Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State
Chapter: Nonviolence is Deluded Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press personal tags: #HNvPtS
Ward Churchill has argued that pacifism is pathological.
Opening sentence. You could even say that's the name of Churchill's essay. I think I understand why Churchill likes this book (according to the footnotes of an updated release), despite the fact that this book's first chapter are nearly identical (and with worse evidence) to Churchill's own essay.
I personally like reading things written by people who share similar ideas to me because they often expand in ways I might not have considered, but this... doesn't do much of that. If anything, you're better off reading most of what Peter “cited.” Except for Yehuda Bauer. I'd personally stray from revisionist Zionist historians.
What is debatable, to some, is whether militant movements can win and survive in the long term while remaining anti-authoritarian.
This is a valid concern. It's also a refusal to understand that 'militant' doesn't necessitate that actions be violent but that a person engage in consistent support of that movement. 'Militant' may include self-protective and self-defensive postures, but it is not only those.
A militant anarchist can be a combatant (and often will), but the other usage is an aggressive (or asssertive) activist. Being militant isn't just this one thing.
Anyway, the existence of authoritarian groups co-opting or massacring (for example) anarchic movements is enough to make people ask those questions. On top of the fact that every Marxist-Leninist (Stalinist) group repeatedly ends up doing the same thing. People are correct to be cautious and curious.
To convincingly argue against this possibility, pacifists would have to show that using violence against an authority inevitably makes one take on authoritarian characteristics. This is something that pacifists have not done and cannot do.
True, but it's still a thing that we have to openly combat within our movements. The very fact that we can't even rid anarchism of patriarchy and racism should highlight that this is a valid concern, and it is one that we should reflect back on anyone asking it because they are similarly engaged in the same faults.
For continuing the struggle behind prison walls, he has been locked up in solitary confinement for longer than I have been alive. Compare this with the recent comfortable, commemorated deaths of David Dellinger and Phil Berrigan.
Once again, for a book that portrays itself as anarchist self-critique, it really doesn't want to make examples of anarchists that often in any capacity.
The authors’ “answer” to this contrived criticism of nonviolence includes many of the typical and deluded fallacies already discussed: the authors counsel people who are far more oppressed than they are to have patience with conditions they couldn’t possibly comprehend; the authors advise people of color to act in a way that is “ennobling and pragmatic”; the authors forestall criticisms of racism by dropping the name of a token person of color; and the authors conclude by tacitly threatening that militant activism on the part of people of color will result in abandonment and betrayal by powerful white “allies.”
I'll end up reading this 10-page document at some point, but I just want to highlight that Peter does some of this, too. Especially the tokenising of oppressed people. He does it all the time (even in the face of critique by people from that oppressed demographic), and people let him get away with it constantly.
For instance, when numerous people who've spent years dedicating themselves to research around abuse corrected his views on therapy and tried to explain that therapy actually assists abusers more than it stops them? He said that “black and brown women” agreed with him.
Even though there were a number of anti-abuse advocates who are Black and brown women who were trying to explain to him that therapy isn't designed to combat systemic issues because it supports systems before challenging them.
Reflection is hard, but he should look in a mirror for a bit.
In comparison, the strategic and tactical analysis of nonviolent activism is rather simplistic, rarely rising above the regurgitation of hackneyed clichés and moralistic truisms.
One could say, however, that certain machismo-entrenched characters who claim to want diverse tactics rarely ever support them unless they can utilise them, which is part of the problem that I have routinely had with this book and Peter's multiply-stated views.
While I find an adherence to nonviolence suspect and infuriating, I also find a refusal to properly understand work as it is being done more frustrating. If people are to physically protect and defend themselves and their liberatory projects, then they need to better understand that they are standing there not for pure battle but for all.
Such nuance appears frequently lacking, even among the “we need diverse tactics” crowd.
The amount of studious preparations required to successfully carry out militant actions, compared with the amount required for nonviolent actions, also contradicts the perception that revolutionary activism is impulsive.
Prime example of the above. Now, let us remember how often he has referenced Mumia's We Want Freedom. In it, Mumia discussed the interconnections between recognised nonviolent work (e.g., clinics, free breakfasts and food banking, etc) and violent work (e.g., armed resistance). Peter fails this because he conflates pacificism and nonviolence, which is a weakness of his book (oddly, this is not a weakness that his patron saint Ward Churchill shares—he at least recognised the interconnections of the two as well, and he also took square aim at pacificism, rarely making “nonviolence” a focus).
“Active resistance occurs when activists use force against the police... or proactively engage in illegal activity such as vandalism, sabotage, or property damage.” This sentence appears in Borum and Tilby, “Anarchist Direct Actions,” 211. The authors, one a professor and one a former police chief, include sit-ins and the like as passive resistance.
Footnote 201 at least takes aim at anarchists, but again. Anarchist criticism of anarchists flounders when the vast majority of your examples are non-anarchist.
I'll read this, too, for some contextualisation. If anything, I question the ability of a former cop to gain some traction anywhere.
Palestine is another example. There can be no doubt that the Palestinians are an inconvenience to the Israeli state, and that the Israeli state has no concern for the well-being of the Palestinians. If the Palestinians hadn’t made the Israeli occupation and every successive aggression so costly, all the Palestinian land would be seized, except for a few reservations to hold the necessary number of surplus laborers to supplement the Israeli economy, and the Palestinians would be a distant memory in a long line of extinct peoples. Palestinian resistance, including suicide bombings, has helped ensure Palestinian survival against a far more powerful enemy.
Not that I think Palestinians should engage purely in pacificist action (because I don't), but I do think that this is an area that requires a lot of nuance. It required it then, and it requires it now.
Violent resistance (paired with support nonviolent resistance and work) certainly has helped ensure some degree of survival against a far more powerful enemy, but I question the strategy around certain kinds of violence happening and what that means for everyone. There is no safe way to fight back because Israel would kill everyone indiscriminately if they could (and they are).
But I think a valid question for us to consider is what happens when our primary actions are perceived as violent and are the very actions that our oppressors are looking for us to do as a means to justify their continued violence against us? How do we fight back against that and try to shift perspective?
And then what do we do when a small group within an already-resisting group takes it upon themselves to engage in a specific kind of violence only for everyone to be severely punished? Because that is going to shift people's views on violent resistance, some positive and some to the negative (“I didn't do [x], and I'm being punished for it”).
I don't think pacifist resistance is the way to achieve this, but I do have to wonder how we're going to push people to recognise what is actually at stake. While the (as Peter calls them) militant activists are more educated and prepared to take these risks, they are rarely considering the entirety of their own actions; they can take those risks because they know the personal costs, but what happens when everyone takes the brunt of the punishment?
I say this because this is a contingency that we clearly need to prepare for, as it will help people better understand supposedly 'violent' actions. Part of learning is also sharing that knowledge and doing so with empathy, and I don't get the feeling that this is being done enough or supported via this book.
Spruce Houser, “Violence/Nonviolence” panel discussion. Houser is a self-proclaimed anarchist and pacifist.
Footnote 203. Nitpicking, but I can't find anyone other than Peter referring to Spruce Houser as an anarchist. I already pointed this out earlier in the book when Peter decided to have a fight with a tedious op-ed. Most things I've found including Houser just say “activist” or “peace activist,” and I'm not keen on applying labels to a person I haven't engaged with.
Based on what work of his I can find, I don't particularly want to engage with Houser. I find him equally as tedious as Gelderloos, except in the other direction.
The very activist who claimed that our society is already pro-violence can drop the name of Leon Czolgosz (the anarchist who assassinated President McKinley) in a guest op-ed in the local corporate newspaper and know that a mainstream audience will respond to that violent personage with condemnation. Meanwhile, the same activist references pacifists like King and Gandhi to give his beliefs an aura of respectability in the mainstream eye.
I referenced this in the previous point (use that link). Anyway, I'd suggest that this would actually highlight Houser's genuine views rather than the ones Peter claims he self-proclaims. (What a weird circle.)
I said that this book feels like it's meant to respond purely to Houser at the beginning, and this chapter is not changing that feeling.
In true pacifist form, Houser submitted his article to the Athens News in preparation for the coming North American Anarchist Conference, in an attempt to bolster pacifism by turning local public opinion against the “violent anarchists.” He meekly protests the fact that his article was turned by the corporate media into propaganda against the entire anarchist movement with a handwritten note, scrawled on the many photocopies of the article he handed out, stating that his original title was “Anarchism and Violence,” but the editor changed it.
Footnote 204. Even this feels like Peter misrepresenting Houser to create an anarchist critique of anarchists. (And if this was a claim Houser made in-person, then I cannot verify it. Much like I can't verify a good deal of the anecdotes in this book.)
Pacifists also harbor delusions about the decency of the state and, subconsciously, about the amount of protection their privileges will afford them. Students leading the occupation of Tiananmen Square in “Autonomous Beijing” thought that their “revolutionary” government would not open fire on them if they remained a peaceful, loyal opposition. “The students’ nearly complete misunderstanding of the nature of legitimacy under bureaucratic power and the illusion that the Party could be negotiated with, left them defenseless both in terms of the theoretical means of describing their undertaking and in regards to the narrow practice of civil disobedience it led them to adopt.” Thus, when the students who had put themselves in control of the movement refused to arm themselves (unlike many in the working-class suburbs, who were less educated and more intelligent), the whole movement was vulnerable, and Autonomous Beijing was crushed by the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army. The students at Kent State were similarly shocked, even as the same government that killed a paltry number of them was massacring millions of people in Indochina without consequence or hesitation.
Quote in above comes from Burt Green's “The Meaning of Tiananmen.”
I also think this is a complete and total failure at analysing a situation, and I could probably retrieve an old project that I did for high school about Kent State that analysed what happened better (and could also unintentionally highlight the same problems that need to be looked at).
The indoctrination of people plays a heavy role here, and it's part of why I continually am confused by people's responses. (Why are so few people against the military? Why are so few people against cops? We have so many examples of them being use to harm everyone and support atrocious supremacist structures everywhere.)
But think about being a young 20-something student on a university campus who has spent years being told all these positives about police. How do you break that so that people are prepared?
That's also pretending that pacificism was the primary goal of everyone, and people often overlook the broader engagements that took place prior (with activists trying, even in a small-scale, to fight back against the police and businesses, including banks). Hell, the ROTC building was set on fire two days prior to the shooting.
But people are allowed to be surprised, especially with their indoctrination. It's the same reason we're allowed to be angry despite knowing the truth of the situation.
This is also why I question how we think about our own actions with regards to others. It doesn't mean we do nothing, but it does mean that we need to stop and prepare way more than most ever do.
In the end, nonviolence has all the intellectual depth of a media sound bite.
So does low-effort “analysis” of strategies, but okay.
Pacifism requires a very vague, broad, loaded, and non-analytical term — violence — to take on a scientific precision. After all, not racism, not sexism, not homophobia, not authoritarianism, but violence, must be the critical axis of our actions. Why would we take pledges of anti-racism before a march, or make participation in a movement contingent on being respectful of women, queer people, and trans people, when we can take far less divisive pledges of nonviolence?
Says the, at best, abuse apologist. Who has also ensured that a lot of anarchafeminists feel unsafe around him.
But this consideration is so far from the minds of pacifists that the nuns to whom I allude based much of their trial defense on the contention that they had not caused any real damage, only symbolic damage, to the missile facility they had infiltrated.
Would hate for him to see Angela Davis's defense.
At a workshop I gave on the flaws of nonviolence, I conducted a little exercise to demonstrate how vague this idea of violence actually is. I asked the participants, who included supporters of nonviolence and supporters of a diversity of tactics, to stand up and, as I slowly read a list of various actions, to walk to one spot if they considered the action violent, and to another spot if they considered the action nonviolent. The actions included such things as buying clothes made in a sweatshop, eating meat, a wolf killing a deer, killing someone who is about to detonate a bomb in a crowd, and so on.
... A wolf killing a deer? That's such poor comprehension and furthers poor understanding. Why would you include it when it's not relevant at all and also requires passing judgement on non-human animals from a point of view of human ethics. Ridiculous. An editor should've asked you to remove or replace this.
Tangent, but “activism” is also a hazy and vague concept... yet he sees little issue discussing that.
A third possible definition might try to draw a line, based on common sense, through the potential candidates for violence. If we lived in a needs based political economy, common sense would recognize people’s need to defend themselves and live free of oppression; thus, revolutionary action toward the goal of a society in which everyone could achieve their needs could not be considered violent. Because we live in a society in which our concept of justice is based on punishment, which is to say that the behavior of just people is the avoidance of transgression, common sense recognizes paying taxes (to an imperialist state) to be nonviolent, while paying a contract killer is considered violent. Though both actions have similar results, it is certainly easier to expect people not to commit the latter action (which requires taking initiative) and permit them to commit the former action (which is just going along with the flow). In such a society (for example, ours), pacifism really is passivism because not committing violence really has more to do with avoiding culpability than with taking responsibility.
Footnote 207. The whole point of Peter's book could've been better summed up in a tweet-length post using the bolded sentence.
It seems to me that it would be much easier to end the psychological patterns of violence and domination once we had destroyed the social institutions, political bodies, and economic structures specifically constituted to perpetuate coercive domination.
Idk, while I don't disagree, perhaps you could also... do it before, too. Because the psychological patterns of some violence do not necessarily need to continue if the institutions are still in place.
But accountability is hard, isn't it. /snark
But there is more than one axis for liberation struggle. It can be cultural, to fight for the expulsion of a foreign colonizer and the bourgeois political parties that have taken on the characteristics of that colonizer (as described by Fanon), or it can be structural, to destroy centralized power structures and hierarchical institutions without targeting any actual people, other than those who choose to fight on the side of power. After a revolution that destroys all of the structures of capitalism — seizes all of the factories, redistributes all of the land, burns all of the money — people who are philosophically capitalist need not be purged or intimidated with irrational authority. Lacking a military apparatus to implement capitalism or a police apparatus to protect it, they — as people — are quite harmless, and will either learn to do something creative with their lives or starve to death without realizing that they can no longer pay someone to slave for them.
I'm going to end up reading Fanon, aren't I. I had planned to, but I thought I'd... take a break. Guess that's not allowed.
Anyway, this is nonsensical. People who are “philosophically capitalist” won't be harmless just because you say they will, and this is similar to the ways in which most of us highlight how bigotries (if left unchecked now) will not be fixed post-revolution (whatever that means).
It also requires us to believe that everyone else underwent a change away from capitalism, but we haven't seen that either.
Morman’s typical pacifist-anarchist construction relies on a Eurocentric, political vision of revolution, in which a revolutionary party seizes power and enforces its vision of freedom on everyone else in the society through some centralized apparatus.
I'm in the process of trying to hunt down Morman's piece because I cannot find it anywhere. And I'm not about to deny that the guy might be Eurocentric (I don't know—I haven't read his work or interacted with him prior).
However, based on what Peter has quoted, nothing that Morman says is inherently Eurocentric. If anything, it sounds like the fear of someone who saw “revolutions” be implemented and further supported via totalitarianism (Mao's China and the Soviet Block). For example, here's what Peter quotes in the beginning of this paragraph:
“The revolutionary is promoting one set of social relations and destroying old ones, not by teaching, example, or well-reasoned argument, but by power, fear, and intimidation: the buttresses of irrational authority.”
This sounds more like someone who has at least engaged with “revolutionary” nations and was burnt by them. It's also worth noting that Morman probably saw “revolutionary” governments still working with imperial powers, such as Czechoslovakia and Cuba. From Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's Wikipedia page:
In February 1969, Ervin hijacked a plane to Cuba to evade prosecution for allegedly trying to kill a Ku Klux Klan leader. While in Cuba, and then Czechoslovakia, Ervin became disillusioned with state socialism. After the US government was unable to obtain his extradition, Ervin was turned over to U.S. authorities by Cuba, and he was arrested upon being returned to the U.S. in September 1969.
If those revolutionary governments were willing to engage in non-revolutionary action, it is understandable that he could've seen many more do it. (I don't know if Morman saw this news at the time it happened or heard of it via other means, but I suspect Ervin was not the only victim of non-revolutionary action conducted by supposedly revolutionary states. Not to mention readily known history of anarchists being executed by totalitarian “revolutionaries”. This is something that, in order to understand, I need context for.)
Anyway, regarding the quote that Peter pulled: Perhaps the requirement for a “well-reasoned argument” may be Eurocentric, but I have also seen similar requests for information by non-European people. What that terminology can mean varies across culture.
According to the Mande, Mangala the creator killed Farrow as a sacrifice in order to save what was left of creation. On the contrary, in Greek mythology, Cronus tried to kill his son, and later Zeus devoured his lover, Metis, to maintain their power. This dynamic is a pattern throughout Western mythologies.
Losing my mind at how people who interpret mythologies of the past in modern terms think they're hot shit.
Yes, Kronos did try to devour his son Zeus (after having devoured earlier siblings). What happened to Kronos, however? Was the violence the goal of the story? And since it's implied here (“tried to kill his son”), were any of the children who Kronos devoured actually dead? Because part of the story is that he ate a rock believing it to be the child (Zeus); the child was sent to grow up elsewhere, and he came back to fight his father and free his siblings. 'Kill' was not part of it.
The use of violence is either calculated, to win power and coercive control, or impassioned, in which case the motivation is nearly always jealousy born out of the desire to possess another being. These patterns are not universal to all cultures.
Are you going to tell me that the way this violence was used isn't seen in non-Western legends and mythologies? Certainly it was used in a wide range of ways, but it was also used in such a wide variety of ways in Western mythologies as well.
If you cannot be bothered to learn any mythologies of anywhere to actually recognise this, then do not pretend you know anything at all.
Fanon aided the FLN (National Liberation Front) in Algeria and worked in a psychiatric hospital, specializing in the psychology of the colonized and the psychological effects of their liberation struggles. In other words, he is somewhat better positioned than Erich Fromm to evaluate the psychology of violence in pursuit of liberation from the perspective of the majority of the world’s population — not the vantage of an educated political party seeking to remake the world in its image, but the vantage of people subjugated to a system so violent that they can either forcefully fight back or displace that violence sociopathically against one another.
Just going to say that it is interesting that a German Jewish man who fled to the US to escape the Nazi regime has nothing to say about, you know, violence. (And it's also interesting that he was a Zionist who turned away from it. Meanwhile, he openly cites continuing Zionists.)
I'm not going to compare the two in this regard because they're coming at things from two different perspectives, moments, and geographies. I'm also not going to defend Fromm's work because I haven't engaged in it.
But I also have to wonder if the violence that Fromm discussed is related to those who ensure the cruelty of the world continues or the people for whom it targets. I don't know. Peter doesn't explain this, and he rarely contextualises people's experiences and what they actually said.
This is what academic anarchist Howard Ehrlich advised in his keynote address to the North American Anarchist Convergence in Athens, Ohio, August 14, 2004.
Footnote 213. This whole book is apparently a response to one event. Interesting.
Nonviolent activists frequently rely on the media to disseminate their point. I have already mentioned multiple examples involving protests. For another example: On January 31, 2006, an activist on a listserv for the supposedly radical anti-authoritarian group Food Not Bombs posted a suggestion for an action during President Bush’s State of the Union address. The suggestion was for thousands of people to Google the phrase “Impeach Bush” during his speech. Supposedly, the corporate media would pick up on this factoid and begin publicizing it rather than their typical surface analysis of how well Bush presented himself in his speech. Needless to say, no such thing occurred.
Footnote 215. Rich coming from someone writing for Truthout and In These Times. I also don't see him going after other anarchists who he likes that have bylines in The Guardian.
And while these alternative sources of information do exist, I'd like to know how easy it is to keep up with all of them (including knowing about them). Anarchists tend to read between the lines, so getting info from mainstream (while problematic) is occasionally all we've got.
Not to mention, this dork ass fucker reminisced about writing this fucking book on a Substack (nazi platform, do better) in a 2024 article and talked about how rural anarchists often had very little. Pick something, Peter.
Closing out the list of common delusions is the all-too-frequent claim that violence alienates people. This is glaringly false. Violent video games and violent movies are the most popular.
Not relevant because they aren't real. And not all people like the stories for the violence. Rather, people are more considering of how violence was used and depicted.
Even blatantly false wars win the support of at least half the population, often with the commentary that the US military is too humane and restrained to its enemies.
Because these aren't depicted as violent. Honestly, understanding how things are depicted would make his point better, but he just seems to fall to making weak tangential arguments that do nothing.
On the other hand, self-righteous candlelight vigils are alienating to the majority of people who don’t participate, who hurry by and smirk to themselves. Voting is alienating for the millions of people who know better than to participate and to some of the many people who participate for lack of better options.
Candlelight vigils do not bother me, even if I do not participate. I have walked by numerous protests that didn't feel alienating to me in the moment; they just weren't things that I'd want to do.
Voting can be alienating, but so can a lot of things. People talking about sex is alienating for some people. That doesn't necessitate a functional argument in this capacity, nor does it address what is intended.
I don't even agree that violence inherently drives me away from a group, but it does depend on what kind of violence.
The real question is who is alienated by violence, and by what kind of violence?
Wow, maybe if you frontloaded the fucking point, you wouldn't come off as so long-winded and needlessly tedious. Look at how many things I've said could've been put the wayside immediately... if you had actually engaged in the point you're trying to make instead of doing some holier-than-thou polemic rubbish.
Reckless violence that subjects people to unnecessary risks without even striving to be effective or successful will most likely alienate people — especially those who already have to survive under the violence of oppression — but fighting for survival and freedom often wins sympathy.
If you know that this is largely what is meant, then why don't you address it front and center? An editor should've asked this because this is an important point that he never engages with prior to the fucking 90% point of this fucking book. Hence, you can see me asking this question over and over again because he says nothing.
Since the first edition of this book came out, I have been approached by many people who were not activists who told me how much they appreciated the sentiments herein.
And everyone clapped.
Nonviolent activism targeting the School of the Americas (SOA) provides a good example.
Still not an anarchist example just because you call yourself an anarchist. You cannot have an intracommunity critique of anarchism when all your fucking examples stem from outside that.
Driving a car, eating meat, eating tofu, paying rent, paying taxes, being nice to a cop — all of these are violent activities.
Now we see why Peter's such a shit to vegans, lol. Which he does repeatedly in this book, btw.
Eating meat and paying taxes are perhaps self-explanatory. Research into aluminum production (and the concomitant of hydro-electric dam construction), auto-factory conditions, air pollution caused by internal combustion engines, the level of fatalities incurred as a matter of course by a car culture, and the way in which industrialized nations procure their petroleum will reveal why driving a car is a violent activity, enough so that we cannot take seriously a moral pacifist who drives a car. Eating tofu, in the current economy, is integrally connected to the use of disposable immigrant labor, genetic modifications of soy and the resulting destruction of ecosystems and food cultures, and the ability of the United States to undermine subsistence-farming cultures around the world, fueling globalization with the threat and reality of starvation. Paying rent supports property owners who will throw a family out into the streets if they cannot make payments in time, who invest in ecocidal development and urban sprawl, and who assist in the gentrifying of cities, with attendant violence levied against homeless people, people of color, and low-income families. Being nice to a cop contributes to the masochist culture of worship that allows agents of law and order to beat and murder people with impunity. It is a striking historical peculiarity that allows police to enjoy broad popular support, and even think of themselves as heroes, when it used to be that they were well known as scum and lackeys of the ruling class.
... How much exploited immigrant labour is tied to meat-eating, you self-righteous prick? Also, genetic modifications aren't inherently a bad thing (they are if it's a coerced monocrop or also a necessity to work as a result of a company's decision). Tofu is eaten across the planet, and it's a bizarre framing to discuss the US undermining of subsistence farming... especially when tofu has a long history of existing (along with soy-related products)... Originating in East and Southeast Asia.
The soybean was domesticated in Asia thousands of years ago. The soybeans farmed in the US and Brazil are primarily used to feed livestock (hey, there's that meat thing again).
There may be issues with agriculture related to soybeans, but I guarantee you that those issues pale in comparison to the meat industry... and I'm saying this as a person who eats low amounts of meat and other animal products but isn't vegan.
I hate this kind of bullshit because it's all there to distract from the conversation and shift blame elsewhere without actually considering the interconnections between two things and how that happened. Lazy fucking arguments that do nothing except make people put their focus elsewhere, just as I did here.
(Maybe Peter should stop eating if this is how he's going to behave.)