Never once when I was in Tahrir Square during and after the Egyptian Revolution did I hear the name Gene Sharp. Not once with all the graffiti that went up on the walls of Cairo did I see Gene Sharp quoted or his name mentioned though I saw quotations by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell and many others. The first i ever heard of Gene Sharp was in an article in the New York Times after the revolution had removed the dictator Mubarak from power. Suddenly, we were being told that Gene Sharp had written the blueprint and we, I guess dumb Arabs that we are, had not even been aware of it. The United States after arming the dictator’s military, supplying him with the gas and bullets used on the demonstrators and funding his army to the tune of $2 billion annually had really, all along, been planning and inspiring the revolution. If only somebody had told Hilary and Obama the whole thing might have ended sooner with a lot fewer casualties and we in the square would not have felt so threatened for so much of the time. 

    Thinking I might have missed something, I downloaded five of Sharp’s booklets from his website to read. I also looked up what I could about the man on the Internet. When I returned to Canada last summer I searched and found at a university library his 900 page book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, published in 1974, on which his booklets are based. More recently, I saw the award winning documentary about him, How to Start A Revolution— So, I think I am qualified to express an opinion.

    Let me start with the man. According to the entry on Wikipedia and to Gene Sharp himself, he refused to serve in the military campaign in Korea in the early 1950s and, as a consequence, was jailed for nine months in 1953. As far as I can ascertain from the sources I have searched this was the sole act of civil disobedience that Gene Sharp engaged in his entire life— assuming that is what it was. I add the rider because it would be reasonable to expect that one act of civil disobedience at such a young age would likely be followed by others and that does not appear to be the case. It is not part of a discernible pattern.

    It is worth pausing here and considering how tumultuous the last sixty years have been, especially in the United States. There was the Korean war; the anti-nuclear campaigns and CND that drew people like Bertrand Russell and many other intellectuals and academics to demonstrate and participate in civil disobedience actions; the Cold War; the Vietnam War, the bombing of Laos and the invasion of Cambodia; and of course the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King and women’s liberation and gay rights, the US funded coups in South America, particularly in Chile. I find no hint or scent that Gene Sharp, in anything written or said by him or others, participated in any of this. He does not appear to have even cheered for the good guys at the sidelines. What he did do was observe, compile and write his books. Am I alone in thinking that if Gene Sharp was committed to non-violent civil disobedience that his abstinence from action is very strange, weird even? Is it any surprise that some people think his behaviour indicative of that of a policeman or government agent trying to get the measure of the threat that they believe civil disobedience to be to the state and that his research was never about making revolution, but an attempt to dissect uprising and civil disobedience actions so as to find components that can be manipulated and redirected to the interests of those in power? (see the claims at http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2012/03/12/the-seven-year-brouhaha-over-gene-sharp/)

    The kindest comparison I can make for such behaviour is that of the giant agricultural corporations that go into developing countries and collect genetic material of crops that farmers have spent centuries cultivating and then patenting that information and selling it as their own property. I am not necessary saying that Gene Sharp profited financially the way the agricultural conglomerates have, but there different ways of benefiting and as an academic the benefits maybe less tangible but still very real. Regardless, I cannot help feeling that if Gene Sharp has not lived civil disobedience, then by what right does he claim it? What claims does he really have over the methods of civil disobedience listed like a shopping list in his booklets, without any explanation of application and neutered of analysis or examples, particularly in the much trumpeted booklet, the supposed blueprint for revolutions, From Dictatorship to Democracy?

    Why would anybody turn to Gene Sharp when we have the example and theory of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi? Their credentials are beyond any doubt or question. Their writing clear and their motives transparent. They succeeded and both paid a price for that with their lives. The answer maybe that Gene Sharp provides a formula that can be followed or a theory that can be applied. But neither is the case. What he calls theory is at best a series of hypothesis, often no more than conjectures, that he states in his booklets and that he tries to substantiate in his 3 volume study, mentioned earlier, by piling on examples. But that is not how a theory is proven. The philosopher Carl Popper made the point fifty years ago. Conjectures need to be tested to see if they are refutable. At no time to my recollection in any of his writing that I have read does Gene Sharp attempt to test his conjectures, let alone refute them. They therefore remain just that conjectures that aspire to being hypothesis that may or may not ever be part of a conceptual framework that is a theory.

    If we take a moment to consider his analysis of power, which is a crucial substrata of his conjectures, after all the purpose of the kind of civil disobedience that Sharp is writing about is presumably the subversion of power structures , it does appear under-developed, to put it politely. After all the work that social analysts like Michel Foucault have done on dissecting power and how it operates in a modern society Gene Sharps analysis seems rudimentary, to call it crude as some reviewers have would not be too cruel a statement. The review by Carl Friedrich on Sharp’s analysis of power is particularly scathing (Political Theory Vol. 2, No. 4 Nov 1974 pp465-467).

   Let us return to the booklets, which is what would be available to those seeking to start a revolution and searching the internet for a how to guide— is that idea even credible to think that revolutions are so planned as one would execute a corporate plan? That they arise not out of a community’s genuine grievances and as a response to oppression, and develop their strategies based on the material conditions of the oppressed turning community strengths into tools of liberation, but are somehow an intellectual exercise that somebody comes to and so looks up a blueprint (which the booklets are not) and then implements it as the US did with the coup against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Musaddeq in Iran in 1953. Anyway, let us suppose so, as that is presumably how Gene Sharp thinks they could happen. He argues repeatedly for planning and following the plan. But the booklets are hardly a guide to planning, being so generic in their descriptions, written in an authoritarian, militaristic vocabulary and monologistic tone that seems to brook no discussion and tolerates no divergent views. That the booklets are available in different languages on his website is undeniable. That they may have been download and read is neither here nor there. Much that is on the Internet is downloaded simply because it is available. The question is are they really a guide? Do they provide any kind of a blueprint for action? Do they answer Lenin’s question of what to do next in a specific revolutionary situation?  The answer would have to be no. They are generic outlines as Gene Sharp makes clear. They eschew the particular, because by his own admission he does not know any country other than his own. But revolutions are not made by cookie cutter choices. The specificity of the situation makes all the difference between a revolt and a revolution and whether either can succeed and to what degree. A fact that Martin Luther King spoke to and wrote about.       

                                                                   CONTINUED ON NEXT BLOG.