The endless circles of social amnesia.
Peter Gelderloos || It’s been clear that one of the major effects of the No Kings movement, at least its dominant, center-Left tendencies, is to reenergize pacifism and historical erasure. Remember how in May 2020 no one was taking nonviolence seriously? Because it’s not something to take seriously. It is discredited, debunked, disproven. And yet it keeps popping up again and again, not from people with movement experience, but from naïve progressives, online trolls, politicians, and people from the non-profit industrial complex who get paid to pacify movements.
We already learned that nonviolence doesn’t work in 2020. The learning got erased. We already learned it in 2014. Erased again. We learned it in 2009. Then lost it. Learned it in 2003. Erased. Learned it in 1991. Gone. Learned it in 1968. Erased. Learned it in 1939. See the pattern?
When I reject nonviolence, I want to be crystal clear where the criticism is aimed:
For starters, “violence” is an incredibly vague category. It inevitably has an ethical or even moralistic connotation, and yet more than any other institution mass media defines what “violence” means. That’s not the case with, say, “solidarity” or “sabotage,” which for some odd reason the media don’t talk about as much. (Eventually I’ll have another article out on word slippage and in which cases it makes sense to resist.)
Before the 20th century, “violence” was a primarily poetic term, one that described mood or energy: it wasn’t systematically used to set ethical or strategic boundaries. And even if radical pacifists one day win their century-long crusade to define violence as something that must be directed against living beings (when the media above all want to speak of the violence of protesters who burn a Tesla or smash a bank window), the problem remains: a word that puts dropping a nuclear bomb, killing a Nazi, throwing a rock at a cop, beating up scabs, murdering a child, poisoning a river, gentrifying a neighborhood, or taking up arms against a colonial invasion all in the same box is categorically useless.
How about the person out there who says, “aha! but if works if you accept that self-defense isn’t violence!” I have heard this point made a hundred times. It is easy to take apart. In decades of debate I haven’t come across a single good response to the rebuttal, which is another illustration that nonviolence is based in ignorance, it thrives amidst historical erasure, and so many people new to social movements (or those who post about them on the internet) don’t learn much about the experiences and debates of our struggles, even in the recent past. This last problem can be viewed as a collective one, something our movements need to get better at, though the cyborgs who believe social media are just another movement space have made themselves immune to any forms of collective learning.
Here’s the rebuttal. Self-defense works to protect what you already have. Those who are lucky enough to have food, a house, bodily autonomy, healthcare, a good relationship with the land—they can use self-defense to protect what they have against any person or institution trying to take it away, and this is legitimate.
But what happens when you wake up in a world that has already been entirely invaded by colonial powers, by capitalism and the State? What happens when there’s already a gigantic economic machinery in place, slowly poisoning and killing everyone? What happens when you’ve been forced into dependence on that Machine? In that situation, no liberation, no survival, is possible without the Attack. And we’ve learned, generation after generation, that a struggle cannot be effective, it cannot thrive or succeed, if it limits itself to defense.
Please. Learn from our shared histories. Listen to our ghosts. Cut with the clichés about self-defense that have been shown, time and again, to be meritless.
Finally I want to be clear, a rejection of nonviolence is not a demand that everyone needs to be “violent,” whatever the hell that means. Nonviolence is the idea that a movement can only use nonviolent tactics, that anyone who uses methods not approved by whomever holds power over that movement can be forcefully excluded. Often this has included directly handing people over to the police, or softer tactics of repression like denouncing them in the media or trying to push them out of movement spaces.
In other words, nonviolence is intrinsically authoritarian and tends to collaborate with the police and media, though I’ve been lucky to meet many principled pacifists who are happy to talk a judge’s ear off but they would never help the cops or denounce fellow radicals. I’ve even been to jail with a couple of them, and they were among the dearest people I’ve met.
The opposite of nonviolence, at least the one I advocate, is an ecosystem of revolt in which there must be room for many different creatures, many forms of participation, and even room for different methods that are contradictory, that enter into conflict. An ecosystem of revolt has an unavoidable need for healers, for teachers or storytellers, for peacemakers and mediators, for translators and singers and builders, as much as it has need for fighters. But, listen up: in the present world, the acts of fighting, of sabotaging, of destroying, of seizing ground, have unique importance and need as much support as possible. The reason? Because an ecosystem needs room to flourish, it needs contact with the earth and the water, and that’s not possible in a world covered in concrete and sewer tunnels (both metaphorical and literal).
Another warning: one of the favorite shared projects of capitalism and the nonprofit industrial complex is to destroy subversive language. And ecosystem has all the makings of a trendy neologism. But a coalition is not an ecosystem. A corporate or nonprofit workplace is not an ecosystem. If it’s centralized, it’s not an ecosystem. An ecosystem is the organic, embodied, unboundaried, chaotic, generative space created by interdependent webs of living beings who create their conditions for life through relationship with one another. Anything that is based on control or top-down planning, anything that encloses or poisons what we need to live is antithetical to the ecosystem. It is the enemy of life.
There is no room for cops, Leninists, politicians, lobbyists for green capitalists or police reform, or dogmatic pacifists in an ecosystem.
That said, I want to name some of the clichés and falsehoods being spread by the latest iteration of nonviolence, which isn’t much different from the last iteration.
“The Color Revolutions showed that nonviolence is effective.” Nope. They only worked where the government wasn’t willing to use full police force or the military. Some governments decided to use full repressive force independently of whether the movements there were peaceful or rioting. In cases where the government decided to step down, it didn’t seem to make a difference whether the movement stayed peaceful or started rioting. Finally, there was little revolutionary about these movements. They all had elite support, and if they succeeded it was only to create regime change favored by Western governments. The method most associated with the Color Revolutions was promoted globally by an academic supported by the CIA and other US government agencies.
“Nonviolence is proven to be effective by major studies.” Nope. The original studies (on which subsequent studies are based) were conducted by a US State Department official and a pro-US academic. They were not using a transformative or revolutionary definition of what constituted a “successful” movement. Most of these “successful” movements created changes favorable to the US, NATO allies, and major investors, but did not significantly improve conditions. Their criteria for “violent” movements basically focused on conflicts with high body counts while excluding most of the very movements that anarchists and other proponents of revolutionary struggle hold up as important, inspiring examples.
“The Civil Rights movement and Indian independence movement were successful nonviolent movements!” Nope. They had nonviolent currents (which in the US still practiced armed self-defense), and those currents tended to be more reformist and authoritarian. Each of these moments also had crucial armed components and many moments of rioting and mass revolt.
“People who are violent provoke the police. They provide an excuse for repression.” Incorrect. This misinformation is copaganda. The police frequently attack, gas, torture, and kill people with no justification or provocation whatsoever, and they rarely face consequences. Police frequently attack, beat, gas, or mass arrest protests that are completely peaceful.
“Nonviolence can work against fascism. Denmark was able to help its entire Jewish population escape without the use of armed resistance.” Nope. Denmark helped a few hundred people escape the Nazis by moving them to another state that had borders and a military, which would have been another difficult front in a growing war. Peaceful Danes couldn’t do much to protect all the other people the Nazis were targeting. The fascists were brought down by an alliance of states with huge militaries (some of these states were every bit as violent and oppressive as the fascists). However, armed partisan movements including anarchists, independent socialists and communists, and anticolonial movements also played a major role in overthrowing fascist power and facilitating the escape of tens of thousands of people from Catalunya to Grenoble, Italy to Poland, Yugoslavia to northern Africa.
“People should be able to organize a peaceful protest if they want. Those who don’t agree can organize a violent protest somewhere else.” Who owns a protest? What are the consequences for openly organizing a nonviolent-exclusive protest vs. openly organizing a protest that encourages sabotage or a diversity of tactics? Pretending there are equal conditions here is turning a blind eye on repression and helping the State marginalize “the violent ones.” I don’t know any anarchists who would go to a vigil organized by Catholic Workers and start throwing rocks. However, in a moment of great social turmoil when mass protest is inevitable (like in a wave of deportations or after a police killing), it is inevitable that people will gather wherever there is a call-out. The Democratic Party, big non-profits, or authoritarian leftists are likely to try to control such gatherings. Should we let them?
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