Book: How Nonviolence Protects the State Chapter: Nonviolence is Ineffective [Part 1: Picking a fight with a guy, India, Civil Rights Movement] Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press
I'm splitting this chapter into multiple posts to... help my brain.
I could spend plenty of time talking about the failures of nonviolence. Instead, it may be more useful to talk about the successes of nonviolence.
Here we go! Maybe he'll actually address the concerns mentioned previously.
I'm also going to add here that I find it frustrating that he frames it this way. He's not good at sarcasm or being snide in text, so he may as well have just said that he was going to look at the successes claimed by the program of coercive pacifism and what their realities really were.
Pacifism would hardly be attractive to its supporters if the ideology had produced no historical victories. Typical examples are the independence of India from British colonial rule, caps on the nuclear arms race, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and the peace movement during the war against Vietnam.[3] And though they have not yet been hailed as a victory, the massive protests in 2003 against the US invasion of Iraq have been much applauded by nonviolent activists.[4]
And related footnotes:
-3-: This particular list comes from an article written by Spruce Houser (Spruce Houser, “Domestic Anarchist Movement Increasingly Espouses Violence,” Athens News, August 12, 2004), a peace activist and self-proclaimed anarchist. I have seen these same putative victories declared by other pacifists time and again.
-4-: Hell NYC, 2/15: The Day the World Said No to War (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003). This book gives one a feel for the way peace activists celebrate these protests.
I'm not planning to read the above book (at this time), but I did at least go through the trouble of hunting down the commentary piece by Spruce Houser (and getting an archive link; the link in Peter's book is out of date, which is normal). That article is quite amusing for its own reasons, like this gem that tries to prove the inherent violent nature of some Bad Anarchists or something: “Czolgosz is the name of the anarchist who assassinated President McKinley in 1901 (anyone wishing to confirm this is welcome to contact the Eugene Weekly).”
Also, why can't you just... look it up somewhere? We did have both Google and Wikipedia in 2004, and I'm guessing that something about President McKinley would've been found on one of them even that early on.
This piece by Houser is terrible, but I can't say that he's entirely wrong when he says:
When I look at the world today, I see that the ills facing our society are precisely related to the willingness to inflict violence.
But I also disagree with him because, I think, in the face of violence... you might have to defend yourself. This makes me wonder if Peter will engage with the 'self-defense isn't violence' wing of the pacifist movement or if he's going to continue cherry-picking a handful of folks who say what helps him make his point.
Here's the list that Peter draws upon, and I think his editing of it is interesting. Again, Houser wrote:
Women's right to vote, more humane working conditions, liberation of subservient colonies, equal rights for racial minorities, ending the Vietnam war, the overthrow of dictatorships, a moratorium on nuclear power, capping an out-of-control nuclear arms race, and protection of old-growth forests have all been gained by movements based on nonviolence. The moral power of nonviolent resistance is limitless, constrained only by our ability to use it to its full capacity.
Again, Houser is largely flubbing a lot of this, and I think part of it is related to previous propaganda he'd engaged in and a lack of recognition for other materials. Gandhi may have been “nonviolent,” but he said the Jews should've gone willingly and submitted to the Nazis during the Holocaust... which doesn't really help Houser. MLK was gradually and incrementally shifting his political tactics prior to his assassination, even though his focus was still largely on nonviolent methods; it's also true that he (and others working with him) understood how violent methods helped support his prior nonviolent work, even if he didn't like them.
Houser, like Gelderloos, is cherry-picking based on incomplete datasets and knowledge while also mimicking someone who is knowledgeable about a thing. Back to Peter:
There is a pattern to the historical manipulation and whitewashing evident in every single victory claimed by nonviolent activists. The pacifist position requires that success must be attributable to pacifist tactics and pacifist tactics alone, whereas the rest of us believe that change comes from the whole spectrum of tactics present in any revolutionary situation, provided they are deployed effectively.
These are two different points being made, and it doesn't make sense. Yes, there is a pattern to the historical manipulation and whitewashing that takes place when people purely focus on nonviolence; I'd also argue that there is an extreme patriarchal and masculinist vision of the world when we focus primarily on violence and a refusal to understand the interconnectedness of the tactics of both.
Most pacifists do not purely translate victories to pacifist ideals. This is Peter cherry-picking some people who espouse specific views he wants to fight with, and that is also a form of manipulation of the historical narrative. Many pacifists recognise (and have recognised) that they have been helped by non-pacifists; a lot of them know that they both have different skills and abilities but that both of them are required for a movement to have success. In fact, this is true of examples of nonviolence movements listed in this very book (which he could've also read in Ward Churchill's essay).
I could do the same thing to the criticism of anarchism and making a statement about “why people shouldn't be anarchist” if I only focused on anarcho-nazis and ancaps, but people would rightly understand that this would be me cherry-picking an argument. Why is Peter allowed to do this for pacifists? (And I'm not even a pacifist.) Continuing the above paragraph to its conclusion:
Because no major social conflict exhibits a uniformity of tactics and ideologies, which is to say that all such conflicts exhibit pacifist tactics and decidedly non-pacifist tactics, pacifists have to erase the history that disagrees with them or, alternately, blame their failures on the contemporary presence of violent struggle.[5]
-5-: For example, as soon as a pacifist panelist at the anarchist conference mentioned in the introduction [North American Anarchist Convergence in Athens, Ohio in August 2004] was forced to admit that the civil rights struggle did not end victoriously, he changed directions without blinking an eye and blamed the struggle’s failure on militant liberation movements, saying that as the movement became violent, it started to lose ground. This argument ignores the fact that resistance against slavery and racial oppression was militant well before the late 1960s, and also disavows any specific analysis that might, say, correspond an increasing militancy with a decreasing base. Such correlations are factually nonexistent.
Is it just me, or does this sound like why Peter might have picked out Houser's commentary? It would also explain the “self-proclaimed anarchist” dig at Houser, even though I cannot find anywhere (in the limited amount of sources available) where Houser claimed to be an anarchist. Even his description on Athens News... just says activist. And it's not a requirement to be an anarchist to attend an anarchist conference.
I have no evidence of it, but the vibes are there.
In India, the story goes, people under the leadership of Gandhi built up a massive nonviolent movement over decades and engaged in protest, noncooperation, economic boycotts, and exemplary hunger strikes and acts of disobedience to make British imperialism unworkable. They suffered massacres and responded with a couple of riots, but, on the whole, the movement was nonviolent and, after persevering for decades, the Indian people won their independence, providing an undeniable hallmark of pacifist victory.
And later:
We realize this threat to be even more direct when we understand that the pacifist history of India’s independence movement is a selective and incomplete picture-nonviolence was not universal in India. Resistance to British colonialism included enough militancy that the Gandhian method can be viewed most accurately as one of several competing forms of popular resistance. As part of a disturbingly universal pattern, pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead and rudder of Indian resistance.
I wonder if Peter realises that he'd have been better off working with, I don't know, someone like me or other school abolitionists on things like critiques of history and social sciences curricula in schools and how schooling shapes our thinking because that's what this is. This specific narrative is not the narrative coined specifically by the pacifist movement; it is the narrative coined by white people in power who wrote history books (and made museums) and wanted to minimise “violent” responses to brutal colonialism and imperialism. The fact that the pacifist movement uses it is testament to the power of the propaganda (largely via schooling) that many of these people went through.
While the people who grab for these examples are engaging in historical erasure and also racism and do need to learn more, it is a problem of what has been taught for years. They are to blame for their continued ignorance, but they are also grasping for what they were given.
This isn't a problem specific to pacifists; it's a problem specific to the rulers of a society who don't want to die for their ill-gotten gains, and society has been harmed for it. (These things are, thankfully, changing.)
(PS: I don't want to work with Peter.)
As part of a disturbingly universal pattern, pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead and rudder of Indian resistance.
This isn't a “disturbingly universal pattern” about pacifists. If he took time to sit down with history curricula, he'd find one area in which the history was warped into the “proper” narrative. This is a “disturbingly universal pattern” of the ruling classes ensuring their safety, teaching the people about specific nonviolent patterns that supposedly work and securing themselves. If this was the aspect of nonviolence that he was critiquing, I'd find it compelling. In this format, it's lazy and shifts the blame to the wrong location... just because he was mad at some guy.
Professor Gopal K, email to author, September 2004. Gopal also writes, “I have friends in India who still haven’t forgiven Gandhi for this.”
This is a bizarre footnote. At least he does acknowledge that he engages with other people, but I don't know anything about this professor beyond the fact that he has friends who haven't forgiven Gandhi. Other than him presumably being Indian or tied to India in some way, why would you reach out to him? Or is it that this was part of a wider conversation that you were already having, remembered you had, and then referenced again which you could contextualise with a few more words?
I'm not looking for academic-standard citations and footnotes here, but it's... odd to not have context for why this exchange happened.
Significantly, history remembers Gandhi above all others not because he represented the unanimous voice of India, but because of all the attention he was given by the British press and the prominence he received from being included in important negotiations with the British colonial government. When we remember that history is written by the victors, another layer of the myth of Indian independence comes unraveled.
Peter, do you (or did you) honestly believe that this is the fault of pacifists and nonviolent activists? Because this isn't their fault. This is precisely what I described above with regards to what people learn and how it shapes their thinking. Your argument would've been better to have had with the state and schooling, looking at how coercive pacifism has been pushed on all of us.
The sorriest aspect of pacifists’ claim that the independence of India is a victory for nonviolence is that this claim plays directly into the historical fabrication carried out in the interests of the white-supremacist, imperialist states that colonized the Global South.
Ah, there we go. So it's that it “plays into,” but he doesn't make that distinction until now. If your claim is that pacifists manipulate history, then you need to show an example of that. You don't get to show an example of what is historical manipulation by [capitalists, ruling classes] and then change your framing... That's not very helpful because you've set up an argument against a group of ill-defined people that they're not entirely responsible for, even if you didn't intend to.
Moreover, India lost a clear opportunity for meaningful liberation from an easily recognizable foreign oppressor. Any liberation movement now would have to go up against the confounding dynamics of nationalism and ethnic/religious rivalry in order to abolish a domestic capitalism and government that are far more developed.
I'm genuinely struggling to connect his thoughts together because the direction doesn't make sense. If he wanted to point to how Gandhi weaponised his “nonviolence movement” for the sake of power and position, then what he says in this section would've made more sense and the connections actually would be there. I have no actual dots for how nonviolence, as a whole, is responsible for this failure.
Peter say it's true and therefore it's true. (I haven't read the citations, but I'd be interested to because one is Arundhati Roy and another is ... Vandana Shiva? Does Peter know who she is? Because whew, I think I'll be passing on her because she plays fast and loose with all manner of factual details.)
On balance, the independence movement proves to have failed.
Yes, but you didn't prove that it was the fault of nonviolence or pacificism. You proved that it failed, was still entrenched in colonial and imperial structures, now had to fight against nationalism, and... You neglected to engage with how people weaponised movements for their own purpose, which is literally what you keep running into with Gandhi. Instead of understanding it, you dodged that analysis to stay mad at strawmen (or just that one guy).
He continues a similar (and abridged) pattern with the other points mentioned. Set up a pin, knock it down; set up a pin, knock it down. Most of the points aren't wrong, but they do just pretend that nonviolence is as Houser claims it is. It's like this chapter was written to be a debate with him.
The next bit is about capping the nuclear arms race. There's not a lot here because, unlike India, it is one singular paragraph. But reading through what he mentions gives the same vibes:
Once again, the movement was not exclusively nonviolent; it included groups that carried out a number of bombings and other acts of sabotage or guerrilla warfare.
His issue is less with actual pacifists or pacifists as a whole and more with the ways in which these histories have been warped by the people who seek to maintain their power and do so via multiple routes. He doesn't engage with why people might believe in the Purely Nonviolent Narrative; he just acts like they are the reason it happened (and often seems to conflate them with the actual issue).
The common projection (primarily by white progressives, pacifists, educators, historians, and government officials) is that the movement against racial oppression in the United States was primarily nonviolent.
Hey, Peter... What do you think would be a better critique since you said this? But you seem to think that all these categories share equal power when they don't. Educators and government officials, along with historians, all share something in common as groups that the other two do not. (And while educators and historians do not share the same level of power as government officials, they are complicit in their behaviours. This requires a degree of nuance while still recognising their role in promoting a specific narrative around nonviolence and violence.)
What might the difference between those groups be, Peter? Or do you not want to make that kind of critique because you keep leaning right up next to academics, finding them handing you some legitimacy? And a lot of your anarchodemic/general academic friends don't like when you critique that they hold position and do not want to reflect upon how the academy uses them to extract in the same colonialist/imperialist system (along with you, too, if we're honest).
On the contrary, though pacifist groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had considerable power and influence, popular support within the movement, especially among poor black people, increasingly gravitated toward militant revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party.
The citation for this is False Nationalism, False Internationalism by E. Tani and Kae Sera, but the part cited here doesn't exactly fit what he's saying because it's in a list starting with:
So the reawakening of anti-colonial struggles here within the continental Empire in the 1960s was still ideologically unaware. It was a situation in which oppressed peoples went through rapid changes, trying and growing beyond different approaches and organizations, as cities burned and U.S. imperialism was thrown on the defensive. The oppressed started rediscovering their true situation, their own heritage, and the reality of their Nationhood. There were four main characteristics to those ‘60s movements:
- They rapidly evolved toward armed struggle, with self-defense leading to armed organizations. Anti-government violence had mass approval and participation.
While this is kind of picky, Peter explains 'they' in the quote (which is the above point 1 from a list of four) as being “the civil rights movement and the black liberationist/anti-colonial movement.” From my reading the paragraph above that, it would be clear that 'they' is referring to 'oppressed people', and that would be largely inclusive of all oppressed peoples (particularly non-white), as the quote that opens the chapter (which is literally above the first cited paragraph) is largely inclusive, listing: Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Indians.
I also think, in the context of the opening of that chapter, it's important to make that distinction because the chapter isn't discussing pure nonviolence. But part of the critique is even found within that list of four things, particularly in points 3 and 4:
National liberation struggles here were not seen as isolated to themselves, but as parts of a world revolution of the oppressed. People were influenced by India, Ghana, Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and many other peoples struggles. Crazy Horse and Ho were both seen as heroic teachers. Socialism was introduced as an alternative to the “American Way.”
The urban movements were in most cases under the class leadership of the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpen. Which meant that their political programs embodied an ambivalent, “love-hate” relationship towards imperialism. Even the most militant organizations were amalgamations of those who were fighting for liberation and those who, whatever thought they were doing, were fighting for a share of Babylon.
This is not an indication of “all nonviolence is ineffective,” but it is a critique that the petty bourgeoisie played a role as being an obstacle through coercive pacifism and appeals to hegemonic nonviolence. Further, the paragraph after the list states:
The national movements did not reach a proletarian viewpoint. This limitation undermined the great advances of the ‘60s movements. Even among those who picked up the gun, driven by anger and need for change, even within revolutionary organizations, this covered-over ambivalence helped create setback after setback.
They point toward the ambivalence toward imperialism and the utilisation of coercive pacifism. These are not the same as just saying that nonviolence is the problem. One more time, the critique towards the Civil Rights Movement in that text and in that chapter states:
The impending failure of the non-violent Civil Rights movement was primarily a crisis for two classes—for the U.S. bourgeoisie and the Black petty-bourgeoisie. In response to the threat of liberation war, the U.S. Empire drew the colonial petty-bourgeoisie closer to itself as a shield while enacting a revamped neo-colonial program to pacify the masses. Civil Rights became the U.S. Government’s official pacification program, while the hollow shell of the dying Civil Rights movement was itself taken over by U.S. imperialism to be used against the deeper anti-colonial rebellion.
They don't say that it's specifically nonviolence that is the problem. It's the wilful participation within a neo-colonial program, which employed a specific form of hegemonic nonviolence.
He also cites Mumia Abu-Jamal, but here's a fun pattern: He cites a lot of things at the beginning of chapters and then doesn't analyse its position within the text and/or in relation to his own point. Here's the quote he pulls from Mumia's We Want Freedom:
The roots of armed resistance run deep in African American history. Only those who ignore this fact see the Black Panther Party as somehow foreign to our common historical inheritance.
Later on, he says:
Many forces converged to bring about the organization bearing the name of the Black Panther Party. One of them, of course, was the powerful psychological and social force of history. In the 60s, many books began to emerge on the theme of Black history. Long-forgotten or little-mentioned figures began to come to life to a generation that, having not grown up in segregated educational environments, was less familiar with the historical currents underlying Black life.
And after that Mumia goes on to describe how “the smoldering embers of Watts,” which was burnt “just one year before the Black Panther Party's formation,” had been front and center in the “bright minds of Huey and Bobby.” He's not just documenting a history; he's weaving the threads to show that what happened in Watts led all the way to radicalising MLK. But it's not only that; he's doing it to also highlight how an understanding of 'riot' can “prove misleading by masking the objectives of mass violence.”
Peter uses none of this, even though the rest of the chapter would easily lend itself to a discussion about nonviolence. But it's also not the conversation Peter would want; Mumia later says, after quoting from The Philadelphia Bulletin:
Order, to the editors of the Philadelphia daily, meant legal support for slavery; any who would resist that evil, even ex-slaves themselves, were branded “enemies of order.”
Mumia was not focusing only on debating violence versus nonviolence; he was focusing on how abolition was demonised as “violent” because people were fighting for their freedom. Again, those are not the same arguments.
Like, I don't know, if Peter read towards Chapter 7 of Mumia's book (“A Woman's Story”), he'd also have some understanding that nonviolent action is a necessity as part of the movement. Mumia quotes Frankye Malika Adams and then makes the following observation:
Adams’s insights reveal a perspective that reflects what every Panther actually experienced daily, feeding thousands of Black schoolchildren across the nation, providing free medical services to the ghetto poor, in some cities offering free shoes and clothing to people, and the like. Armed conflict, despite its salience in press reports, was actually a rare occurrence.
I have to wonder why the focus Peter makes is on nonviolence protecting the state rather than what actually protects the state (and then doesn't even explain what that means to him in the first chapter)... which are collaborators and people with designs on power, people ambivalent to the colonial and imperial projects, and those who've imbibed the propaganda that has been crafted by the state to pacify them (which is far more indicting and is actually part of the conversations that both Mumia and Tani and Sera are having).
Anyway, Peter then goes on to say this:
A month and a day later, President Kennedy was calling for Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, ending several years of a strategy to stall the civil rights movement.
Citing a quote of MLK that appears in Tani and Sera's work as a footnote for this section. In the context of their book, that quote looks like this:
The Birmingham rebellion absolutely convinced the government that even larger reforms were needed to dampen the fires of revolt. As King said: “The sound of the explosion in Birmingham reached all the way to Washington.” On June 11, 1963 President Kennedy, addressing the Empire, called for Congress to pass the now-historic Civil Rights Act. The failure of the non-violent Civil Rights movement and the spreading breakout of anti-colonial struggle by the New Afrikan masses, forced the imperialist government and the Black petty-bourgeois protest leaders to wake up and admit how much they needed each other, to back each other up. This was the true meaning of the March on Washington, which on August 28, 1963 brought 250,000 persons to Washington as a pacified backdrop for King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
Emphasis mine. Their critique is not purely on nonviolence (it is an element, and it is mostly an adjective); their critique is primarily on the connection of the petty bourgeois Black protest leaders (many of whom, if you connect the dots, would be seen attempting varying levels of government positions) and the imperialist US government. Their critique is largely on how these people were working together to undermine a movement (which involved multiple and diverse strategies).
Once again, in favour of a catchy title (from someone who gets mad at people using catchy slogans like KYLR and claims it's because they're too hard for people to understand), he has managed to argue the wrong point when discussing their ineffectiveness.