume famously claimed, the “slave of the passions,” at least in the sense that one’s well established or otherwise intransigent convictions are rarely altered by rational argument, for in such cases the head depends on a prior movement of the heart:
“Although Gandhi sometimes formulated the doctrine of satyāgraha in a typically individualist fashion, he was fully aware that it was dependent in practice upon the sanction, not only of individual conscience (satyā) and ahimsa [nonviolence] but also of public opinion. ‘An awakened and intelligent public opinion is the most potent weapon of the satyāgrahi.’ He must first mobilize public opinion against the evil which he is out to eradicate, by means of a wide intensive agitation. When public opinion is sufficiently roused against a social abuse, ‘even the tallest will not dare to practise or openly lend support to it.’ [Like Socrates,] Gandhi refused to set up the demos as a demi-god and he could recognize no higher court of appeal than ‘the Court of conscience.’ And yet he was willing to see that the success of the satyāgrahi’s efforts must necessarily depend not merely on the appeal to his own conscience but even more on the awakening of the slumbering conscience of a large number of people, and ultimately, the stifled conscience of those responsible for enacting or administering unjust laws and social abuses.
In its appeal to public opinion, to the prevailing or potential respect in society for satyā and ahimsa [truth and nonviolence], and to the moral sensitivity of those whose acts are being challenged, satyāgraha differs from the methods of rational persuasion and violent action chiefly in its unique reliance upon tapas or self-suffering. Gandhi argued that experience has shown that mere appeal to [the faculty of] reason produces no effect upon those who have settled convictions. ‘The eyes of their understanding are opened not by argument, but by the suffering of the satyāgrahi. The satyāgrahi tries to reach the reason through the heart. The method of reaching the heart is to awaken public opinion. Public opinion, for which one cares, is a mightier force than gunpowder.’”[12]
As Iyer proceeds to explain, this is not an argument for the abdication of reason although Gandhi did value nonviolence and love more than reason. The turn to satyāgraha is only justified when reason has failed, where attempts at rational persuasion have no effect, in cases where one has exhausted, insofar as is practically reasonable, legalistic arguments and conventional avenues for change. The purpose in all cases remains to both convert and convince one’s opponent.
Returning to Smolar’s discussion of the leaders of Poland’s self-limiting revolution: while the new social resistance that broke out in 1976 was not a direct result of actions or public proclamations of the Catholic Church, the Church in Poland did, in time, transform the historic Polish culture of resistance into one no longer eager or content to resort to violence, indeed, both intellectuals and the masses at large came to decisively reject violent methods of social and political change, a belief that was not the sole or necessary conclusion of political realism or expediency in the shadow of Soviet domination:
“The Catholic Church in Poland, traditionally powerful, naturally fulfilled some of the functions of an opposition, in a system based on the omnipotence of a single [political] party. First and foremost, the Church was an independent moral universe of free speech and free ideas. But it also presented a consistent message of nonviolence, especially following the tragedy of the Second World War. [….] The authority of the Catholic Church in Poland, already very strong, was reinforced when the archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, became John Paul II in 1978. His philosophy and his strategic vision for the transformation of Poland can be summarized in a passage often cited by him, and by Solidarity’s martyr priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko: ‘Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’”[13]
The Church’s position on this score, and John Paul II’s exhortations in particular, affirm a Gandhian-like commitment to absolute nonviolence (not surprisingly, Gandhi regarded Jesus as the very embodiment of the true satyāgrahi) or, put differently, an “absolute moral rejection of all political violence.”