FIRST they worked within the system, and failed; then they moved outside: this is a typical activist’s description of extra-legal militancy. Short of revolution, however, it is not so easy to move outside. Even extra-legal actions must aim at producing effects within the system; there is no other place where effects can be had. So militant tactics must always be calculated in systematic terms. The necessary questions are obvious ones: What kind of support will they build? What kind of pressure will they put on conventional politicians? I am not going to consider here the moral implications of such questions. It is enough to point out that the commitment of activists to act as effectively as they can for the cause is a moral commitment. They have no right to harm their own cause, and so they must resist the pressures of personal frustration and anger that so often lead them to do so. Their calculations must be dispassionate and impersonal. These qualities are more likely the functions of organizational discipline than moral exhortation, but that only suggests the moral value of organizational discipline.
There are times when extra-legal action serves the cause. The clearest cases are those in which citizen activists already have widespread but latent support, and when all that is required for victory is the acting out of systemic values. But mass inertia, particular interests, the obstacle course of routine politics all stand in the way. Then it may well be helpful if some significant number of citizens breaks the law in order to demonstrate the importance (to them) of their cause. They say to their fellow citizens: if you don’t do this or that, which you know ought to be done, you will have to put us in prison. Such demonstrations work, or sometimes work, precisely because they call attention to some common knowledge of what is right and good. Thus the history of the extension of suffrage to workers, women, and blacks: extra-legal action was effective in large part because no one watching it had good reasons (I mean, reasons they were confident about) to deny the justice of the cause. And so they were unwilling or morally unable to support a sustained program of repression and punishment directed against the activists.
When activists do confront sustained repression (as has happened often in the history of the labor movement), another kind of law-breaking may be necessary. Sometimes it is not possible to act at all, or to act with any hope of success, without setting oneself against laws (or executive orders, court injunctions, police commands) that aim explicitly at preventing collective action. Then activists break the law for the sake of reaching and mobilizing their own constituency and without any immediate reference to wider effects. Even here, however, it is wisest to act within limits, for the possibility of influencing other people should never be entirely forgotten.
People are not favorably influenced by being assaulted. Doubtless they can be forced to act in some new or different way, and if politics comes to that (to war and revolution), then one wants one’s assaults to be massive. But given the hope of systemic effects, of repealing this law or changing that policy, even, simply, of ongoing political work, persuasion must be considerably more delicate. The need for caution and limit is especially urgent in the absence of common values. Then the almost certain effect of extra-legal action, and above all of violence, is to increase the distance between the band of activists and everyone else. Not only is the movement proposing new policies which many people don’t understand and which they fear, but its members are pressing their proposals, acting every day, willfully and publicly, in incomprehensible and frightening ways. They may think they have moved outside the system, but in fact they have only set themselves up to be driven out. They will be driven, most likely, into sectarian isolation, where many of them will in time discover they don’t want to be.
I ought to mention one further use of militance by citizen activists: they sometimes point to the violence or the threatened violence of others as a warning to society as a whole. There, they say to their fellow citizens, but for your acquiescence or support, go we. This is really a cry for help rather than a threat on their own part (and if a threat, not always a serious one). Like the boy’s cry of “Wolf!” it can’t be said too often. But there are occasions when citizen politics is only one of many possible responses to a crisis and when the others, or some of them, are dangerous to the political system (or, more often, simply to life and limb). Then the warning is plausible and may even be heeded; certainly it is worth making—soberly and quietly, if possible, as by Martin Luther King in the early 1960’s. I need hardly say that it is not possible to work out in advance a division of labor between violent militants and citizen activists, so that the second group draws advantages from the outrages of the first. Nor should the activists ever pretend that if they win concessions, they can call off the militants.