<commit_before>---
layout: post
title: What's all this about Gandhi and constructive program?
---

It started one day a couple months ago. I was in a dark place, feeling anxious and depressed about what was happening on the national political scene, but also feeling guilty about everything I _wasn't_ doing about it. I believe the work I'm doing is important and it takes pretty much all the energy I have, but at the same time every call to Congress I hadn't made, every protest I hadn't attended, every donation I withheld weighed on me.

I brought this up at a session that day with my spiritual director. I expected Dan to say something supportive, of course, along the lines that each of us has only so much energy, that we have to let ourselves off the hook for not doing everything, to focus on what we can do. But that's not exactly what he said.

What he said was that it would be a _tragedy_ for me to spend time calling Congress or marching in protest. Not because making those calls or hitting the streets are not good or important things to do - they are.  But doing them would take me away from the work that only I can do. Important as they are, they aren't _mine_.

Then he told me that he's been excited from the beginning about the work I've undertaken through Code for Asheville, DemocracyApps, and now through my job at the City of Asheville, that he sees the work I do as what Gandhi termed "constructive program".

So that led me to investigate just what the constructive program is and how it applies or doesn't to my work and that of civic tech generally.

## Constructive Program vs Nonviolent Resistance

Gandhi is known, correctly, for his pioneering use of non-violent resistance as a mechanism of social and political change. But Gandhi himself talked throughout his life, and increasingly toward its end, about a vital complementary component of non-violence that he called _constructive program_. Where non-violent resistance is designed to break down the system of oppression, constructive program is the vital process of building something better to replace it. In the concrete case of the fight for self-rule in India, Gandhi argued that failing to do the constructive part would lead to the British regime being simply replaced by an Indian version of the same thing (and he would probably argue that that is largely how it turned out). Constructive program is essentially a program for building capacity for democracy.

In the decades since Gandhi's assassination there has been tremendous ongoing work on non-violence as a mechanism for social and political change. Non-violence has been shown by researchers like Gene Sharp not just to work, but often to be more effective than violent resistance in a wide range of circumstances. There were significant successes in the Nordic countries and even in Germany during WWII and a veritable explosion of successes in 1989 and the years since, partly through the dissemination of how-to manuals like Sharp's _From Dictatorship to Democracy_. As Dan pointed out in a recent forum, non-violence as a strategy has been so successful that a recent Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times refers to Sharp simply as "THE expert on challenging authoritarians."

Constructive program has, in contrast, been largely neglected. It is usually mentioned in books on Gandhi and on non-violence, but generally as a side note rather than as central theme. For example, in _How Nonviolent Struggle Works_, the "Cliff Notes" version of Sharp's 3-volume work on the politics of non-violence, there is just a single reference to constructive program, and the period after struggle gets only the following:

> Advocates of the use of nonviolent action in place of techniques of violence have sometimes argued that the results achieved by nonviolent action are likely to be more permanent and satisfactory than those achieved by violence.
>
> Those advocates have argued that in the period following a successful nonviolent struggle, there will likely be "no aftermath of resentment, bitterness or revenge, no necessity for further threats of force," as <NAME> put it. A lasting change in the power relationships between the contending groups is also likely.

In effect, the constructive program is reduced to a simple assumption that the use of non-violent means to force change will somehow automatically result in a transformation of society.

On the one hand it seems reasonable to assume that the aftermath of change brought about by non-violent means is likely to be better than that following violent ones. On the other hand, the assumption of transformation is in direct contradiction to Gandhi's assertion that the resisters are likely to simply become the new oppressors within an essentially unchanged system.
<commit_msg>Working<commit_after>---
layout: post
title: What's all this about Gandhi and constructive program?
---

It started one day a couple months ago. I was in a dark place, feeling anxious and depressed about what was happening on the national political scene, but also feeling guilty about everything I _wasn't_ doing about it. I believe the work I'm doing is important and it takes pretty much all the energy I have, but at the same time every call to Congress I hadn't made, every protest I hadn't attended, every donation I withheld weighed on me.

I brought this up at a session that day with my spiritual director. I expected Dan to say something supportive, of course, along the lines that each of us has only so much energy, that we have to let ourselves off the hook for not doing everything, to focus on what we can do. But that's not exactly what he said.

What he said was that it would be a _tragedy_ for me to spend time calling Congress or marching in protest. Not because making those calls or hitting the streets are not good or important things to do - they are.  But doing them would take me away from the work that only I can do. Important as they are, they aren't _mine_.

Then he told me that he's been excited from the beginning about the work I've undertaken through Code for Asheville, DemocracyApps, and now through my job at the City of Asheville, that he sees the work I do as what Gandhi termed "constructive program".

So that led me to investigate just what the constructive program is and how it applies or doesn't to my work and that of civic tech generally.

## Constructive Program vs Nonviolent Resistance

Gandhi is known, correctly, for his pioneering use of non-violent resistance as a mechanism of social and political change. But Gandhi himself talked throughout his life, and increasingly toward its end, about a vital complementary component of non-violence that he called _constructive program_. Where non-violent resistance is designed to break down the system of oppression, constructive program is the vital process of building something better to replace it. In the concrete case of the fight for self-rule in India, Gandhi argued that failing to do the constructive part would lead to the British regime being simply replaced by an Indian version of the same thing (and he would probably argue that that is largely how it turned out). Constructive program is essentially a program for building capacity for democracy.

In the decades since Gandhi's assassination there has been tremendous ongoing work on non-violence as a mechanism for social and political change. Non-violence has been shown by researchers like Gene Sharp not just to work, but often to be more effective than violent resistance in a wide range of circumstances. There were significant successes in the Nordic countries and even in Germany during WWII and a veritable explosion of successes in 1989 and the years since, partly through the dissemination of how-to manuals like Sharp's _From Dictatorship to Democracy_. As Dan pointed out in a recent presentation, non-violence as a strategy has been so successful that a recent Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times refers to Sharp simply as "THE expert on challenging authoritarians."

The constructive program has, in contrast, been largely neglected. It is usually mentioned in books on Gandhi and on non-violence, but generally as a side note rather than as central theme. In fact, in _How Nonviolent Struggle Works_, Gene Sharp notes that:

>> Advocates of the use of nonviolent action in place of techniques of violence have sometimes argued that the results achieved by nonviolent action are likely to be more permanent and satisfactory than those achieved by violence.
>
> Those advocates have argued that in the period following a successful nonviolent struggle, there will likely be "no aftermath of resentment, bitterness or revenge, no necessity for further threats of force," as <NAME> put it. A lasting change in the power relationships between the contending groups is also likely.

In effect, the constructive program is reduced to a simple assumption that the use of non-violent means to force change will somehow automatically result in a transformation of society.

On the one hand it seems reasonable to assume that the aftermath of change brought about by non-violent means is likely to be better than that following violent ones. On the other hand, the assumption of transformation is in direct contradiction to Gandhi's assertion that the resisters are likely to simply become the new oppressors within an essentially unchanged system.

{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02523860021208908, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0009544008483563097, 'mean_word_length': 4.597032640949555, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 5, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 12, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '366405', 'n_tokens_mistral': 2122, 'n_tokens_neox': 1966, 'n_words': 1550}