To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS

I give special attention to his questionable assumption that violence always triumphs over nonviolence. In my judgment, Gelderloos’ arguments are based on pervasive double standards. In addition, he fails to spell out what levels and types of violence he considers acceptable, an omission that undermines his argument.

This was also part of my problem with Gelderloos's book, too, though I won't be “making a case for nonviolence.” This links in with my criticism of: If you're not going to define “violence,” you can't really discuss the use of “nonviolence.” This fails its entire argument because it doesn't want to elaborate on either, meaning the criticisms of “nonviolence” (and “nonviolent” activists) fall flat.

This is also why, even if I don't like the essay, Ward Churchill's work is better than Peter's because it makes the argument clear and doesn't muddle concepts. He rarely engages with “nonviolence” and focuses on “pacificism.” As a result, Churchill doesn't have to delve into a definition of either “violence” or “nonviolence” because we can at least understand what pacifists tend to do (and he also explains this, too).

Through history classes, Hollywood movies and the daily news, most people come to believe two things about violence. One is that groups with a greater capacity for violence — armies, weapons, military industry and ruthlessness — can nearly always win over those with a lesser capacity.

Neglect that Martin doesn't incorporate the 'why' here, it's not exactly false that groups with greater capacity for enforcing violence to maintain themselves (oh, hey, a key understanding that Martin ignored) are better at winning over those with less capacity (for whatever reason).

It's just... true, especially when it comes to the domination of the state over the peoples within its borders (or those outside the borders that it seeks to control). Empire-building also makes this very clear.

But that's a different form of violence, and any person can recognise that violence is not always equally bad. This is why:

This is the assumption behind the question “What would you do to stop the Nazis?” asked rhetorically as a presumed refutation of nonviolence.

Did pacificism (better term than “nonviolence”) stop the Nazis? I'd argue that it couldn't (and I don't even just mean in the context of WWII's military campaigns), especially considering the industrialisiation of torment that the war became known for (both in terms of industrialised genocide—the Holocaust—and in terms of creating systems of surveillance that we've only built upon as decades went by).

Not to mention: How many governments today who “fought” the Nazis (nominally, I'd say) have benefited from taking in former Nazis? How have those places been influenced by former Nazis having power? Hell, how has Germany been influenced by the reinstatement of Nazis who knew how state-craft worked into their own governments?

We can also look at Italy and fascists. Or Europe as a whole and its continual support of people from the far-right (with a number of links to former Nazis of the WWII era).

How has a purely pacificist action stopped them? This is why I cannot be a stalwart defender of that.

Second, most people believe that violence is a tool, usually a neutral tool. If it is used by bad guys — the enemy, terrorists or criminals — violence is bad, but when used by good guys — “our side” — then it is good.

This is a false dichotomy. Violence, as used by oppressors, is always bad. Inherently so. Violence, when used by the oppressed, can be either. Killing your local rapist? Fine. Bashing the gay bashers? Also fine. Context is key.

But all violence by “my side” can't be purely categorised as good. We know that a lot of men who led movements used their position to sexually abuse women and girls. Should I categorise that violence as good? (Would I do it if they raped my enemy? No. Context matters, and this is also something I would say that Peter failed at engaging with cohesively.)

Most supporters of revolutionary warfare accept these assumptions; they believe revolution is a good cause and hope to use armed struggle to achieve it.

This is a failure of understanding. The armed struggle that people discuss is used because they have no other choice; very few people, outside of those who sound like intelligence agency infiltrators and people who've never endured any kind of violence against their person, hope for an armed struggle.

If we could win without the physical fight, most people would prefer that. Will we? It's pragmatism, and Martin is missing this.

Cool that I'm reading a dude who can't read a dude who also can't read. Good grief.

Mohandas Gandhi

Did the reviewer read Peter's book? Because while I disagree with the structure and analysis that Peter engaged in, he already adequately (not brilliantly) dealt with this example. What would be better would be to highlight inaccuracies, which do exist.

However, with regards to Gandhi: In many ways (because he did try to get commutations for sentences, like that of Bhagat Singh), he also recognised that his own movement would not function without the people willing to put up arms to protect it. He also recognised why people may engage in the violent action that he wouldn't do.

But I also still think it's worth noting that he said shit that really should be questioned, like how Jews should've gone willingly and submitted to the Germans during the Holocaust... Who the fuck says that kind of shit? Even if it was supposedly, as I've seen, “in line” with his own views. Even if he was apparently anti-Zionist.

It's worth noting that a lot of people at the time took issue with him saying that, and it seems to only be supporters who will twist themselves into pretzels to say that his apparent “nonviolence” was still fine. (Even his contemporary critics pointed out that it makes no sense to go willingly to the concentration camps because the Nazis viewed them not even as people. How do you deal with that if you choose to do nothing except make yourself an example because what? People will feel bad? I won't blame Jewish people for dying in the camps as many people, especially some Zionist revisionist historians, do. But I also wouldn't tell people to make plans for passive resistance so their deaths have meaning in prompting some people to stop it... somehow but without physical fighting. We'd be better off with them alive.)

Nonviolent action thus encompasses a wide range of activities that go beyond conventional, routine action but do not involve physical violence against humans. When people think about nonviolent protests, rallies and sit-ins commonly come to mind, but there are many other sorts, such as workers refusing to tear down an iconic building, judges resigning in protest over political pressure, roads activists digging up streets and planting crops, and office workers misplacing or destroying files on dissidents targeted for surveillance and arrest.

Protests can work but often do not. They provide support for a wider movement, but they will largely be ineffective due to the strategies that people will opt for. For example, a protest held in a park isn't very helpful because you can opt to walk around it. A protest that doesn't hold space does little to resist.

Who cares about iconic buildings? They should fight to not tear down buildings where people live for the sake of developers. They should be squatting. Are they? Not normally.

As a person who willingly lost a job in protest (as an immigrant, no less), it does nothing. Judges are replaceable. Someone shit will always take the job. Same goes for teachers who protest their work environment and the safety of their students from the institution and other teachers. Not a reason to not fight, but it is a thing to be aware of.

These aren't bad things to do, but they aren't nearly enough on their own. Reading anything by a Panther would tell you that.

... From reading this and also reading comments about The Failure of Nonviolence, I am guessing that book is a fight with Brian Martin. Did Peter ever write a book where he wasn't arguing with a specific person? I guess I'll find out.

Here I concentrate on arguments for pragmatic nonviolence because they allow a more direct comparison with Gelderloos’ case. Principled nonviolence has its own arguments and criteria which are important but given less attention here.

The problem is that Peter doesn't know how to write a book (I'd argue that he can barely form a coherent essay for all the baffling decisions he makes in terms of ensuring readability for his audience—this is not because one can't read them, but it is because he obfuscates his points behind a list of arguments without making those clear until the very end... like we're reading a novel where someone forgot 'foreshadowing' is a useful tool).

So Martin kind of implies here (and elsewhere) that Peter is focusing on “principled nonviolent action” and also doesn't engage with “pragmatic nonviolent action.” (Part of why I think the other Nonviolence book is a fight is because of Martin mentioning Gene Sharp, who I know is criticised in that book.)

The problem is that, after critiquing everything, Peter does default back to “diversity of tactics.” He's not wrong here; we do need a diversity of tactics. Peter's major failing is less with the concept of the book and almost entirely the execution of it (namely that he never puts his actual point at the beginning to make it easier for his examples to flow into it; he starts off with a vitriolic attack, gives examples, and then attempts to make his point... which feels like a constant backtracking).

Nonviolent action involves withdrawal of support from the system. It is a challenge to the legitimacy of standard behaviours or policies.

As a proponent of abolishing school systems, I'd have to ask: What happens to a lot of people across the globe if they refuse to send their children to school? And what support systems do we have to fight that?

Many countries consider that neglect (and even these so-called “activists” do) and will therefore enforce surveillance on those families along with police brutality (in the form of stealing their children).

Numerous people have very good reasons for not sending their children to school (disabled children, Indigenous children, racially marginalised children, immigrant children), but society mandates it. This disregards a person's needs. What will “pragmatic” nonviolent activists (as Martin calls them) do when a person's child is stolen because they refuse to support this state institution?

Nonviolent action usually wins more support than does violence.

Sociologically, I have to ask a question: Why? Where do our views come from?

Opponents, by not being physically harmed, are accorded a certain respect: implicitly, their health and life are respected. Opponents are less fearful and hence do not have to be as ferocious in defence or attack.

Please tell that to the many people who've been shot by cops or ICE for simply trying to de-arrest or protect their neighbours. Your opponents do not become “less fearful,” and this is a massive misunderstanding of both police and military forces.

When violence is used against nonviolent protesters, this is widely seen as unjust, and can lead to a major reaction against the violent attackers, a process Sharp calls political jiu-jitsu.

Tell this to the families of the people who lost their loved ones to that brutality. This feels incredibly heartless to say that they become examples of the injustice. They're gone forever, symbols or not. Is it better that they're dead or left for such? I don't think so.

Nonviolent action allows widespread participation. Women, children, elderly people and people with disabilities can participate in many forms of nonviolent action. This can be a goal in itself.

While I critique Peter because the hyperfocus on violent tactics is masculinist (not the use of violent tactics, but the hyperfocus on them), I think this is an egregious error in understanding all of these demographics.

Not to mention all the kids, elderly, and disabled people who've been gassed and have suffered incredible damage (which even people outside of these demographics can suffer) for simply existing in a protest.

Martin is as bad at arguing a point as Peter is. They were made for each other.

Violence often alienates potential supporters.

Who? Why? This is a sociological question that neither you nor Peter explore, though he does accidentally hit the reasons why it happens without considering anything beyond those near-misses.

Martin does try to explain why, but uh:

A psychological perspective called correspondent inference theory helps explain why. People often infer someone else’s motivations by looking at the consequences of their actions. If the actions lead to people dying, the inference is that activists are motivated to kill — not to liberate, which might be their actual motivation. This theory helps explain why terrorists’ motives are so widely misinterpreted.

I'll have to look into this, but I think people are better at contextualising events than we assume they are. I also think indoctrinisation is a huge chunk of why people feel alienated, which comes with a heaping dose of disinformation (e.g., “cops there to protect you” when you visibly see that that's never true).

While this is from 2008, I think we could probably find similar examples that are older than this. However: Take Luigi Mangione. He had a lot of widespread support for his actions, even if people wouldn't do it themselves. Why is that? Is it because they could empathise with his actions?

I'd also argue that, even among proponents of violent tactics, they create streams of disinformation. Peter himself has done this with KYLR (kill your local rapist). I have my suspicions as to why, but it's notable that a lot of men have a tendency to bristle at this and engage in “but what if you make a mistake and he's not guilty?!” (Notably ignored are two key things. First: 'Your' local rapist doesn't mean that I kill any rapist; it means I have the option to kill my rapist. Second: It is not a requirement that it happens, as men like Peter often represent it; it is a slogan of possibility that implies the victim should hold more power in that decision-making process than those who aren't, which isn't what usually happens.)

Violence targets individuals, but harming individuals is not an effective way to challenge systems of oppression. Killing a politician does not undermine the state, because politicians can be replaced, sometimes with ones who are worse. Furthermore, a person who is a politician has other roles, such as parent, friend and musician. Violence, by not discriminating between roles, destroys much that is good, rather than targeting the damaging roles and building on the beneficial ones.

Full offense, Brian, but I don't care if a genocidaire has created the most brilliant symphony to ever exist. I do not care if he's someone's best friend, and I do not care that he has a family.

Did they give the same consideration to the people they killed? Should we have cared that Hitler was a painter? Do I need to care that Mao adored the ballet? Should I care that Stalin, despite his many atrocities, was a Georgian boy who endured poverty?

At some point, who people are is forfeit when they are presiding over the deaths of a number of people via genocide, pogroms, and legislated murders (or murder-by-policy).

Also, your resigning judges in the prior example of nonviolence's benefits can be replaced with worse people. You can't be like, “Oh, that's a bad idea because politicians can be replaced” and then ignore that it literally happens in the same example you provided elsewhere.

Violence restricts participation. Young, fit men predominate in both armies and armed liberation movements. The secrecy accompanying armed struggle also limits participation.

Hmm. I wonder if there's a word that supports why this is? Is it misogyny? Mayhaps. But we also know that women can and do form revolutionary units (Rojava was well-known for this, though the YPJ was founded in 2013. So he couldn't have known. But also, there are examples of women-led units across history. Reading books isn't hard, especially if you're paid to have 'research' as part of your job.)

Violence as a method clashes with the goal of a nonviolent society.

This assumption is improper. The goal shouldn't be a nonviolent society. Liberation doesn't necessarily mean that we should disengage in responses that might appear violent.

Since the definition Martin gives is “harm against another,” I can only assume that slapping someone is violent. But is there a contextual use to it? Similarly, if we have someone who is routinely attacking people and refuses to stop no matter what we do, what are our options? I have seen zero prefigurative explorations of how to handle these situations, and most people like Martin have a tendency to assume that because they want a nonviolent world... that we're going to have one.

Rather than take up Gelderloos’ claims about nonviolence one by one, it is more illuminating to understand his perspective as stemming from a few key assumptions. At the core of his thinking is the view that nonviolence cannot be successful against violence.

At the risk of having to defend Gelderloos's shitty book, the core of his thinking (which he poorly writes because, again, he cannot make his point clear at the beginning of anything) is that we need a diversity of tactics and that nonviolent action does not work on its own. He largely cribs this from Mumia's work (which is something that Mumia does discuss in We Want Freedom and is something that he openly reflects upon).

It's important to note this because he also states that the state is inherently violent (something most—should be all—anarchists agree upon).

Some of these arguments sound strange. How, for example, can nonviolence be patriarchal when women have been so prominent in nonviolent action whereas armed groups are almost always dominated by men?

Perhaps Martin could try looking at the inherent patriarchy that has existed within movements, rather than acting as if women don't engage in a diverse range of tactics.

While this example makes me want to throw up, it's worth looking at why so many women's groups in all political ideologies keep popping up. Mujeres Libres popped up because the men refused to engage with their needs, so they took it in their own hands; this is one of the most common things to happen, especially within anarchist organising. Misogyny is a key component.

On top of that, a lot of women are pushed to focus on care work, even in movement building. Why? Misogyny.

That's a rather simplistic way of looking at it, but it happens in every organisation and also institution (as a female-perceived person working in a school, the men often forced me to do their woman-related thinking for them—how should we celebrate women's day? do you want flowers? which flowers?—while also trying to mansplain why girls shouldn't do certain things and how I was too emotional or making too big a deal of something). It's fucking misogyny, just like this point.

Which is literally what Peter badly argues because he misogynistically ignores the criticisms leveled at the whole bit about how violence is machismo. The point is that the hyperfocus on violence and the assumption that everything be done through violence is machismo, not that violence is inherently masculine.

Reading is a core skill that everyone involved has neglected.

ON TOP OF THIS, Martin also misses the best pieces that would support himself for this patriarchy chapter: the over-reliance on bell hooks (notoriously anti-violence) and the statement right before a quote he uses which says that this will likely be peaceful and healing work, which he does not state in any other chapter.

political jiu-jitsu

You people sound like fucking dweebs. I hate this phrase.

In guerrilla struggles and other campaigns involving violence, there is also a great amount of nonviolent action, for example during the Vietnam war, the Iraq war and the second Palestinian Intifada. Why should violence be given all the credit when both violence and nonviolence are used?

I think Martin is suffering from the constant problem I had with Gelderloos's work and didn't realise that he was struggling with it at all. Peter annoyingly concedes that this nonviolent actions worked, but they worked because they were supported with armed resistance. Which isn't wrong.

It's just that he waffles on and on and on and buries the fact that he recognises that all the work together made it possible. It's really annoying, and it actually angered me because I sat through so many chapters with similar critiques... only to later go, “Oh, for fuck's sake, couldn't you have said that 10 pages ago?”

Peter is a bad writer. Full stop.

Gelderloos’ second argument against nonviolent campaigns is to say they didn’t really change anything. They weren’t liberation. They didn’t overthrow the state — just the current rulers — and didn’t overthrow capitalism. “The liberation movement in India failed. The British were not forced to quit India. Rather, they chose to transfer the territory from direct colonial rule to neocolonial rule.”

Please stop making me defend this piece of shit, Martin.

He's not wrong here, though. Let's look at the trajectory of India: Did they do anything other than change leadership? While they gained independence, did that shift anything in the region (e.g., political dynamics with nations developed as a result of partition, like Pakistan)? Did that remove them from the capitalist structure? (Kerala might have CPI members in parliament, but uh... how many others? And how did that impact their exploitation ever since?)

India may've gained independence, but did all the people of India gain liberation? Those are two very different concepts, and it's hard to argue that they gained the latter (it's also hard to argue that some people, particularly those of the Dalit, gained the former).

It's an argument that I'd make for where I live now. Did the Velvet Revolution actually do anything substantial? Or are people here still forced to endure capitalist exploitation, just without the Communist Party and the Soviets running things?

He very clearly doesn't state that the independence movement failed because India became independent, but liberation isn't the same thing. And I'd argue that most people on this planet are not liberated.

He refers approvingly to the Black Panthers in the US in the 1960s and 1970s and the anarchist revolutionaries in the Ukraine in the early 1920s, among others, none of which overthrew capitalism or the state.

It's less because they succeeded (since they didn't) and more because it was a stated goal. Find me a movement where that's a common feature, particularly among “principled nonviolent activists” or “pragmatic nonviolent activists.” It often isn't because much of their work will not upset the status quo or will only shift it vaguely.

Even within the anarchist movement, there's a reason that Emma Goldman is widely read and well-known while Lucy Parsons isn't. And it's because the former was not seen as a threat by the state, while the latter was (with her library having been burnt down and then the FBI taking what of her library wasn't destroyed after her death, including her own work). It's worth considering why that is.

If a campaign fails, Gelderloos attributes this to the use of nonviolent action and insufficient use of violence. In the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China, “the students who had put themselves in control of the movement refused to arm themselves …” (pp. 122-123). The double standard here is that Gelderloos does not mention the failure of armed movements in Bolivia, Latvia, Malaya, Philippines, Uruguay and many other countries.

If anything, I'd say you're both guilty of this. Peter fails to really read much about Tiananmen (and also Kent State)... But both of you fail to actually engage in the why of why something failed and the resulting actions afterwards.

Which is annoying.

In referring to recent campaigns that unseated governments in Serbia, Ukraine and other countries, Gelderloos says they were “orchestrated” by the US government (p. 100). He doesn’t give any evidence for this claim, aside from citing one newspaper story.

This was also a problem I had. It veered way too close to the color revolution losers. (And even if the US provided funding to some groups, they're not providing funding to all participants; this denies the agency of an overwhelming amount of people, and I find it grotesque that Peter even tried it.)

Gelderloos addresses none of the complexities of these situations, simply assuming that because the US government was involved, therefore it orchestrated the whole operation.

Yep. This is a very, very valid critique continuing from the above.

In one of many examples, in 1944 the dictator of El Salvador — a US client state — was toppled in a popular nonviolent campaign.

After, ironically, killing a US citizen at a protest and then being questioned about it by the ambassador who also said that Maximiliano Hernández Martínez should resign.

And since Martin acknowledges that El Salvador was a “client state” of the US, I wonder what kind of pressure that led to. Also, El Salvador didn't escape the military dictatorship because... the provisional president Andrés Ignacio Menéndez was later overthrown in a coup by Osmín Aguirre y Salinas in the same year (October 1944). And he was recognised as a proto-fascist.

He resigned in January 1945, scheduling an election (which he rigged), and was followed by Salvador Castaneda Castro and basically continued the projects that Martínez started. (He also loosened restrictions on labour unions only for the Ministry of Labor that he re-established to decide that strikes were illegal, which is cool.)

Hmm. What a weird example to choose! I would say this points to Martin doing the same double-standard as Peter.

Gelderloos claims that the nonviolent strategy of generalised disobedience cannot bring power to the people because the state still controls key resources and the loyalty of the military and police: “in recent decades, the only significant military defections have occurred when the military faced violent resistance and the government seemed to be in its death throes.” (p. 99). To the contrary, there are quite a few cases in which military defections have occurred without there being much violent resistance, including the Philippines in 1986, various Eastern European countries in 1989, the Soviet Union in 1991, and Serbia in 2000. Gelderloos is right that military defections are essential for revolution,20 but defections can occur as a result of nonviolent methods such as fraternisation.

Question: How many of those military-included movements have maintained liberation for the people and didn't fall into their own personal goals of leadership? Even using the above example of the 1944 toppling in El Salvador (where the former military attempted a Palm Sunday coup and failed prior to the student activists' protests), what happened to the military provincial leader who kind of wanted to do things better for people?

Ah. A coup a mere five months later.

But also, how many times do military-led coups actually succeed at liberating people rather than recapturing control but for someone else? It's a valid question to consider, and I don't see that happening here.

It also neglects the interactions of the military with the mafia to retain control, which at least one of those examples (Eastern Europe) struggled with and continues to struggle with.

In a forthcoming paper, Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth

... Yep, I'm more convinced this article is what he fights with in The Failure of Nonviolence.

But just because violence might be justified does not mean it is the best option. If someone at a party swears at you, you might be legally and morally justified in suing for slander, but it is seldom a wise idea to do so: it is likely to be very costly and could harm your reputation even more.

Punching them can also be an option. Suing them would be ludicrous in this instance, but I think the immediate action of swiftly hitting them in the jaw would be beneficial.

Of course, it depends on why they are swearing at me. If they're being a misogynistic prick, I think it's fine. If I were (for some reason) treating them like shit, then it'd be out of line. Too many people mistake it for always being out of line (and also criminalise it as assault, adding further violence to a situation—we don't need the cops in that situation, I guarantee you).

This is also a weird example. Swearing as violence without any context? Maybe we should have everyone involved start working on defining some terminology.

Historically, many pacifists do not engage in nonviolent action and many nonviolent activists are not pacifists.

Lmao, half of my critique. (But also, which pacifists are out here engaging in violent action? Is it the definition of 'violent' that's broken or is this true? It's weird that people whose primary attribute is to be against violence aren't engaging in “nonviolent action.” Peter made this point about terminology and failed to address it at all, so... Someone should and did not.)

Gelderloos often uses sources in a selective, misleading fashion.

Things I have also said, especially because of his use of bell hooks.

Gelderloos explicitly rejects presenting a definition of violence: “… one of the critical arguments of this book is that violence cannot be clearly defined.” (p. 3). He says that many activists consider everyday activities, such as “buying clothes made in a sweatshop”, to be violent and says the concept of violence isn’t useful when “no two people can really agree on what it means” (pp. 124-125). However, even though activists may have different conceptions about terms, it’s still possible for analysts to agree on meanings.

Also conflating weird shit like a wolf killing a dear, which forces us to put human concepts onto two non-human animals.

The question arises: are there any methods that Gelderloos rejects? Does he reject use of machine guns? Does he reject missiles? Does he reject biological weapons? Does he reject nuclear weapons? Does he reject torture?

Valid critique. (But if you know Gelderloos, he rejects a lot of the anti-abuser violence enacted by victims against their abusers in favour of ~healing~. So yes, there are things he avoids; ironically, they are ones you'd think he'd logically support, but no.

One of Gelderloos’ chief complaints is that nonviolent activists are unwilling to support activists who use violence. Is Gelderloos willing to support any activist, even ones who use land mines and chemical weapons? If not, then his strictures against nonviolent activists, who draw a line at a different place, reflect a double standard in his argument.

This feels like a weird strawman to be building because, while I agree that Peter needed to outline his own boundaries? Watching a lot of “pragmatic” and “principled” nonviolent activists let people rot in jail for using weapons in a nonviolent way (e.g., Prairieland—where one person shot at the ground near a cop, intentionally so that someone else could get away from the cop shooting them).

If the presence of a gun bothers you, even while people aren't being violent, I have to question your ethics. Maybe Martin would agree with me that these people should be supported, but a lot of people have ignored these people for the sheer existence of a gun (and the lies the cops told—like how the cop was somehow injured in his back by the person who shot at him... despite facing that person).

Again, Prairieland is too recent. But it's too common to watch people let others get hanged for presumed violence they refuse to interrogate in their own minds. See the historical example of the Haymarket anarchists.

Prominent anarchist Murray Bookchin

... He had relocated himself to a libertarian socialist/minarchist view in the 1980s, which is typically not aligned with anarchism. (It still supports and enables hierarchies, which is contradictory with anarchism.)

If you wanted a widely accepted anarchist, Graeber would've been the go-to because he's yet another example of someone Peter misrepresented in this text (and his whole thing around Occupy was a focus on primarily engaging in a Gandhian Nonviolence pact). This would've been known in 2008.

Another rationale arises out of the anarchist belief in prefiguration, namely that means should reflect ends. If the goal is a world without organised violence, this means avoiding violence in the struggle for such a world.

Wild assumption. There is a vast difference between “a world that avoids violence” and a “nonviolent world.” One of these two acknowledges that violence may happen to us and, while we prefer to not use it, we may have to in order to halt certain behaviours. It is not a go-to solution, but it is an option that must be weighed heavily.

Ironically, anti-abuse activists have spent the most time considering what constitutes violence and how it can be used (if at all). Weird that no men seem to engage with these unless they can weaponise them in some way.

Gelderloos gives no hint of debates over violence and revolution within the anarchist movement: for him, anarchism seems to mean his own particular set of beliefs. Nor does he acknowledge the anarchist sensibility that is widespread in nonviolent movements.

This is a critique I leveled at him, too. He rarely engages with anarchists (and usually only when he disagrees with them); he doesn't synthesise any of the sources. Instead, his work primarily rests upon the shoulders of Marxists.

Which is something more people should point out. Not because we can't learn from Marxists, but it definitely highlights a failure to engage with the community he's critiquing (even “as an anarchist”). It's not like the work wasn't there when he first wrote the book (or when he had it republished or updated), but he simply wasn't curious to engage.

Chapter: The Alternative: Possibilities for the Revolution Author: Peter Gelderloos Published: 2007 / South End Press personal tags: #HNvPtS

I have made a number of forceful, even vitriolic, arguments against nonviolent activism, and I have not diluted these arguments.

I'm not sure vitriolic arguments are helpful, especially when those arguments are really coming across as “I hate this specific guy, so I wrote this book.” Spruce Houser seems like someone I wouldn't want to spend time with or organise with, but he also doesn't seem like a good reason to write a book where you conflate a lot of shit because your arguments often apply to yourself.

in order to defenestrate the stranglehold pacifism

I'm going to be nitpicky here, but this metaphor sucks shit. You cannot defenestrate a stranglehold. You can block it, you can fight it, you can defenestrate the stranglers, but this is just bad writing. It annoys me.

Would-be revolutionaries need to realize that pacifism is so vapid and counterproductive that an alternative is imperative.

Except you didn't say this because you spent so much time conflating pacificism with nonviolence, and you also kept complaining that “violence” is a nonsensical category (which also means that “nonviolence” is a nonsensical category). You should've either cribbed from Churchill harder and stuck with fucking “pacificism” or actually made proper definitions (instead of waffling about how it's not possible).

My argument is not that all pacifists are apologists and sellouts without redeeming merit or a place in a revolutionary movement. Many pacifists are well-meaning would-be revolutionaries who have simply been unable to move past their cultural conditioning, which programs them instinctively to react to assaults on, the Godlike state as the highest crime and treason.

I'm sure these pacificists would love to read a vitriolic book rather than one that actually and usefully explores these issues. I wonder why this polemic hasn't really changed that many minds (other than the ones he's told me it has).

Now that I have demonstrated the need to replace a nonviolent revolutionary practice...

You haven't because you missed some vital steps.

But rather than say, for instance, “See, the violent Russian Revolution led to another violent and authoritarian government, therefore violence is infectious,” it would help to point out that all the Leninists wanted was an authoritarian, red-painted capitalist state with them at the head, and in their own terms they were quite successful.

File this under: Things that could've been said ages ago to make a more coherent text that addresses critiques rather than waffling for ages.

Also file this under: This is an interesting thing to include in a chapter about “alternative possibilities.” Did you forget you were done doing that?

The common element of all of these authoritarian revolutions is their hierarchical form of organization. The authoritarianism of the USSR or People’s Republic of China was not a mystical carryover from the violence they used, but a direct function of the hierarchies to which they were always wed.

Hey, so... I wonder why it's now that you're talking about this when it could've been synthesised earlier in the text. You know... When you brought up the ineffective strategies fighting against them?

This book is so badly written, and it has gone through two more-or-less proper publishers (aside from Peter's self-publishing outfit). Anarchist material doesn't need to be published ASAP all the time. Books can be read and critiqued and reorganised before you go to print.

Some people have friends who read things for them, too. Someone else I know tosses a post up so that he can edit it as people send him messages or leave comments or whatever. This book is old and doesn't seem to have ever gotten either treatment.

A good article containing thoughts on an anarchist revolutionary process similar to the one I have phrased is Wolfi Landstreicher’s “Autonomous Self-Organization and Anarchist Intervention.”

Part of footnote 230. Can we stop referencing patriarchal anarchists who are abuse apologists (if not abusers)? Hmm.

In all likelihood, though, an anti-authoritarian liberation movement would need to emphasize building an autonomous culture that can resist the mind control of the corporate media and a foundation of social centers, free schools, free clinics, community agriculture, and other structures that can support communities in resistance.

Weird how schools are always in this when they aren't necessarily needed and could be replaced by any other concept at all. Anarchists never seem to deviate from these things that too many of them see as good.

Readers may notice that some of the major initial requirements of a liberation movement do not include “violent” actions. I hope that by now we can abandon the dichotomy between violence and nonviolence altogether.

Which you could've done more about earlier.

I hope that during this process we can build a culture of respect for our enemies (a number of non-Western cultures have shown it is indeed possible to respect a person or animal you must kill), which will help to prevent purges or a new authority when the present state has been defeated.

... What do you mean by “respect?” (And also, there is a vast difference between killing an oppressor and killing a bear. The two are not viewed the same in pretty much any culture, and it's because of the human qualities that we imbue both with. A bear is not my enemy, though it can be dangerous. A human who is dangerous can be my enemy, depending on what sort of danger they bring.)

For example, it could be seen as acceptable to kill a more powerful enemy (for instance, someone who must be targeted clandestinely for fear of state reprisal), unfavorable to kill someone who is equally powerful (such that it would only be seen as justified by one’s peers in pitched circumstances and self-defense), and downright immoral and scornful to kill someone weaker (for instance, someone already defeated).

I have a lot of questions on this because it sounds like it comes from somewhere... very weird.

... At least I'm done reading this awful book. I hope.

To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS

Around the world, the events in Beijing on June 3-4, 1989, have been commemorated with solemn speeches and ceremonies, each crafted to reflect the glory of Beijing's courageous citizenry onto the current projects of the official world in a light filtered by its present interests.

Yep. But also I find it amusing that, for younger generations who participate in gaming, they are more likely to learn about this event because of how the Chinese government mandates that game companies must handle it, which results in them often disabling all sorts of features that might enable players to even interact with each other (lest they mention Tiananmen's anniversary).

Ironically, in trying to force people to forget, China forces them to remember what they're forgetting in the first place.

Human Rights activists, trade-unionists and spokespersons for the Chinese democracy movement deplore the massacre of non-violent protestors and the continued repression of political, labor and religious oppositionists, without calling for the liquidation of the bureaucratic class in whose interest this ongoing reaction is structurally embedded. When the citizens of Beijing are mentioned, it is largely as victims, not as actors. Those whose voices should be loudest of all are still stifled.

This has always been one of my frustrations with human rights activists and trade unionists: they never want to go far enough. Sometimes I don't think it's malicious, but other times I find it hard to believe that they can seriously think that the world we live in now won't have to change that much for any of their goals to be realised.

So it feels like they don't want to give up their positions, even if the world we could create would be better.

They also established linkages and routes for information, underground libraries, and escape routes for fugitives. Continuity in the development of this current to the present may be seen in the contemporaneous Beijing group “North Star,” which included Chen Zeming, one of the “black hands” (i.e., hidden organizers) later alleged to be behind the Beijing events of 1989.

For my own notes to come back to.

While some of this feels overwhelmingly lacking... I do know that I need to look more deeply into events like this, just as I do others. I'm going to use this source as it stands, but I want to acknowledge my own ignorance regarding aspects of these events.

Based on this, I feel like Peter's synthesis of it with his own work is extremely superficial. He takes this part:

Many of the shortcomings of the movement lay in its origins in a student milieu still burdened with the habits of the old Chinese scholar-gentry and its neo-Confucian role as moral repository and advisor to the imperial court. To preserve the purity of ''their'' movement, students sought initially, as they had during the1986-1987 movement, to limit contacts with and participation by the workers and other outsiders. In fact their movement only really began to resonate throughout Chinese society and raise the actual question of power when the massed citizenry of Beijing, pointedly among them the workers of Capital Steel, joined them first in support of their hunger strike and then in defiance of martial law. Even so, when the organizers of the Workers' Autonomous Federation wanted to set up a tent in Tiananmen Square, they were confined to the outer perimeter. The authorities who suppressed the occupation of the square were not so blinkered as to their importance; the WAF tent was one of the first at which they directed their assault. The students' misdirected desire to appear as a loyal opposition to the regime (and their equally absurd thinking that this attitude would protect them) appears repeatedly as the greatest limitation of a movement which had already broken the bonds of loyalty in the eyes of China's masters, and was going to be made to pay for it. The student's 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. There were fewer who shared this view in the working-class suburbs, where large numbers were arrested for possession of weapons and ammunition: proof that there, the requisite conditions for the negation of bureaucratic capitalism were better understood.

And he focuses on the aspect of how the students misunderstood the nature of legitimacy under bureaucratic power, but he doesn't synthesise it with anything and just... drops it as a piece of information.

Personally, my first inclination in why a movement fails tends to be around the people who want to maintain control over something (be it political control or even narrative control), and that was something that was made clear in this paragraph on its own (the students didn't want to engage with people they treated as 'beneath' them, despite the fact that those ordinary people are also likely tired of the same shit as they were).

This is further made clear by this part:

In the three weeks during which the movement grew and developed, it was not always possible for institutions of self-rule to realize directly democratic forms, the more so as China was not a society in which the ideas of directly democratic, anti-statist, anti-capitalist social organization could be freely or legally disseminated. Partly as a consequence, there was a lack of clarity regarding the nature of organizational forms and a fear by what was already becoming the elite of the student movement, of the consequences to their power arising from the adoption of democratic procedures. When Liu Xiaobo, “the liumang ('hooligan') intellectual”, proposed elections to the student leaders, the response of one of them, Wuer Kaixi, was ''what if we don't win?” On the other hand, however prominent the movement's informal leadership became, it always remained subject to the sovereign base. Again, in Wuer Kaixi's words: “Anyone in charge had to support the Tiananmen occupation. Were you to ask the students to leave, they would get rid of you.” The disproportional importance of personalities, a corresponding underdevelopment of ideas of self-organization and the lack of a general critique of bureaucratic capitalism (as of world capitalism in general) were signs of the movement's relative immaturity. How really insignificant these “leading personalities” turned out to be, once detached from the movement of which they had been a part, became only too clear later in exile. Today, the continuing preoccupation with personalities by the Chinese opposition in exile is the sign of a milieu still without a substantive oppositional politics. The feeble philosophical and psychological resistance to religion afforded by many of these same refugees serves as well as another unedifying display of their soft critical cores. The greatness of the 1989 Protest Movement was not in its leaders, but in its rank-and-file, ordinary citizens, workers and students.

You can see that, while some people may have wanted to create a more inclusive structure (even if by voting, Liu Xiaobo's suggestion allows more people to participate in the decision-making here), others were against it because they saw themselves as losing control (exemplified by Wuer Kaixi in this passage). This highlights a problem in perspective (two perspectives that very much cannot work together).

Before the issue of nonviolence (whatever is meant by that for Peter with regards to 1989), they were already having issues regarding goals. Nonviolent or violent strategies wouldn't have changed this because they were clearly not all on the same page, with all wanting to change society away from the Maoist politics they had endured prior but having incredibly different ideas on what that would mean (both in the interim and in the long-term).

Not taking that into account doesn't... help.

To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS

I took off over a fence and through a park with a comrade I recognized from the van. We climbed way up a tree to hide from the helicopters and snatch squads. She had a think Baltimore accent. We ended up smooching until night fell and we crept down to go our separate ways, but we kept in touch. She kept organizing and became a teacher back in her city.

It's hard to read this and not feel like it mirrors a lot of “anarchist fiction.” Regardless of veracity, it's hard not to roll my eyes so hard a migraine occurs.

There was a bit of a lull in Harrisonburg. Our first infoshop had been evicted. Food Not Bombs was still going, this was before the vegan university students in the group got mad that the houseless folks who had started helping cook and set up—people the students never spoke with—were donating ingredients that weren’t up to their dietary codes. Our Anarchist Black Cross chapter was in a nascent form, just writing to some long term prisoners, and we hadn’t started Cop Watch or the next social center yet.

I was trying to find this in the foonotes of the fucking book as I was reading it because I got confused about where I saw it, and I knew it existed... but I forgot it was here. The constant undercurrent of anti-veganism is so infuriatingly regressive. And I'm saying this as someone who isn't a vegan but eats a low quantity of meat and animal products.

The Convergence, hosted at a university building an anarchist enrolled at OU had been able to reserve, was intimidating and inspiring. The keynote speaker was Howard Ehrlich, an older comrade associated with the Social Anarchism journal.

(They were really kind to me when I reached out to them with some early writing… but then they ghosted me after they cancelled the publication of a review I wrote for a Chris Ealham book, Anarchism and the City. My review was overwhelmingly positive, since it’s a good book, but I also had a strong criticism where Ealham fudged the actual history and projected a very modern and very silly debate—mass organization vs. insurrection—onto the Iberian anarchist movement of the ‘20 and ‘30s. In the actual history, those two strategies worked hand in hand. Anyway, Ealham and some of his grad students threw a hissyfit, pressured the editors who I guess were also academics, maligned me online for good measure, and that was the end of my relationship with Social Anarchism.)

Worth recognising that one of his essays exists within the best of book for Social Anarchism. So... not sure how true it is that this was “the end” of his relationship with anyone there.

It was so frustrating, I had done so much research to prepare, and I barely got to use any of it! The other two panelists weren’t interested in solidarity or sincere strategic debate at all! They just wanted an easy chance to dunk on some dupe, reinflate their feeble dogma, and pad their egos.

This whole thing explains why it is that he had such a beef with these people, and it came through loud and clear in his book.

I had grouped my research and arguments into six different themes.

Two of which are the same thing (Ineffective and Tactically/Strategically Inferior), one of which is full of nonsensical straw people (Deluded—this was updated to 'Delusional'), one that explains why we probably can't use violence (Patriarchal), one that should've probably been the first chapter but was the third (Statist), and another that kind of misconstrued the history it utilised (Racist).

Granted, all of them kind of misconstrued the history it used, but that one was particularly egregious.

But the more I wrote, the more I wanted to develop the arguments and flesh out the silenced histories.

While silencing those histories, failing to engage with basic tenets of certain ideas (particularly in the Patriarchal chapter), and also misrepresenting a lot of those histories despite what the person he's referencing states.

So what to do with a book manuscript? Well, anarchists self-publish all the time, don’t they?

Ask a friend to edit it before you publish it would've been my go-to. But at least this explains why it's so repetitive. South End Press should've edited it better (my favourite error is a chapter title reading “Stategically”, which should've been caught on even a quick glance over the table of contents).

And then it was republished by Detrtius Books with some weird fucking edits that make it less coherent and more bizarre, including an entire reorganisation of at least one of the chapters.

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.)

— from page 38 to the end To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS

The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state—that would be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot.

This really is just what happens all the time. Perhaps one should try to crowbar separate the concepts of 'state' and 'society', forcing people to argue from the positions they very much are willing to ignore.

So we’re back to the original problem. There is assumed to be an absolute rupture between the world we live in, and the world inhabited by anyone who might be characterized as “primitive,” “tribal,” or even as “peasants.” Anthropologists are not to blame here: we have been trying for decades now to convince the public that there’s no such thing as a “primitive,” that “simple societies” are not really all that simple, that no one ever existed in timeless isolation, that it makes no sense to speak of some social systems as more or less evolved; but so far, we’ve made very little headway.

I think what this highlights is that people refuse to give up their racism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism. This should also be particularly enlightening when we work with non-anarchist people (who are otherwise leftists). If they are unwilling to engage with things that are “primitive” or “tribal” or “like peasants,” then they aren't our allies.

I disagree that anthropologists aren't to blame here. This neglects the history of the field and its persistent weaponisation within the state. Many anthropologists are, indeed, responsible for this simply based on how they present their information and engaged with the people they were researching; they are also responsible for working with the state and giving their research to people who could use it to further oppress the peoples they researched. That cannot be ignored. (It's also weird to see Graeber say this somewhere when he was a student of Marshall Sahlins and also worked with him; Sahlins notoriously was vocal about his disdain for the NAS doing research for the military.)

This kind of rhetoric is only possible because the commonplace definition of revolution has always implied something in the nature of a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no longer apply. It is this which makes it possible to, say, claim that the modern world is derived from two “revolutions”: the French revolution and the Industrial revolution, despite the fact that the two had almost nothing else in common other than seeming to mark a break with all that came before. One odd result is that, as Ellen Meskins Wood has noted, we are in the habit of discussing what we call “modernity” as if it involved a combination of English laissez faire economics, and French Republican government, despite the fact that the two never really occurred together: the industrial revolution happened under a bizarre, antiquated, still largely medieval English constitution, and nineteenth-century France was anything but laissez faire.

This makes me wonder what the etymological reasoning is for 'revolution' in things like the Industrial revolution. Is it that one of the two would benefit from better terminology?

Also keeping this to look into Ellen Meskins Wood.

If there is one logical error underlying all this, it rests on imagining that social or even technological change takes the same form of what Thomas Kuhn has called “the structure of scientific revolutions.” Kuhn is referring to events like the shift from a Newtonian to Einsteinian universe: suddenly there is an intellectual breakthrough and afterwards, the universe is different. Applied to anything other than scientific revolutions, it implies that the world really was equivalent to our knowledge of it, and the moment we change the principles on which our knowledge is based, reality changes too. This is just the sort of basic intellectual mistake developmental psychologists say we’re supposed to get over in early childhood, but it seems few of us really do.

Putting this here to come back to it, too. Both for the developmental psychology aspect and also the rest.

I do not think we’re losing much if we admit that humans never really lived in the garden of Eden. Knocking the walls down can allow us to see this history as a resource to us in much more interesting ways. Because it works both ways. Not only do we, in industrial societies, still have kinship (and cosmologies); other societies have social movements and revolutions. Which means, among other things, that radical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of revolutionary history.

I like this, and I especially like that he doesn't discount anarchists from benefitting and not doing enough to knock down the walls that enable this.

Peter Lamborn Wilson has produced the brightest of these, in a series of essays which include reflections, on, among other things, the collapse of the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures through much of eastern North America.

Couldn't restrain himself to just one citation of this creep, I see.

Paul Lafargue, Marx’s West Indian son-in-law and author of The Right to Be Lazy

Reminder for myself again.

In fact the threat of that man with the stick permeates our world at every moment; most of us have given up even thinking of crossing the innumerable lines and barriers he creates, just so we don’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. If you see a hungry woman standing several yards away from a huge pile of food—a daily occurrence for most of us who live in cities—there is a reason you can’t just take some and give it to her. A man with a big stick will come and very likely hit you. Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted in reminding us of him. Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.

This is actually a good point and also something I want to come back to. Much like the rest of the section.

Such a theoretical emphasis opens the way to a theory of the relation of power not with knowledge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Because violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance. If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracies do not create stupidity. They are ways of managing situations that are already inherently stupid because they are, ultimately, based on the arbitrariness of force.

Ultimately this should lead to a theory of the relation of violence and the imagination. Why is it that the folks on the bottom (the victims of structural violence) are always imagining what it must be like for the folks on top (the beneficiaries of structural violence), but it almost never occurs to the folks on top to wonder what it might be like to be on the bottom? Human beings being the sympathetic creatures that they are this tends to become one of the main bastions of any system of inequality—the downtrodden actually care about their oppressors, at least, far more than their oppressors care about them—but this seems itself to be an effect of structural violence.

A lot of this might actually give me a direction to go with the project I want to undertake on why people will believe things that are just wrong, especially because the literature available (cognitive dissonance, in-group/out-group, indoctrination from childhood) don't seem to have answers to other questions I have. Why is it that people won't unlearn something? Why is it that it's possible for some to unlearn but others just won't?

After all, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that a considerable chunk of the hours worked in America are only actually necessary to compensate for problems created by the fact that Americans work too much. (Consider here such jobs as all-night pizza deliveryman or dog-washer, or those women who run nighttime day care centers for the children of women who have to work nights providing child care for businesswomen...not to mention the endless hours spent by specialists cleaning up the emotional and physical damage caused by overwork, the injuries, suicides, divorces, murderous rampages, producing the drugs to pacify the children...)

So what jobs are really necessary?

Here we can see the beginnings of Bullshit Jobs, but it also has one of the problems that I routinely recognise. There's a lot of inherent ableism in Graeber's own work, whether he acknowledged it or not. This also plays into his “what jobs are necessary.”

All-night services are good for people who do not exist on the 24-hour time, like people with N24. There are people for whom our schedules simply do not match what the social expectation is, like people with DSPD.

The assumption that the world should work on one standard time is an inherently ableist structure, and it's also worth noting that most (not all) people with sleep disorders that impact our waking times wouldn't be as impacted if our world accommodated them with having 24-hour availability of many things (and you know who could run those things? people who are awake at that time).

Part of what keeps people with these sleep disorders from getting rest is the rest of the world.

Some people need help with washing their dogs (do all dogwashers hate their job? I'd rather be a dogwasher than a tutor, tbh).

Childcare is a thing we all need to think about and in better ways, but even Graeber ignores this and his points barely explore any of the issues related either for children or for the women/parents... He only goes so far as to highlight its uselessness in a capitalistic sense.

The elimination of radical inequalities would mean we would no longer require the services of most of the millions currently employed as doormen, private security forces, prison guards, or SWAT teams—not to mention the military.

Doormen feel like an odd-one-out sometimes. They are context-dependent, as I've lived in buildings where the doormen lived in the building and were there primarily to help take care of package delivery and (in one case) helping residents sort their trash and also learn about where they could take things to recycle or ensure their reuse. Their job was occasionally mixed with “grounds keeper” or “building manager,” so they were frequently problem-solvers that you could go to if you had a problem (locked out? they know the best locksmith to help you! pipe leaking? they often knew where to go for repairs). If we removed the 'security' aspect from their job and also ensured that they lived in the building they worked in (and also shared responsibilities with others in the building), it'd still be a helpful role.

Not quite like the SWAT teams and prison guards and security forces. This is the same problem in Bullshit Jobs, but it's interesting to see him quite literally rehash his own work from here.

All in all we might discover that if we identified the work that really did need to be done to maintain a comfortable and ecologically sustainable standard of living, and redistribute the hours, it may turn out that the Wobbly platform is perfectly realistic.

The irony of this is that there are enough people on the planet to deal with even what we're dealing with now, despite a good chunk of it being pointless bureaucracy or absolute nonsense. We could easily have these hours being realistic without changing anything (and that's part of why Wobbly work gets co-opted easily, especially since it's less an anarchist union now than it ever had been prior).

This of course brings up the “who will do the dirty jobs?” question—one which always gets thrown at anarchists or other utopians. Peter Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallacy of the argument. There’s no particular reason dirty jobs have to exist. If one divided up the unpleasant tasks equally, that would mean all the world’s top scientists and engineers would have to do them too; one could expect the creation of self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots almost immediately.

This is nonsense? I mean, the end of it is nonsense. The beginning is fine. Also, if people just... cleaned up after themselves? It wouldn't take that long. And if we all had to figure out what to do with the waste, well... It wouldn't take long before “Wow, landfills are gross” would suddenly drive people back into learning things like composting.

We don't need self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots (do we necessarily need coal-mining? even in 2004, this sounds weird). If we could live in ways where we help take care of each other, we'd all be able to get this shit done. And probably have less waste, too.

The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic”—well, aside from simple racism, the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity were quite on the level as Pericles—is that they do not vote.

Finally?! Like, yeah. It's mostly the racism.

I’ve talked a little about the radical inclinations in much early twentieth-century anthropology, which often showed a very strong affinity with anarchism, but that seemed to largely evaporate over time. It’s all a little odd. Anthropologists are after all the only group of scholars who know anything about actually-existing stateless societies; many have actually lived in corners of the world where states have ceased to function or at least temporarily pulled up stakes and left, and people are managing their own affairs autonomously; if nothing else, they are keenly aware that the most commonplace assumptions about what would happen in the absence of a state (“but people would just kill each other!”) are factually untrue.

... Because most of them are uh... still agents of colonialism? And imperialism. Like, that much was obvious to me when I was doing a BA in Anthropology in the early 2000s. Even the “progressive” anthropologists I encountered still failed to recognise their own bigotries, with some often falling into the fetishising and co-opting of cultures (rather than the actual appreciation for or understanding of).

Then there’s the question of politics. Most anthropologists write as if their work has obvious political significance, in a tone which suggests they consider what they are doing quite radical, and certainly left of center. But what does this politics actually consist of? It’s increasingly hard to say. Do anthropologists tend to be anti-capitalist? Certainly it’s hard to think of one who has much good to say about capitalism. Many are in the habit of describing the current age as one of “late capitalism,” as if by declaring it is about to end, they can by the very act of doing so hasten its demise. But it’s hard to think of an anthropologist who has, recently, made any sort of suggestion of what an alternative to capitalism might be like. So are they liberals? Many can’t pronounce the word without a snort of contempt. What then? As far as I can make out the only real fundamental political commitment running through the entire field is a kind of broad populism. If nothing else, we are definitely not on the side of whoever, in a given situation, is or fancies themselves to be the elite. We’re for the little guys. Since in practice, most anthropologists are attached to (increasingly global) universities, or if not, end up in jobs like marketing consultancies or jobs with the UN—positions within the very apparatus of global rule—what this really comes down to is a kind of constant, ritualized declaration of disloyalty to that very global elite of which we ourselves, as academics, clearly form one (admittedly somewhat marginal) fraction.

This paragraph really needed to be hit with a “just because you are like this and are labelled an anarchist anthropologist... doesn't mean the others are.” Again, if anthropologists have a disdain for the elite classes, why are they consultants to the UN? Why are they working for intelligence agencies? Why are there anthropologists who weaponise their knowledge in marketing and PR, especially when it comes to being against those who most need support (and in favour of that elite oppressor class)? Why are they hiding their research in universities? Why aren't they fighting for more open sharing of information?

This whole thing is like he's trying to avoid what the field really is, even as his mentor literally was fighting against Napoleon Chagnon and the NAS... because they willingly worked with the military. It ignores the history of ethnography being done in the name of empire! How could a field that invaded the most vulnerable aspects of a people and then turned around to hand it off to empire to help them destroy those people... ever truly be against the elite? That's rubbish.

It’s not that different on the political level. Lauren Leve has recently warned that anthropologists risk, if they are not careful, becoming yet another cog in a global “identity machine,” a planet-wide apparatus of institutions and assumptions that has, over the last decade or so, effectively informed the earth’s inhabitants (or at least, all but the very most elite) that, since all debates about the nature of political or economic possibilities are now over, the only way one can now make a political claim is by asserting some group identity, with all the assumptions about what identity is (i.e., that group identities are not ways of comparing one group to each other but constituted by the way a group relates to its own history, that there is no essential difference in this regard between individuals and groups...) established in advance. Things have come to such a pass that in countries like Nepal even Theravada Buddhists are forced to play identity politics, a particularly bizarre spectacle since they are essentially basing their identity claims on adherence to a universalistic philosophy that insists identity is an illusion.

Come back to this. Especially figuring out who Lauren Leve is.

Many years ago a French anthropologist named Gerard Althabe wrote a book about Madagascar called Oppression et Liberation dans l’Imaginaire. It’s a catchy phrase. I think it might well be applied to what ends up happening in a lot of anthropological writing. For the most part, what we call “identities” here, in what Paul Gilroy likes to call the “over-developed world,” are forced on people.

Same here. Kept for my own reference.

Largely, it seems, a collection of teenage anarchists in Europe and North America, who soon began besieging the summits of the very global elite to whom anthropologists maintain such an uneasy, uncomfortable, alliance.

Bullshit on the uneasy, uncomfortable alliance. This is so annoying.

— beginning to page 37 To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS

Why are there so few anarchists in the academy?

I mean, the basic assumption would be that the principles of free association and non-hierarchical have something to do with it. Anarchists aren't typically found in places where they'll be stifled to death.

So are academics just behind the curve here? It’s possible. Perhaps in a few years the academy will be overrun by anarchists. But I’m not holding my breath. It does seem that Marxism has an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D., even if afterwards, it became a movement intending to rally the working class.

I mean, Marxism lends itself to an institution where people organise themselves hierarchically and believe that they have the answers to pass downward to the masses. Anarchism doesn't.

At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either—and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write.

Which is also why I don't really trust most anarchist academics. Many have no intention of dislodging themselves from the comfort to do the necessary challenging. While this was published in 2004, it's going to be interesting to see any of the folks at the Anarchist Research Group (ARG) in Loughborough challenge the fact that their university is working with the UK's Ministry of Defense.

But they won't do that, at least not most of them. Because they're too fucking comfortable and 'anarchist' is an aesthetic or niche to study for them.

Pierre Clastres

This is a note to self to possibly come back to him. This is because:

He insisted political anthropologists had still not completely gotten over the old evolutionist perspectives that saw the state primarily as a more sophisticated form of organization than what had come before; stateless peoples, such as the Amazonian societies Clastres studied, were tacitly assumed not to have attained the level of say, the Aztecs or the Inca. But what if, he proposed, Amazonians were not entirely unaware of what the elementary forms of state power might be like—what it would mean to allow some men to give everyone else orders which could not be questioned, since they were backed up by the threat of force—and were for that very reason determined to ensure such things never came about? What if they considered the fundamental premises of our political science morally objectionable?

Is interesting to see included, and I don't know much about Clastres. (Though, he was apparently naive about the power wielded against, for example, women by men.)

... This pamphlet has a lot of errors in sentences. It's kind of annoying.

In typical revolutionary discourse a “counterpower” is a collection of social institutions set in opposition to the state and capital: from self-governing communities to radical labor unions to popular militias. Sometimes it is also referred to as an “anti-power.” When such institutions maintain themselves in the face of the state, this is usually referred to as a “dual power” situation. By this definition most of human history is actually characterized by dual power situations, since few historical states had the means to root such institutions out, even assuming that they would have wanted to. But Mauss and Clastres’ argument suggests something even more radical. It suggests that counterpower, at least in the most elementary sense, actually exists where the states and markets are not even present; that in such cases, rather than being embodied in popular institutions which pose themselves against the power of lords, or kings, or plutocrats, they are embodied in institutions which ensure such types of person never come about. What it is “counter” to, then, is a potential, a latent aspect, or dialectical possibility if you prefer, within the society itself.

Interesting that Peter jabs at part of the book that discusses a vague notion of nonviolence, but Graeber doesn't show a diminished view of actions seen as violent. He openly discusses them as options (seen here as “popular militias”).

I find it interesting that Peter routinely neglects anarchist works that would support his theory in this “anarchist” book, but he will take on a liberal professor who is entirely anti-violence in every way because she says things he likes about how to deal with patriarchy. It's kind of telling.

Of course, in later contexts, what Peter Lamborn Wilson calls “the Clastrian machine,” that set of mechanisms which oppose the emergence of domination, what I’m calling the apparatus of counterpower, can itself become caught in such apocalyptic fantasies.

... Is there a point where I can read one fucking anarchist text without someone neutrally or positively citing some pederast piece of shit? Ever?

If a revolution is a matter of people resisting some form of power identified as oppressive, identifying some key aspect of that power as the source of what is fundamentally objectionable about it, and then trying to get rid of one’s oppressors in such a way as to try to eliminate that sort of power completely from daily life, then it is hard to deny that, in some sense, this was indeed a revolution. It might not have involved an actual uprising, but it was a revolution nonetheless.

I would argue that it's... not, much in the way that I don't see the Velvet Revolution as a revolution in anything but name. In neither case have they rid themselves of their oppressors; they're still there, and they can still come back.

If anything, they're both 'revolutions' in the way that we consider the 'agricultural revolution' or 'industrial revolution' to be a thing. It's a (noticeable) shift in thought or practice, not a shift in removing the oppressors. This is also clear by the next paragraph:

How long it would last is another question; it was a very fragile, tenuous sort of freedom. Many such enclaves have collapsed—in Madagascar as elsewhere.

This doesn't make it feel revolutionary, in the sense of removing oppressors and maintaining autonomous structure.

Essays: Mujeres Creando (Bolivian Anarcha-Feminist Street Activists), An Interview with Mujeres Creando, An The Creative Force of Bolivian Debtors To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS

Mujeres Creando

“We are here because nobody is listening to us. These people are showing the typical hard-heartedness of bankers. We are here because we cannot pay our debts.” Their words echoed loudly from their fifth floor position, accompanied by insults and songs directed against the bankers.

Peter, like men before him, doesn't use this kind of... contextualisation to people's actions.

For three months thousands of debtors have been coming to La Paz from all parts of Bolivia to stage daily protests. These had pacifist beginnings but later became more radical, going as far as attempting to burn banks. During the conflict, because of the misery and desperation surrounding them, more than six debtors have committed suicide. Many have been forced to give up all their belongings and live in the street. Meanwhile, the government favors the rich by pardoning their debts and granting them immense sums of money.

He also doesn't engage with this, when it would actually help is point. It's rather strange that the more interesting parts of this that exist are the parts he skipped over.

An Interview with Mujeres Creando

Mujeres Creando is a “craziness” started by three women (Julieta Paredes, Maria Galindo and Monica Mendoza) from the arrogant, homophobic and totalitarian Left of Bolivia during the ‘80s, where heterosexuality was still the model and feminism was understood to be divisive. It’s not really a new design in a society such as ours. So we had already been developing this kind of criticism. The other part of our criticism of the Left is toward what has been a constructed social practice; that is, it was unethical, dishonest and it had a double morality.

He quotes this part but doesn't engage with it in any capacity allows for a proper contextualisation. This happens when people discuss well-known women's groups. We get this kind of lip-service statement that skips over what that contextualisation means. Here's Peter before he quotes Julieta Paredes (Mujeres Creando) and Sylvia Rivera (and then just lists a bunch of examples of women's groups and individual women):

Whether militant or pacifist, nearly every tactical or strategic discussion I have participated in was attended and dominated overwhelmingly by men. Rather than claim that women and transgender people are somehow unable to participate in a broad spectrum of tactical options (or even discuss them), we would do well to recall the voices of those who have fought-violently, defiantly, effectively — as revolutionaries.

And a lot of it reads as if he's just copy-pasting shit without analysing it.

Like, c'mon. We all know we should listen to women and trans people (basically, listen to people experiencing the shit you're talking about and be fucking diverse about it). We didn't need that shit said in 2008, and we don't need it said now either. We fucking know.

So why not analyse why it is that it still happens? Why not point out how women are often forced to drop out of anarchist groups and start their own? Because that shit's more than just nonviolence protecting the state (and also that analysis would help here).

It's like when people talk about the Mujeres Libres and gloss over why they started and why shit like that feels like it's still needed. There's no analysis of why that separatism feels like a requirement to be heard and to do the things you need to do to survive. Never. Not here, not fucking anywhere.

I can make my own list. We've had lists for decades, even before Peter wrote his shit book. He could at least look at the examples and analyse them, but he doesn't. He only does it in other chapters (and not great there, either... but at least he does it).

To be a feminist in our society means to fight against neoliberalism and its ideology; for us, being a feminist means denouncing racism, machismo/sexism (in the Left and within anarchism, as well as feminine sexism), homophobia, domestic violence, etc. It means denouncing the sexist, bureaucratized, technocratic women of this generation (for us, those women that have fallen into neoliberalism and are administrators of the murderous politics of the World Bank, IMF, etc.) Here’s the difference between us and them: they use power and are within the system, and therefore they always control the forces (military, economic, social, political) against those who oppose what they say.

Here's another point that would've been able to synthesise all of these shit chapters into one coherent piece. Julieta Paredes clearly states the interconnections between them all, that there is no feminism if we're not fighting neoliberalism, racism, etc.

The book could've been an essay, and it would've done a better job at discussing most things if he didn't just turn it into a fucking list and tried to copy Ward Churchill. I don't even know why Churchill likes this book; it's practically his essay word-for-word with random and somewhat meaningless additions.

Women have sympathy as well as fear. The sexist women are much more stubborn and violent than macho men. These men are careful about having sex with us; they’re afraid, it’s some kind of complex… but in the end they have a certain kind of respect toward us because we have been fighting for ten or eleven years. At first, most women have sympathy, and later they’re afraid because it’s a demanding and radical proposal, but that’s the only way to build a place where everything is not superficial and diluted. And the men that sympathize with us follow us if they’re interested in everything, but they keep wanting us to be like mothers, feeding them; they’re a little lazy because they don’t want to accept the challenge of making their own group.

This is a single paragraph and is a better analysis (not perfect, but better) than anything Peter attempted to regurgitate about how some feminists are pacifists and want a pacifist feminism.

It would've provided him a template for the kinds of discussions that we're already having, especially if he wanted to introduce it to the machismo of his audience (but I don't think he cared, tbh—he'd rather quote reactionary aspects of bell hooks's unevidenced self-help nonsense).

Whenever we’ve gone out to do graffiti, we have been afraid, and we’re always afraid. But we’ve thought about our right to do it… Coca-Cola pays and paints, Repsol pays and paints, so why can’t we paint without paying? The problem isn’t that the walls are painted, the problem is that it’s not paid for. If we must pay for public space, then it’s a big contradiction in democracy. What’s public and what’s private?

Streets are public space, the whole city’s courtyard, not a jail hallway, where you go from the jail of your house to the jail of your office job… if it’s public, then everybody can use it. But if you pay for public space it becomes private. Public space doesn’t exist. Let’s start this discussion.

What’s dirty? What’s clean? “You’re making my walls dirty!” Oh, so when Coca-Cola contracts a painter, it doesn’t make the wall dirty? That’s an aesthetic concept. It seems to me that it has made the wall dirty in a disgusting way. And what we have done, our graffiti, that’s beautiful.

This is just a good reminder.

The Creative Force of Bolivian Debtors

From table to table, I distributed our leaflet, scolding, shouting and pestering them. I described the terror of children when lawyers brought eviction orders. I said it was impossible to extract another cent from the debtors. I called the bankers inhumane bloodsuckers.

What’s the point of such direct action? It’s fun. Insolence and mockery are indispensable for our movement. Without us, the luncheon would have been a warm reception for the superintendent. With us inside, the event became scandalous, shameful and profoundly unpleasant.

This essay is also in Quiet Rumours, and Peter noticeably ignores much of what they do and say here. Interesting.

We shouted but, despite cowardly claims to the contrary by the bankers and their columnist friends, we didn’t attack or even insult them. We are humane, and we know that social change comes not from hate or violence, but from hope and creativity.

I disagree with this line, but I think it's probably because they say this that he ignored this essay... despite the fact that he claims we have to deal with sexism without violence. Racism can be dealt with violence, statism can be dealt with violence, violence makes a movement effective...

... but sexism? No. Sexism probably not, Peter says:

From another angle, nonviolence seems well-suited to dealing with patriarchy. After all, the abolition of patriarchy in particular requires forms of resistance that emphasize healing and reconciliation.

There's also the implication that it will be one of the few systemic problems that we have to deal with individually and that we can't really fight against people who hold power:

Because the distribution of power within patriarchy is much more diffused than within the state or capitalism (for example, a male general who also sits on the advisory board of a major corporation holds significant power within the state and capitalism, but does not derive much more power specifically from patriarchy than any other male, except perhaps as a role model of manliness), fighting against power holders or those most responsible plays a much smaller role. Instead, people must build a culture that allows everyone to self-identify in terms of gender and that supports us as we build healthy relationships and heal from generations of violence and trauma.

Which isn't what most of the essays in this collection state. Even the ones I find troubling are far more incendiary than he is.

Essays: Rote Zora, Interview with Rote Zora To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS

This essay includes the use of “wimmin,” and it's hard not to look at it as being a transphobic dog whistle when a lot of transphobes love those alt spellings of 'women'. I don't assume this to always be true of someone, but it's hard not to considering how frequently the two overlap. You can thank things like the trans-exclusive Michigan Womyn's Music Festival for a lot of people being hesitant around people using alt-spellings of 'woman' or 'women'.

Which is frustrating because a lot of alt-spellings come from somewhere else ('wimmin' was apparently seen in Black American English on occasion, 'womyn' was used Scots) and were co-opted by predominantly transphobic cis white women.

Anyway...

Red Zora attacks predominantly patriarchal institutes, companies, and persons representing and building up a male sexist society, which is oppressing and exploiting wimmin worldwide. They are conducting campaigns against porntraders, sex shops, international traders of wimmin (those who profit from importing Asian wimmin as “brides” for West German men), doctors who are carrying out forced sterilizations, the Doctor’s Guild (“We see the Federal Doctor’s Guild as exponents of rape in white trenchcoats”), drug companies (notably Schering who produced the birth defect causing drug Duogynon), as well as computer companies such as Nixdorf and the multinational Siemens.

... Don't think I'm far off because the immediate first action they list is... anti-sex work (an overlap with transphobia). There are criticisms of the porn industry to be made, but the bougie white cis women who went full-on for things like discussions of exploitation without consulting sex workers? Or focused purely on trafficking (which happened but they always ignored what kinds of trafficking were most common, and they still do)...

This may have a history behind it that we can learn from, but goddamn if it isn't problematic as shit and perpetuates the same bullshit we saw from older women's groups (like Mujeres Libres or groups of the Paris Commune) when sex work was discussed.

It's also interesting that they mention “doctors who are carrying out forced sterilizations” but don't even mention who was being forcefully sterilised... because it largely wasn't able-bodied cis white women in Europe.

Interview with Rote Zora

These people were such second-wavers. There's no consideration for so many things: actual trafficked people (and where most trafficking victims end up), refusal to understand immigration, blanket-attacking porn shops and sex work institutions without regard for any of the women working in those spaces...

Even if they've got other good ideas, most of this shit sounds like paternalistic bullshit.

Essays: Social Democracy and Anarchism (Charlotte Wilson), A Woman Without a Country (Emma Goldman), The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation (Emma Goldman), Make Your Own Tea (Alice Nutter) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS

I have very little to say about either Charlotte Wilson's essay or the two Emma Goldman essays... They're interesting historical pieces, but I can't say that I get much from them at the moment that I haven't already had as a thought myself or recognised on my own.

Emma's first one is interesting for discussing citizenship and borders, though it appears to awkwardly handle countries.

It does strike me deeply that we never get anything other than Emma for anarcha-feminism, even from publishers who could help create systems that would support more diverse writing (and categorically never do).

Make Your Own Tea

In the early years of Class War, the attitude was that feminist demands did not go far enough. We said why call for equal pay? Equal rights under capitalism was putting out a begging bowl for equal gender exploitation and was spectacularly unambitious. Class War were calling not for equal pay packets but for the abolition of money. The feminist fixation with voting rights was another half measure. Why choose between two evils when there’s so much more to be had? Class War tried to support the principle of gender equality while disagreeing with the reformist tendencies of established feminism.

This is something that I find infuriating about so many “liberation” movements. Rather than actually think about any kind of alteration to the world we exist in, they always sit at the same places. Equal pay (equal exploitation), ability to vote (for a government that will never represent you)... In the case of queer liberation, the assimilationist cause for marriage (rather than the dismantling of marriage entirely).

Every single time, people push for the most mundane reforms rather than actually pushing for real changes...

This essay has some issues, but it is largely interesting and at least worth a skim.

So far, I don't think I've found this collection that interesting.