Violence is Golden

Today I more or less finished reading Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects The State, the new release from South End Press that argues for an end to the ostracism of the violent left. The tactic of nonviolence, he says, is completely ineffective and must be left behind if we are ever to make real progress toward a stateless society. His arguments seem to have taken hold, because time and again, as I forced my way through this short book, I felt like slapping him silly.

As an anarchist, Gelderloos is all about dismantling the state and all other oppressive power structures, and this project, as one might imagine, is proceeding rather slowly. So, he wants to escalate. He talks about bombing things, for example. His argument is that the hegemony of nonviolent tactics neuters the left by taking all of our best options off the table.

When he and his anarchist buddies show up at a demo in their bandanna masks and black hoodies to take out some windows, they don't want to be seen as provocateur pariah assholes. They want to be embraced as allies who happen to be in the tactical vanguard.

And so, this book forcefully makes the case that nearly the entire left has already rejected. I found myself appalled at the holes in his logic, the shallow and selective grasp of history, and the contempt he holds for those who don't embrace violence as their primary tactic.

The IWW wasn't radical enough for this guy. Nether was the Weather Underground. Almost no one is.

Were Gelderloos to simply argue that nonviolence is not always the best tactic in all situations, I would have been right there with him. The IRA, for example, had popular support for armed resistance to an armed occupation. During the Vietnam War, it was not uncommon for campus ROTC buildings to catch fire at night. When I watch The Times of Harvey Milk, my pulse always quickens a bit at the sight of queers lighting fire to overturned police cars. Sometimes, it makes sense.

But this book sets out to discredit every single tactic short of sabotage, kidnapping, molotov cocktails, and bombings as ineffective, which is simply ridiculous. There are dozens of "throw this book across the room" statements such as this: "Activists using the lobbying approach fail to see that making demands to authority is bad strategy."

Huh?

Gelderloos sets up straw man after straw man and then knocks the crap out of them. The logic of nonviolence, for example, prefers rape to self defense. Nonviolent activists also apparently think that all third world revolutionary movements should disarm. Who are these people? I've never met them.

To my amazement, Gelderloos argues that building public awareness of issues will forever be ineffective because state control of propaganda systems will always overwhelm our feeble efforts.

This same logic, obviously, is much more aptly applied to the use of violence. The State pretty much has the monopoly here. While Gelderloos romanticizes the Panthers, AIM, and the Weather Underground, his recall of how things turned out for those folks and their movements is highly selective. He sees what supports his argument. What doesn't, he ignores.

Some, I suppose, will find his arguments compelling, and that, I think, is unfortunate, but for most, his book is an opportunity to rethink why non-violence is such a given within the American left. Movement building is less about anger in action than the engagement of moral imagination. I found it interesting that Gelderloos completely avoids the nonviolence trump card: violent tactics, to the vast majority of Americans, are profoundly alienating and play directly into the hands of the state.

Earth to Gelderloos: Stop hanging out so much with your twenty-something anarchist friends who read Fanon for breakfast and go talk to some normal people once in a while, because to make a revolution those are the folks you need. Try not to scare them away, OK?

What's So Great About Violence?

Sunday night I read the first chapter of Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects The State. Provocative title, huh? I thought so too. It's just out by South End Press, and I put in for my review copy the moment I got their postcard.

So far, my reaction is disappointment, amusement, and annoyance, but I'll try to keep an open mind. Perhaps chapter two, Nonviolence is Racist, will win me over.

The argument of chapter one, Nonviolence is Ineffective, rests on two prongs. The first is that the various wins generally associated with nonviolence — India's overthrow of colonialism, the civil rights movement, the non-nuclear proliferation movement, etcetera — weren't actually wins at all. They were all tactical capitulations to power that were spun as wins by the hegemonic victors.

Gelderloos dispenses with the civil rights movement, for example, in just four paragraphs.

The second is that nonviolence was not the only current within these examples, and whatever victories these movements did enjoy may be attributed to whatever more militant (read violent) tactics that may have been employed.

Writing this powerfully facile is best attempted by the very young. As near as I can tell, Gelderloos is about twenty-five. I found his affinity group photo from the Nov. 18, 2001 School of the America's action that put him in prison for six months, and he was 19 then. Since then he's shaved his head and become an anarchist. He's started the Signalfire site, and has developed an impressive activist resume.

His SOA stint led him to prison organizing, and for that alone I am grateful, since the attrocity of America's prisons seem to exist in some sort of magical twilight realm of which liberals everywhere are blithely unaware.

Yet, his book thus far just pisses me off. He moves way too fast from the position that working for change without building for power is useless to the notion that more violence is just the thing our movement needs.

Put simply, unless a movement is a threat, it cannot change a system based on centralized coercion and violence, and if that movement does not realize and exercize the power that makes it a threat, it cannot destroy such a system. ... The elite cannot be persuaded by appeals to their conscience.

So far so good. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree. But his evidence for the ineffectiveness of nonviolence and the salubriousness of its opposite, at least in the first chapter, is weak.

He makes the mistake of thinking in binaries, which causes him to dismiss King as an ineffective sellout and to embrace the Weathermen as bold revolutionary tacticians. He also makes the elementary mistake of confusing nonviolence with the absence of militance. Nobody who is familiar with, for example, the history of the Freedom Riders would make such a claim.

At some point (I'm thinking French Resistance here) we may have no choice but to form underground cells and fight fascism with violence. But we're a long way from that moment. At present, the state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and, as we saw here during WTO, violent tactics from a small romantic cult on the extreme left mostly just provide legitimation for the deployment of state violence against us all.

So let's not get ahead of ourselves, OK?