Nonviolence versus capitalism

When community members organise against a new development, such as a factory, apartment block, housing estate, stadium, freeway, airport, or just the cutting down of a few trees, the motivation is often self-interest, including maintaining property values, preventing noise and air pollution, ensuring nice views, reducing traffic congestion or preventing the “wrong sort of people” from moving into the neighbourhood. Local antidevelopment campaigns are often dubbed with acronym NIMBY, standing for “not in my back yard.” The implication is that NIMBY campaigners do not care if the development occurs somewhere else. They just do not want it near where they live.

In spite of the derogatory connotations of the term NIMBY, many local activists do care about others. Local campaigning can be especially effective when it combines principled opposition to certain types of harmful development — such as nuclear waste dumps or high temperature incinerators — with concerns about local impacts or racial discrimination. In any case, local campaigns can be a potent mode of resistance to capitalist initiatives. Therefore they are worth considering.

1. Does the campaign help to

undermine the violent underpinnings of capitalism, or

undermine the legitimacy of capitalism, or

build a nonviolent alternative to capitalism?

For most NIMBY campaigns, the answer is no. There may be undermining of the legitimacy of individual capitalists — namely the ones promoting the development being opposed — but seldom of the system as a whole.

2. Is the campaign participatory?

This depends on the campaign. High participation is important for campaign success.

3. Are the campaign’s goals built in to its methods?

When, as is typical, the aim is to stop a development and the methods include meetings, letters, lobbying and rallies, there is little direct connection between goals and methods. Often there is, in addition, a more general aim: for local people to make decisions about local developments. One way to capture this general aim in methods is for local community members to develop their own participatory planning processes and to use them to reach agreement on desired plans. An alternative plan is a good way to help challenge an undesired development.

4. Is the campaign resistant to cooption?

Cooption is always a serious risk for local antidevelopment campaigns. Sometimes this occurs through compromises: a height of a proposed building is reduced or better emission controls are installed in a factory. Another method is buying off opposition, as for example when developers pay high prices to purchase existing dwellings targeted for removal. The community as a whole can be bought off when the developer or government allies provide facilities such as parks, pay higher taxes or make donations to schools.

In a wider sense, cooption occurs when developers go somewhere else: the development is not stopped but instead displaced, often to a community that cannot resist as effectively. The result is that undesirable developments often end up in the poorest and most oppressed communities (though effective resistance occurs in some poor communities).

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By these criteria, local antidevelopment campaigns are weak vehicles for challenging capitalism, since they provide little fundamental challenge and are easily coopted. However, while this is true of most local campaigns, as a collective phenomenon they should not be ignored. Sometimes a combination of NIMBY campaigns constitutes a strong challenge to a type of development. A good example is disposal of high-level radioactive waste. No community wants to host this particular “development” and cooption strategies have not proved successful. In this case, local opposition results from and provides support to wider antinuclear consciousness built by the movement against nuclear power. Several of the limitations of individual NIMBY campaigns are overcome when they are part of a wider struggle.

10. Social defence

The power of the military and police lies at the foundation of capitalism, as described in chapter 3. Without organised violence to protect the system of private control and to contain challenges by workers and communities, capitalism could not survive. Therefore, in examining nonviolent challenges to capitalism, it is worth examining nonviolent challenges to military and police power.