Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Nonviolence is Statist Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press personal tags: #HNvPtS
I'm going to predict that, out of all these chapters, this is likely to be... the better one because it enables Peter to ignore things he sucks at talking about. It might also be one of the few places in which his love for citinig listserv emails can help him, even though there are most certainly articles that've been written across all media sources that'd... y'know... make the case better. (First citation of the chapter, btw, is a listserv email.)
And based on the sheer number of references to Ward Churchill, whether you like his work or not? It'd be better just to read that and get a more comprehensive piece that doesn't basically repeat exactly what Churchill wrote but with updated references that you can't even have a chance to access! I'm not a fan of Pacifism As Pathology, but it is far better than this trite bullshit. And at least it's openly Marxist in a lot of ways, which Peter... Peter says he's coming at this from an anarchist perspective, but I keep getting Marxist vibes. That's not to say anarchists can't learn from Marxists, but it is to say that there's nothing specifically 'anarchist' about this when he's cribbing from one person who definitely isn't.
Again, the references to Mumia's We Want Freedom, which is a book worth reading. However, it's making me wonder how widely read Peter decided to be at this time (and how widely read he remains now... we'll see if I torment myself with future entries). I can say that he added no further information to the references in the updated version of this book despite doing a ton of weird (mostly superficial but negative) edits to the text for the re-publication. He could've easily added more references to build his case (and actually engage with more than a few people)... and he chose not to.
We can take their word for it. FBI COINTELPRO documents, revealed to the public only because in 1971 some activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole them, clearly demonstrate that a major objective of the FBI is to keep would-be revolutionaries passive.
When this book was originally published, the people who did it hadn't yet come out about it. (I think that happened in 2014.) But the updated version (which again, has a lot of edits to the style, structure, and sometimes organisation of a whole chapter and looks to have been re-published in 2018) doesn't even make any changes or notes to expand upon new information. I find this weird.
After smugly noting that Malcolm X could have fulfilled this role, but is instead the martyr of the movement, the memo names three black leaders who have the potential to be that messiah. One of the three “could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence)” [parenthesis in the original].
First: I don't get why he doesn't cite where a person could find this information. It's in a memo that was released; there's documentation of it. Let people go back to the original to, y'know, learn more.
Second: This is why I find his refusal to define “nonviolence” at the beginning disingenuous and nonsensical. If he led with this chapter, he would've also been able to make a good case without people having to figure out what counts and what doesn't count. This one line from a COINTELPRO memo highlights precisely what kind of people and what kind of nonviolence. Ugh, it's so annoying because a good editor could've actually made the decent points stand out.
I'm also guessing Peter uses this for the parenthetical because he doesn't focus on the 'obedience' aspect and what that means, which is kind of funny... when that makes his point stronger. Granted, I'm also guessing that this entire chapter is cribbed from another Ward Churchill project (Agents of Repression)... because the citations are full of that (upon investigation, it feels like what a student does for an essay they have to do research for—they read one book, make an outline, and use that book extensively; having skimmed the book in question, it seems far more interesting to the point than this does).
He does this thing again, this time citing Frantz Fanon (so this quote isn't Peter):
The colonialist bourgeoisie introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they....Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed...before any blood has been shed.
This just proves to me that he should've opened with this chapter instead of refusing to define “nonviolence” (which he needed to do, regardless of whether he wanted to or not). It also would've kept things much clearer, which he also manages to do repeatedly by pointing at the actual target of his ire: pacifists. The organisation of this book creates some really troubling conflations, which he doesn't help in previous chapters because he frequently conflates nonviolent work (i.e., work where violence isn't the main goal) with pushes for total nonviolence in the midst of a struggle.
This underlying comfort with the violence of the state, combined with shock at the “outrages” of forceful rebellion, lulls pacifists into relying on state violence for protection. For example, pacifist organizers exempt the police from the “nonviolence codes” that are common at protests these days; they do not attempt to disarm the police who protect peace protesters from angry, pro-war counter-demonstrators. In practice, pacifist morality demonstrates that it is more acceptable for radicals to rely on the violence of the government for protection than to defend themselves.
The irony here is that many of the people who do this at protests wouldn't necessarily label themselves as pacifists. Pacifists definitely do this, but a lot of liberal “left” groups do, too. From my own experiences, I watched groups organising solidarity BLM marches in my (non-US) city. First, they did not work with some of the most frequent targets of state and police violence where I live (Romani people); second, when we finished the march portion through the walkable downtown and got to the final stage, the organisers told us if there were any problems... to report to nearby police. A solidarity march for people being brutalised and murdered in the US by police... was fine with putting its safety into the hands of cops.
When questioned, they didn't consider themselves pacifists. But they bought into the same propaganda that pacifists did. (This is also why he needs better framing around 'nonviolence'. His focus is clearly meant for pacifists, despite the titling of his book and chapters. It becomes super muddled because he doesn't want to do the work of defining things like 'nonviolence' or recognising that pacifists aren't entirely responsible for the propaganda they've imbibed... Which causes a ton of conflation that just makes his points feel hollow.)
During and after World War I, the American Legion was an important paramilitary force in helping the government repress anti-war activists and labor organizers, particularly the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers of the World). In 1919, in Centralia, Washington, they castrated and lynched Wesley Everest of the IWW.
Upon investigating this footnote, it's interesting to see something without much evidence (even from the side of the IWW prisoners/defendents and their own lawyer, who didn't mention it at all) being put down as inherent fact. Where did this come from? There's no mention of it. And while I'm not keen to take state sources at their word, I find it interesting that people who were very close to Everest's dead body said nothing about the mutilation at all. (Possibly, Ralph Chaplin? But Peter cites nothing, so...) He's not wrong about the American Legion, but I don't like embellishing with unfounded information.
Pacifists claiming to eschew violence helped to desegregate schools and universities throughout the South, but, ultimately, it was armed units of the National Guard that allowed the first black students to enter these schools and protect them from forceful attempts at expulsion and worse. If pacifists are unable to defend their own gains, what will they do when they don’t have the organized violence of the police and National Guard?
Not wrong on pacifists helping to desegreate schools, but... Do you want to give examples or just ignore everything? Are you complaining about white pacifists here or are you getting upset at people like Erna Prather Harris? And while people probably can (and did) critique her, I feel like this flippant throw-away comment is doing very little in the way of actually having that conversation (and a question isn't a conversation).
Institutional desegregation was deemed favorable to the white supremacist power structure because it defused a crisis, increased possibilities for co-opting black leadership, and streamlined the economy, all without negating the racial hierarchy so fundamental to US society. Thus, the National Guard was called in to help desegregate universities. It is not that hard to imagine a set of revolutionary goals that the National Guard would never be called in to protect.
This also feels like a throwaway. Literally, whole books have been written by Black historians (and Black people, in general) that have criticised what desegregation/integration did in varying spaces. Like, if we check out what happened to Black teachers (for example) as a result of integration, we find that children had far fewer of them and that many of them lost their jobs or were pushed elsewhere after integration. (While this video came out well after, I'd still recommend checking it out for Yhara Zayd's discussion on integration. She's not even focusing entirely on integration, but she's fucking talking about it and not throwing it away as a kind of gotcha for her point.)
Bloomberg got political points for being hip and lenient, even as his administration cracked down on dissent during the week of protests. Pacifists got an added perk: anyone wearing the button would be given discounts at dozens of Broadway shows, hotels, museums, and restaurants (highlighting how the passive parade of nonviolence is tapped into as a boost to the economy and bulwark of the status quo). As Mayor Bloomberg put it, “It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach.”
But is playing into this kind of thing a commonality among pacifists? You haven't shown that, but you have assumed it. Since this doesn't happen with regularity, I would bet it's not on many people's radar as why they'd be a pacifist or even a perk to being one.
A huge amount of energy was expended weeks in advance (by the institutional Left and the police) in attempts to alienate and exclude more militant activists.
This is more goal post shifting. You started strong on pacifists, but now we've moved to “the institutional Left” (and police)... who may not overlap all that much with pacifists.
A few of these citations are uh... Really hitting the whose who of anarchist abusers and misogynists.
... Also, this book could've been an essay.