Newsletter 340 — April 10, 2025
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
In Brief
Harry Boyte sent this out as an email in early March, and we asked him at the time if we could publish it here. He said "yes," but then we got caught up with other things, and haven't gotten it out until now. So below you will find Harry's report on the core ideas he and his wife Marie Strom presented in a nonviolence training he did recently. The key ideas are:
- Martin Luther King's concept of "public love" or "agape," which, he reported, still resonated with his young, progressive audience. A key aspect of that concept was that power and love are not opposites. Harry quoted Martin Luther King as saying, " power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic."
- From there, they developed the notion of "thinking politically," which included the importance of
- knowing who your audience is and matching your message to them.
- identifying your desired outcomes, both short term and long term.
- identifying your strategies and tactics for attaining those outcomes, taking account political realities.
Guy and Heidi linked King's notion of agape to Kenneth Boulding's "three faces of power" and Paul Wehr's Power Strategy Mix. We also have comments about Harry's pointers about political thinking. However, we are experimenting with shorter newsletters, so we plan to hold those until later.
Harry Boyte On Nonviolence Training and Effective Nonviolent Action
On February 27, Marie Strom and I did nonviolence training for students at the University of Illinois YMCA. Many of the key activist groups on campus were there, concerned about immigrants, the environment, racial justice, global peacemaking and other issues. The Y, now more than 150 years old, is the hub of active civic activism and organizing at the University of Illinois. We talked about the need to recover the deep philosophy of public love (MLK called it agape) from the Freedom Movement. For this group of largely progressive (blue) students, it was important also to translate nonviolence into our time of threats, challenges and a wave of hatred and authoritarianism at home and abroad. The workshop focused on "thinking politically" in the older, citizen- centered understanding of politics. This means being attentive to goals, strategies, audiences, everyday environments, and the dignity and demeanor of participants in actions.
The response was powerful and quite positive. We both thought it may suggest a new interest in being strategic these days, more needed now than ever. From a Braver Angels “red” perspective, strategic nonviolence is also applicable to conservatives concerned about other issues (e.g. threats to rural communities, cancel culture and shaming, decline of citizenship, overregulation and big government).
Marie suggested the question ,"How can you think politically?" It had been central to the challenges facing civil rights leaders and organizers after the passage of landmark legislation outlawing segregation in 1964 and 1965. While the effort to dismantle legal segregation had achieved success, the struggle continued – indeed it was just beginning, according to Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King’s mentor on nonviolence. They needed to address many more problems than segregation — unemployment, poverty, underfunded education, a shortage of housing, crime, and widespread hopelessness. And the political mood was changing with the war in Vietnam, drawing attention away from such issues. Many students saw parallels to our time.
Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington, concluded that the new stage required new thinking. King asked in a famous speech, “Where do we go from here?” In answering the question, he added power to his emphasis on agape, public love.
“The concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.” Martin Luther King 1967
Rustin said the movement needed to shift “from protest to politics” (the title of his famous essay in 1965):
“My quarrel with the ‘no-win’ tendency in the civil rights movement parallels my quarrel with the moderates outside the movement. As the latter lack the vision or will for fundamental change, the former lack a realistic strategy for achieving it. They substitute militancy. But militancy is a matter of posture and volume and not of effect.”
Rustin argued that protest was not enough and sometimes was counterproductive. People needed to think strategically about what they were accomplishing through action. Did it increase public support? How did it build power? These questions are, if anything, even more crucial today. Politics, in this way of thinking, is not party politics. It involves understanding the power dynamics and everyday politics of a situation. Thinking politically includes asking three questions:
- Who is your audience? Not only decision-makers but also the larger community you are trying to win over. The famous March on Washington was framed not as a protest, but as a living petition. Its aim was to win support from middle America.
- What is your desired outcome, in the short term and the longer term? Keeping in mind the principle of not substituting militancy, posture and volume for realistic strategy, what can you realistically achieve (not what would you like to achieve)? What are your goals in the near future? What are your long-range goals? For the Freedom Movement, the goal was "beloved community.” Only nonviolence could achieve. [Heidi's addition: King's notion of the beloved community was a society in which everyone is valued, free of prejudice and discrimination, poverty, hopelessness, where they can share equally in the wealth of the earth.]
- What strategies and tactics are most suitable for your short term and long-term goals? How do you read the politics of a situation? How can you avoid turning off allies whom you need? What would increase the power of your group? How can you add surprise and other elements to increase impact? [Gene] Sharp’s list of 198 tactics provides many ideas; they need to be chosen with an eye to maximum effect.
Heidi and Guy's Comments
We asked Harry if we could share this because we thought it made several extremely important points. The first is that power and love are not opposed, but closely intertwined. I hadn't heard King's quote before "power without love is reckless and abusive," while "love without power is sentimental and anemic."
We have been teaching the same idea for years (see Newsletter 102), drawing from Kenneth Boulding's notion of "Three Faces of Power." In 1989, Kenneth Boulding published a book with that title, which argued that power can take one of three forms, threats (coercive power), exchange (the power to get things done through negotiation and compromise), and love (he said that "if love seems to strong a word, think "respect"). Here he was basically talking about the integrative social ties that hold people together, regardless of what they might get in return. We think of it as an effort to persuade people to "do the right thing." (Robert Putnam would call this "social capital.")
A colleague of ours and Kenneth's (also a friend and co-founder with us of the Conflict Information Consortium), Paul Wehr, coined the term "power strategy mix." Paul's notion was that it was rare that people use one kind of power alone. Rather, they usually use a mixture of forms of power. Legitimate coercion, for instance, occurs when police enforce traffic laws. Legitimacy of the laws is the integrative system at work, while the police enforcement is a coercive approach to get us all to drive safely. When negotiations happen according to an agreed upon set of rules, that is a combination of integrative and exchange power. Boulding argued that integrative power, while being the least often noticed, was actually the strongest, and most important form of power, because neither of the others could work effectively without it.
King relied heavily on integrative power (which he called public love or agape) when he called for Americans to "live out the true meaning of our creed." Rather than disavowing or criticizing America's founding principles, he embraced them, and called for Americans to more fully adopt them. Neither the left, nor the right are doing that now. The far left is denouncing America's founding fathers and founding principles, claiming the whole edifice of America is based on oppression and violence. The right pretends to support our founding principles, but Trump is violating them almost daily. So far, the Republican establishment is supporting him, being unwilling or uninterested in standing up for what America used to be about. So we strongly agree that it is up to the people, not our politicians, to reintegrate the notion of agape or the three faces of power into our guiding principles, and indeed, work for that "beloved community" that we have elsewhere described as "a democracy in which everyone would want to live." We also talk about building a democracy in which we treat others in the same way that we would like to be treated. This is something that we tried to encourage people to think about in Newsletter 256.
Lead photo credit: Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:March_on_Washington_for_Jobs_and..., Attribution: Center for Jewish History, NYC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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