Raj Patel on 'Reclaiming the right to have rights'

[marmar]

"One shouldn't underestimate how hard this will be. Reclaiming the ability to engage market society, reclaiming the right to have rights, is difficult work. To begin with, it means regaining an appetite for conflict. It means understanding that some entities in the private sector are structurally part of the problem, not part of the solution, and that they need to be successfully challenged. Every philosophy of social change has had an understanding of enmity. Gandhian philosophy isn't, as some have reconstructed it, a big tent of beads and incense. Although it's nonviolent, it involves opposition and conflict - tender opposition no doubt, but opposition nonetheless. Movements around the world have developed the psychological tools to deal with conflict, guided by principles of equality and a desire to control the terms of inclusion.

Of course, this threatens the status quo, which is why many of the movements I've discussed - from peasants to shackdwellers - have been branded criminals and hooligans. Turning dissenters into criminals doesn't happen by magic - it happens because today's market society has an ideology in which those who challenge the fragile consensus around the role of the market cannot be tolerated. The activist Abbie Hoffman once observed, "You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not by the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." By that metric, there's not much democracy around."

-- from Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[Remember Me]

2. Yes, Gandhian philosophy is VERY oppositional

As exemplified in the non-violence that Martin Luther King, Jr. practiced.

The way it works, it seems to me, is that the civil disobedience, carried on in a completely passive and non-violent way, ultimately so enrages TPTB that they overreact and the general public gets so upset and outraged themselves by the overreaction that TPTB lose. The overraction phase is not pretty (just ask John Lewis).