A vital element of civil disobedience is that campaigns must be non-violent,
and indeed, should be as law-abiding as possible in every way, except with
regard to the specific law or policy that is being protested at. The reasoning is
strictly tactical, and does not follow from any implicit connection between
civil disobedience and pacifism. Thus it was essential that the Indian protesters
against British rule accept the consequences of their actions and passively
submit to imprisonment, making clear the absence of any challenge to the state
in general. Similarly, in the 1960s, white Americans campaigning against racial
discrimination towards blacks in the southern states would break specific laws,
as law-abidingly as possible. Thus they would, for example, attempt to ride in
‘Negro Only’ rail cars, but would not attempt to evade arrest or avoid
punishment. It was particularly important that they did not allow the dominant
southern white conservative establishment to hide behind the claim that the
protesters were ‘un-American’, or were radicals whose views need not be taken
into account. Later, when theVietnam Warwas the object of protest, this
strategy was crucial. It would have been too easy to brand those who genuinely
opposed conscription for what they thought was an immoral war as traitors,
and indeed as cowards, had they not attempted to act in due submission to the
state apart from their direct actions against conscription. (This does not mean
that all, or even most, anti-war protests in this era were in fact law-abiding or
peaceful. The movement might have been more successful had they been.)
As early as the mid-1950s similar tactics were tried in the UK against nuclear
weapons policies, by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in its first
manifestation. A particularly favoured tactic was to attempt to block traffic
routes with a ‘sit-down’, thus disobeying the Traffic Acts, and similar methods
have been used in countless student and worker demonstrations and strikes ever
since. The most significant recent example in the UK of civil disobedience was
the anti-‘poll tax’ campaign in 1989–91. This, akin to the ‘rent strike’ some-
times used in other contexts, involved the intentional non-payment of the poll
tax. It is hard to assess the effectiveness of the campaign because the tax proved
generally so unpopular that the government moved to abolish it for fear of
electoral disaster. Certainly one of the problems influencing government
thinking was that the tax came to be seen as uncollectable.
As far as political theory is concerned, it is entirely unclear whether the
concept of peaceful disobedience, or of limited and specific civil disobedience,
can be handled inside the general theory of legal andpolitical obligation. As
long as it is not generally recognized, as it cannot be, that the individual citizen
has the right to pick and choose which laws to obey, or for which policies to
pay taxes in support of, it is impossible to take account of motivation when
dealing with an illegal act. Most would agree that it is not, in principle, very
supportive of democratic government for individual policy choices of govern-
ments to be overturned because a minority of citizens are prepared to make the
Civil Disobedience