Reading: The Failure of Nonviolence
Chapter: Violence Doesn't Exist By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN
Perhaps the most important argument against nonviolence is that violence as a concept is ambiguous to the point of being incoherent. It is a concept that is prone to manipulation, and its definition is in the hands of the media and the government, so that those who base their struggle on trying to avoid it will forever be taking cues and following the lead of those in power.
This argument feels absurd. It butts up with “abuse doesn't exist.” (Coming back to this part of the book after moving, it strikes me that his explanation for why it doesn't exist would mean that no concept at all exists. According to his logic: abuse doesn't exist, rape doesn't exist, murder doesn't exist, and so on.
Just because a concept is “prone to manipulation” doesn't mean that it doesn't exist; one would say that all concepts are prone to manipulation (and many more are defined at the hands of state actors, like learning), and that is precisely what people (especially right-wingers) are going to do in order to make it more difficult to discuss them. Peter doesn't need to participate in their poor logic to befuddle anarchists, but he definitely chose to do so.
Instead of complaining about how it's “ambiguous,” why not try to force people to... rethink what violence is? Like actually discuss what should be classified as violence (or categories of violence) instead of pretend that it's not real.
Put simply, violence does not exist. It is not a thing. It is a category, a human construct in which we choose to place a wide array of actions, phenomena, situations, and so forth. “Violence” is whatever the person speaking at the moment decides to describe as violent. Usually, this means things they do not like.
This also butts up against arguments about what abuse really is and his inability to discuss abuse (especially the “whatever the person speaking at the moment decides to describe” part). Also, human constructs are everywhere. You can't argue that a thing doesn't exist because humans made it. If this were true, a lot of things wouldn't fucking exist. (Should many of them? Maybe no. But also, all the useful ones wouldn't exist, either.)
“It's a human construct” is a lazy argument, and it only works in certain contexts (e.g., identity-based discussions, “how we've always done” things).
As a result, the use of the category “violence” tends towards hypocrisy. If it is done to me, it is violent. If it is done by me or for my benefit, it is justified, acceptable, or even invisible.
What this means is that we shouldn't bother with the discussion of what is violent and nonviolent. It means that we should be discussing the tactics and their utilisation.
Punching someone in the face is generally a bad thing, but it's acceptable (or should be acceptable) when it's a Nazi attempting public speaking. Shooting people is generally a bad thing, but we see that a lot of people are capable of bending that principle when it comes to healthcare CEOs.
If you can't have this nuanced of a discussion around violence/nonviolence, maybe you shouldn't have written two books on the matter.
In the last ten years, I have organized or participated in dozens of workshops on the topic of nonviolence. Whenever I can, I ask people to define “violence”. The curious thing is that no group of people, whether they number five or a hundred, has ever agreed on the definition. And we’re not talking about a random sample of the population, but relatively homogeneous groups who participate in social movements, who live in the same town and often know each other, or in a few cases a neighborhood association or study group. Excepting the occasional university class, we’re talking about a self-selecting group of people who come out to a talk critical of or in support of nonviolence. And even in that narrow sample, there is no consensus about what violence actually means.
What this tells me is that you haven't actually done anything practically useful in these workshops to prompt people to step away from a useless dichotomy and to walk toward working their way through their own personal thoughts on how strategies are employed, when they're employed, and who they're employed against.
While it's not my favourite video on the subject, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard's (very recent) video about “Why Do Women Get Cancelled More Than Men?” actually handles the nuance of this kind of conversation well. In it, she decides that the more interesting question is who is being asked to be accountable and how.
So why, if Peter so desires a conversation on these things... does he not actually do the work to support that? And then focuses purely on the useless dichotomy?
Sometimes I would try teasing it out by asking folks to stand or raise their hand if they thought a specific action or situation was violent. Then I named cases like, “a protestor punching a cop who is trying to arrest someone,” “breaking the windows of a bank that evicts people from their houses,” “buying and eating factory-farmed meat,” “buying and eating factory-farmed soy,” “a person killing someone trying to rape them,” “carrying a gun in public,” “paying your taxes,” “driving a car,” “the police evicting someone from their house,” “making a cop feel good about their job,” “a predator killing and eating prey,” “a lightning bolt killing someone,” “imprisonment” and so on.
Literally rehashing the final chapter of How Nonviolence Protects the State.
Also highlights his anti-vegan stuff yet again and conflates non-human animals with humans (which notoriously have different views of the world—should I impose my views on killing bugs on my cats? that makes no sense because they also simply don't have the same capabilities or desires as me). He ignores the fact that the majority of soy grown is given to animals who are part of that factory farming, while also not even asking useful questions about agriculture-as-violence (clearcutting, environment erasure, etc). It's kind of bullshit and is additional propaganda nonsense.
He doesn't seem to want to engage in a task of defining violence in any capacity and just wants to leave it as nebulous for his own rationale. But I also wouldn't trust him to do so.
And even if he's not going to define it, why doesn't he ever fight against the inherent dichotomy? If it's truly that tedious, then he can't by into the use of either side (which would mean a complete reframing of his books).
In other words, “violence” is not necessarily a category that is reasonably defined, so much as one that is defined by the reactions of our peers.
So define it. Or stop using the dichotomy.
What about natural violence? What about the harm caused by weather, by predators, by lack of predators, by the simple fact so many people still have not come to terms with, which is that everybody dies? How much does the concept of a “right to life” owe to Christian morality, founded in the idea that our lives belong to God and not to us? What is the relationship between this fear of violence and a fear of the naturalness and inevitability of harm and death? Categorically separating harm that is inevitable in nature and harm caused by humans is inextricable from a separation of humans from their environment, both philosophically and materially. How much suffering is caused by this separation?
Peter, this is bullshit and nonsensical, and you knew it when you wrote it down.
But even more interesting was what happened if I asked people to close their eyes while answering. If they could not see how their peers were responding, there was an even greater divergence. If people had their eyes open, most questions had a clear majority describing the case as “violent” or “not violent”. If their eyes were closed, many more cases were divided clearly down the middle (this divergence was even more evident if I asked people to position themselves on a spectrum rather than giving a simple yes or no). In other words, “violence” is not necessarily a category that is reasonably defined, so much as one that is defined by the reactions of our peers.
In this book, Peter learns that social animals also make decisions and act in ways that (while they individually disagree with) are socially acceptable to avoid ostracisation. What an amazing sociological finding. Truly amazing and novel.
Only people who are involved in radical causes, or who have experienced it first hand, tend to see structural harm as violence. People in a typical college class do not identify paying taxes or buying clothes made in a sweatshop as violent. People who have been foreclosed, or participants in a group that fights foreclosures, will identify an eviction as violent. Animal rights activists will identify eating meat as violent. Small farmer advocates or rainforest advocates will identify soy as violent. Almost no one will identify driving a car as violent, even though in objective terms it is the item on the list that has caused and will cause the most deaths, without a doubt.
I wonder if we could chalk much of this up to something in the world that people experience with near-universal entirety that the State controls. If you grow up in a violent system (schooling) and then live in the state of that system, you aren't likely to recognise it.
It's called indoctrination, and we need far more discussions on how to disabuse people of the notions they have learned rather than being surprised that indoctrinated people believe a thing that's obviously wrong.
Like, I'd love to know how I get people out of the “Well, I experienced this horrible thing, so everyone else should have to experience that horrible thing” attitude that plagues so many older people. But I also need to engage with the fact that they didn't actually engage with those horrible things, like student debt, in the ways that the rest of us are compelled to.
Because Peter focuses on the (self-proclaimed) useless dichotomy, these conversations go ignored.
What about natural violence? What about the harm caused by weather, by predators, by lack of predators, by the simple fact so many people still have not come to terms with, which is that everybody dies? How much does the concept of a “right to life” owe to Christian morality, founded in the idea that our lives belong to God and not to us? What is the relationship between this fear of violence and a fear of the naturalness and inevitability of harm and death? Categorically separating harm that is inevitable in nature and harm caused by humans is inextricable from a separation of humans from their environment, both philosophically and materially. How much suffering is caused by this separation?
My favourite way of creating an argument is to take everything that could be harmful and equate them. Natural violence? The tornado ripping through your street isn't violent (unless the tornado has intent to harm, which would be interesting), but the acts of the people who've designed systems for your safety? They are capable of being violent.
Did you get mauled by a bear? Well, that bear wasn't being intentionally malevolent, and we should look at why that attack happened so that we can prevent future ones. Were you taking selfies with the bear? Well, then you were in its space and are the intruder. Did you steal its cub or otherwise make the cubs feel unsafe? Well... Humans, like all other animals, are capable of learning; we can learn how to decrease our chances of succumbing to other species and invading their space. We are the violent ones in these interactions.
Neither of these fit with Christian morality, but we should learn how Christian morality impacts our views of those (and minimise it).
None of these conversations are things Peter wants to have, and they are useless arguments that equate things that cannot be equal. I love flattened context! (/sarcasm)
Does violence mean causing harm? If we participate in a non-voluntary structure (like the State or the capitalist market) that tortures, kills, or malnourishes millions of people, are we off the hook, just because we would face negative consequences for refusal (to pay taxes, to engage in any market exchange because, let’s face it, even if you buy green, all economic activity fuels overall economic activity)? This would make a joke of nonviolence, if those who fight back against structures of oppression are considered worse than those who accept them passively. And if complicity with violent structures is also to be defined as violent, then how much resistance is required of us so as not to be violent? If we participate in a protest once a year, that after over thirty years has still not succeeded in closing one military school, can we now be considered nonviolent? What if we get arrested for civil disobedience, even if we know that our arrest will probably change nothing?
I'm going to say that this wilful refusal to engage with either: a) defining violence and setting forth a definition that you can then work from as a response to engaging with this argument of violence vs. nonviolence; or,
b) how it's a false dichotomy—something he frequently neglects in his work‑ in order to discuss how it is a shifting goal post that gradually encapsulates more and more and becomes ever pointless as a dichotomy...
... Then you're not doing it justice by asking any of these questions. “Does violence mean causing harm?” What do you mean by 'harm'? Does it have a target? Or does it apply to anyone?
Why does your questioning of violence sound suspiciously like people who question abuse victims while trying to shift goal posts? He's trying to have both arguments (you can't talk about nonviolence without defining violence; you can't define 'not that' while not defining 'that').
Therefore, nonviolence is not an absence, avoidance, or transformation of violence. That would be impossible to certify. Nonviolence is an attempt to resolve, transform, or suppress those things in our society and in our social movements that appear to its practitioners to be violent.
At least they've engaged with having a definition, even if we disagree.
Violence is so vague, so hard to define, it is useless as a strategic category. It would be silly to abolish it as a word, because it can succinctly describe a certain emotional reality. But to use it analytically, to use it as a guiding criterion for our strategies of struggle, is an invitation to confusion.
To use it analytically, you define it. That's it. This sounds like his abuse apologetics.
It can take hours of debating and only sometimes will a group of people agree to a common definition of violence.
A book is not a group, so come up with a definition that you can share and spread and maybe we can actually work on a social definition.
How was the category of “violence” introduced in our strategic debates? I would argue that it was introduced by the very institution that serves as the gatekeeper to people’s perception of violence: the media.
You can argue that, but perhaps you might want to research it rather than make a polemic out of conjecture. This is, after all, a historical question that should be answered as such instead of having someone provide a confident answer with zero evidence.
There are also histories that suggest the media’s role in introducing this category in earlier struggles.
Maybe you could research them and share them here. Perhaps.
Discussing the history of popular movements and elite responses in the city of Barcelona, Chris Ealham reveals the media’s use of “moral panics” to unify the city bourgeoisie against the threat of revolution from below.
... Guess I'm going to spend time book-hunting again. I don't trust Peter's analysis of other texts, especially after he has repeatedly utilised known anti-feminists in his works without even offering a shred of critique for how their anti-feminism shapes their critique (and thus shapes his, without that critique).
!! INTERMISSION !!
Jumped into Ealham's book for a moment to look at the section on moral panics and caught these bits of weirdness:
Utilising a variety of mediums in the growing bourgeois public sphere, including the press, pamphlets and scientific and medical papers, in certain respects the moral panics reflected the burgeoning interest in social life that eventually gave rise to the academic disciplines of sociology and anthropology.
... Did they give rise to those academic disciplines? Weird statement that I'd want to investigate, especially since it provides little evidence of it.
Especially with this bit following:
While the moral panics were not a coherent or unified body of thought—they valued morality over sociology and presented an obscure and fragmented vision of social reality that is of little use to students of either the practices or motivations of ‘outsider’ groups—they are nonetheless an important elite commentary on the evolution of the capitalist city.
Which makes it a bit strange as an idea, at least in that order.
... Not sure I'm fully on board with this book.
!! END INTERMISSION !!
Aside from uncleanliness or hygiene, the principal term used to unleash a moral panic and mobilize elite action was “violence”. Among the elite, then as now, in Barcelona as in the English-speaking world, “violence” was a euphemism for a threat to the ruling order and its illusion of social peace, with which the class struggle, the brutality of patriarchy, and the murderousness of colonialism are hidden. The newspapers did not talk about violence when cops killed strikers, when landlords evicted families, or when poor people died of hunger. They talked about violence when workers went on strike, when tenants stopped paying rent, when street vendors refused to surrender their wares to the cops (who would harass them at the behest of the store owners), and when anarchists carried out sabotage or held unpermitted marches.
Yes, but also...? We don't have to cede concepts to the right all the time, and the things that were considered as violence (not by the state, but by the people) were very clearly discussed in independent media as... being violent.
We have this habit of having a concept and letting the right-wing define it for us, even when that may not have been its original intention. The left never seems to want to fight for the concepts we have; we always cede ground conceptually (and then literally). It's kind of exhausting how often we enable this to happen, and it's also frustrating how often this seems to happen starting with “lefty” elites who are actually infiltrators that support more right-wing causes (or give cover to right-wing causes).
As soon as social movements began to listen to the media, the elite could determine which forms of resistance were acceptable, and which were unacceptable. Every day of the week, the media—which are owned by the same people who profit off the current state of affairs—are telling us what is violent and what is normal. The category of violence belongs to them. By using the same category as our moral compass, we are allowing those in power to guide our struggle. One justification for clinging to the category of violence is that violence is oppressive, therefore we need to highlight it and avoid it.
This may be much of the argument now in some circles, but was it always the case? When was this “as soon as”?
One justification for clinging to the category of violence is that violence is oppressive, therefore we need to highlight it and avoid it.
More argumentation that leads into abuse apologia territory, for the record.
This would only have a chance of being true if we controlled the definition of violence, rather than the powerful. If we choose other criteria for evaluating our resistance, for example whether or not a tactic or method is liberating, whether it makes us more free and opens up space for new social relations, we can avoid the forms of authoritarianism or self-harm the pacifists wish to avoid, without giving the advantage to the media.
So we give up a line of thought because the media and the powerful control it... Which we'd have to do on a lot of other lines of thought. Weird that Peter gives them this one while not ceding others... Or does he? Hm.
Freedom as a concept sides with those who are struggling for theirs, whereas nonviolence as a concept sides with the enforcers of normality and the rulers of the status quo.
... Is this the actual dichotomy? Freedom vs nonviolence?
I do not want to waste any more time by talking about violence. I will try to talk concretely about the actions we need in our struggles. If I have to refer to a body of methods or tactics that are usually excluded by nonviolence, I will talk about “illegal”, “combative”, “conflictive”, or “forceful” actions, as the case may be. But I will try to do so with my eyes set on the necessity for a diversity of tactics.
... Good luck. Anyway, this is what he should've been doing from the jump instead of polemicising on nonviolence and whether violence is real... Though, I'd argue the category of “illegal” isn't exactly helpful because laws are made by the same people who withhold our rights to exist and continue to engage in harm against us.
But “diversity of tactics” should not simply be a replacement term for “violence.” I think the criticism has sometimes been warranted that practitioners of a diversity of tactics have done whatever they wanted without thinking about the consequences for anyone else.
Conveniently not a thing he's addressed previously, and it doesn't seem like he'll be engaging in it more than this superficial statement (based on the fact that the next bit is “but also”).
Generalizing these criticisms to all “violent protesters” would be dishonest and it would also miss the very valuable and nuanced points they bring up.
Nuanced points that even Peter doesn't engage with.
So, I’ll just leave the criticism in the open and reiterate the point that those who support a diversity of tactics are not generally satisfied with our struggle, many are self-critical, and many want to be more inclusive.
The irony of this is that Peter didn't want to address this in the first book, and this is coming in this book because that was a wide criticism he received. Sure, he's addressing it... Except he isn't. It's all superficial and is done with the excuse that he can't actually engage in this discussion because pacificists (of all stripes) would close their ears and refuse to listen.
Which isn't the point of a book, btw.
There are many totally erroneous or backstabbing forms of struggle, and these should be criticized vehemently, not protected behind a polite relativism. But the goal of our criticism should be solidarity, not homogeneity.
What do you classify as backstabbing, Peter? Anyway, this kind of belief is often weaponised against abuse survivors, and he doesn't seem to want to engage with that in any way (including the fact that he routinely cites some of the abusers with survivors who might be making these critiques).