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Title: Pacifism Author: Tom Nomad Date: 7/15/2020 (written in 2009) Language: en Topics: diversity of tactics, nonviolence, Insurrectionist Theory, anti-pacifism, pacifism, anti-globalization movement Source: Seith Communiti Imprint Notes: Published in an edition of 50 physical copies by Seith Communiti multimedia imprint. seithcommuniti.noblogs.org Free dissemination and reproduction of this text is encouraged.
“Put quite plainly, nonviolence ensures a state monopoly on violence.
States- the centralized bureaucracies that protect capitalism; preserve
a white supremacist, patriarchal order; and implement imperialist
expansion- survive by assuming the role of sole legitimate purveyor of
violent force within a territory. Any struggle against oppression
necessitates a conflict with the state. Pacifists do the state’s work by
pacifying the opposition in advance. States, for their part, discourage
militancy within the opposition, and encourage passivity”
— Peter Gelderloos. How Nonviolence Protects the State (2007, South End
Press)
Perhaps one of the most exhausting debates within “activist” movements
is the discourse concerning the effectiveness of “violent” vs
“nonviolent” tactical sets. For numerous reasons, and for quite some
time, this debate has gone nowhere. In many instances, both sides of
this debate make sweeping generalizations about the other, which engages
tactics on the level of effectiveness without examining the very
constructed abstractions inherent in either approach. This debate has
gained some energy once again with the success of insurrectionary
anarchist tactics at the IMF/World Bank demonstrations in the Fall of
2007, the Republican National Convention in 2008, and the recent
uprising in Greece; all at a time when the mainstream pacifist antiwar
movement has been relegated to the dustbin of ineffective social
movements, and one that sees many in the “official” Left defecting in
droves to join the “Obamanation” (as many anarchists have come to call
the recent cult of personality around the election campaign of Barack
Obama). Many involved in social movements have to come to grips with one
stunning fact that many of us seem to forget: none of the tactical sets
that we have employed have resulted in a substantial victory over the
moves of capital and state. Despite this, I cannot count how many times
I have been subjected to a lecture from an old pacifist claiming “Well,
these are the tactics that we have always used, and they have worked so
far.” If the current social and political condition is what results from
nonviolence working, I would hate to see what happens when it fails!
What this all comes down to is the reality that nonviolence has not
worked as a force of social change, and that historical precedence of a
tactic does not guarantee its legitimacy. This historical precedent is
just another glaring example of the near-total inability of pacifists to
make sweeping social upheaval a possibility – for this reason we must
deal a critical blow to the legitimacy of nonviolence as an organizing
tactic that hopes to threaten the order of things as they exist.
Nonviolence has become accepted by the state as a generally harmless
form of action, a classic example being the action done in front of the
White House on September 26, 2005. Over 150 people — including the
activist celebrity Cindy Sheehan — sat down in front of the gate of the
White House to wait to be arrested. Outside of the utter pointlessness
of this action (as if the state cares if people get locked up for
political action in an age of vast prison expansion and privatization),
there were details that many of the observers of this action were
unaware of. The organizers had told the police that they were planning
an action, and entered into a process of negotiation with them a month
prior. They came to agree that people would be arrested and not cuffed,
walked over to a processing van which would be on site, and asked to pay
$50, then they would be released. In essence, organizers negotiated with
the police an agreement to make the action the least disruptive that it
possibly could be. This is where the nonviolent paradigm has led us —
the question is why? I suggest that this is not an unintended
consequence, but rather a mentality which is inherent to the nonviolent
perspective.
We need to first examine the ontological assumptions that structure the
kernel of nonviolence. Two pieces of writing stand out in particular in
how well they represent the two most common arguments for nonviolence
outside of those offered religious / new ageism (which are based on the
mass-authoritarian imposition of religious norms over movements rather
than a ground-up tendency toward nonviolence upon which this piece
intends to focus). The first piece is “The Politics of Nonviolent
Action” by Gene Sharp, a tactician on a series of “nonviolent”
campaigns, well-known and often cited (and often challenged) theorist
and historian of nonviolence. In this piece, Sharp puts forward the
common belief that nonviolent struggle is necessary to create a
nonviolent world. He bases this theory around an articulation of a
networked idea of political power; that the state persists in its
actions because of structuring of social consent, and that nonviolent
action presents a mechanism to hinder undesirable actions by the state
while constructing the basis for a new political paradigm through the
exercise of popular or constituent power. The second piece worth
examining is the anarchist pamphlet “You Can’t Blow Up A Social
Relationship”, which presents an argument uniquely suited to the
framework of anti-authoritarian movements. The central argument made in
the pamphlet is that revolutionary violence is a “strategy of
impatience,” (12) and a characteristically vanguardist tactical set that
presents nothing but authoritarian possibilities. The arguments within
these two pieces mutually reinforce each other in several interesting
ways (which we examine later) — but perhaps most fundamentally they
share the common the assumption of the legitimacy of mass politics and
the pure ideality of the state. This assumption of the nature of the
state and our ability to withhold consent from its perpetuation forms
the crux of their arguments and would have to be the case in order for
nonviolence to be more than an individual aesthetic morality in one’s
self-discovery quest. The very contradictory nature of reality
illustrations that this assumption is also the basis of their collective
failure — and thus, the pivot-point that leads to the latent
authoritarianism of nonviolence.
Before attempting to move further, perhaps it is necessary to draw a
simple distinction, to identify what we are concerned with here. Many
nonviolent actions are carried out for reformist goals, for example the
mainstream antiwar movement or other protests aimed at putting political
pressure on the state spurred onward by popular demonstrations of
grievance with the system and its functions. For many of us enaged in
political movements, a pig in makeup is still obviously a pig — putting
restrictions on police violence still makes it police violence, and
making capitalism “ethical” (a complete impossibility) still preserves
the forced equivalence and channeling of everyday life through the
commodity form as condition of possibility. Reformist movements are
worth even less than the wasted paper, money and gas spent on mobilizing
huge spectacles of conformity. What we prefer to focus on is the
destabilizing potentiality of the tactics and ontological frameworks of
nonviolence. Put another way, the only paradigm of nonviolence that is
even worth considering is some set of tactics amounting to
“revolutionary nonviolence”. All other forms, because they do not even
maintain the illusion of attempting to combat the violence endemic in
capitalism, are merely a neoliberal lifestyle choice.
The position of a revolutionary nonviolence has been argued by such
widely divergent people as The Catholics Workers, Crass, and Albert
Einstein. The actions that have emerged from this tradition are
spectacular and tactically diverse, and have ranged from the
“nonviolent” barricading of a military research lab in Pittsburgh, the
“nonviolent” breaking and entering into draft offices and subsequent
arsons of draft records, the “nonviolent” sawing-down of telephone poles
at NORAD which connected global positioning satellite dishes from the
central computer infrastructure, the “nonviolent” hacking the US
military missile targeting system which delayed the invasion of Iraq
(unfortunately only by 48 hours), etc. In other words, nonviolent
actions without the goal of reform can be effective at sabotage and
disruption given the right circumstances, clandestine planning and
strategic structure. Despite these moments of rupture, is there a
greater possibility for nonviolent acts to smash the state apparatus?
Many pacifists take their lead from Sharp, who at many points described
himself as a “tactical pacifist”, and notable in that his vision of
nonviolence departs from a discussion on the functioning of political
power. He states,
“There appears to be two views of the nature of power. One can see
people as dependent upon good will, the decisions and the support of
their government, or any other hierarchical system to which they belong.
Or, conversely, one can see that government or system dependent on the
people’s good will, decisions and support” (Sharp, 8).
The division that Sharp illustrates here lies between understanding of
the state as an entity as such which controls and oppresses the actions
within its area of control, and an understanding of the state as the
structuring of consent. Sharp goes on to argue that the structuring of
political violence is the structuring of violence to combat the state
qua monolith. In other words, what Sharp lays out is a matrix in which
the state can only be viewed through two lenses, as a complex
relationship of theoretical investments which structures a form of
consent — a sort of philosophical state — and a monolithic material
structure which represses through force. From this simple reductionism,
Sharp then proceeds to argue that political violence can only function
to attack the state as a monolithic structure of force, which is bound
to fail. There are a wide array of issues with this view, including the
vast historical reductionism that lays at the heart of this matrix; but
most problematically, this simplistic matrix is grounded in a
fundamental misunderstanding of how logistics of force function, how
dispersed apparatuses of force can emerge, and how this complex dynamic
of shifting force is the only actual way that we can understand the
space through which ideas can leave the conceptual space to be imposed
materially through force. By misunderstanding how dispersed logistical
force functions, Sharp renders himself incapable of speaking of the
state in a material way, in the sense of actions taken, and as a result,
is incapable of understanding the relationship between ideas and action,
let alone the tactical logistics of state action, without which it is
impossible to speak of tactics at all.
As Paolo Virno argues, the state is the entity which turns multitudes
into people (21), it functions to the degree that it can eliminate
difference and impose sameness, and as such presents itself as
equivalence, as a force which creates sameness. Though this seems
abstract, we experience this constantly through law, the imposition of
sovereign determinations of how we must act, and the concept of
citizenship, the transformation of a person into a person as defined by
the state. Within the Newtonian assumption of equivalence, the
equivalence posited is an ontological determination – that of the
necessary equivalence of like and like. The positing of the Newtonian
move — the generation of the frozen temporality of the equivalence — in
being ontological is a claim on space-time generally, it names some and
space as nothing other than an expression of that equivalence, that
definition imposed through state action. This is borne out in practical
experience; the state is an apparatus which frames, limits, and channels
actions into acceptable channels — legalistic or informal. This activity
of generalization, however, is not simply an ideological process, which
would assume a total sameness in how different persons understand ideas.
It is also not borne out of the activities of a monolithic structure,
which does not exist without this sameness already being existent.
Rather, the state functions as a complex mechanism. On one hand, the
state departs from defining existence based on the declarations of the
sovereign (that one or those that hold power). To the degree that we
approach existence as unique, that we approach those that exist as
unique, and to the degree that we assume that our actions have effects
which change the conditions we exist within, in even simple ways, then
nothing can possibly function monolithically. Rather, the state is a
logistics, constructed from the attempt to structure cohesion in the
midst of difference and historical fluctuation, which deploys force in
an attempt to end difference, eliminate historical flux, to structure
existence through force; a paradoxical process of utilizing a logistics
grounded in difference (those that make up the actions of the logistics)
and operated through actions which are supposed to have effects, only to
eliminate difference and the effects of actions or historical flux.
Everyday over a million people get up, put on uniforms, and go to work
in the bureaucracies and control mechanisms of the state, every cop
makes a decision every day to be a cop. Hobbes surmises:
“The only way to erect such a Common Power…is, to conferre all their
power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may
reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, onto one Will: which is
as much as to say, to appoint one man, or Assembly of men, to beare
their Person…This is more than Consent or Concord; it is a reall Unitie
of them all, in one and the same Person…This done, the Multitude so
united in one Person, is called a Common-wealth…”(227)
The state is the generation of the Subject from the multitude of
discontinuous acts, it forms the conditions of possibility for the act
by structuring the continuity within which the act occurs. In this sense
Sharp is correct — the state is not a monolith. He departs from this
correct argument and combines it with the absurd reductionism at the
heart of his critique of violence — that it can only attack monolithic
structures, to form the foundations of his notion of revolutionary
non-violence. This becomes important, as he goes on to claim that
nonviolence gains legitimacy because it deals with power “at its source”
(Sharp, 10). His claim that nonviolence builds the basis of a new
presumably-nonhierarchical form of power, through the absence of the act
qua coercion. Sharp claims that nonviolence can be deployed as a form of
non-cooperation which attacks power at its base: the very structuring of
consent necessary for the state to function (36). This begins to sketch
out a concept of revolutionary nonviolence based around the generation
of mass noncooperation; in essence, he is attempting to construct a
concept of nonviolence as war machine unto itself.
The nonviolent war machine is a tactic of refusal based in a
destabilization concept. If the state is the structuring of consent for
its existence as a series of acts, then refusal of the mandates of the
state undermines the states ability to implement equivalences. In other
words, the assertion here is that the world does not function through
this monolithic consent, but rather, that this consent has been
functioning as a sort of ruse of complex deception; in this he is
positing a sort of division between the organicism of life in its
complexity and the inorganicism of the state, in its monolithic process.
In taking this position, Sharp is constructing a conflict between
masses; the mass of “fools” who are convinced by the state, and the
masses of organic beings fighting against the consensus of the “fools”.
Life within this structure becomes defined absolutely, both by the state
in the process of creating the mass, and in the claim Sharp makes about
some sort of inherent human existence. In a sense it is the theory of
nonviolence as virus - the hope is that noncooperation will spread
exponentially throughout the base of consensus. In this sense,
nonviolence is a defensive move against the inorganic construction of
the state — in defending an already present human condition from
encroachment by the state, the nonviolent activist is exercising an
ability that is always already latent. But because of this defensive
character inherent within the base, Sharp creates the condition that the
nonviolent act must always be the mass act. Everyone in the factory
needs to seize the factory or strike, all people need to march to the
sea to pound salt, etc. In this sense, nonviolence is the genesis of a
form of alternate stability — formed around the maxim to not impose upon
the consent of the base.
The other basis for revolutionary nonviolence in an anarchist context is
the argument presented in “You Can’t Blow Up A Social Relationship”. The
piece’s central thesis – that violent insurrection is an inherently
vanguardist pursuit – is an argument not intended for nor effective
within authoritarian circles (which willingly accept the authoritarian
vanguard role inherent in its strategies — hell, this pamphlet may just
encourage them); rather, it is aimed at making an appeal to
anti-authoritarians who utilize insurrectionary tactics within their
waging of social war.
“A democracy can only be produced if a majority movement is built. The
guerrilla strategy depends on a collapse of will in the ruling class to
produce the social crisis out of which the revolution occurs, whether
the majority favors it or not. Any reading of guerrilla strategists
reveals that it is a philosophy of impatience” (“You Can’t Blow Up A
Social Relationship”, 12)
Although every example cited by the authors are drawn from guerrilla
forces that unapologetically assume an authoritarian character as
integral to their revolutionary paradigm, this argument is still worth
our consideration as anti-authoritarians. What the authors are
attempting to argue is that a violent revolution is incapable of being a
populist revolution. In the structuring of the concept of revolutionary
violence around impatience, they equated all violent action to
vanguardism, claiming in essence that the violent insurrection generates
its own structuring of authority around the revolutionary act — a “with
us or against us” mentality. In choosing to act before waiting for the
will of the masses, the insurrectionist is unilaterally defining the
conditions of action within the plane of resistance. They state,
“concentrating on the supposed insanity of the guerrillas or terrorists
is an attempt to provide a justification for murderousness towards them
and for the introduction of general repression” (16).
Now this is not wholly incorrect; violent actions do draw an increase in
repression from the state. Yet this is problematic in a very basic way.
The claim that the acts of the insurrectionists is the cause of
political repression by the state ignores the fact that the existence of
the equivalent Subject qua state that is the condition of possibility
for generalized repression. There are practical examples that back this
up; in Italy over the course of the 20^(th) century, it has become
routine for fascists (potentially acting in conjuction of the will of
the state and metapolitical state if Operation Gladio is to be taken at
face-value) to bomb a target and blame it on the anarchists to draw
state repression onto anarchist militants. It is not the
insurrectionists that generate the repression, however, but rather it is
the state reaction that generates repression. The state is a posited
equivalence which has exceeded and become the condition of possibility
for everyday life. Whether we like it or not, the pigs believe that they
control the streets.
In the generation of the Newtonian equivalence all outlying variables
need to be eliminated. Like the airstream pattern studies that generated
the basis for chaos theory, as an equivalence progresses it needs to
either freeze time (impossible) or reincorporate or eliminate
potentially destabilizing elements in order to maintain its coherence
(Gleick, 15) . If all acts present a destabilization in continuity – if
acts form a continuity of discontinuity — then acts are reincorporated
or repressed due to the threat of entropy which they pose to the
abstracting machine. So it is not the act that generates repression, it
is the existence of the abstracting apparatus of the state that
generates repression in an attempt to maintain coherence. All effective
insurrectionary events will draw repression by the state to the degree
that they are potentially destabilizing. This is why I personally hate
the anarchist complaint about police brutality following action — isn’t
this the point?; we reject the state because it can employ violence to
prevent us from living our desires?, because it makes us all equivalent?
If we are serious about this struggle, we have to expect that the state
will attack with everything they have, within the very amorphous social
limits of acceptability (for instance, the pigs largely no longer use
water cannons because it hearkens back to images of white pigs firing
water cannons on black civil rights demonstrators — but will they
hesitate to use a water cannon if they had to? We saw them deployed on
the streets of St Paul during the RNC in 2008.)
Both of these arguments make a similar set of assumptions that construct
a framework for nonviolent action. Both depart from the long-held idea
that violence is used against the state in order to “sever the head of
state” and impose a new form of organization. They are correct to argue
that this frames revolutionary violence as a completely vanguardist
enterprise that does not engage with power on the level of deployment.
This approach has been the downfall of both authoritarian communism
(which was able to take power in certain sites but left the general
social structuring of power untouched while imposing another structure
to control those flows), and anarchist assassinations (which did cause a
general amount of chaos in the ruling structures of the Western early
20^(th) century but failed to accomplish its larger goals). They reject
the imposition of a mass political solution imposed by a minority group,
only to rebuild the idea of mass politics.
The argument that both put forth is that noncoercive nonviolent acts
attack power at the level of deployment — everyday life — by opening up
a non-authoritarian social refusal. Yet both pieces rely on the
construction of the nonviolent equivalence. Rather than the mass Subject
imposed by the violent imposition of social order through violent
action, they both construct the Subject of mass action based in a
definitionality of nonviolence, where the legitimacy of participants is
defined through their adherence to an externally defined morality. This
imposes the restriction on temporality and action through the assertion
of an inherent nonviolent noncooperation; the argument is that we always
have the ability to withdraw consent from the state through mass
nonviolent action. Yet, if violence is considered as inherently
authoritarian, nonviolence then becomes the condition of possibility for
action. For example – an imposition of nonviolence occurred in Seattle
during the WTO demonstrations in 1999 where pacifist demonstrators
pepper-sprayed anarchists attempting to smash windows in Niketown
(Nike’s corporate store in Downtown Seattle). Here is an axiom of
nonviolence that was violently imposed against so-called authoritarian
violence. Like the state apparatus, nonviolence generates a Newtonian
equivalence. Once a certain tactical set is rejected absolutely, all
attempts at this can be repressed to preserve the nonviolent aspects of
the act.
The question of so-called non-violent revolution is not merely a moral
question, as it is often framed, or a tactical question, as framed by
the pieces discussed here, but exists at the confluence in which
morality, an abstract generalization of actions within a discourse of
proper action, and tactics, the material dynamics of action at a
particular time and space. This raises a clear problem however. The
discourse of tactics, as discussed by Clausewitz and others, is one in
which the concept always fails; in which the idea never grasps the
complexity of the moment in, and relies on simplifications and
equivalencies to be able to identify objects and phenomena with concepts
and names. In other words, the simplifications of the concept — the ways
that concepts speak in general and attempt to speak of equivalencies —
eliminates the complex uniqueness of the dynamics of any present moment.
As such, to posit a conceptual qualifier to a moment, and to attempt to
speak of the moment through the concept, abstracts the particularity of
the moment out of existence. As such, to attempt to place a conceptual
universal morality at the core of materially particular action means
that, at best, we are left with a framework that is incapable of
speaking of the moments — of tactics themselves — in the process of only
processing the dynamics of action as they relate to an abstract moral
framework. This abstracts tactics into a discussion of morality, limits
the possibility of action, imposes this sameness of action, and fails to
be capable of elastically responding to shifts in the tactical scenarios
of lived moments.
Take, for example, the crowd control procedures outlined in “Field
Manual 3–19.15: Civil Disturbance Operations” issued by the US military
to National Guard forces and police departments. Although there are many
manuals which address civil disturbance operations, it is this
particular manual upon which that most of the police civil disturbance
operations manuals are based, including the recently-released RNC Civil
Disturbance Manual used by the St Paul Police Department. The main goal
of the procedures outlined in the manual are based on the generation of
equivalences in order to respond to a situation in order to maintain
stability, but not necessarily to end all political acts – thus
preserving the illusion of acceptable political expression within the
confines of state surveillance. Beyond this, Field Manual 3–19.15 is the
standard operations manual for crowd control situations — repeatedly
cited and mimicked by pigs all over the country learning how to deal
with the rise in political demonstrations. The manual proceeds by
generating a series of categories of analysis. Firstly, the crowd is
analyzed and positioned into three classes: “public disorder” is when a
small crowd is gathering; “public disturbance’ is when a crowd begins to
chant or engage in mild actions like marching or nonviolently blocking a
road; and finally, “riot” when the crowd begins to engage in property
destruction or other forms of violence (1–5). “Commanders must be aware
of the possibility that some individuals or groups within an organized
demonstration may have the intent to cause disruption, incite violence,
destroy property, and provoke authorities” (1–3). Their pre-action
preparation lays out a series of considerations for the pigs to take
into account; they are advised to avoid confrontation, focus on
prevention, and define goals beforehand. “Crowd situations are highly
unpredictable, but one thing seems certain- confrontation will likely
cause crowd resistance. When pushed, people tend to resist opposition to
the realization of their purpose” (2–5). It goes on to recommend that
the pigs communicate with the “leaders” of the protest (which in the
context of anarchist blocs has led to some quite funny situations with
very confused pigs) in order to form a working relationship which
results in “protest groups largely policing themselves” (2–7). If this
fails, the pigs then move into what they call scaleable effects. In
other words, they will attempt to develop a matrix of escalation, moving
from warnings to disperse to shows of force and finally escalating force
(2–13).
Current crowd control doctrine places an emphasis on crowd dispersal.
Forced dispersal may result in a crowd breaking up into multiple groups
that scatter over a large area. This may pose even greater public order
problems and may pose a continued threat to control forces. A crowd is
often controlled better by means of containment (confining its
activities to a given area). A crowd has limited duration, and its
numbers are likely to diminish as individual needs take precedence over
those of the crowd (2–22).
This all provides the revolutionary anti-authoritarian with valuable
insight into the mindset of the pigs within the state. The goal of the
pigs is not to prevent actions, nor to put a blanket level of force
around the action itself; rather the goal is to respond to
destabilization with increasing armed stability. The main variable
within in the approaches laid out here is that the pigs need to have a
situation which they can generalize and respond to. The manual states,
“forced dispersal may result in a crowd breaking up into multiple groups
scattered over a large area. This may pose even greater public order
problems and may pose a continued threat to control forces” (2–22). In
other words, the decentralization of insurrectionary violence generates
a potential entropy within their strategic framework. The concern of the
pigs is to contain and de-escalate the situation, by force if necessary.
The state tolerates and even solicits certain political acts (notably,
large self-regulating nonviolent demonstration actions), in order to
maintain the myth of political freedom within the state apparatus to the
degree that these acts are emptied of their destabilizing and entropic
properties.
Nonviolence plays neatly into the state’s strategy of containment and
mitigation — and that is why pacifists pose no threat. Recall the two
fundamental characteristics of the nonviolence discourses analyzed
earlier: that pacifists approach the state as a pure ideality which —
and this is the second point of agreement — can be combated through mass
noncooperation. The state as the state of technique and stabilization
responds to acts of destabilization to the degree that they are
potentially entropic. This leads our nonviolence proponents into their
ideologically self-defeating trap. The mass Subject of nonviolence is
the Subject of necessary mass action, or unified and striated action,
based in the definitionality of nonviolence. So they become presented
with a choice: the Subject of nonviolence — always already generated as
an equivalence- can engage in only those acts that are limited in the
potential for destabilization. If the action carried out is not
effective, if it fails to generate a potential destabilization (most
nonviolent actions fall into this category), then the action defeats
itself. If the action does become effective, then the violence of the
state — which forms the condition of possibility for the state - goes
unopposed. The nice pacifists sit in the road till they either get bored
with the police escort or get dispersed through the use of force. The
posited equivalence of the Subject qua nonviolence is, like all
Newtonian moves, an equivalent impossible to act situationally; thus it
is no wonder that the pacifists almost never achieve anything.
The ineffectiveness and technocratic aspects of nonviolence manifest
most practically in the sets of nonviolence guidelines that many of us
have grown completely sick of being handed printed upon small fliers
before every mass demonstration that we choose to attend. Many of these
sets of rules tend to be very similar – as such here is the guideline
set by the Declaration of Peace. This was an antiwar campaign which had
some potential to challenge the state on their original premise – that a
date should be set for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq or
else trigger a wave or direct action across the US. Any entropic
potential which the mobilization possessed dissipated upon the
unilateral institution of nonviolence guidelines by the organizing
group. The Declaration Of Peace guidelines set the parameters upon which
actions will be carried out:
all we encounter.
consequences of our actions.
purposes).(
http://declarationofpeace.org/nonviolence-guidelines
)
Under these guidelines any participant cannot be stoned, hostile towards
the pigs, smash windows, and must voluntarily allow themselves to be
arrested- need I say more? The very framework prevents confrontation or
any attempt to destabilize a situation. The goal of these actions is to
“invite the majority in this country to take steps to call for an end to
the US war in Iraq.” Thus we return to the stated goal of nonviolent
action to encourage the building of the mass nonviolent Subject — the
Subject of nonconfrontation. The generation of the Subject qua
nonviolence exceeds and limits the potential for action, and thus the
potential for the constitution of agency, which in turn limits the
agent; when action is defined, and the possibilities of existence in
that moment limited, the autonomy and agency of that who acts is also
consequently stolen away. We can see this theft of autonomy clearly in
the tendency of pacifists to form “peace police” groups to police the
actions of others. It become common at demonstrations to endure the
presence of people clad in orange or green vests tasked with preventing
people from violating these guidelines and acting as a de-escalating
buffer between the crowd and the pigs. By the inclusion of these “Peace
Police,” nonviolent organizers attempt to mitigate as much
destabilization as possible by forcibly limiting the actions of the more
insurrectionary among us, thus effectively prohibiting us from
manifesting a resistance that departs from our lives and contexts by
substituting our positionality for one within an abstracted nonviolent
Subject.
A sobering example of this took place at the first major antiwar
movement march in DC following the commencement of this most recent
phase of the genocidal Iraq War, wherein the pigs attacked the black
bloc while still on the permitted march route. Instead of allowing space
for self-defense and tactical fluidity, the organizer-appointed “Peace
Police” physically prevented the bloc from leaving the permitted route
to get to a space that was more easily defensible. This resulted in a
shouting match that eventually escalated into a fist fight between
anarchists and “peace police”, all while still attempting to repel a
police assault on the protest. The march ended when the pigs decided to
tear gas and charge the crowd; most of the pacifists ran, leaving the
bloc to defend 35,000 people trapped in a park fearing arrest and
further brutalization by the state. While the bloc ultimately prevented
the pigs from entering the park — giving everyone else space to rest and
recover — it resulted in a slew of broken bones and arrests within the
bloc. Meanwhile, the bloc once again had to fend off the “Peace Police,”
who were attempting to de-escalate the situation by attempting to push
anarchists off the street from behind while the pigs attacked from the
front. Are the actions of those employed by the organizers to “keep the
peace” between radicals and the state not replicating the very form of
action which the state treats as its limit before the attempting to
control a situation by force — allowing the participants to police
themselves and mitigate any potential destabilization within their ranks
— here in a very literal sense?
I personally witnessed one of the Declaration of Peace actions occur at
the Hart Senate Office Building where the organizers and pigs negotiated
the terms upon which the demonstration would be able to occur. All signs
and banners were confiscated, and activists were told that if they
talked they would be arrested. In the end, a mass of 50 or so people
stood in the lobby of the building — silently and without signs — until
they were all arrested one-by-one and put on a bus to be dropped in
another area of town. Following the action, the organizers attempted to
present this as a victory – to which I say again, if this is victory I
would hate to see defeat.
Naturally, much like the Subject qua nonviolence, there is also a
possibility for the Subject qua violence. If it is accepted fact that
violence and total war are conditions of possibility for everyday life
in the age of globalization, then while violence is endemic to all
relations of power the construction of a Subject around the
definitionality of tactical violence recreates the problematic
equivalence of the Subject qua nonviolence. If nonviolence, in its
positing of a generalized equivalence, creates another form of stability
and a space for negotiation with the state, that does not mean that one
can generate the ideology of violence. Violence, if it is to maintain
the potential for destabilization of the political apparatus, cannot
become another form of equivalence, nor are all violences the same — a
point missed by many pacifists in their admonishment. War machines and
the reappropriation that intends to counter them are fundamentally
different, yet it is problematic to begin to argue for the tactical
universality of violence without also generating a negotiable
equivalence.
This seems to have landed us at an impasse, given the terms of the
discussion as it exists. We clearly cannot speak of a tactical
nonviolence, which becomes separated from the particularity of action in
tactical scenarios through its retreat into moral generalities. We also
cannot speak of a generalized violence without falling into the same
trap. However, the question in not an impossibility; only the attempt to
have a singular total answer is. The reality of our scenario is that
tactics shift, goals differ and situations are fluid. As such, the
question of the correct, or proper, tactics is one that is often
discussed in the abstract, even if that abstraction eliminates the
subject of the discussion, tactics itself. If we are to approach the
state as a fluid, complex logistics, rather than some sort of monolithic
entity or reductive concept of a mythical consensus, then we have to
come to terms with what is actually occurring; that we are placing
ourselves into situations of acute conflict, which are complex, kinetic,
shifting situations which we are doing the best we can to survive and be
as effective as possible. Just as with perspectives that argue to a
universalized violence, non-violence is also completely incapable of
responding to, or even discussing, actual material dynamics and actual
tactical scenarios without preconditions and overabstractions.
One recent approach to moving beyond this impasse — outside of agreeing
to disagree — is the discourse of a diversity of tactics. Employing a
diversity of tactics creates the space for agency to be situationally,
politically and positionally dependent; one engages in the tactics with
which they have a desire to engage. To illustrate a real-world
application of this paradigm, examine the St. Paul Principles, developed
to facilitate actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention
protests.
“The principles are: 1) Our solidarity will be based on a respect for a
diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups, 2) The actions and
tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or
space, 3) Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement,
avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and
events, 4) We oppose any state repression of dissent, including
surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to
assist law enforcement actions against activists and others” (
http://www.nornc.org/st-paul-principles/
)
These have become the standard point of departure for discussion and
deployment of destabilization actions, which has been useful in forging
an agreement between various groups and collectives around tactical
limits. This framework is a fluid and dynamic way of making sure that
all groups — regardless of tactics — have space for their own desires,
regardless of how totally ineffective many of these forms are. Diversity
of tactics at once rejects the equivalence of all acts by generating an
“ecosystem of resistance” (a term used a lot on the ground in St Paul
during the RNC) which knows no limitations. This move away from the
essentialized act creates a space which is always already destabilized
to the degree that there is a multiplicity of actions, either announced
publicly or not, while still making sure that there is a support
infrastructure in place for legal and medic support. It is an approach
based in a approach firmly rooted in theories of the multitude; “for
Spinoza, the multitudo indicates plurality which persists as such in the
public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs,
without converging into a One” (Virno, 21). It generates an environment
of potential non-reducability, an environment which rejects the
equivalence of situationality posited by the state and its civil
disturbance approaches.
The practical meaning of the tactical impasse of nonviolence is that the
Subject qua nonviolence frames and limits acts through the
definitionality of a fluid nonviolence immobilized in the nonviolence
guideline. In other words, the adherence to an abstract nonviolence
supersedes the tactical necessities of the situation itself, it is
nothing but institutionalized ineffectiveness. There are a series of
equivalences made in the calculations of the nonviolent action. First,
the guidelines are determined through the naming and defining of the
concept of nonviolence which comes to supersede the act and agents
themselves, substituting the equivalence for the actual participants and
situation. This is the very same move made by the state, just in a
microcosmic form. Secondly, the Subject qua state is taken as the plane
of engagement, they are the Subject of consent, doing nothing but
reinforcing the Newtonian equivalence of the state as such and
generating another appropriation of mass politics — negating the actual
existence of actual agents. In positing this series of equivalences, the
defining of nonviolence comes to supersede the actual goals of the
action itself in favor of building mass consent and support for
nonviolent tactics and politics. Can someone explain to me how this is
different than the assumption of mass movementism from Leninism to
electoral neoliberalism?
Nonviolence refuses to engage in tactics that would be effective to
rather serve the interest of preserving the mass image of nonviolence.
But how is nonviolence possible in an apparatus that has formed us in
the image of total war? To define nonviolence means to section it off
from violence; but if everything is saturated with violence, the
battlefield abolished, then this form of definitionality becomes pure
simulacra, a generated construct that by design exceeds everyday life
and forms its Subject in the cryogenic time of Newtonian equivalence.
This becoming-cryogenic prevents any form of nonviolence from responding
to attempts by the forces of the state to enforce stability over a
situation, the tactics are set, the participants are “responsible” and
harmless, and the action becomes nothing but theatre, and ineffective
theatre at that.
“You Can’t Blow Up A Social Relationship”. anonymous. 1979
Politics of Nonviolence. Sharp, Gene. Boston. Porter Sargent. 1973
Leviathan. Hobbes, Thomas. New York. Penguin Classic. 1982
Grammar of the Multitude. Virno, Paolo. New York. Semiotexte. 2004
Chaos: Making a New Science. Gleick, James. New York. Penguin. 2008
“Field Manual 3–19.15: Civil Disturbance Operations”. United States
Army. 2005
St Paul Principles. retrieved 1/30/2009.
www.nornc.org/st-paul-principles
Declaration of Peace Nonviolent Guidelines. retrieved 1/31/2009.