Is Non-Violence more effective than Violence?

Is Non-Violence more effective than Violence? It could be, if Non Violence is believed to have some special soteriological or spiritual power and efficacy. However, such beliefs soon degrade because genuine economic and geopolitical problems are not amenable to magical solutions. Thus, Non Violence can only be credited with success if the aim is a cosmetic change, advantageous to a particular client base, which is cheaper to implement than active repression.

Gandhian Satyagraha was a Nonviolent movement which appealed to certain upwardly mobile castes who believed that their ancestors had given up Violence and taken to Commerce or Clerical work for spiritual reasons. Previously, people like Gandhi and Nehru and Sir Subramaniyam Iyer and almost all the other Hindu/Jain Congress lawyer-politicians, had served Princes whose ancestors had risen by the sword.

However, after Independence, this class of people proved to be sanctimonious fools who mired the country in corruption and economic stagnation. Thus, they were increasingly challenged and displaced by dominant agricultural castes who took pride in their 'rugged masculinity' and previous martial successes.

By contrast with Nonviolence's magical mythos, Violent change can be substantive not cosmetic. The problem with Violence is that it is a learned skill which is scarce and therefore costly. Furthermore, to remain competitive, it must continually embrace technological change- often of an arcane type.

Consider the dilemma faced by the British in the Seventeenth Century. Their island nation was vulnerable to invasion by sea. Thus, to secure its ancient liberties, the country's Navy needed to dominate its own littoral. However, Navies cost money. To pay for themselves, ships need to be engaged in global trade- including trade of a repugnant type- slave trading, opium trading, and the forcible export of 'invisibles' involved in Colonial 'primary accumulation'- i.e. loot.

Still, as technology evolved, Britain found itself vulnerable to new threats from the air and under the water. The global hegemony of the British Navy could not prevent the Nazi missile from pulverizing its green and pleasant land.

Thus Britain gave up its quest for Naval dominance and concentrated on building ever closer mutually beneficial ties with its Continental neighbors.

This illustrates an obvious truth- viz. a superior alternative to both Violence and Non-Violence is fostering goodwill and reciprocity through highly pragmatic, mutually beneficial. deals.

In our own day to day lives, neither Violence nor Nonviolence have any great salience. We don't get ourselves a pizza by stabbing the delivery boy nor do we do so by haranguing him on the universal right to pepperoni toppings. We pay and get paid for what we buy and sell.

Most Social change occurs because the market coordinates rational self-regarding actions in a manner which eschews both coercion and moral persuasion.

It is seldom the case that a political movement has greater wisdom than the average self-regarding individual. Speaking generally, both the Saint and the Revolutionary is as stupid as shit and will fuck things up worse than the current bunch of crooks.

Unlike Nonviolence, Violence can cause dramatic re-allocations of resources but the cost of Violence has to be covered. Those better at inflicting it may switch sides, or otherwise change the outcome, to reward themselves. Here, Violence succeeds because it limits its aim to rewarding itself and thus becomes a fixed cost, or rent. Non Violence too, if it limits itself to narrow, pragmatic, ends, can, by gaining obligatory passage point status, become an overhead, or constraint, on resource allocation. However, both Violence and Non Violence which aim at universal ends fail completely. But then so does Magic.

Still, there is a small amount of money to be made out of pretending Magic, or Non Violence is a real thing and works swell if only we will all believe.

Thus, a recent study finds-

Between 1950 and 2013, mass killings (i.e. more than 1,000 intentional deaths) occurred in almost 43% of popular uprisings that challenged incumbent regimes.

'Popular uprising' is not a term which lends itself to an exact definition. The American 'Tea Party' may have seen themselves as a 'popular uprising'. So may the French 'Yellow Vests'.  The number of 'intentional deaths' is a function of the pre-existing political culture. There are plenty of countries which have seen significant political changes where neither 'Violence' nor 'Non Violence' featured.
Thus, it would be more accurate to say 'between 1950 and 2013 economic and geopolitical factors, not Violent or Non Violent movements, posed challenges for incumbent regimes.'

Consider the following definition- 'Nonviolent Resistance refers to civilian uprisings where the dominant method of resistance eschews directly and physically harming others. This might involve protests, sit-ins, walk-outs, or other coordinated, purposive events that deliberately avoid violent confrontations. 

The above definition applies to legal forms of protest. Such movements do not normally describe themselves as Non Violent unless there is a fringe element which is actually committing violence, whom the mainstream wish to distance themselves from.

By contrast, in countries like India where 'Ahimsa' as Non-Violence supposedly has a soteriological or spiritual value over and above any practical change it may effect, a movement describing itself as Non-Violent has different aims and a different client base from other similar legal or seditious forms of protest.

The authors of this study conflate things like Gandhi's satyagraha with the British General Strike of 1926 though their aims and ideological presuppositions were very different. By their definition, any coordinated legal activity movement which could cause political change would count as 'Nonviolent Resistance'.  But illegal actions of a self-regarding type would have the same effect. Pervasive tax avoidance or the disintermediating of Law Courts and Police forces by turning to the Mafia for contract enforcement would debilitate the legitimate Government. Communal conflict leading to ethnic cleansing could paralyze the administration.


There is another side to the coin of legal or illegal collective actions which cause political change. Consider the General Strike. It imposes a cost on the strikers. Moreover, if the economic condition of workers deteriorates under an administration more to their liking, they may change their voting behavior and become reconciled to the sort of regime which had previously provoked their ire.

Thus, in the end, Resistance does not matter very much. What matters is economic and geopolitical factors of an impersonal objective type.

These campaigns either sought to overthrow and replace the existing government or to fundamentally reshape their political institutions.

This happens every time there is an election in a democratic country or a putsch in a military dictatorship or some opaque clash between cliques within a totalitarian Political Party. In general, neither Violence nor Non Violence have had much influence on the outcome.

Yet, as this also implies, a significant proportion of uprisings did not experience a mass killing.

This is a fallacy. Mass killing has often happened without any provocation whatsoever. 'Uprisings' don't matter. Economic and Geopolitical considerations do.

In a majority of cases—57%—dissidents were spared from the brutal violence that befell many of their counterparts in other countries.

Dissidents have experienced brutal violence without there being any uprising or even the possibility of any such thing.

Why, then, do some dissidents face less direct state violence than others?

The pre-existing political culture or legal framework of the country determines this. Neither Violence nor Non Violence greatly changes the equation.

Relying on newly collected data and original analysis, this special report aims to shed light on the factors that increase or decrease the odds of government-led mass killings during popular resistance campaigns.

Violence is not just about killing. It is about rational expectations regarding the outcome of an all out conflict. In this sense, the 'data and original analysis' available is useless. There is no metric for what happens in even the 'closest possible world'- which is what the cost/benefit calculus of Violence must look at.

There are times- perhaps the ongoing confrontation between Hamas and Israel is an example- when the benefit of staying alive seems so low that one side has people willing to die in an otherwise futile violent confrontation.The same could be said of Non Violent gestures- like Buddhist monks setting fire to themselves or saintly activists threatening to fast unto death. The problem with assessing 'effectiveness' here is that the response may be superficially accommodative while actually deeply adverse.

The other problem has to do with Expectations. Where a Super Power is collapsing, Expectations shift so even a very small amount of violence, backed by non-violent protest, is enough for the regime to change because the Super Power is retreating. Thus British Colonialism disappeared relatively quickly after 1945 with little violence- save in 'settler' colonies like Kenya and Rhodesia. The same was true of Warsaw Pact countries. The eventual trajectories of these countries did not depend on whether they achieved regime change by Violence or Non Violence. What mattered is if their people were sensible and could work together to do smart things. In general, this involved disintermediating both murderous nutjobs and sanctimonious bores.

This is not to say there were no economic returns to investment in either type of sociopathy. However those returns were very unequally distributed and did not correlate with positive outcomes.

There is one difference between Violence and Non Violence. The latter can use technology to greatly increase its productivity and itself contribute to knowledge based 'endogenous growth' and technological innovation. The Israeli Army is now itself that country's biggest incubator. The PLO too made a lot of money training terrorists and extorting money. But theirs was a low tech type of violence and had only negative spin-off effects.  By comparison, the premier 'knowledge based' Non Violent movement of the Twentieth Century- the Gandhian shite India got saddled with- imposed an increasing deadweight loss on the country. This was despite the vaunted 'discipline' of 'satyagraha' its members had acquired by getting hit on the head and being led off meekly to jail.

Violence is a skill amenable to Scientific augmentation. Competition in this field can have positive spin off effects. Non Violence is a gesture of an essentially normative sort. Competition here yields a stasis of holier than thou virtue signalling.

Violence is of a similar type to other existential threats and thus competition in this field yields benefits for 'games against nature'. The reverse is also true.

 Non Violence is not an existential threat. It is a nuisance you can get rid off by being slightly stupider and claiming to represent some more abject victimhood. However, this diverts resources from productive uses. It makes positive sum games more difficult because they get 'deadlocked' by concurrency problems- e.g deciding whom should be helped first- and, because the Social decision space becomes more and more multi-dimensional, 'Agenda Control' gains salience. This frustrates the masses who come to sympathize with a hooligan type of violent protest. Thus Ricoeur's disciple, Macron, discovers that though words can dream as much as they like, a bunch of vandals in yellow vests can still derail the Paris agreement. Why? It's because economics matters. Money talks, Bullshit walks.