MS

Gene Sharp is, as Politico put it, the most important American political figure that you’ve never heard of. And I think that is a fair assessment. He was a social scientist who passed away in early 2018, who spent his career writing about the dynamics of nonviolent action as a political tool. If you were to Google him, you’d see lots of articles talking about him in the same breath as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize multiple times. Especially since his passing I think you can observe a mainstream effort to almost sanctify, to canonize him. You can look at the BBC or the New York Times or the Washington Post , also outlets like Waging Nonviolence and other lefty outlets, and he is cast, generally without caveat, as being a hero of peoples’ movements around the world and a friend of the Left, broadly construed.

I spent about ten years, from 2006 to 2016–2017 involved in the US climate movement, and I also spent some time working within the climate movement internationally. And about 3–4 years ago I started to become acutely aware of, and frustrated with what were, in my view, chronic challenges that I kept observing — strange idiosyncratic tics within our movement that I couldn’t really understand. And I started this research as an effort to understand these challenges, and as part of that I started looking a bit more critically at some of the intellectuals and books that circulated in the movement, generally without any kind of skepticism or critical engagement. Many of these organizing handbooks are superficially apolitical; there’s no obvious ideology that they spring from. Indeed, often “ideology” is treated like a bad word. Anyway, Gene Sharp is one of the intellectuals whose name kept coming up again and again, and the more I read about Sharp, and read Sharp’s work itself, the more stunned I was that this fellow is so central to US protest movements and to international protest movements as well.

I’ve spent about two and a half years or so learning about Sharp and reading his corpus — he wrote prolifically. My argument is threefold. I think that Sharp is best understood not as a modern-day Gandhi, but rather as one of the most important Cold War defense intellectuals that the US has produced. He should be as thought of and recognized alongside people like the nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling, who was in fact his mentor and is the one who brought him to the Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Second, that Sharp should be understood as a kind of early neoliberal theorist of state transformation. Because even though he adopted a realpolitik sort of affect — that’s his tone in all of his major work — the thing that inspired Sharp more than anything was that he saw the world, as many of the Cold Warriors did, in terms of good and evil. And for him evil was personified by the totalitarian dictator.

But if you look more closely into Sharp’s work, his indictment is not merely of dictators, it’s also of the “centralized state” more broadly. This centralized state in his view is the key source and vector of violence in the modern world. It is the thing that produces tyranny and genocide and war; but for the centralized state the world would not be so violent. What are the hallmarks of the “centralized state” for Sharp? Features that are easily identifiable to most on the Left as the key redistributive hallmarks of the New Deal state — things like economic regulation, public ownership of key sectors. Sharp talks about how in a “centralized state” there are too many “government controls” in the economy. So he wants state “decentralization,” a common watchword on the modern US left; he wants to “devolve” key state functions to “non-state” entities. And by implication, Sharp thinks a decentralized state will produce less violence. He goes so far as to say that his politics of nonviolent action — his theorization of how nonviolent action can be used to overthrow a dictator — can more generally be used to diffuse (that’s his word, “diffuse”) or “decentralize” state power. What is telling about that is that, again and again, such state “decentralization” is indeed the outcome of nonviolent revolutions that used Sharp’s methods, like those in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the Color Revolutions in places like Georgia and Ukraine. That practically looks like economic liberalization, what we refer to as “neoliberalism.”

Which brings me to the third part of my argument. I think Sharp should be understood as a kind of wise man to anti-communist movements, from the final stages of the Cold War through the 2000s. Sharp offered up the art of protest to the US government for anti-communist purposes abroad. I contend that if you don’t get this, you don’t get Sharp. Sharp and his colleagues were on the ground providing counsel to the secessionist movements in the Baltics. They were in the Baltics and in Russia consulting with activists just a day before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There were similar patterns in Yugoslavia: Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, which is the organization he starts to advance nonviolent action around the world, they train people in Yugoslavia who go on to train people in Georgia, Ukraine, the Arab Spring, Venezuela. In many cases AEI is working parallel to the National Endowment for Democracy and its adjuncts.

For Sharp, there is an affirmative belief that US Cold War policy, very broadly construed, is a good thing. He doesn’t accidentally find himself working with people like Thomas Schelling, in a center that also houses Henry Kissinger and so forth, just by happenstance, or because he’s a sellout or a rube. It’s because Sharp thinks, “I agree with the US anti-communist agenda, but I just want this agenda to be advanced by nonviolent means as opposed to violent means, and in fact I think nonviolent action will do the job of defeating communism more effectively than violence will.” And it seems Sharp was right. The USSR is dead, vestiges of socialism in Eastern Europe have largely been eliminated through the Color Revolutions, Yugoslavia was destroyed, and so on, all nonviolently. And surprisingly large quarters of the US left have cheered, even as these events have practically meant the destruction of public health care and social housing, destruction of unions, imposition of harsh social-safety-net cutting austerity. We need to wise up.

Stepping back, Sharp’s full career tells us important things about modern imperial strategy. Are workers supposed to celebrate when the United States advances owning class interests nonviolently? Many Sharpians seem to think so. Sharp tells us a lot about how protest itself can be used, but also how it can be abused. Too often there’s this attitude that if we see people in the street protesting, that’s the beginning and end of the inquiry, it is prima facie evidence that they are righteous and whatever they want they should be given.