Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Introduction Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press
This book still gets traction almost two decades after its publication, and it doesn't seem like Peter's really updated any thoughts since then... So I figured, why not.
Because of the hegemony advocates of nonviolence exert, criticisms of nonviolence are excluded from the major periodicals, alternative media, and other forums accessed by anti-authoritarians. Nonviolence is maintained as an article of faith, and as a key to full inclusion within the movement. Anti-authoritarians and anti-capitalists who suggest or practice militancy suddenly find themselves abandoned by the same pacifists they’ve just marched with at the latest protest.
This is the second paragraph in the book, and it is jumping immediately into an argument without even defining what is meant (and even if later it does add “context,” that context is kind of wimpy). My two primary issues with this are:
- How do you define “nonviolence” and what constitutes “nonviolent action” in the course of a resistance struggle?
- How do you define “militancy” and what constitutes “militant behaviour” in the course of a resistance struggle?
Neither of these things are addressed prior to just jumping into the argument that nonviolent action is upheld and that militancy is looked down upon. (It's also a failure to engage with how nonviolence is used within, for example, non-white communities and how white Europeans might alter its framing... Much like Peter often does.)
In my experience, most people who are becoming involved with radical movements have never heard good arguments, or even bad ones, against nonviolence. This is true even when they already know a great deal about other movement issues. Instead, they tend to be acquainted with the aura of taboo that shrouds militants; to have internalized the fear and disdain the corporate media reserve for people willing to actually fight against capitalism and the state; and to have confused the isolation imposed on militants with some self-imposed isolation that must be inherent in militancy. Most proponents of nonviolence with whom I have discussed these issues, and these have been many, approached the conversation like it was a foregone conclusion that the use of violence in social movements was both wrong and self-defeating (at least if it occurred anywhere within 1,000 miles of them). On the contrary, there are a great many solid arguments against nonviolence that pacifists have simply failed to answer in their literature.
Here we have Peter building what effectively looks like a strawman (even though it's “in his experience”). Because we don't know, at this point in the introduction, what he means by “nonviolence” or “militancy,” we cannot accurately gauge what's being discussed. This is a problem in his communication and not our understanding; we're going to come to this with our own internal understandings of these two terms.
The other thing is that he's front-loading a lot of negativity without doing the work of explaining. What arguments have these people heard? What arguments should they be hearing? “In this book, I will...” isn't enough of because it just devolves into... more of the same as we've already heard in the first three paragraphs.
And considering I'm reading the “2nd edition,” I find it strange that he never addressed these kinds of arguments. If he had, it might make his argument stronger and more focused, but y'know.
This book will show that nonviolence, in its current manifestations, is based on falsified histories of struggle. It has implicit and explicit connections to white people’s manipulations of the struggles of people of color. Its methods are wrapped in authoritarian dynamics, and its results are harnessed to meet government objectives over popular objectives. It masks and even encourages patriarchal assumptions and power dynamics. Its strategic options invariably lead to dead ends. And its practitioners delude themselves on a number of key points.
Presumptuous claim to put up front. I know he's doing the edgy writer thing of front-loading without effort, to try to push you to want to read... But this kind of shit always pisses me off in every book.
Also, again, what is “nonviolence, in its current manifestations?” This presumes that the audience doesn't have ideas of what nonviolence are or that they share the exact same ideas of nonviolence as Peter does, and that's just silly.
And while he's not inherently wrong that some elements of how people understand nonviolence are due to the manipulations of history by white people, he's still not explaining what nonviolence even means so we don't know which manipulations of struggles or if Peter understands that a lot of struggles by people of colour used disruptive nonviolent tactics (e.g., Black people sitting at counters and blocking white customers). And if I view those tactics as nonviolent (because they are) and I recognise how they worked (because they did), then he and I cannot possibly share the same view of nonviolence.
Even if we're both white.
Oh, and another thing on this: This reads exactly like Peter trying to dress up his words in a veneer of truth. He's not wrong, but it also doesn't all add up to the generalisation of “nonviolence does nothing” or “nonviolence protects the state.” What he needs to do is point to specific framings of nonviolence, even in the introduction, to make those arguments. What he's doing here is lazy; he's taking true statements and weaving them into lazy writing. If I weren't reading this with another goal, if I were reading this by choice, this would've made me put it down because it just shows me that all I can expect is generalisiations to be made with no analysis of the framings I want to understand.
We might say that the purpose of a conversation is to persuade and be persuaded, while the purpose of a debate is to win, and thus silence your opponent. One of the first steps to success in any debate is to control the terminology to give oneself the advantage and put one’s opponents at a disadvantage. This is exactly what pacifists have done in phrasing the disagreement as nonviolence versus violence. Critics of nonviolence typically use this dichotomy, with which most of us fundamentally disagree, and push to expand the boundaries of nonviolence so that tactics we support, such as property destruction, may be accepted within a nonviolent framework, indicating how disempowered and delegitimized we are.
This feels like a pre-emptive “I will not define these terms because that's what they want me to do” entry, and I find it infuriating. It's also frustrating to see him doing a similar tactic in the conflation of pacificism and nonviolence, and it's even more interesting to see a lack of base engagement (it is an introduction, after all) with how people understand these terms.
Instead, it's just... harping on pacifists (which ones?) for controlling the terms of debate.
Also, are we going to actually consider that pacifists help the state when there were some pretty large-scale obstructive pacifist movements within many wars over time? This kind of conflation is unhelpful, and it also contributes similarly to the same kinds of movement history erasure that Peter complains about.
I will refer to proponents of nonviolence by their chosen nomenclature, as nonviolent activists or, interchangeably, pacifists. Many practitioners of such prefer one term or the other, and some even make a distinction between the two, but in my experience the distinctions are not consistent from one person to the next.
Where did they choose this? When did they choose this? Which ones chose this? I'm sorry, but this is just made up bullshit because there is a long history of pacifism, with the terminology being older than both he and I combined.
Also, he calls himself an anarchist, but I don't think he is because his values don't fit my understanding of anarchism (which is that it is fully liberatory and requires no celebrities who weaponise their clout, as he does). Meanwhile, a bunch of publishers are happy to let him say as much and support him. We all disagree. All ideologies and value systems have this problem, but you wouldn't just make a snap judgement because you want to use the terminology in ways that most people wouldn't.
A good example to understand this is when people fight over who is and isn't 'Christian'. Some Christians try to distance Christianity from other Christians who they think are wrong (“that isn't what Jesus would do, you're not a Christian!”). A lot of well-meaning Christians do this (which I find personally frustrating and very limiting for their own personal exploration). But the exploration should be less on the determination of who should be a Christian (they all are, they claim) and more on how it is that Christo-fascists and regular nice folks who take no shit can coexist within the same religion (and the latter needs to look at the history of their religion to do so). A lot of non-Christians do this nonsense, too, and I think it should again fall to understanding the history and trajectory of the common Christian faith(s).
It's kind of like... what Peter should do for pacifists. You can't just decide who is a pacifist because you decided they are rather than listening to them or what definition you like for it without actually engaging with the history of pacifism and understanding how it operates and how some people engage with it. That's actually necessary to building a critique, and that's supposedly the point.
At this point it might help to clearly define violence, but one of the critical arguments of this book is that violence cannot be clearly defined.
... Then the point of the book is moot, tbh. If you cannot bring me onto your page because we already have different understandings, you have failed.
(Similarly, in case anyone is still unclear: an anarchist is not someone who favors chaos but someone who favors the total liberation of the world through the abolition of capitalism, government, and all other forms of oppressive authority, to be replaced by any number of other social arrangements, proven or utopian.)
I 'favour' chaos, but that's because my understanding of chaos is not the same as that which is understood by common white supremacist society; while this isn't the point of the book, I think more people would benefit from exploring the ways in which order and chaos are neutral existences that need to exist in equilibrium (too much of one is not good). Chaos creates chances to innovate something new within greater amounts of freedom; order creates restrictions and constraints, which can also provide different pathways to development. Both are necessary, but too much of one is harmful.
Where's that in your anarchist definition?
Anyway, beyond his refusal to embrace chaos, the rest is fine.
I use [revolution] only because it has such long-standing favorable connotations, and because the more accurate alternative, liberation, is clumsy in its adjectival forms.
... But revolutionary already has a lot of connotations about being 'new', and it doesn't inherently imply freedom in the way that a word with 'liber' does? How is 'liberatory' clumsy? Just say you don't like a word and move on.
I asked you to define words, not be smug about them.
To reemphasize a crucial distinction: the criticisms in this book are not aimed at specific actions that do not exemplify violent behavior, such as a vigil that remains peaceful, nor are they aimed at individual activists who choose to dedicate themselves to non-combative work, such as healing or building strong community relationships. When I talk about pacifists and advocates of nonviolence, I am referring to those who would impose their ideology across the entire movement and dissuade other activists from militancy (including the use of violence), or who would not support other activists solely because of their militancy.
Okay, but like... Did you engage with any pacifist movements? Or are you basing this on the five people who got upset at an anti-Iraq war protest for saying not to break a window? Because most often, a lot of pacifists do not impose their own ideology on others (and many are pacifist-to-a-point, meaning that they will do their best to err towards pacifism but will fight back when necessary).
Also, a lot of pacifists are involved in those healing and building aspects of our movements specifically because they are pacifists and know that their best chances for fighting (or, technically, not fighting) in this fight is through creation and improvement.
This kind of reminds me of how Peter talks about vegans, if I'm honest.
Again, what is “militancy” here?
Though I focus on debunking pacifism in service of revolutionary goals, in this book I include quotes from pacifists working for limited reforms in addition to quotes from people working for total social transformation. At first, this may seem like I am building a straw-man argument; however, I include the words or actions of reformist pacifists only in reference to campaigns where they worked together closely with revolutionary pacifists and the quoted material has relevance to all involved, or in reference to social struggles cited as examples proving the effectiveness of nonviolence in achieving revolutionary ends.
Lmao, at the strawman bit. Yeah, it does because that's what you're doing, and you can see the evidence of it here. Prior to this paragraph, you have only used “nonviolent activists” and “pacifists” (and then said the two are interchangeable when they aren't because not all nonviolent activists are pacifists, just like how not all anti-militarist activists are pacifists—that's called “conflation”). Now, in this paragraph you suddenly remembered a term that would help narrow down the group you're speaking about: “reformist pacifists.”
Not all pacifists are reformists, but now you're conflating all pacifists with reformists.
Also, you cannot debunk something that provides alternative tactics if you (as you claimed earlier) want a 'diversity of tactics'. From earlier in the introduction:
I know of no activist, revolutionary, or theorist relevant to the movement today who advocates only the use of violent tactics and opposes any usage of tactics that could not be called violent. We are advocates of a diversity of tactics, meaning effective combinations drawn from a full range of tactics that might lead to liberation from all the components of this oppressive system: white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and the state.
(Also, this line gets me. “Relevant?” Who the fuck are you to decide who is relevant and who isn't? Shut the fuck up.)
Anyway, back to the paragraph about reformist pacifists, the following sentence (from the above quoted part) is this:
It is difficult to distinguish between revolutionary and non-revolutionary pacifists, because they themselves tend not to make that distinction in the course of their activity-they work together, attend protests together, and frequently use the same tactics at the same actions. Because shared commitment to nonviolence, and not shared commitment to a revolutionary goal, is the chief criterion for nonviolent activists in deciding whom to work with, those are the boundaries I will use in defining these criticisms.
Except it isn't difficult at all to distinguish between them. What this says to be is that you didn't make the effort to try. There's a whole fucking history of pacifism and different pacifist elements of movements. Did you read about it at all before you published this book twice?