Reading: The Failure of Nonviolence
Chapter: The Revolutions of Today By: Peter Gelderloos (2016) related tags: #tFoN
After demonstrating that the historical victories of nonviolence have not been victories from a revolutionary standpoint, that they did not bring an end to oppression and exploitation, they did not fundamentally change social relations, much less create a classless, horizontal society, one often hears the rebuttal, But violence has never worked!
It would benefit your argument to actually shift the perspective, rather than do whatever he's going to do “from an anarchist perspective.” The problem here is that they aren't wrong that those violent revolutions didn't necessarily work, but they're wrong to think it's because of the violence.
The problem is that he's going to do this:
Moving past the moralistic simplemindedness contained in the belief that “violence” is a method, this statement conceals an important fact. Unlike the proponents of nonviolence, we (and here I only mean to speak for anarchists who believe in revolution, though many other anti-authoritarian anticapitalists as well as indigenous people fighting for their freedom from colonialism may identify) have never claimed victory. We have pointed to specific battles won, ground gained, or small steps ahead as sources of inspiration and learning, but we are not trying to offer easy solutions, cheap hopes, or false promises to anyone. If we liberate ourselves in one area, all we gain will be lost again unless the State is defeated on a worldwide scale.
He's not going to look at what the flaws were and to actually create arguments that would highlight what their downfalls were. He just says that all “nonviolent revolutions” didn't work (without analysing what aspects were helpful and which weren't) while saying that their superficial retort (or his strawman) is the rebuttal... and he needs to just acknowledge that none of them have worked but they all have had useful elements and harmful elements.
This failure of analysis (maybe that's what the book should be called) does little to prompt people to recognise the true issues.
Supporters of nonviolence claim Indian independence as a victory for their method, whereas anarchists who support combative methods do not claim the Russian Revolution as a victory. Why should they? Although they participated, along with other currents of struggle, the world they talked about did not come about, and in fact they were slaughtered as other elements took over the revolution. Things clearly changed in Russia, but it was not an anarchist change.
Speaking of a superficial argument.
Tangent: I hate how most of his footnotes are further polemicising when he could actually point to real sources of information, like... his own research. This is a common frustration between both books.
By chalking up the failure of the revolutions in Russia, Spain, China, Cuba, and elsewhere to one simple factor, the revolutionaries’ use of this thing called “violence,” they save themselves the need for any nuanced, thorough historical analysis. Nonviolence, in sum, encourages superficiality, false expectations, dishonesty, and sloppy thinking.
Honestly, Peter, I've been waiting for you to engage in anything resembling the opposite of these characteristics you attribute to nonviolence. I'll probably remain waiting.
Social scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan are the authors of a study that is among the only statistical analyses of the effectiveness of nonviolence. Like many social scientists before them, they use statistics to obscure more complex truths.
Criticisms that can be applied to him, too.
They do not use revolutionary criteria for success, and in their mind the “Color Revolutions” and many other reformist, dead-end, or self-betraying movements were successful.
This may well be true (I haven't read their work), but it's also worth noting that he doesn't provide an understanding of what he thinks “revolutionary criteria” are. He also doesn't engage with why people think these “reformist, dead-end, or self-betraying movements” succeeded; we'll see if he engages in that analysis, which would be an analysis of the self-replication of views that these people were schooled in for decades.
Although they rate campaigns as objectively violent or nonviolent, they do not define violence, and they also uncritically use loaded terms like “the international community”.
Again. More criticisms that can be levelled at him, especially since he won't define terminology that he needs to define.
They credit nonviolence with victory in cases where international peacekeeping forces, i.e. armies, had to be called in to protect peaceful protesters, as in East Timor, and they define victory simply as the achievement of a movement’s goals, as though movements ever had a consensus on their goals.
His critique on so-called “peacekeeping” forces is correct, but I think it bizarre to say that the lack of consensus means that we can't see if a movement's goals were achieved... Especially in light of the fact that he thinks a vague definition of revolution is fine enough for people to work together.
I agree that this isn't whether or not a movement is successful, but he has to pick some shit to remain consistent with. If he can't be consistent on a similar point, then I find it strange when he critiques it.
** !! INTERLUDE !! **
I also think it interesting that he doesn't point out some really easy criticisms of the beginning of Chenoweth and Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. They open with the following:
IN NOVEMBER 1975, Indonesian president Suharto ordered a full-scale invasion of East Timor, claiming that the left-leaning nationalist group that had declared independence for East Timor a month earlier, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin), was a communist threat to the region. Fretilin’s armed wing, the Forças Armadas de Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste (Falintil), led the early resistance to Indonesian occupation forces in the form of conventional and guerrilla warfare. Using weapons left behind by Portuguese troops, Falintil forces waged armed struggle from East Timor’s mountainous jungle region. But Falintil would not win the day. Despite some early successes, by 1980 Indonesia’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign had decimated the armed resistance along with nearly one third of the East Timorese population.
But they do not account for how the violent repression by the Indonesian government was possible due to Jimmy Carter's support (this may be a new article, but we've known for a long time that he supported Indonesia).
Peter had some really easy points that he neglected almost entirely in their narrative of what happened. He loves talking about “Color Revolutions” and whatnot, but he never wants to actually add in the critiques where actual intervention was done in favour of the oppressive regime.
Chenoweth and Stephan's book seems pretty shoddy from this paragraph alone, and it doesn't entice me to read further.
!! END INTERLUDE !!
From footnote 22:
The 1965 “Correspondent-Inference Theory” they cite explains how an observer infers the motivations behind an individual’s choices. They do not mention the highly individualized scope of the study when they trot it out as proof for a geopolitical argument. Ironically, research around the theory demonstrates that observers often overlook or underestimate the situational, socioeconomic, and institutional factors that may constrain a person’s choice.
This is, once more, something where he could provide that research. Just because other people force him, as he complains, to hunt down research... doesn't mean he should do it for others. It's infuriating.
Also, he complains that they “provide no evidence,” and he is also guilty of the same thing for his own audience.
They also make convenient use of non sequiturs...
Things he's also done, such as the entire final chapter of How Nonviolence Protects the State. So he can recognise it in other people's work, but he fails to recognise it in his own?
All the subsequent arguments in the paragraph, which are rhetorical arguments lacking any documentation or data, refer to the topic sentence of the paragraph.
... The irony of him saying this in this fucking book with so few citations makes me want to scream so much.
Anyway, I think it's quite interesting that Peter didn't engage with this simple fact (from Erica Chenoweth's Wikipedia page):
Together with Maria J. Stephan, who was then at the U.S. Department of State, Chenoweth co-wrote the book Why Civil Resistance Works.
I wonder why someone working at the US Department of State would participate in the writing of such a book and what a professor at Harvard (or dean, as of 2023) could provide them in that partnership. None of these critiques are engaged with.
In sum, the four basic criteria are: 1) whether a movement seized space for new social relations; 2) whether it spread an awareness of new ideas (and secondarily if this awareness was passive or whether it inspired others to fight); 3) whether it had elite support; 4) whether it achieved any concrete gains in improving people’s lives.
If these are his criteria for, you know, whether a movement is a success... I don't think we're going to be in for any pleasant surprises. It's also clear that he's going to include as successes things that, in later years, would also find themselves struggling under other pressures, which he couldn't have predicted but... could've still seen as being tenuous in their existence.
One case study Peter uses is the “Oka Crisis” (known to the Mohawk peoples as the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance, so it's a bit weird that he doesn't use the name that Indigenous peoples have given it). He measures it on his above criteria saying:
1) It succeeded in seizing space. 2) It spread ideas of indigenous sovereignty and inspired many others in North America to fight back. 3) It did not have elite support. 4) The golf course expansion on their lands was defeated, and the conflict came to a dignified conclusion for the Mohawk.
I'd disagree on the first point, which is that the Government of Canada purchased it and still holds it, never having made an effort to transfer ownership (unsurprising). People involved still point that things in Canada “have not changed,” even as the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance did bring awareness to the struggles of Indigenous peoples across the continent and elsewhere.
Also, what is considered a “dignified conclusion?” And do all Mohawk peoples agree on this point?
He continues this for other events (over 30) and creates a section that is, quite honestly, tedious to read and unengaging. I suppose boring your audience with a poorly written list that includes varying explanations for different events is a good idea.
And in some cases, he openly admits that he can't even apply his own criteria to the events in question... and then does it anyway, which is confusing. For example, he does this for the First Intifada, where he states:
From a distance, I cannot venture to say whether the struggle opened up more liberatory spaces than the reaction closed down.
And then states in his criteria:
1) The intifada seized and defended spaces.
And while these may not be contradictory (seizing and defending spaces doesn't mean they're inherently liberatory spaces), it is bizarre to include it in this manner (because people are likely to focus more on what he says toward the end of each 'case study').
Anyway, I don't feel the inclusion of these “case studies” does much for him in terms of creating examples. This is largely because by doing it in the way he opted for, he effectively removed ability to actually engage with what was happening and the full history. They're written as blips and nothing more.
On the sixth of December, 2008, Athens police shot and killed a teenager in the largely anarchist neighborhood of Exarchia.
I wonder if Alexandros Grigoropoulos had a name or something, Peter. Hmmm.
There are some cases, like the Libyan Civil War, where he doesn't think it right to use his criteria... and doesn't. But doesn't fully analyse them in any useful capacity. The quantity over quality is so frustrating.
3) Inside China, the movement did not enjoy elite support, but government and media organizations throughout the rest of the world were overwhelmingly favorable to the movement.
In talking about the Hong Kong Democracy Movement, he states this and doesn't even bother to analyse what it meant and why. Then he has the audacity to call other people lazy. This is exhausting.
And while I find that the support of those elites created trouble, it does nothing to engage with their Sinophobia and perpetual development of anti-China propaganda. The HK Democracy Movement (any of them) could've been explicitly anarchist, and the West would've found some way to recuperate and co-opt it as a means to fight against China (and then would've found other ways to put HK in their place, once they got to make use of them).
Subjecting the successes and defeats of social rebellions and revolutionary movements to a rigorous scientific objectivity destroys what is most valid in them and produces only the illusion of knowledge.
Peter loves doing this thing where he, like... Does a thing (excessively) and then is like “See? It's bad!” Which is such an obtuse way to make a point. This is because you're already formulating thoughts and he rug-pulls you, and it's not in a way that makes it beneficial.
What it ends up looking like is him agreeing to a scale of “analysis” and prompting the audience to at least tacitly agree with it... and then doing the “Well, aren't you stupid for thinking I was serious?”
I hate it.
Beyond these four criteria, we have seen that peaceful movements are much more likely to fade away after winning a token gain like electoral reform, whereas combative movements are more likely to continue in the pursuit of deeper, more meaningful social changes; combative movements are more likely to be connected to a critique of capitalism and state authority whereas nonviolent movements hold democratic government, regardless of actual conditions, as the absolute good; movements with the greatest participation tend to display a diversity of tactics, whereas strictly nonviolent movements tend to be smaller or shorter-lived (bringing huge crowds together for a protest, but rarely for more extended action); within the time period under examination, nonviolent movements have never been able to stand up to military force, whereas under certain circumstances, combative movements have been able to defeat the police and military; democratic as well as dictatorial governments sometimes do use lethal force against peaceful protesters, contrary to pacifist claims that governments cannot effectively repress nonviolent movements because public opinion would prevent them.
I feel like both the “nonviolence advocates” and Peter are doing the same thing from opposite directions. There is no evidence of either of them enacting “lasting movements,” and it's also presuming that all movements are permanently required. Some movements have smaller and short-term gains (which are movements that generally operate as part of a larger whole); other movements are going to be longer-lasting for various reasons.
The only thing that I agree with him on is that they should engage in a diversity of tactics, which is the most important aspect of all movements. Peter has even stated that this is the most important element (and thus renders the dichotomy of nonviolence vs violence false), but he perpetually moves back into the rhetoric of that dichotomy (which puts him squarely on the field developed by people who enforce the behaviours that he's speaking against).
Although nonviolent organizers frequently claim that protesters who use combative or illegal tactics ruin “their” protests—clearly demonstrating an ownership issue—anticapitalist protests in which people damage corporate property, fight with police, and interrupt the spectacle of social peace or disrupt whatever elite summit world leaders have planned, are clearly more effective than protests in which people get arrested, carry out civil disobedience, hold witty placards, but do not go on the attack.
These are the points he should be focusing on the most and fails to do so because he refuses to leave their rhetoric behind. The ways that people view ownership of a protest and the impact of those views is a necessary conversation to have, but it gets glossed over in favour of what he things are witty jabs.
But it's also silly because these don't have to be mutually exclusive ways fo doing protests. You can see the combative tactics in the same places as you find the arrests; you can see them in the same places as people carrying “witty placards.” Civil disobedience is a term that should be recuperated by the people engaging in all disobedience, especially as a lot of the combative tactics emerge as responses to quieter forms of that disobedience. Peter should be making those linkages, and he's just... not. This whole thing hinges on utilising a dichotomy that he already said isn't real.
Also, I find it bizarre that he'll use “illegal” as part of his terminology despite the fact that illegal is just as vague and meaningless as he says “violence” is (actually, I'd think it's more vague and meaningless considering how a lot of obviously legal actions get collapsed into being illegal just because someone says they are despite the laws stating otherwise... and the State gets away with it because that's literally the point). How he ignores this aspect here while claiming the other one is truly baffling to me.
Compare the various antiglobalization protests in Washington, DC or New York City between 2000 and 2004—where there were huge crowds but little or no rioting—with the the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. No one even remembers the former anymore, whereas the latter is often referred to (incorrectly, but capitalism tends to have a corrosive effect on memory) as the birth of the antiglobalization movement.
No one remembers the former, says the person who is clearly remembering the former.
Also, a lot of people don't remember the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and have to constantly be reminded of them. There's a reason for this, and it is the erasure of history that all movements endure (and is something that he should also be writing about here, seeing as he thinks one of the criteria for a movement's success is related to the spread of information).
This is especially the case when it is self-evident that those tactics deserve the lion’s share of credit for the victory activist leaders subsequently wish to manage. If it was the union march that was the most decisive, important element in the Seattle protests, the element that inspired the most people across the country and energized a new cycle of struggle, why did union activity only continue to stagnate in the aftermath of the Seattle protests? If it was the nonviolent civil disobedience, was there a boom in such practices after the whopping success outside the Kingdome?
Both of these questions are things that can be handled in historical research, if he even bothered to try. And I don't think either of the answers would involve any conversation on nonviolence vs violence. In fact, it would be a more compelling discussion (especially in light of his claims about Rebecca and David Solnit... and other apparent nonviolence advocates). The questions he poses and then sidesteps in order to, once again, stand on the rhetorical field given to him... are the ones that would actually provide an interesting conversation.
But Peter wants simple, even if simple doesn't serve him or even a broader conversation about anything.
This is not to say that we must be ever grim and serious, nor that our only activity is to smash. Just as we need the full range of tactics, we will express a thousand emotions in our rebellion, from street festivals to funeral marches to riots.
STOP DOING THIS SHIT. Stop arguing from one field and then ending chapters in the DID YOU THINK THE PREVIOUS WAS SERIOUS? WELL, HERE'S WHAT I REALLY THINK at the end. It's so fucking annoying.
How do people take him seriously when he DOES THIS ALL THE TIME? Ugh.