Speech to University of New England’s Peace and Justice Symposium, February 14, 2025

Good morning, everyone, and what a pleasure it is to be here with you for this stimulating and oh so timely symposium. I want to thank Marty Branagan and UNE for bringing us together, and acknowledge that we come together on stolen land, land that always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

So. Here we are. As we’ve been discussing a lot, the world is on fire. Wars are raging. Democratic institutions are crumbling. No, not crumbling – they are being smashed to pieces deliberately. Ecosystems and expectations and ice sheets are collapsing. Communities are tearing themselves apart, driven by the alienation of capitalism chased by the return of a politics of full-throated hate and exclusion. And, at the same time, as the old world is dying, the new is struggling to be born. All over the world, from Barcelona to Kurdistan to Newcastle, communities are coming together to take direct action in all sorts of ways, with a commitment to nonviolence, mutual aid, and deep democracy that prefigures, and starts to live into being, the world we need.

This morning I want to draw a thread between this inspiring work at this historical moment and the incredible insights of the great 20^th century moral philosopher, Hannah Arendt, whose formative years as a German Jew in the 1920s and 30s hold many confronting parallels to today.

Arendt argued that “violence can destroy power… [but] is utterly incapable of creating it”, and she contended, against Mao’s declaration that “power comes from the barrel of a gun”, that true power emerges from people “coming together to act in concert”. Her theoretical intertwining of nonviolence with democratic participation encompassing both action and discussion played out in real terms at the Rising Tide blockade, through nonviolent action, nonviolence training, mutual aid, and a participatory, deliberative Spokescouncil.

I’ll argue, through Arendt, that, as existing institutions crumble, clinging ever more desperately to their coercive power, this creative, communicative, connecting, nonviolent path will be far more powerful than any violent resistance could be and than continuing to work within the system could be.

Before I begin that, I do want to recognise that the three generations or so between Hannah Arendt’s insights and last year’s Rising Tide blockade are a tiny blip in time, and that the journey of thought and action that both continue is one which began millennia ago with First Nations models of deep democracy. Indigeneity was, unfortunately, one of Arendt’s blind spots, but I see so much of her concept of “acting in concert” long preformed in what I have learned of Aboriginal governance from people like Professor Mary Graham.

Mary has articulated how Aboriginal law and culture avoids and suppresses the acknowledged reality of violence by institutionalising conflict. “Aboriginal languages have a word for every form of conflict you can imagine,” she says, “but no word for invade, conquer or subjugate.”

This stands in stark contrast to the modern nation state which institutionalises violence, claiming to monopolise it through war and policing, the military industrial complex, in a way which makes us truly terrible at managing conflict. First Nations forms of managing conflict are deliberative, participatory, restorative, bringing all voices together to discuss and find a path through, even if that path might sometimes involve a violent act, like spearing. Our modern institutional mechanisms – our courts and parliaments – are adversarial reflections of violence: two sides battling it out for supremacy.

Mao Zedong said “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Trump, and Netanyahu, and probably Peter Dutton, would all agree. Let’s face it: Clinton and Harris and Albanese and Chris Minns probably would, too. At least, they govern as though they do – seeing their power unpinned finally by coercion.

Hannah Arendt disagreed, completely reframing power. “Out of the barrel of a gun,” she said, “grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What can never grow out of it is power … Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert.”

What she means by this is that political power comes from a connective process that combines action with communication, people coming together across difference to do something new together. Genuine power “derives its legitimacy” from this acting … in concert.

These insights, set out in her 1969 essay, Reflections on Violence, build on her thinking in The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, where she argues that the fundamental reality of human existence, the space where we derive our morality, our joy,  and our power is in relation to others: acting with others, communicating with others, in thinking together, in public life, in discussing ideas across our grand diversity. Acting in concert, if you think orchestrally, implies not that everyone is the same – the same instrument playing the same notes – but that it is in diverse voices, listening to each other, in interplay with each other, feeding off each other, that we create complexity, harmony and challenging disharmony, counterpoint.

Coercing and dominating destroys this. Indeed, the evils of totalitarianism are, in her thinking, both made possible through disconnection and alienation, and characterised by prohibitions on thinking together across difference, on acting in concert.

It’s because of our capacity for communication, for developing ideas together across difference rather than enforcing them through domination and coercion, that nonviolence is creative. Indeed, that is how she effectively defines nonviolence, saying:

“The distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.”

And she applies the same principle to democracy itself. Combining the right to have rights and the duty to disobey and the necessity of communication and public life to articulate a vision of democracy as lively, unpredictable and fun direct engagement and action.

And the connection runs the other way, too. For Arendt, violence is a failure of politics, a failure of democracy.

Arendt’s “acting in concert”, through nonviolent direct action combined with deep democratic participation and discussion, was the beating heart of the Rising Tide blockade of Newcastle harbour last year.

With a public focus on a high profile, large-scale act of civil disobedience – something Arendt specifically endorsed with her articulation of a duty to disobey bad law – 7000 people gathered in Newcastle to raise our voices together in a powerful no to the coal profiteers and the governments that protect them, blockading the world’s largest coal port in kayaks for several hours.

And we found our voices weaving together in a myriad of other ways, as we acted in concert.

The ten day Protestival involved 44 teams of volunteers, mobilising the energy of over 1000 people doing everything from cooking and washing up to inflating and carrying kayaks, cleaning toilets to de-escalation-based camp security, police liaison to media liaison, and, through it all, putting First Nations justice at its heart.

The kitchen, for example, had a core team with clear plans, but responding to feedback and to realities on the ground. Countless people committed time to chopping veggies, stirring pots, serving up, and washing up the stacks of reusable bowls and cutlery.

The security team did gentle dispute resolution internally, mostly by simply observing and being a reassuring presence, while the police liaison team kept external relationships mostly smooth by keeping communications channels open and generally respectful.

But I mostly want to describe to you the incredible direct democracy program – the spokescouncil – that I was involved in cofacilitating. Following an ages-old organising model, attendees were encouraged to band together into small affinity groups – friends, or people from the same place, or with shared interests – to look out for each other both during direct actions and around the site. Each affinity group could then send a delegate to the spokescouncil, which met at least twice a day. Our spokescouncil involved spokespeople from some 140 registered affinity groups, representing well over 2000 people in a consensus-driven body which was amazingly effective in ensuring communication, cooperation, agency, and well-tested decisions.

The meetings were a space for acting in concert in so many ways. There were important updates for everyone (“we’ll be meeting on the beach at 10am to prepare for launch”), volunteer call-outs (“can we have 5 people to help carry a raft after this council?”), and offers and proposals (“would a few younger people like to join some of the elders in kayaks?”). And we discussed decisions like endorsing a union campaign, selecting political targets for the media messaging, whether and how to do decentralised actions without jeopardising the whole blockade, and how to manage the campsite after dark. Bearing in mind that consensus is properly understood as an effort to ensure that everyone is at least comfortable with an outcome rather than needing everyone to be ecstatic – it’s still remarkable that every single decision was made by consensus, and generally at speed. The spirit of cooperation and solidarity across differences of opinion, age, background and perspective was wonderful.

And that consensus process dovetails, in an Arendtian way, with the countless trainings in nonviolent direct action. People were trained in how to see from other perspectives, in how to reach across difference, in how to act with respect, in how to de-escalate, and in seeing the creativity and genuine power that comes through that spirit.

There was a moment on the beach that will stay with me forever. After the second wave of arrests on the water when a ship was brought through and we had all kayaked back to shore, a group of police officers marched down the beach and started confiscating paddles. This aggressive and unnecessary act caused a fair amount of angst and anger, understandably, and the crowd, already upset at seeing a coal ship come through, started up some anti-cop chants. The energy was rising in a way that could have exploded. All of a sudden a few people started singing. And we all joined in. It was a climate protest song, so the message remained strong. But it effectively de-escalated, reduced the tension, and brought us back to our purpose. And it shifted the power back to us.

When the tension was rising you could feel the power shifting towards the armed police, who would absolutely have won, physically and narratively, if violence had erupted. But, as the song rose from the beach, the power of the police melted, and they skulked away, embarrassed, returning the paddles, later.

And in this is a pointer to what I think is the cornerstone of Arendt’s thinking on power – how obedience begins to crack as power through acting in concert grows.

Rising Tide shone a bright light on the brute coercive power of a police state defending an omnicidal industry. The state’s attempt to shut us down, through an exclusion zone which a court deemed unlawful and through a militarised police presence escorting massive coal ships through a colourful crowd of kayakers, backfired. As Arendt predicted.

“All political institutions,” she wrote, “are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”

And, as a state realises it’s beginning to lose power, “rule by sheer violence comes into play.” State violence gets more intense the more threatened the state is, and that undermines its power. And if dissidents stick to nonviolence, violent repression is far more likely to backfire and cause the state to lose even more legitimacy. Because obedience is more fragile than power.

Indeed, as Arendt observed, the “superiority [of the violent state] lasts only so long as the power structure of the government remains intact – that is so long as commands are obeyed and the army or police forces are prepared to use their weapons”. Once those forces, invited by the courageous and open practice of nonviolence, begin to question, resist and finally disobey orders, a regime’s collapse is imminent. And the new can grow to replace it.

Rising Tide, I believe, is at the forefront of a movement of movements, across climate, ecology and social and racial justice, that, through acting in concert, is accelerating this process.

By exposing the violence of the system through nonviolent direct action, and by prefiguring the nonviolent, deep democratic, creative, communicative vision of the world we need, it is both undermining obedience and building power. And it is doing it all through acting in concert.

Thank you, Hannah Arendt, and Rising Tide, and I look forward to discussion.