Commissioned by the Tea Club
Gene Sharp’s essay “From Dictatorship to Democracy” could just as easily have been titled “From the State to Ancap” or “From Bad to Good.” In fact, it is simply a collection of reflections on how to change a political regime if you dislike it, feel morally justified, and assume public support for your position.
The central idea of the book is that the most reliable strategy for this is political disobedience, also known as nonviolent resistance. A consistent denial of the state’s legitimacy can indeed make it illegitimate as this denial becomes increasingly stylish, fashionable, and youthful.
The weak point of the approach proposed by Sharp is that everything must begin with strategic planning, and then the resistance develops its activities strictly according to the plan, centrally deciding which of the 198 methods to choose for today and which for tomorrow. Thus, the best tactic for a dictator is to sow discord within the opposition, letting them fight among themselves to determine under whose banners they should unite in the war against the bloody regime.
Decentralized resistance, according to Sharp, is far less effective, and this is bad news for ancaps wishing to act through political methods.
On the other hand, Sharp explicitly points out that one should not just fight a dictatorship, but already at the stage of resistance plant the seeds of a new society that will already be legitimate by the time the regime falls, and this fall will merely provide them with legality. Thus, if the ultimate goal of the resistance is to adopt the construction of a stateless society with decentralized law and a free, unregulated market, then the idea of building the resistance on these very same principles seems damn logical; Sharp simply did not consider such a goal: his political fantasies did not extend beyond the Swiss cantons.
The least useful part of the book turns out to be the most famous—namely, the appendix listing the notorious 198 methods of nonviolent resistance. The book was written in 1993; in 27 years, the toolkit has changed significantly, and those methods that are still relevant are already more or less well-known. So, I can understand Leonid Volkov, the chief of staff of the Russian resistance, stating that the book is weak, but I do not accept his reproaches that it is harmful. It is definitely worth reading. As for using it in practice—do so with great caution. Especially since, since the book was written, dictatorships have increasingly mutated into electoral autocracies, and the set of methods for abolishing them will be very different.
Among the book’s strengths is its modest size; if one wishes, the essay can be finished in one evening.
