Oppressive Companies

On our website, you can present information about oppressive companies that need to be stopped by defensive political violence. But militant operations will only be justified if it can be proved that people’s lives are in danger because of these companies. The evidence must be able to withstand criticism in a court of law. Activists are terrorists if they attack CEOs without such evidence.

Only owners, corporate board members, and CEOs should be attacked, not ordinary workers. Attacks on the later will make activists unpopular because common people in our societies will identify with the workers. It is difficult for workers to stop a firm’s oppressive operations in poor communities, and they are not directly responsible for those operations. That’s why it is pointless to target them.

It can be objected that it is unserious to use an internet forum to assess evidence for and against the oppressiveness of a company. But it is not as bad as it sounds. Many oppressive situations are well documented by journalists and respected NGOs. If a journalist films soldiers who are hired by a firm to repeatedly attack and even kill poor farmers, then it is pretty obvious that we are dealing with an emergency situation that can justify defensive political violence against the oppressive company.

But the evidence must be certain. It is not enough to believe that a firm is guilty of oppression. It will in many cases be difficult to decide whether the evidence is good enough or not. It is very important to understand that defensive political violence is not justified in those cases. Absolutely no attacks should be allowed without reliable evidence. This means that there will be relatively few instances where militant operations are justified. Many anti-capitalists will probably be surprised of how difficult it can be to prove for certain that a company is continually involved in violent attacks that can justify the use of physical force in self-defence.

Anti-capitalists often accuse multinational firms of being really bad and ugly. If that were true, we would expect to find a lot of firms with CEOs who deserves to be assassinated in order to protect the victims of their oppressive policies. But that is not the case. The list of extremely oppressive multinational corporations is rather short if one tries to find hard evidence for continued attacks on innocents persons in poor communities.

Of course, there are lot of instance where big firms use smaller companies whose work conditions are so dangerous that there is a great risk that labourers will get killed or seriously injured. But defensive political violence presupposes that all non-violent alternatives are tried before physical force is used as the last option possible. Most multinational corporations will quit their relationship with unethical subcontractors if it gives them bad publicity. So that leaves the ones that don’t care about bad media coverage and non-violent protests. It is difficult to assess the number of those companies, but one will probably not find very many whose ongoing killings and violence can be documented in such a way that it can be used as evidence in a court of law. Defensive political violence is ruled out without such evidence.

If one studies the web pages of organisations like CorpWatch and Amazon Watch, one will find a lot of information about unethical companies, but not much clear cut evidence of grave violations that will justify defensive militant operations. The closest one gets are the crimes of Texaco in Ecuador and Union Carbide in Bhopal, India. Union Carbide is now owned by Dow Chemicals, and Texaco is owned by Chevron. If the information presented by the critics of these companies is correct, then the legal rules of necessity or self-defence can arguably justify operations against the leaders of Chevron and Dow Chemicals.

The accusers of Texaco say that the company caused damages in the Amazon that can be compared to Chernobyl. They claim that Indians get cancer and other serious diseases because of the oil and wastewater spilled by Texaco. If that is true, defensive political violence can be used to force the leadership of Chevron/Texaco to clean up its trail of toxic destruction, and thereby save the health and lives of many men, women, and children in Ecuador. But the trial against Texaco is expected to be over relatively soon, so no action should be taken until we see the results.

The Bhopal Medical Appeal claims on the website bhopal.org that “More than 20 years after the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, upwards of 100,000 people in the city are still seriously ill and the drinking water of a further 20,000 has been poisoned by chemicals leaking from the abandoned plant. Union Carbide and its 100% owner Dow Chemical, refuse to clean their factory.” If that is true, defensive militant operations against the owners of Dow may be justified to force Dow to help the victims of the disaster. However, there has recently been progress in this case too, so militant activists should not interfere before considering whether non-violence at this point is better than defensive political violence.

Others companies worth taking a look at are Freeport, Rio Tinto, and Newcrest in Indonesia; Burlington Resources in Ecuador; and Pluspetrol in Peru.

But activists should remember that the legality of defensive political violence presupposes that the attacks of oppressive companies are illegal in some way. The company must break a national or international law before militant operations can be legally justified. Why? Because it is not judicially fair to punish a person if he or she has not broken a law. It will make punishment arbitrary if a legal system allows persons to take the law into their own hands. A Neo-Nazi, for instance, could kill a Jew in “self-defence” because he believes that Jews are a threat against the life of Aryans. The concept of self-defence can easily be misused, especially if a conflict is large and complex, so it is important to check that an attack actually is illegal before one reacts with defensive militant operations.

But there are cases where the law is out of touch with a common sense understanding of ethics. Defensive political violence can then be used as a kind of civil disobedience until the law is brought into harmony with what is commonly recognised as being ethically justified. Such violence will, however, be illegal, and activists must expect to be sentenced to jail. But they can at least rest assure that they have acted in accordance with a commonly accepted ethical standard.

The advantage of the necessity defence is that it does not presuppose that the attack one tries to prevent is illegal. It follows a different logic than the principles of self-defence. It is enough that the harm sought to be prevented is much larger than the harm caused by militant operations. But to stand a chance in court, activists should study the laws of self-defence and necessity closely.

Why trust the courts? Well, it is worth a try. But activists are not ethically obliged to voluntarily appear in court if judges repeatedly show that they are not impartial and treat defensive political violence differently from “ordinary” self-defence and necessity. In addition, it is useful to know these two laws, because activists can use this knowledge to reveal that Western judicial systems are not impartial if they are sentenced to jail  when all the conditions of self-defence or necessity are actually satisfied.