Nonviolence, the State, and Revolution

by Jeremiah Kim

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Does the nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. offer a theory of state power within its total vision of revolutionary change? If so, how does it compare with the theory of the state championed by V.I. Lenin and Karl Marx? 

And further, what does it look like when these ideas are put into practice and unleashed on a mass scale? Between the movements embodied by Gandhi and by Lenin, which ideas are more likely to bend the future as we proceed in this stage of humanity’s long development?

These are the types of questions one might expect a student of history or seeker of social change to ask within the natural trajectory of his or her knowledge. Yet such questions are not asked, especially not in radical circles in the United States.

So there remains an ocean around us, an extraordinarily rich catalogue of revolutionary experiences descending from the past century of human history. It waits to be picked up, examined, known, and used.

Revolutionary and Democratic Questions

We are living in a time when the crisis of American society has reached such a degree that we must consider the real possibilities and conditions of state collapse in the U.S. Such a collapse would have profound consequences for the world, due to the imperial nature of the U.S. state. Indeed the internal crisis of the United States mirrors the global crisis of U.S. imperialism, which faces a collapse of its hegemony and insurgence from the world’s darker nations on multiple fronts. As such, certain questions now take on a more vivid hue of intensity.

Can we say that state collapse in America is inevitable, given the increasingly vicious struggles between establishment wings and “counter-elite” factions of the U.S. ruling elite? Or must it be forced by external pressure, such as a broad mass movement of the American people? In either case, can there be a nonviolent transition of power? It is exactly the interplay between these lines of thought that, in turn, raises the larger question of what we mean by such fundamental terms as revolution and democracy in the 21st century.

Here, there are existing interpretations we can consider. In his April 1917 article “The Dual Power,” Lenin declared, “The basic question of every revolution is that of state power.” Today it is appropriate to ask whether this formulation is sufficient, or if we must adopt a more complex framing — especially if we assume that every revolution must, in the end, be a social revolution. In other words, what we seek is a revolution at the highest level of the state and at the level of ordinary human beings in their ideological, social, political, and economic relationships with one another.

At the center of this discussion, we must also account for a new reality: the overwhelming majority of people on this planet are more conscious, more aware than they were 100 years ago. Great leaps in consciousness have been ushered into the lifeblood of humankind. The capacity for democratic rule is far vaster; just as the contradictions in people’s consciousness are far more intricate. All this places far greater demands upon our thinking and vision today.

From here, we turn our eyes to two great streams of light from world history: the Russian Revolution and the Indian Freedom Struggle. Each reveals a distinct path of revolutionary change, yielding different lessons about how a people can achieve democracy and state power in modern times.

The Russian Revolution: The Vanguard Party

With the Russian Revolution, there is no shortage of ideological and historical material to sift through. The Bolsheviks’ theory of the state was unambiguously stated by V.I. Lenin in works such as The State and Revolution — published on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917. Lenin, invoking Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, defined the state as an instrument for the suppression of one class by another. Across time and place, it was the product of the “irreconcilability of class antagonisms,” characterized in bourgeois society by such institutions as a bureaucracy and standing army. Lenin insisted the historic task of the proletariat was not to “lay hold” of the existing state machinery, but to smash the old regime. Only then could revolutionary forces institute a new, democratic state, organized by the entire working class, that would expropriate and if needed, suppress the capitalists. This socialist state would eventually “wither away” with time, leading to communism.

The seeds for 1917 were laid twelve years earlier, in Russia’s Revolution of 1905. That year saw the emergence of the first worker’s council, or soviet, in St. Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire, amid an intense wave of strikes met by reactionary violence from the Tsarist regime. The year ended with the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, an unstable compromise in which the Tsar shared power with the new parliamentary Duma. 

In the years that followed, these soviet councils of workers and soldiers spread to other parts of Russia, concentrated in urban cities. They burst into prominence amid the chaos wrought by World War I, which devastated Russia with mass death, hunger, and upheaval. The authority of the Russian monarchy buckled before it suddenly collapsed, and in February 1917 the Tsar abdicated power, ending centuries of Romanov rule and imploding one of the largest land-mass empires in the world. A provisional government was created. It was weak and shambolic, and among its greatest immediate challenges was the surging popularity of the soviets as a rival source of authority in Russian society. In essence, there were two governments — what Lenin called a dual power.

The strategic offensive of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in these fateful months hinged on several key factors. First, they focused primarily on two decisive metropolitan cities: St. Petersburg (newly renamed Petrograd), and Moscow. The Bolsheviks also sought to exploit the weakness of the provisional government, which remained committed to Russia’s war effort and failed to control the food crisis. One can interpret Lenin’s severe formulations in The State and Revolution as an attempt to rhetorically strip the provisional government of its legitimacy and justify its dissolution.

Simultaneously, Lenin seized upon the soviets in his political vision. For him, the soviets embodied a new form of government, a sign of the working class’s capacity for rule. The most powerful soviet was the Petrograd Soviet (which shared some governing authority with the provisional government in an uneasy arrangement) followed by the Moscow Soviet. Otherwise, the soviets were largely decentralized and scattered.

It is important to note that the Bolsheviks did not dominate the soviets in their early phases of development. Of the 1,090 delegates present at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917, the Bolsheviks comprised only 105, trailing rivals like the Socialist-Revolutionaries at 285 and the Mensheviks at 248. This did not discourage Lenin and his followers from pressing forward with their call to transfer “all power to the soviets,” defying the other major socialist parties. In concrete terms, this took the form of vigorous mass agitation and various covert efforts to overthrow the government, combined with a tenacious struggle to win over contingents of disaffected workers and soldiers. By September, the Bolsheviks had earned a majority in both the Petrograd and Moscow soviets.

The actual October Revolution was a relatively bloodless affair. On the night of October 24-25, Bolshevik Red Guards swiftly captured key government facilities and centers of communication in Petrograd, encountering little to no opposition. Lenin declared the provisional government deposed. There ensued a brief skirmish at the Winter Palace, the seat of government, in which only five people died before government forces gave up and withdrew. The historian Richard Pipes notes that contrary to popular imagination, the Bolsheviks and their followers did not so much “storm” the grand chambers of the Russian monarchy as simply walk in. Less than a week later, they won control of Moscow after a few days of street-fighting.

A consequence of the Bolsheviks’ approach is that when they seized power in Petrograd and Moscow, vast stretches of Russia had no idea what was happening. It would take a bloody civil war to consolidate the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics across the total sweep of its geography. Ultimately, the inheritors of Lenin did succeed in establishing sufficient grounds of legitimacy upon which a socialist society, a civilization of a new type, could be built. Three decades later in the 1950 work Russia and America, W.E.B. Du Bois would observe how the local soviet functioned as a “cell of democracy,” almost akin to the New England town meeting, as he reflected upon his travels in the Soviet Union.

In the arc of world history the Russian Revolution sits among the defining events of modernity. Much has passed into the realm of myth. Yet a sober assessment shows a revolution whose course was highly contingent and frequently a matter of chance, rather than propelled to an inevitable conclusion by unerring scientific laws. For our purposes, the Russian Revolution is best understood as the revolution of a vanguard party — one enacted by a small group of revolutionaries who proclaimed a new state in the name of the people, the workers, the peasants, and humanity.

The Indian Freedom Struggle: The Mass People’s Movement

Any attempt to describe the Indian Freedom Struggle in a mere few paragraphs will necessarily be limited, considering its staggering breadth and still-more remarkable moral dimensions. By all measures, India’s anti-colonial struggle was the largest mass movement in the history of humankind. It involved millions upon millions of people across multiple generations: peasants and workers, students and the elderly, women and men, different religious traditions and ethnic groups, an emerging middle class and the poorest of the poor. This profound mass quality immediately distinguishes India’s revolutionary path from that of the Soviet Union.

In 1945, Mahatma Gandhi visited the town of Mahishadal in Bengal. He spoke with freedom fighters from nearby Midnapore, who had recently struggled in an uprising as part of the Quit India movement in 1942. The people of the region had conducted acts of sabotage against organs of colonial authority; more strikingly, they had created a parallel government, called Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar, to independently govern themselves for a period of two years.

In his exchange with the Midnapore comrades, Gandhi made a direct reference to the Russian Revolution: “Unless we can have a new way of fighting imperialism … in the place of the outworn one of a violent rising, there is no hope for the oppressed races of the earth. Let nobody be misled by the Russian parallel. Our tradition is wholly different from Russia's. The historical setting too is different. In Russia the whole population was under arms; Indian masses won't take to arms even if they could be given the necessary training.”

They asked him: “But, is not nonviolent rebellion, a programme of seizure of power?"

He replied: “Therein lies the fallacy. A nonviolent revolution is not a programme of ‘seizure of power.’ It is a programme of transformation of relationships ending in a peaceful transfer of power. … If the ruling power abdicates and a vacuum is created, the people's organization will naturally take over its functions; but such Jatiya Sarkar would have no other sanction except that of nonviolence and service of the people to enforce its fiats. It will never use coercion.”

From Gandhi’s remarks we gain a glimpse of the process wherein Indian freedom fighters sought to work out the practical and ideological contours of a new type of revolution — a nonviolent revolution — and with it, questions of state power. Whereas Lenin spoke of arming a whole people to directly dispense justice, Gandhi envisioned a state that would require no form of armed suppression at all. Instead human action would be compelled and all problems resolved through the organized social force of the people en masse exercising nonviolence.

The concept of revolutionary nonviolence was forged in Gandhi’s experiences struggling against white supremacy in South Africa; its roots lay much deeper in the spiritual values of Indian civilization. Gandhi’s subsequent return to India in 1915, armed with the doctrine of satyagraha, initiated a wholly new phase of the Indian independence struggle.

This time marked a new era for the Indian National Congress, which had served as the principal organ of nationalist leadership since the 1880s. When Gandhi called for the first Non-cooperation Movement in 1920, he was also calling upon the INC to transform itself: to evolve from a Western-influenced political organization, focused on achieving swaraj (self-rule) through legal means, into a true mass organization, one enmeshed with the people of India and adopting nonviolent mass action as its program. So too must it join together diverse ideological strands of the freedom struggle and disparate populations of a vast subcontinent toward this unified political vision. In essence, the INC became the movement itself.

Of these electric early years, Jawaharlal Nehru writes in his Autobiography: “The whole look of the Congress changed; European clothes vanished and soon only khadi (hand-spun cloth) was to be seen; a new class of delegate, chiefly drawn from the lower middle classes became the type of Congressman. … Non-cooperation was a mass movement, and it was led by a man of commanding personality who inspired devotion in India's millions. … There was a tremendous feeling of release there, a throwing-off of a great burden, a new sense of freedom. … Even in remote bazaars the common folk talked of the Congress and Swaraj.”

Such a higher stage of politics acted as a threshing floor to separate those forces who sided with the masses, from those who did not: “While the country was seething with excitement and becoming more and more revolutionary, [the Liberals and Moderates] became frankly counter-revolutionary, a part of the [colonial] government itself. They were completely cut off from the people … and became a small number of individuals dotted about in a few big cities.”

The next two-and-a-half decades brought dramatic high-points of struggle as well as years of frustration. There was the great Salt March and Civil Disobedience movement of 1930-31; there was the experiment of 1937-39, in which the British yielded partial state power and the INC governed eight provinces for 28 months. There was the “Do or Die” Quit India movement of 1942. Each successive campaign further eroded the legitimacy of the colonial government — systematically breaking down the morale and self-confidence of British authorities who believed they could control India’s restless population and the flow of events.

The movement was a living, breathing thing; and Gandhi’s leadership proved crucial in his ability to sense the ebb and flow of human energies. He knew when to withdraw, giving the people time to breathe and gather strength; and he knew when to press forward, escalating with ever-more audacious campaigns targeting strategic weak points of British rule. He knew the capacity of his people at a level of intimacy perhaps only paralleled by Martin Luther King Jr. 

New heroes were born — not just national figures like Nehru but millions of ordinary people who gladly accepted imprisonment, suffering, and brutal repression, and thereby assumed their place on the stage of world history. The movement traveled to far-flung provinces, as armies of volunteers won more to their ranks through political education, the organic development of people’s institutions, door-to-door persuasion, and countless other methods of activity.

Throughout this process, the Indian Freedom Movement was not only forcing the British Raj to its knees; the movement was forming the very basis for the new Indian nation in-becoming. City by city, town by town, the people of India reconstituted their existing civilizational unity, the blessing of long millennia, into a modern body politic. This meant more than the establishment of parallel governing institutions or dual powers. The nature of nonviolence created the possibility for an entire civilization of people to participate in mass revolutionary politics at an almost inconceivable scale. It birthed a new, democratic consciousness among hundreds of millions of darker human beings whom Western civilization saw as incapable of self-rule and only fit for lives of dumb, emaciated servitude.

The achievement of independence in 1947 was not without contradictions, chief among them the violent wrenching of partition between India and Pakistan. In spite of this, the formation of the Indian state must be considered one of the most remarkable experiments in modern history. The centrality of the INC to the freedom struggle meant that new India at its conception was something close to a one-party state in essence, even as it adopted a parliamentary form. The nation’s first general election of 1951-52 saw the INC win close to three-fourths of all seats in the legislature; it would dominate Indian politics for the next half-century.

So it happened that a cadre of freedom fighters, schooled by decades of struggle, took up the task of writing India’s constitution. Led by the philosophical vision of Nehru, they framed the constitution around two core pillars: fundamental rights and directive principles. With the latter, India’s revolutionaries laid down an enduring set of directives to the state to improve the welfare of the people — to remove poverty, educate every child, ensure social control over wealth, and more — for generations to come. This was an attempt to take the essence of a mass movement and elevate it into a mandate of governance. It must be said that the directive principles, upheld and prioritized by subsequent leaders like Indira Gandhi, clearly distinguish the Indian state from Western liberal paradigms that solely focus on the rights of the individual.

The Russian Revolution was, in plain terms, a struggle to seize state power. Within this framework, Lenin cast aside questions of morality to later stages of socialist development. Yet with the Indian Freedom Struggle, we see a movement that sought not only to transfer state power to the people, but to achieve new values, to crystallize moral tenets of civilization, as part and parcel of the revolutionary struggle itself.

Visions for Tomorrow

We return to America and the present world situation with our eyes already marked by visions of that great inheritor to Gandhi: a second Mahatma, Martin Luther King Jr. It was the Civil Rights Movement that proved Gandhian nonviolence could be wielded as a revolutionary “sword that heals” in the wilderness of U.S. society, infused with the consciousness of her Black proletariat.

A full account of the Third American Revolution and its implications for today requires deeper discussion in every forum and social sphere. Yet we can say this: the message cast out into the world by the Indian people has born fruit in the darker soils of America.

The story of the Indian Freedom Struggle, more so than the Russian Revolution, shows that it is possible to struggle with human beings to the widest degree; to transform the relationships among them; and to create a social power so overwhelming that it forces a despotic state into submission. The vanguard party method of revolution marked one era of history; the achievement of the mass people’s movement ushered in another. Only a dogmatic or sterile worldview would refuse to even consider this history, now emblazoned in the record of the human race, as worthy of the most intense and fruitful inquiry.

As such, we cannot hesitate in saying that India’s example is an incalculable gift to all peoples and future generations in every continent. At the international level, nonviolence bears its promise not only in the quest for world peace but in the development of new coalitions to isolate the forces of Western imperialism and build the foundations for a more just world order.

With the experience of these and other revolutions at our side, we hold before us one unifying thought for the future: that always the new emerges alongside the old — sometimes sharply, sometimes unevenly, oftentimes overlaid and intertwined with one another. This field of possibility is the furnace and hope of human striving.

Jeremiah Kim is a peace activist based in Philadelphia and a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation.