My political views have been what might be called dissident for a long time, thanks to Thoreau's Essay On Civil Disobedience and a conscience sharpened on the whetstone of adversity. Since '96 I've been bemoaning the military-industrial complex, the penal system, big pharma, the dangers of partisanship, the evils of modern empire, and the profound ignorance which both breeds and nurtures these evils, but as of late I've had opportunity to further reconsider the role of nonviolent protest, especially in it's incarnation of civil disobedience.
In certain "integral" circles (those not living up to the ideals such a vision demands), protest and civil disobedience are dismissed as "unconstructive" in that such is said to represent a failure to adequately discern the contours of conflict and to evidence a misguided expenditure of energy which might be better put to use through developmentally informed action manifesting in entirely novel (and presumably more effective) ways of altering the current socio-political landscape as to "promote the greatest depth for the greatest span."
While I agree that protest in an of itself cannot possibly hope to address and transcend the igorance and pathology which breeds and perpetuates power abuse in the first place and is but one weapon in the battery of reform, I do believe the afore articulated proposition is somewhat untenable in that protest and civil disobedience are not necessarily mutually exclusive to integrally informed activism. Furthermore, I believe such a disdain for protest and civil disobedience bespeaks a tacit (and in my opinion, erroneous) assumption that "legitimate" (lawful and legislative) channels are the means par excellent for addressing and instituting change in the service of humanitarian ideals when there is ample evidence to the contrary.
Despite the many advances that have been made through the various liberation movements of the past two centuries, the historical record, both recent and otherwise, provides incontrovertible evidence that the denial and suspension of civil liberties by the power elite--that monolith supposedly amenable to more "progressive" persuasion through legal and lawful channels--continues to be accomplished through precisely these channels wherein the law is exercised not in the service of justice but of oppression, and wherein that which is incontestably immoral and unethical is sanctified on the altar of legality. Civil disobedience, with it's deliberate and conscionable breaking of those depredatory statutes which make a mockery of justice, pays homage to this realization by demonstrating the farce of law as executed by corrupt power structures, thus mobilizing the public to serve as the check and balance the bureaucracy shows itself largely incapable of.
There is a further danger in dismissing protest on the grounds it does not conform to more "progressive" standards. The modality of protest is not primary, per se; what is primary is the injustice it stems from and the reform it aims for. Complaining protest is "unconstructive" while failing to offer any substantive corrective to the injustice it is in response to constitutes a performative contradiction and hyprocrisy of the worst kind. Dismissing legitimate opposition on the grounds that it is not developmentally informed, integral, or evolutionary, is to miss the point entirely, the point being that despite protest's relative merits (or glaring lack thereof), it is perhaps the single greatest manifestation of the intolerability of state-sponsored trespass, and to become preoccupied with the modality of reform to the exclusion of it's meta-message is to remain blind to the fundamental injustice it demonstrates opposition to, thus promoting the very abuses it claims a commitment to ending.
