Reading: The Failure of Nonviolence
Chapter: Recuperation is How We Lose By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN
Sometimes we meet in the streets—in protests, occupations, demonstrations, festivals, talks, and debates—and sometimes we are separated by a wide gulf in our practices. What we have in common is that we want to fight against the current state of things, but we don’t even agree on how to phrase this. Some would say we want to liberate ourselves from colonialism, others that we want to abolish oppression, and others that we want to change the world. One person might say we are working for social justice, and others, myself for instance, would counter that justice is a concept of the ruling system.
If Peter would spend time looking into etymology, he might actually find that the concept of “social justice” isn't inherently rooted in the “concept of a ruling system” and that the word justice has multiple uses across the English language. This isn't exactly a complex thing to understand, but it is an intentional misrepresentation that doesn't make any sense at all.
This can be seen in that we can ask if something is “just.” Now, if he wanted to argue that it has relationships to religion (as “just” often had connotations of being “righteous in the eyes of God”), that would benefit him.
This is merely one example of how I hate the way he plays with language without actually engaging with the multitudes of definitions at play, which is really just his lazy rhetoric (and also his refusal to think about things through more than one facet of their existence). It'd be better to point to the genuine ambiguity of terminology like “social justice” and how it can be collapsed into concepts of the judiciary (and thus the state), but we have to simultaneously acknowledge that many people aren't using “justice” to imply a use of legal framework and do mean it as “rights” or referring to something being “righteous” or “equitable.”
Even though revolution is a term with many definitions, it is informed by experiences of the struggle we often share. This vague commonality, the fact that we are on some level struggling together even though our reasons and concepts differ, is why we can criticize one another’s concept of revolution without necessarily agreeing on what revolution means: because concepts inform practices, and practices meet with different results when they are put to use in the streets. When these results are counterproductive, sometimes we refuse to see our own failings and need to hear criticism from a different perspective.
Ironic, given the author's behaviours.
Also, why is it acceptable that there are so many definitions of “revolution” and that we can work together despite not having an actual shared goal? That's exactly how this reads. If one person wants to struggle to give power to the proletariat and I want to struggle to rid the world of states/borders, it doesn't mean that we're sharing the same goal because we both “seek revolution.” Those are two separate revolutions.
Please look at anarchist history related to things like the Kronstadt rebellion (with revolutionary rebels fighting 'revolutionary' Bolsheviks...) or even Makhno and the Black Army. There are far more across time and space, but there are numerous examples of one “revolutionary” group fighting against another... which means that this “vague definition” is actually equally as important as discussing the false dichotomy of nonviolence/violence.
Despite lacking a common definition of revolution, we can criticize the nonviolent vision of revolution for betraying that nameless refusal, that urge for freedom we all have inside of us.
I disagree entirely with this for the above reasons. This is nonsensical if you refuse to hold the discussion you're claiming to want.
Through collective debate, we can dismantle visions of revolution that do not live up to their pretenses of being either liberating or realistic.
As an anarchist, Peter should recognise entirely how often anarchic visions are deemed as “unrealistic” (and often framed as impossible). It doesn't matter that they are often entirely possible (but that people don't want to explore ways to do them out of a refusal to move from certain status quo aspects), but that defining of anarchic visions as “unrealistic” is part of the propaganda against us.
This is ridiculous coming from an apparent anarchist.
The end result of this debate is not a single definition of revolution nor a common, correct practice, since we do not represent a homogenous humanity with the same needs and experiences. The result is a multiplicity of practices that are more intelligent and more effective, and that either complement one another or clearly evince the unbridgeable chasm between themselves.
Again, this sounds okay on the face of it, but that refusal to recognise what different groups deem as “revolutionary” mean that we're likely to be working with people who would be fine with seeing us dead or jailed, and that doesn't bode well. There's a reason the CNT and the varying ways that people engaged with politics didn't work (and still haven't). If he'd read the essays he suggested (including the one that was about Spanish insurrectionaries), he might actually have recognised those issues.
It also seems weird for an apparent anarchist who has lived in Barcelona to, uh... Not recognise those ruptures and how that has created stagnation, a lack of direction, and a lot of sabotage by people holding onto their positions, which have been present there for decades.
It's not that we can't negotiate what these terms mean and what we want to do with each other, but it's nonsensical to behave as if it makes sense to frequently align ourselves with other “revolutionaries” who seek revolutions that still deny liberation to others (which, for example, many Marxist revolutions do).
This is equally as important to acknowledge as our own tactics, and it's weird that Peter downplays that here.
The present criticism of nonviolence, therefore, does not seek to convert its adherents, but to disprove their pretenses, suggest new directions for those interested in a revolution against all forms of domination, and let them make up their own minds.
While insulting them and their intelligence.
Many proponents of nonviolence try to say, more pragmatically, that “violence” is simply less effective, but they have no historical revolutions to show, and therefore no basis for claiming effectiveness. When pressed to answer for the violent revolutions that were successful in overthrowing a particular government, they will almost always claim dissatisfaction with the revolution in question due to its authoritarianism, a quality they often blame on the means used to bring it about.
Why are you relegating the interesting parts of the conversation to sniping in footnotes (this is footnote 15). It's so annoying that he doesn't engage in the parts that actually make the argument interesting and worth having but likes to polemicise on the most tedious aspects.
The government of India continued to mete out humiliation, exploitation, beatings and killings after the victory of the supposedly nonviolent independence movement. In the United States, the desegregated South continued to preserve white supremacy northern style, through gentrification, judicial lynchings, structural discrimination, and other measures. And in recent years, where the “Color Revolutions” have forced out the ruling political parties in Serbia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere, we still find government corruption, police brutality, the forcible exclusion of common people, and widespread apathy.
In this section, he cites himself (read the other nonviolence book for discussion on India and the Civil Rights Movement! ... which were badly handled there, to be honest).
Is he honestly taking “Color Revolutions” seriously, which also implies that a lot of people in those places didn't want to change the governments? And fails to engage with the kinds of propagandisation that were done to support “pro-democracy” movements, which were not only at the hands of Western governments but were part of the 'New Ruling Class'—often members of the old guard, despite being “New”—who wanted to incite that change for themselves? Because when USians use “Color Revolution,” it often is utilised in a way that denies the agency of the people who are there and seeking difference (even if that difference is later recognised for the sham it could be).
Government violence is not the result of violent revolutions, but the product of government itself. Any movement that leaves the State intact will fail in ending the oppressions we are fighting against. A nonviolent movement that replaces one government with another—and this is the greatest victory a nonviolent movement has ever achieved in the history of the world—ends up betraying itself, allowing Power to change its masks without addressing the fundamental problems of society. Nonviolence as an analytical tool has no means of understanding this kind of defeat—the kind that looks like victory.
The problem with this is the insistence on “any nonviolent movement” that replaces the current government with another, when it's... any movement. A Marxist “revolution” that places the proletariat in control of a government is not necessarily better for everyone and still will mask a lack of change.
This is applicable regardless of strategies used, and his refusal to engage with it shows a clear failure to understand the dichotomy his book is premised on as being false (and therefore useless as an analytical tool).
When evaluating the possibility for a revolutionary social change, it is necessary to set our sights on a complete transformation that does away with coercive hierarchies of any kind, including governments, capitalism, and patriarchy.
All hierarchies are inherently coercive. What are you, Peter? Noam Chomsky with his justified hierarchies?
This book is not only for anarchists, but it is written from an anarchist perspective, based on the belief that no matter how people understand their problems, rising up to solve them will necessitate conflict with the State, and those problems will not be solved until the State is destroyed.
I'm not sure how considering there is a considerable lack of anarchic analysis, and he relies heavily on Marxist analysis without even critiquing how that might impact his own anarchist principles or understandings.
For more on counterinsurgency, see Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue; or How Nonviolence Protects the State, p.106.
Footnote 17. He's not inherently wrong in the assertion this footnote is related to, but the fact that he cites himself and cites a known abuse apologist makes it interesting. Do you have no other sources?
Nonviolent activists very rarely talk about recuperation, and some would say this is because they tend to play the role of recuperators.
Not inherently incorrect, but he's also not going to discuss the ways that they may not play into the system but can still be recuperated by it in some capacity. Francisco Ferrer is a fun example, in that he was executed by the state and is now plastered over a lot of Spanish state-connected organisations. He, on his own, may not have been someone who was a recuperator, but the state still saw the ability to do this to him and thus the anti-clerical movement associated with him.
I don't know whether or not he would've been classified as 'nonviolent', but they can do this with anyone. And it's not just the state that can recuperate (or, to put it better, co-opt) these people and symbols. Che Guevarra and Frida Kahlo are two people who've been commercially co-opted, despite their anti-capitalist beliefs.
It's not just nonviolent activists, and this kind of co-optation needs to be explored in detail. Peter, however, doesn't want to see the connections between the two.
Recuperation is the process by which those who rebel and break away from current power structures are induced to rejuvenate those power structures or create more effective ones. They either turn their rebellion into the mere symbol of rebellion, as a way to exorcise whatever anger or discontentment led them to rebel, or they direct it against only a small part of the system, creating a change that allows the State to function more effectively overall. Recuperation is when countercultural movements like punk or the hippies become just new ways of buying and selling, new product lines, a new niche within the diversity of capitalist democracy. Recuperation is when workers’ movements around the world form political parties that enter into government and sell out their base, or when labor unions come to convince workers of the needs of bosses, for example accepting voluntary pay cuts for the good of the company. Liberation movements in India, South Africa, and many other countries were recuperated when they decided to seek common ground with their colonizers and fight for a new government that would carry out all the same economic projects of the old government, reserving themselves the special role of local managers for international finance.
Like, he's not fully wrong here, but he's missing the key component that it's not always they are “induced.” It's also not always them doing that work of fucking over their movements. His inability to see this makes it impossible for him to accurately understand what's happening (but does make it possible for him to play his blame game in polemic form).
NGOs profit constantly off the State’s need to recuperate popular rage. Rich donors and government agencies give away huge amounts of money to pay dissidents to feel like they’re making a real change in the world by running services that constitute a bandage on the gaping wounds of poverty and structural violence, while training those in need to passively accept aid rather than fighting to change their circumstances. Thanks to charity, the powerful can throw some crumbs to those who wait obediently, allowing them to more effectively crush those who rise up to create change directly.
Who is doing this recuperation, Peter? How is it operating? You've got some of the functions of how NGOs (especially charities) operate, but you're missing huge components of what is happening and who is doing what.
You're also missing that the NGOs, despite the name, are part of the State and that many state actors (e.g., former presidents) run their own NGOs to syphon off the same kind of activism and work. They're not “profitting off the State's need to recuperate,” they are actively working with the State to operate in the ways they do.
The Civil Rights movement in the US was recuperated when it was convinced to fight for voter registration instead of any material equality or meaningful freedom. The independence movements in India and South Africa were recuperated when they set their goal on new capitalist states that played by the same rules that had enriched investors during the colonial or apartheid regimes. Popular outrage in Ukraine, Serbia, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, and other countries that experienced the “Color Revolutions” was recuperated when they identified their enemy as one specific political party, and declared victory when a new political party came into office, even though none of the structures that caused their poverty and powerlessness had changed. Nonviolence played a key role in all of these processes of recuperation by enabling dialogue between powerholders and movement leaders, by preventing people from taking power into their own hands, giving them instead an ideology of glorified powerlessness, and by ensuring peacefulness and stability in critical moments of transition from one form of oppression to another.
I honestly think this isn't good enough analysis of how that recuperation occurred. I also think being able to understand the “nonviolent” revolutions through specific examples would make it clearer, and he doesn't do this. Like, a great example would be to check out the Velvet Revolution and how these changes occurred and later influenced Czechoslovakia (and later Czechia and Slovakia).
It's necessary to actually understand how they operate rather than just say that they were “co-opted” or “recuperated.” If you're going to claim that they were color revolutions, it doesn't actually engage with who was driving them or how (but it implies they were bought and paid for by the West, without ever looking at the agency of people living there—every revolution is likely going to see foreign influence, and we have to be mindful of that while not acting like these people have zero political engagement with the world around them).
It's also necessary to engage with people's views on what has happened since those “nonviolent” revolutions. There are a lot of people who have critically reflected on the changes since them, and it is worth engaging with their work to understand it. Does Peter do this? (No. The answer is usually no.)
Anyone who believes in revolution needs to have an analysis of recuperation and a strategy for how to keep their rebellion from being twisted to suit the needs of the State.
Personally, I think more people need to engage with Joy James on this topic because she's rightfully critical of academia and academic capture, even as an academic. She's been putting out this kind of work for years now, and I guarantee there was something she'd written or discussed that he could've referenced.
But it's also worth noting that the state is going to twist things as much as they want, and it's not that we can prevent that. It's that we need to have a strategy to handle it and a response to it. If the state can recuperate the most well-known figures of a movement who would've been working against it in their deaths, the state will co-opt anything. (And if they can't do that, they'll do everything they can against it.)
None of this is a conversation that needs to happen in a nonviolent vs violent strategies discussion.