VIOLENCE VS. NON-VIOLENCE: EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES FOR SOCIAL CHANGE? Written by Renaldo McKenzie

Is “violence” more effective than non-violence in creating social change? Peoples have used violence and non-violence with certain degree of success. By success, we mean disrupting the routine, smashing the old order to smithereens. I am talking about something new, fresh that truly celebrates freedoms and liberties; a change of history and culture, where the last shall be first. It is a change that affects the day-to-day lives of the colonized, the globalized oppressed man. I am here advocating a redistribution of resources and wealth. When America was desegregated and blacks were elevated to a relative place of privilege, it was a mere equality with the poor whites and a small opening for some blacks to realize marginal increases in their positions, but their lot remains the same. Clarke describes this change as superficial; you see Clarke like troika, the Italian anarchist, understood that the changes necessary to improve the daily lives of the working class were far removed. The kind of change that was required was a social and economic revolution that involved the redistribution of wealth; unless there is some pre-accumulation of wealth then the freedom accorded to blacks did not do much to liberate their poor wretched state. They were freer, but in actual fact they were still divorced from any rightful claims to their wealth which necessitated a meaningful change. They got civil rights but not economic rights. We may conclude the same d be said of so-called third world states (countries in the Global South) that were fooled into negotiating their independence from their colonial oppressors. They had envisioned a colony that guaranteed their freedom as true men, not “mimic” man – when “decolonization had a dream of a third world of free post-colonial nation firmly on its horizon. However, hope met despair when the freedom negotiated on the terms of the neo-liberals propped up the negotiators (new local elites) over their fellow citizens) who continue to follow the tactics of “Britton Woods. Finally, Ron Elvin in his article published in the NPR commentary on June 13, 2020 in an article entitled “Will This Be the Last Reckoning on Race that Lasts” stated that:

In 2020, things happen that never happened before. And right now, they seem to be happening all at once.

Atop a global pandemic and resulting recession, May and June have given us another dimension of head-spinning events. Following two weeks of widespread street protests after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, a change of attitude seems to have swept through the national culture like a sudden wind.”

But I disagree, this is not so Ron, it’s not new (maybe to a particular set of oppressed groups rather than a nation) as the actions that spawn the Haitian Revolution, French and American Revolution and the Revolutions that sought the tearing down of walls that divided us in the past stems from the same actions of what we are witnessing today. I have discussed this more fully in an essay you can request via renaldocmckenzie@gmail.com