November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

Arms and the Movement

(Page 5 of 5)

Utne Reader May / June 2007
Peter Gelderloos How Nonviolence Protects the State 
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Time and again, people struggling not for some token reform but for complete liberation -- the reclamation of control over our own lives and the power to negotiate our own relationships with the people and the world around us -- will find that nonviolence does not work, that we face a self-perpetuating power structure that is immune to appeals to conscience and strong enough to plow over the disobedient and uncooperative.

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We must reclaim histories of resistance to understand why we have failed in the past and how exactly we achieved the limited successes we did. We must also accept that all social struggles, except those carried out by a completely pacified and thus ineffective people, include a diversity of tactics.

Peter Gelderloos is an activist and community organizer who has worked with Food Not Bombs and against the School of the Americas. Excerpted from his book How Nonviolence Protects the State (2007), published by South End Press, an independent, collectively run publisher dedicated to the politics of radical social change; www.southendpress.org.

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