Civil disobedience: Three Minute Warning

Civil disobedience refers to several actions carried out in a frame of peaceful resentfulness against government actions, laws, or policies. It is most common that the law, which people disagree with, is infringed during such cases. It is allegedly a non-violent movement and is not meant to incite violence. Yes, this was in fact true of the hippie movements of the sixties and seventies in protests against war. Nevertheless, that utopic reality no longer holds true, as is it common that a civil protest will unleash reprisals by the enforcement agencies or certain violence against public and private property, perhaps even injury or death of several members of the movement.

When is civil disobedience justified?

Social action can be transitory, unchanging and functional in its own right, according to Durkheim, or must unravel violently in search of justice and equality if Marxism is taken as the reference.

It is justifiable when the struggle between classes, in this case, civil society and its government, establishes new paradigms for social cohesion. This of course, will signify that a civil rights movement will begin as a group of people breaking a specific law because of the disinclination to acquiesce to its application and will ultimately convert into an armed movement with severe changes to national and local policies, a total purge of the State and its offices. In this case, if the new government appeals to public benefits then by all means, go ahead!

It is not justified when disobedience is founded on aestheticism, rioting for rioting’s sake. A myriad of civil movements comprise leaders with fierce ideals embedded into their hearts and minds, who in turn play the role of herders to several hundred mindless sheep who follow because then labour or education will stop, for what purpose? Unknown to many, sometimes even the leitmotifs are uttered as gibberish for the followers can hardly read or write, let alone understand a three-syllable word.
Civil disobedience is a natural part of social cohesion, however, when done within frames of truthfulness. This is hardly the case, and what is most common is for people to apply the latter. As Thomas Hobbes stated, “man is man’s wolf”.