You may have grown up with the term “nonviolence” shining like a pole star over every discussion of how we accomplish socio-political change. But what does it really mean? And who defines violence for that matter—beyond the police, the courts, and others in power?
Today, the theory of non-violence has grown beyond its Gandhian, spiritual aspiration roots, while retaining an irrational faith and offering a distorted view of resistance history. It is now a think-tank-approved, purportedly evidence-based method that guarantees movement success.
That reasoning comes from the pioneering scholarship of the pacifist Gene Sharp in the 1960s, and his inheritors in strategic nonviolence discourse, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. They argue that Gandhi’s sacred ideal of satyagraha also happens to be the only successful pathway to lasting change—and they have the data to prove it.
But do they? Nope. Matthew’s guest today persuasively shows that the movements we think of as “nonviolent” never really are. Why don’t we know this? Through a tangle of academic malpractice, spiritual bypassing, liberal wish fulfillment, and erasing anticolonial voices. Oh, and Gene Sharp also got a lot of funding from the Department of Defense.
Benjamin S. Case is a retired professional Muaythai fighter, an organizer, educator, and writer. He is a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative.
P.S.: During our conversation, Ben mentioned that there are antifascist fighting clubs out there. Here are a few to look into:
Haymaker in Chicago.
SKN Muay Thai in Pittsburgh, PA.
Balagoon Boxing Club in Philly, PA.
Show Notes
Street Rebellion: Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | Case
Why Civil Resistance Works | Columbia University Press
Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org
Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One) – Nonsite.org
Have Repertoire, Will Travel: Nonviolence as Global Contentious Performance
Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I'm Alex Schwartz, and we are Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker.
Guys, what do we do on the show every week?
We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.
That's right.
We take something that's going on in the culture now.
Maybe it's a movie.
Maybe it's a book.
Maybe it's just kind of a trend.
And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.
Join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.
New episodes drop every Thursday.
Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler podcast.
The Amateur Traveler podcast is about the love of travel.
It's about where to go and why you should go there.
We're going to open up to you different destinations you haven't heard of or places you have heard of but things you didn't know to do while you were there.
Each episode is about 45 minutes long and it's typically an interview with someone who wrote the guidebook on that destination or who has been there or who's a local tour guide or someone who is an expert on that destination and knows how to tell you what to do to get the most out of your precious vacation time.
So if you value your vacation time and you want to use it wisely, listen to Amateur Traveler and learn about destinations both domestic and international, places you've heard of and places you haven't.
Amateur Traveler has almost 900 episodes talking about different destinations, so if there's a place you want to go, odds are we've already covered it and can help you plan a trip there.
Amateur Traveler, subscribe today.
Amateur Traveler, subscribe today.
Hey everybody, this is Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism, i.e.
your daily news feed.
You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian on Blue Sky, and we're still on Twitter as it continues to bottom out, and the podcast itself is on Instagram and Threads.
Also, please support our Patreon.
And the Patreons of all the independent media outlets you value and can afford to support, especially for U.S. outlets currently under threat.
I've said it before, there's no time like now.
State repression is only going to be ramping up.
Universities are being threatened.
Research and arts grants are getting yanked.
If you depend on knowledge workers, please support them independently.
Okay, so this brief today is a continuation of the anti-fascist woodshed series, and it's called Beyond Violence and Nonviolence, and it's going to follow the same two-part interview format with my guest, because as with the last double episode that I did with Chris Johnson on his book,
How to Talk About Fascism with Your Son, my guest today, Ben Case, has a ton to say about the confusion and misinformation swirling around the subject of civil resistance and how this has a chilling effect on what we imagine political opposition to fascism can or should look like, or more to the point, what it actually looks like in practice.
We're going to spread this consideration out over today's time and Monday's Patreon episode.
Now, if you're like me...
You may have grown up with the term nonviolence shining like a pole star over every discussion of how we can accomplish sociopolitical change in difficult times.
But what does it really mean?
And then who defines violence, for that matter, beyond the police, the courts, and others in power?
For me, the term nonviolence always had this spiritual glow to it, and I think that was reflective of its origins in the saintly persona of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
And as a younger person, those religious connotations were also there as well because my progressive Catholic milieu drew me to people who walked that path in their civil rights and Vietnam struggles, people like Thomas Merton and Father Berrigan.
I came to believe that embodying a kind of noble and peace-loving faith in the long arc of history bending towards justice was the only real power that changed history.
And along with this came a very pious self-image that I think mapped onto the iconic photos of hippies placing flowers in the rifle barrels of riot cops in the hope of spontaneous collective awakening.
Now today, the theory of nonviolence has grown beyond its spiritual aspiration roots while retaining what I would describe as its irrational faith.
It is now a think-tank-approved, purportedly evidence-based method that guarantees movement success.
And that reasoning comes to us from the pioneering scholarship of the pacifist Gene Sharp, going back to the 1960s, and then his inheritors in strategic nonviolence discourse, Erika Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who argue that Gandhi's sacred ideal of Satyagraha also happens to be the only successful pathway to lasting change.
And they have the data to prove it.
But do they?
My guest today, Ben Case, is a long-time anti-fascist organizer and researcher.
He dug into this new secular set of rationalizations for the cultural logic that all successful civil resistance is non-violent.
And he found that Sharp, Chenoweth, and Stephan not only didn't do any fieldwork on the topic, and they basically ignored the history of anti-colonial struggle, They also worked from deceptively bad data, which failed to distinguish armed violent resistance, i.e.
military force, from non-armed violent resistance, or rioting.
Now, we'll unpack that complexity over these two episodes, but the main takeaway is that a big block of progressives and liberals have come to believe that civil resistance is only ever effective if people absolutely avoid actions that Sharp and Chenoweth and Stephan actually ignore.
Throwing things, property damage, fighting with police to de-arrest comrades, and rioting.
And guess what?
Sharp's work was funded for years.
We'll get into that rabbit hole on Monday.
Case's book is called Street Rebellion, Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence, and it persuasively shows that the movements we think of as nonviolent never really are.
They are messy, emotional, and usually feature various levels of forceful resistance that can catalyze broader support and galvanize the dignity and will of oppressed people.
Further, the premise that we should all remain calm and protest on in an orderly fashion with our signs in one hand and our lattes in the other, or else we'll mess it all up, makes people tentative and afraid, perhaps naively faithful in the premise that the powerful will concede power because we're asking them to.
My guest today, Ben Case, is a retired professional Muay Thai fighter, and he's an organizer, educator, and writer.
He's a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative.
Case is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Here's our conversation.
Ben Case, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Excited to be here.
So I want to start with a super brief clip from a viral Rachel Maddow editorial from April 19th.
This is her take on Trump's first 100 days.
Now, so she's a well-respected liberal commentator who's done good historical work on American right-wing extremism dating back over a century.
Politically, she describes herself as a national security liberal and as being in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform, unquote.
In her editorial that we'll hear a snippet from, she predicts that while Trump loses favorability, he'll engage in more extreme actions, but the movement defending democracy is gaining strength with increasing public resistance and institutional pushback expected to continue.
So this is her word on that public resistance part.
Bottom line, I think as long as the movement against him stays nonviolent, the movement against him dies.
So there we have it.
It's just one line, but coming from Maddow on MSNBC, which means there's a lot of eyes on that line and a lot of audience testing, that's significant.
It's also kind of vague.
So I want to start with...
What does that line cue for Maddow's viewers?
And what does it call up for you, for somebody who's researched violence and nonviolence and street rebellion?
Well, she's telling her audience that there's a rulebook for resistance.
Yeah.
Right?
And somebody knows that rulebook, and it isn't you, maybe.
So, you know, I guess it cues obedience, I think, is what it's really conveying.
Not obedience to the Trump regime, of course.
Maddow wants us to...
To protest that.
But obedience to a concept of resistance and the experts who understand how to resist correctly and a warning that if you do it incorrectly, you could ruin it for everybody else.
So that's a good place to start.
But I want to pull back here and just mention that you're not a security state liberal.
You are a former...
Professional Muay Thai fighter, and you've been active in anti-racist and anti-fascist protest movements for a long time.
Can you just give us a quick bio on that and how you pivoted to this research focus, which amounts to trying to accurately describe Street Rebellion?
Sure.
So I went to a public high school in New Jersey, northern urban New Jersey, and I played football and I was in the Navy Junior ROTC program.
And, you know, my life goal at the time was to become a Navy SEAL, you know, and I saw the world as there's good and bad, and I wanted to fight injustice and be on the side of good.
And, you know, I followed the sort of like young boy action movie path to that.
And then I had a crisis or an epiphany or something like that after the attacks on 9-11, actually.
I lived right across the river from Manhattan and saw physically the aftermath.
And I dropped out of the program, the ROTC program, about a month before I graduated high school.
And instead of going into the military, I joined anti-war organizing and anti-military recruitment efforts.
And from there, I got involved in other kinds of organizing in communities and labor and so forth.
But my aggression and my issues needed somewhere to go.
What turned out to be boxing and then Muay Thai after that, which became its whole own career.
And I would work in gyms and I fought professionally in the U.S. and Thailand and elsewhere around the world.
But I was doing that as my job.
And then I would organize.
I considered myself like that was my thing as I was doing political organizing.
And after Occupy Wall Street was dispersed, I was part of one of the groups that helped to start Occupy Wall Street.
I had also, at the time, grudgingly retired from fighting after a series of injuries, and so I was looking for the next thing, and I was connected to a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who was doing things with Occupy there, and he encouraged me to apply for a PhD program in the sociology department, which was focused on studying social movements, and he said that they wanted people who were on the ground, who were from Occupy.
And I saw that as a way to sort of step back and take some time to think about what had just happened and maybe, you know, study some of the things that I saw as holding the movement back.
And so I ended up pursuing that route.
And the book, the book Street Rebellion, came out of my dissertation study where I ended up tackling the violence, nonviolence question and the ways we talk about these types of action in social movements.
So we're going to get to a lightning round of definitions in a moment, but I want to pick up on one.
Just personal detail, which is, I would imagine that there's a number of guys who are in high school, in ROTC, who are looking at the smoking wreckage from across the river, and they go in the other direction.
They actually double down.
What do you think made the difference for you?
You know, I think it's one of those things where I was already learning some other versions of history.
You know, think like...
Like a people's history of the United States and things like that and Howard Zinn.
And I had some teachers who were teaching other things and I was reading some political writing.
So I think it was already that ground was being seeded.
But the thing, honestly, that it was, it was this turn of phrase.
It's funny, you know, open with matter, but there was a particular turn of phrase that was in the news all the time.
And they kept calling the terrorist attacks on 9-11.
They kept calling it the cowardly attacks, these cowardly attacks, these cowardly attacks.
It was just this refrain.
And I remember I was kind of a...
You know, I was kind of a kid who liked to be confrontational sometimes.
And so I was saying, you know, it's not cowardly.
Like, it's horrible.
It's, you know, it's atrocious.
But it's brave.
Like, objectively speaking, to kill yourself for the sake of a political cause that you see as bigger than you is an objectively brave thing to do.
It's not a cowardly thing.
Actually, now that I think about it, launching missiles from thousands of miles away that kill people you never see is actually...
You know, so I started saying things like that, and that didn't, and I got a lot of, you know, people didn't like hearing that.
But it did get me, it started getting me thinking of, okay, so why would these people do that?
And it's not to, again, it's not to in any way justify that kind of a thing, just to be clear, since we're on the air here.
But it did get me thinking of, you know, you start learning, okay, there's actually military bases in how many countries with U.S. soldiers there?
Like, wait, what am I actually about to sign up to do?
Like, what, like, you know, uh-oh, maybe, you know, maybe we're the empire in Star Wars, sort of.
You know, sort of mindset.
So it was that that sort of got me on that track.
Okay.
So some key words from your research.
This is a lightning round.
So brief definition of civil resistance.
Basically, that means civilian protest movements as opposed to armed struggle.
So think, you know, street protest.
Big violence versus little violence.
Yeah, these terms came to me actually, for me, from a South African activist who I interviewed for my research.
That's in the book.
And that particular person used them to distinguish between the big violence of oppression and exploitation and inequality and racism and the police brutality that it takes to maintain them and, you know, the small violence of resistance to those things.
So things like throwing things in protests or scuffling with police or sabotage or vandalism or things like that.
And just to preview for our listeners, the key thing that we're going to get to by the end of our discussion is how these two things are very poorly distinguished and often conflated together.
Right, exactly.
So the word violence makes it seem like they're equivalent, right?
Violence is violence.
But, you know, he was using this thing to distinguish between, like, you know, poverty, people starving when there's people with lots of money, is a type of violence that's really a lot different than, like, a protester breaking a window.
Unarmed collective violence.
So anything that people are doing together in opposition to a government or a regime that damages property or threatens or hurts people without the use of hot weapons like guns and explosives.
The radical or violent flank.
This is the idea that there can be parallel movements in the same country fighting against the same regime at the same time, but using different strategic and tactical approaches.
So going back to that distinction between civil resistance and armed resistance, suppose there's a country with a non-violent movement protesting the government in the cities and universities and so forth, and then there's also a guerrilla war happening in the mountains where some insurgent force is fighting the government's army trying to overthrow the government that way.
In that instance, the guerrilla soldiers would be understood as the violent flank of the protest movement.
Nonviolence as a key term.
There's no agreed-upon definition of nonviolence.
I think that's important.
But there's sort of broad distinctions.
We could say there's sort of a clinical negative definition, which is basically any type of action that doesn't harm people or damage property.
That's a pretty, like, clinical negative definition.
And there's some people who want to define it more positively, like, you know, protest actions that build collective power in a way that opens space for a more peaceful future.
Then, very importantly, strategic nonviolence.
This is the idea that nonviolent tactics are materially effective at achieving social change.
Specifically, it's used to distinguish that idea from a principled nonviolence or moral nonviolence, which is the idea that people should be nonviolent because it's the right thing to do.
Strategic nonviolence argues that it doesn't matter if it's the right thing to do or not.
It works better.
Those are the building blocks of what we're going to be discussing.
And I'm just going to turn to the distinction between nonviolence and strategic nonviolence or the lineage of those terms first.
And paradoxically, this comes out of a very complex decolonizing event.
It casts a huge conceptual and emotional shadow over the entire discussion.
So it's something a lot of our listeners will be familiar with from their experiences in yoga and wellness and New Age spaces.
What can you tell us about Gandhi's principle of Satyagraha?
So obviously you can't talk about nonviolence without talking about Gandhi.
And so I know some things, but to be clear, I'm not a historian or a biographer of Gandhi or a specialist.
You may well know more than I do about the man himself.
But Gandhi's distinction, at least in the terms he used, between ahimsa, which I understand to be a principle in a number of religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, Which is maybe the idea of nonviolent love, kind of, which some people might identify here as Christian love, the idea that you should love people, whoever they are, and satyagraha, which is sometimes translated as truth force.
I think satya is truth.
This distinction for Gandhi sort of seeded that later distinction between principled nonviolence and strategic nonviolence, even though he didn't put it that way.
But the word itself for Gandhi, I think he popularized that term.
It was sort of the way he talked.
We talked about the use of righteous, organized, nonviolent self-sacrifice and collective refusal to go along with injustice as a way of building an anti-colonial movement that could leverage power against the British military, even though the Indian masses had...
had no power in the sort of formal sense next to the British military, but they could leverage this other kind of power that he was sort of gathering, this idea of a dignity and collective refusal to go
Now, anyone who watched Richard Attenborough's 1982 biopic on Gandhi, and this would be me when I was 11, would have come away with the impression that I
don't know, but I do feel like kids sometimes pick up on more than adults when it comes to these things.
I'd actually be really curious to talk to your 11-year-old self about this.
You know, I think it's important to say, at least for me, I don't see Gandhi as a saint, certainly.
You know, even without getting into his personal life, when there's some things there that are less than comfortable, or his racist views in his youth in South Africa.
You know, he was a very effective political leader and a cult of personality.
And like any effective political leader that develops into that...
It develops that kind of following.
He could be very shrewd in calculating.
And he understood that spiritual appeal in India was, you know, whether or not he believed in it personally, I assume he did.
But again, I don't know.
And it doesn't actually even matter in the sense, because I think he did understand that that was a particularly persuasive and mobilizing way to frame political struggle.
And certainly was very successful in galvanizing a lot of people.
So I think it is useful to think of Gandhi.
I mean, we can think of him as a spiritual leader, if that's your persuasion, if that's important to you.
But when it comes to this kind of thing, when it comes to studying nonviolent protest or different types of protest strategies, I think it's important to see him as a strategic thinker and a political leader first.
A little bit later in the conversation, as we continue on Monday, we'll talk about how his principle of Satyagraha gets operationalized and secularized by the modern strategic nonviolent movement.
But a key point there, which I'll just flag now, is that there tends to be a minimization of the more radical flank operations that were also involved in that decolonial process.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
And there's, you know, the history and legacy of armed struggle, anti-colonial armed struggle, and, you know, we might call people's war.
Until today in India, there's a very strong and important legacy there that certainly had a lot to do with what was going on in the moment.
And the historical...
This was a moment of the decline of the British Empire, of a sort of trading batons of the Western hegemon to the United States, World War II.
There was a lot going on at that time that Gandhi was able to effectively wedge his movement into and achieve Indian independence.
Speaking of another figure in...
You spend a lot of time in your book on Frantz Fanon's thoughts about the process of decolonization and what it entails and what happens during it.
Why is he important and why might we be unlikely to hear a Fanon scholar interviewed on MSNBC?
Fanon was a clinical psychotherapist from the island of Martinique, which was a French colony in the Caribbean.
He studied in France and he practiced as a psychotherapist in Algeria, in occupied Algeria, where he saw patients who were both French colonizers and Algerians.
And in one instance, in fact, that he writes about, he writes about simultaneously treating a French soldier who was in therapy for torturing an Algerian prisoner, right?
In therapy for the trauma of having inflicted torture upon another human.
And also at the same time, he was treating the very same prisoner who had been tortured for the trauma of having been tortured.
Oh, man.
So this is a guy who's black from the Caribbean, studied in France, worked in Algeria via France.
And so he's someone who understood a lot about the complex dynamics of racism and colonization and power.
And he writes really powerfully about all those things.
And he ends up joining with the Algerian resistance and fighting in the War of Independence before dying of cancer as a young man.
But his work is deeply influential for anti-colonial movements all over the world and for race scholarship and for the study of political violence, which he wrote on very powerfully.
And when it comes to violence, Fanon is most famous for his arguments in the book Wretched of the Earth.
The first chapter of Wretched of the Earth is probably the most widely read piece by Fanon, which is called On Violence.
He talks about the importance of violence, violence struggle in colonized people's efforts to regain the dignity that was I think he's often misunderstood in this regard, in that he isn't...
Exactly valorizing or celebrating violence, right?
He isn't even necessarily arguing for its tactical necessity.
He's arguing that it's essential on a sort of social psychological level for people who've been raised in a society to think that they're lesser than in their own land, to be able to overcome that feeling.
You know, essentially by shedding the blood of the people who've imposed that violence on them and who've told them that they're better, right?
And via that process, sort of achieving a sense of dignity that could enable people to actually move beyond the power structures of colonization, not just take over the government, but actually try to found a decolonized society.
And, you know, for me, Fanon talks about revolutionary violence actually in a very similar ways to how Gandhi talks about Satyagraha.
It's not just a method of struggle of achieving a political end, but it's a step in building a proud revolutionary nation that's capable of taking control of its own future.
And so these are sort of different paths that these two different thinkers are sort of taking to a similar end, I think.
My understanding of the rest of Fanon's book is that he puts a lot of...
Caveats and warnings with regard to how the retributive force that might spark a kind of dignity can also obviously take on its own momentum.
So how does that feature into the rest of your scholarship?
Well, no, I think that's exactly right.
I mean, I think that it's not, again, it's not this sort of...
He's one of these people who approaches it outside of this binary of violence versus nonviolence, where he's saying in this particular instance, it can be necessary or even unavoidable, maybe he would say, because of the dynamics of colonization.
But that doesn't mean it's something that we should go looking for, certainly not something that we should organize when it's, you know, sort of a different phase of struggle.
And you're right, he talks extensively about the ways that continuing to apply that kind of violence.
We'll end up just turning into bigotry and chauvinism and leads in a very different direction.
And I think that's been borne out in a lot of places.
I think for me, yeah, he's been very influential in my thought in a lot of different ways.
In this regard, I think it pushes me to think about the practice of violence in the action itself and really focus on what's happening when, for example, we'll probably talk more about this, but a lot of my work looks at what you might think of as very low-level Unarmed violence.
So in riots, somebody throwing an object at police or breaking a window or de-arresting somebody, so pushing and shoving.
That kind of thing, which barely registers as violence if you look at violence as a spectrum between spitting in somebody's face and dropping a nuclear bomb on a country.
It barely registers the sort of low-level vandalism and pushing and shoving.
That doesn't mean we should ignore it.
It can be actually really important to people's experience of politics, and it can have really important effects on political movements, that, you know, we should move beyond this, like, is it good or is it bad?
Purely, you know, this sort of, like, functionary thinking, like, it's either good or bad.
We move pieces on a chessboard and, you know, and think about it more in terms of its effects.
There's the binary of is it good or is it bad that sort of plays out or maps onto the question, the other binary question of should it happen or must it not happen?
And that just sort of takes us back to, I think, some of the vagaries that we get in a comment like Maddow's, where I believe that what that...
What the appeal to nonviolence really points to is, you know, make sure that you don't scuffle with the police.
Like, make sure that you don't try to de-arrest somebody.
Make sure that you don't throw a rock at a Tesla or something like that, even though you are faced with police brutality or you are suddenly sort of inspired by the...
By the solidarity of the people to make some sort of muscular show of strength, just don't do that.
Right.
And it provides sort of a retroactive validation for the people who want to blame failures on those things happening.
Right.
Because here's the thing.
Those things are going to happen anyway.
They always do.
That's the thing.
You look back at movements and these types of actions are ubiquitous, I mean nearly so, in major movements.
Because of course they are.
Because they're not just...
People are not just these economic automatons making decisions based on raw calculation of interest.
People are emotional beings too, and that's how we move through the world.
And so there's always going to be things like that happening.
So when you make a statement like that, you're not only telling people to like...
Follow your rules.
You're also providing a justification for, you know, your failures in the future by blaming them on those things having happened, right?
It's part of this mentality that I think a really problematic mentality that a lot of professionalized, non-profitized social movement groups have that think that you can plan, you know, the revolution in a retreat center.
You can gather together and you plan the whole thing and you do that and you do that and then everyone, you know, it's like it doesn't work that way.
I should say, not that we shouldn't think strategically.
We absolutely should, those of us who are thinking about these things.
But I think we also have to reckon with the fact that political change in the real world is messy.
Foreclosing on the messiness of the thing that we know is messy from all historical instances, what you're saying is that that really allows the commentator afterwards to assign blame.
Well, I mean, you know, we can start with like how that particular statement has nothing to do with how we got here.
Let's talk about how we got here.
If we want to talk about where we're going to go, let's talk about where we are right now.
And so to do that, you have to talk about the failure of liberalism and liberal capitalism to meet people's needs.
And, you know, people are angry and frustrated, and that doesn't justify all the directions that goes.
But if you're going to talk about that, then you have to talk about how you actually do meet people's needs.
How do you put in place policies that really do help people?
Because for Maddow, I'm guessing here, I mean, I don't, I'm assuming her solution is that the Democrats will win the midterms in a landslide, and then they'll take a trifecta over the government, and then they'll pass all the good policies, and everyone will be happy forevermore, right?
Lifetime, several times.
And they don't pass those policies.
It exposes broader questions about our failures that I think have important answers.
But if you don't want to deal with all that, then you leave yourself an out to say, well, people were too violent.
They blew up too many Teslas or whatever it was.
So that's why XYZ happened.
I mean, you could already see them preparing for that in 2020, even though...
I know I'm making this about elections, but that is the way a lot of American politics are organized.
Even before the election, you could see these articles by a lot of the nonviolent scholar folks about, like, oh, they're doing too many riots in Portland.
Like, they're going to give Trump the election.
They were ceding the ground so if Trump won, they could explain it with that.
Right?
That, in reality, I don't think had almost anything to do with it.
But you see that stuff come out in those moments so that it can then be used on the flip side, I think.
Let's go back to Fanon and your personal story, because with his focus on dignity being restored through various forms of resistance that might include violent resistance, what have you personally learned about the benefits and risks and stakes of physical culture in anti-fascist life from your own participation and your research and your fieldwork?
Look, we live in a tough world, right?
And I think that there's a need to culture ourselves in softness and kindness and not let those very human things be ground out of us.
But I also think there's a need for toughness.
And to me, being able to practice the physical and emotional toughness through fighting.
Has been very important.
And I think, honestly, it's something that we could use more of in our politics.
I mean, a sport fight is obviously consensual.
You're both there.
You're both agreeing to be there.
But it's the closest you can get to mirroring that actual, real fight.
So when you're in the ring and the referee says, fight, and steps out of the way, and it's just you and that other person who's the same weight as you, who's been training for months to hurt you so badly you can't stand up.
Coming right at you.
No one's coming to save you.
You can't look at your coach to save you.
You can't look at your friends to save you.
There's nothing you can do except get beat up or fight back.
I think that for me has been a really important experience to feel at a deep level and to learn that you can fight and you can fight well and you learn a lot about yourself and you learn a lot about other people and interactions through that.
I think that sort of spirit is something that movements that want a society that's more fair and just.
I think could learn a lot from.
Do you also know that you can get beaten and you won't die?
Yeah, there's that too.
I mean, of course there's the threat of that.
People do die sometimes.
But right, for the most part, yeah, you can get a little banged up and you can get hurt and that's okay.
And that's really important too.
I mean, that's one of the biggest values to me between...
Uh, combat sports and martial arts to take nothing away from, you know, traditional martial arts, but the actual act of sparring, full contact, full on sparring, I find incredibly important because learning to get punched in the face is one of the most important parts of fighting.
If you're going to be in a fight, you're probably going to get punched in the face.
And if you've never practiced getting punched in the face, uh, I also really want to draw out on that note,
you have this great...
chapter in Street Rebellion, chapter six, in which you're describing the Follast movement in South Africa, the student movement that really combined a number of objectives, including reducing tuitions, but also it tied into all kinds of social reform and decolonization programs as well.
And in 2015, 2015-2016, there was a number of confrontations in the universities that got reported throughout the global media as being primarily about tuition fees, as though these were kids who just didn't want to pay as much money or something like that, and they didn't have a bunch of other concerns.
And some of those protests became violent in a riot-type sense with property damage and scuffles with the police.
And you talk to those protesters after the fact who describe that riot conditions could actually be invigorating to their sense of solidarity and to their overall objectives, but also...
I found it interesting that you found that they remained students of the reality of their conditions, and they would meet up every night to debrief, right?
So they would be at a protest during the day and then they'd gather in their dorm rooms and they would discuss what exactly happened and what it meant and what that might sort of lead them to the next day.
And I think this seems like an essential piece of information and a discourse that usually paints street resistance and defense against fascist street violence.
Yeah, protest sociology, I think they called it.
No, there's a very impressive series of movements, starting with Roads Must Fall in Cape Town, where somebody defaced a statue of Cecil Rhodes that still sits.
Let's just pause there.
They threw shit at it.
Cecil Rhodes, as many people will know, but some people might want to be reminded, is basically the top diamond merchant tycoon in the 19th century colonial movement.
If human beings can really be categorized as evil, this is somebody who's about as evil as it gets.
This is not someone who is just a beneficiary of Although he certainly was that.
But this is an architect and an ideologue, like someone who believed deeply in European control over the rest of the world and specifically benefiting at everybody else's expense.
And the guy, you know, I mean, his legacy lives on in the Rhodes Scholarship that everybody's heard of.
And so they had some real grievances here.
He's still sitting presiding over this campus.
And yeah, someone threw some shit on the statue and caused a whole big...
And when police responded and people were like, actually, no, why is that statue here?
Actually, get rid of that statue.
Actually, by the way, how come we don't have more courses in African studies here?
How come we're learning European studies?
So one thing leads to another.
And there was a series of movements that came out of that, the biggest, I think, of which, at least on an international stage, was Fees Must Fall, which was about the university fees.
And they were very adept at, the student movement was, at connecting that sort of economic populist call.
So what they were doing was basically they were raising fees at a lot of these universities in a way that would have been prohibitive for...
for a lot of the poor black students.
Right.
And a lot of these are historically white institutions that are now, of course, integrated.
But, you know, that obviously, that plays into a whole history there.
And so...
And this also was connected to the labor movement on campus, where they were trying to outsource workers, you know, workers that would have been organized for, you know, these other contract companies to come in and do the labor on campus.
And some of those people, their kids were the ones who wouldn't be able to attend if there were fees, you know, so all these things were connected.
And they were able to connect those sort of more economic populist calls to the legacy and history of...
And all the ways that was continuing to oppress South African society.
And one of the reasons I think they were able to do that is because they were students and because, you know, there's a reason that students are essential to...
Nearly every major uprising you see across the world.
Students are people whose job is supposed to be to learn things about the world.
And they're young people who are full of energy and sometimes have more time and have more, you know, really thinking about a lot of big things.
And so, you know, we're at a time in the U.S. where we see students and student movements being demonized.
Students are, you know, these universities are these sort of like out-of-touch people who are totally...
Just like separate from the working class, from the regular people.
And there are some truths to that in some instances.
But I think it's also an attempt to sort of section off this whole category of society that tends to be really central in major social movements.
Just to underline the point about like whether social movements, social change movements can be designed in retreat centers, there probably isn't any retreat center planning that involves, hey, we're going to start everything off and tie all of these issues.
Yeah, I mean, and much less, I mean, if you're going to plan it somewhere, like plan it in the atrium of a university building while it's being occupied by students.
Like, okay, like now I'm listening in terms of like what you're planning.
And that's what they were doing, for example, at WITS, you know, sort of most internationally prestigious university in South Africa, where they took over the whole campus.
And they, you know, they did things like they, I don't know if they exactly held him hostage, but they held the president of the university there for a while and made him call the board on the phone and relay their grievances.
They were jamming things in the locks of classrooms to make sure they couldn't open because they wanted to shut down the university.
They were creating roadblocks.
The university would send in these sort of private security thugs to attack the students, and the students would find ways to either evade or fight back against them.
There was a whole sort of battle for these campuses.
Okay, last question.
For now, anyway, because we're going to come back on Monday.
At this point, and this has been true for about a century, There's been a huge reinvigoration through Fight Club, but also the Joe Rogan phenomenon.
Fight culture in the global north is pretty much dominated by right-wing ideology.
So I wanted to ask you, are there alternative spaces for that?
So yes, there are absolutely anti-fascist gyms and what you might call fight clubs and sort of alternative spaces like that across the country.
I mean, I'm aware of several that hopefully you can...
Tell your listeners about.
I want to make sure that folks are cool being shouted out, especially in this particular moment.
But there certainly are places like that.
If you go looking, asking around, you will find them.
And then there's also a lot of other places that may not be explicit that way but are friendly to those sorts of ideas.
But I do want to, for a moment, talk.
You mentioned Fight Club, right?
And I think that's a really important reference point.
I think it's gotten a little bit lost in at least a lot of leftist discourse because, you know...
It sort of got rolled into this critique of hyper-masculinity, which is very real.
That's a real thing in that story, in the movie and in the book.
The movie by David Fincher from 1999 and the book from a little bit earlier by Chuck Palahniuk.
But there's also really prominent anti-capitalist themes.
This is about the sort of mundane, pointless, middle-class existence that emerged in this zeitgeist of U.S. supremacy after winning the Cold War.
This was the sort of embodiment of what Francis Fukuyama called the end of history.
And it wasn't just for middle-class people.
It was about this middle-class white guy who just spent his life leafing through Ikea journals or Ikea magazines or whatever.
But this was a society that was telling people that everyone could be that, right?
This was like capitalism had conquered culture and convinced everyone that we were all middle-class white guys in one sense or another.
And so I think this is why it resonated with a lot of people.
This leads to a sort of blasé meaninglessness that sort of calls out for something else.
And once you start doing that, you see all the things that are rotten about that system that led to it in the first place, right?
I think in one sense, Fight Club is sort of a middle class, if you want to say, a very middle class American adaptation of Fanon, in the sense that there's no colonization to fight because these are the descendants of a colonial culture.
So in that sense, they are themselves the problem, but they're also the victims of the problem.
Right?
So they fight themselves and each other.
They punch themselves out.
Yeah, with no real purpose.
In front of their bosses.
Right, totally.
I mean, the very thing starts, like, spoiler alert, but, like, the whole thing starts with a guy getting drunk and fighting himself in a parking lot.
Yeah.
And other people are reacting to that spectacle.
And, you know, there's no purpose other than feeling something.
But once they start doing that and finding camaraderie in that, then their aspirations turn political.
Yeah.
And so, you know, Certainly the use of fighting as a tool to raise class consciousness and create a sort of movement mentality, a fighting movement mentality, as well as the use of that kind of consensual interpersonal violence as a method of transcendence, which is something that I could talk a lot about my experiences in fighting that really resonate with that.
I think that's an important thing to bring out of that sort of cultural artifact.
But you're not wrong.
I mean, the right has really...
I mean, he's a really interesting example, though, because Joe Rogan himself was not a fighter, right?
He was a stand-up comedian and TV host who became a commentator and sort of came to kind of embody that whole thing and gave voice to it.
But, you know, I could talk endlessly too long about the UFC and, you know, the differences between MMA as a sport and other types of combat sports, but I think...
Fighting itself, sport fighting to me, is not actually a good fit with political right-wing culture in reality.
Really?
No, I don't think so.
Because the right, the far right, I should say, it really, it's a bully mentality, right?
They tend to want to apply.
Force and violence against weaker people.
And you'll notice this if you've ever been part of anti-fascist mobilizations.
You'll notice like the far right is super scary and tough when there's a whole bunch of them and they gang up on someone.
But when they're outnumbered or even when numbers are equal, they tend to be cowards.
And I think, by the way, I don't mind saying I think this is true of a lot of police as well.
I think this is true of a lot of people who have that kind of mentality.
That shy away from an actual fair fight and the dynamics of a sport fight where everything is fair and you really have to dig down into yourself about why you're there.
I think that culture, if it's sort of a proper fight culture, I don't think is a good fit with that.
It doesn't mean it can't exist, but I think the culture takes more from the spectacle of it than the actual practice.
That is fascinating and riveting.
And you know what it makes me think of is that We don't have an example of right-wing actors volunteering into international brigades as we saw during the Spanish Civil War.
People who had never trained in...
You know, weapons or in warfare.
People who were like teachers and lumberjacks and miners and journalists and were willing to go to another country to learn how to fight against a bigger enemy.
That's not the story of the bully, is it?
No, and you could say something very similar about the struggle in Rojava right now.
You know, and not to say that there aren't examples of far-right forces that are very scary and effective in combat.
I mean, you can look at Eastern Ukraine, a lot of those folks, you know, and don't take more out of that than that alone.
But a lot of the folks on the front lines in the East are part of, you know, historic far-right movements.
So there certainly are those things.
Ben, let's leave it there because when we come back on Monday, I want to cover...
How Gandhi's moral principle of nonviolence became this secularized and strategic theory, or maybe pseudo-strategic theory, put forward by Gene Sharp and then reinforced by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Steffen, and why we should look very carefully at who funded those efforts and who they might ultimately serve.
