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Title: Against Violence Author: Bart de Ligt Date: 1937 Language: en Topics: violence, pacifism, non-violence Source: Retrieved on 21st September 2020 from https://www.panarchy.org/deligt/violence.html
The non-violent methods of struggle are not bound up with any one
person, nor one particular race, nor with any separate country, nor with
one sole conception·of life or of the universe. At the Anti-Imperialist
Conference at Brussels in 1927, we heard the Zulu Goumed declare that
the blacks, in their fight for liberty, could not do better than follow
the example of India. Yes, indeed! for how could they ever rival the
modern armaments of the whites, armaments which are closely connected
too with a whole social and technical organization which is absolutely
foreign to them?
At the Conference of Non-Europeans, which was held at Port Elizabeth in
South Africa in April 1934, a resolution was passed among others asking
the whole non-European population to boycott all goods manufactured or
sold by establishments which refused to employ native workers.
Gandhi himself admits that he has come round to his tactics not only
through the influence of certain Hindu religious traditions, but also:
Let us note that the technical term “civil disobedience”, which Gandhi
likes to apply to his fighting methods, has been consciously borrowed by
him from the immortal speech Thoreau made in 1848, in which he gave a
classic exposé of his ideas concerning individual and collective refusal
of military service, and, in certain circumstances, of all social
service and payment of taxes.
According to Thoreau, every responsible citizen should utterly ignore
the public authorities, laws and institutions, when a truly human
interest requires it, and so prevent his Government from committing
crimes in critical moments. Co-operation with all people and
institutions which lean towards the good, non-co-operation the minute
there is a question of promoting the bad, such is the maxim in which one
could sum up Thoreau’s theory, which he himself put into practice in
exemplary fashion.
The few hundred people who knew him during his life in America, looked
on him as a rule as a cranky idealist, if not a pleasant simpleton, with
whom practical dealings were impossible. To-day in Asia, millions of his
fellow men have put his tactics, as simple as effective, into practice
with surprising results.
Like his friend Emerson, whose speech On War in 1838 should at least be
mentioned here, Thoreau was familiar with the doctrine of that gifted
young Frenchman, Etienne de la Boétie (1530–63) to whom Emerson
dedicated one of his most outstanding poems. In his essay called Of
Voluntary Servitude Etienne de la Boétie threw a light on the whole
social edifice and showed that a ruler only has power in as much as the
people allow it to him. The power of the ruling class lasts only as long
as those who are subject to it recognize it in principle and in fact —
that is, as long as the governed people consent to give their respect to
those who require it.
Official authority, the power some hold legally over others is more
moral than physical in character. It rests less on violence than on
respect, that is, on the belief in the right to govern of those in
power. The day the masses learn to free themselves of their veneration
for those who hold them down, the authority of the ruling classes, no
longer being recognized, will vanish at once, and they will lose their
power immediately.
No despotism, tyranny, dictatorship or public authority of any kind
exists except thanks to the submission of the masses. As soon as the
people realize that the public authorities are essentially parasitic in
nature and take from them the power which formerly they had granted, the
whole social pyramid topples. The one advantage, declares la Boétie,
that the ruling class has over the subjugated masses is the right these
masses have conceded them to hold them in slavery. From where come the
police, the spies, the soldiers? From the people, who, putting
themselves at the service of all branches of official authority, fight
amongst and destroy themselves. When, with their heavy tread, the
soldiers go forward over fields and towns, it is the people crushing the
people, at the behest of the established powers, declares la Boétie once
again. Domela Nieuwenhuis, a Dutch anti-militarist, was to say, several
centuries later, “A people in uniform is its own tyrant! ”
Another thinker to be deeply impressed by la Boétie’s essay was Tolstoy,
who quotes a striking passage from it in The Law of Violence and the Law
of Love. Tolstoy’s Letter to a Hindu bears witness also to a strong
influence from de la Boétie. The German Socialist and lover of freedom,
Gustav Landauer — whose tomb was one of the first to be violated by the
Nazis — made a stirring summary of Voluntary Servitude, which became the
pivot of his classical essay, Die Revolution.
Let us pass over the impressive history of the direct non-violent action
of Christianity in the first centuries and that of religious sects, both
mediaeval and modern, as well as the remarkable anti-war movement which
is being led by an ever increasing number of Protestant clergymen in
Europe and America, reaching a figure of thousands at the present time —
a history which we have dealt with at length in another book (La Paix
Créatrice). Because, if we were to quote these, the Western workers
would immediately reply: “That has nothing to do with us, it’s
religion.”
Well then, let us leave out the Christians, whether modern, mediaeval or
primitive, and go back to pagan Rome. In 494 B.C. even she gave us an
unforgettable example of non-co-operation. As we know, the plebeians —
that is to say, the small peasants who, although free, were excluded
from political power — were suffering out of all reason from the
iniquitous laws. The patricians — that is to say, the great landowners,
who occupied the State offices — had all the rights; they possessed
enormous fortunes. On the other hand, the plebeians, who were very poor
for the most part, were shut out of all position and public duty. The
patricians had seized all the common lands, which had been a survival of
communal ownership, and drew vast profits from them. They continued to
force the people to equip themselves at their own expense for war. These
people, resorting more and more to loans to maintain their families, got
deeper and deeper into debt. Crushed beneath the weight of these debts,
they were subjected to a cruel system of imprisonment. But aware that in
society, the wealth and the victory of the upper strata only exist
thanks to continual support of the lower classes, they decided at a
certain moment to withhold their forces from this iniquitous social
system. Driven to the end of their tether, they left Rome to found an
independent community on Mons Sacra, sine ullo duce, without a leader —
they had no use for FĂĽhrers! They declared that they would not return
until they were granted a share in the government and in the common
lands. Livy describes how this exodus took place in exemplary order and
how these peasant-soldiers organized a camp on Mount Aventine and
installed themselves there. Such a secessio in montem, secession to the
mountain, must have been repeated more than once. At last, the
patricians were forced to comply with the demands of the plebs because,
with their warlike policy, they needed them. In the fourth century B.C.,
therefore, the plebs acquired considerable advantages both economic and
political.
Clarence Marsh Case affirms that this “boycott”, the first effective
action by the proletariat, took place without any disorder or violence.
(Non-violent coercion. A study in methods of social pressure, 1923)
…..
In Livy, too, we find a description of how, in 375 B.C. the people of
Tusculum “averted the vengeance of Rome by an obstinate peace, which
they could never have done with their arms “. See the different forms of
Gandhi-ism which appeared even in pagan Rome ! We must admit that the
non-violent methods of struggle are not at all foreign to a Western
conscience. Did not Mirabeau, who has been praised as one of the
thinkers who were most alive to the different times, declare at the
Assembly of the States of Provence, “ Take care, do not despise these
people who produce everything, this people who, to be formidable, have
only to stand motionless.” Opposing in this way the “strength and the
law of the producers” to the privileged “sterility of the nobles”, he
gave “the most powerful and striking formula of what we now call the
general strike”. (Jean Jaurès, Histoire Socialiste de la France
contemporaine, Tome I, La Costituante)
In the middle of the last century, the French revolutionary Anselme
Bellegarrigue, as a consequence of his social and political experiences
in the United States and in France, lost all confidence both in the
Governments whose very nature is violence and in revolutions from the
moment they allow themselves to be involved in bloodshed: in one case as
in the other, everything rests in the final analysis on oppression and
murder, and once caught in this trap there is no way of getting out. The
barricades, in his view, are usually raised by those who wish to rule
against those who are ruling. Let us do away with all forms of
Government and govern ourselves in reasonable fashion, and henceforward
all barricades will be superfluous for ever.
“In the end,” Bellegarrigue goes on, “there are no tyrants, only
slaves.” The Socialist movement has only arisen from the profound thirst
of humanity for freedom. The exercise of power, even in the name of
Socialism, can only kill it. A people is always too much governed.
That is why Bellegarrigue spread the idea of a refusal of assistance,
which is identified with the principle of non-co-operation and civil
disobedience. He developed a whole “theory of calm” which opens up
possibilities of overcoming even the most powerful regime “by abstention
and inertia”. Everything must bow to the power of abstention: social
privileges, unjust taxes, surveillance, military hierarchy, all must
give way when the masses withdraw their support from violent regimes and
exercise their moral force.
Bellegarrigue returned from America to France in February 1848. Soon
after, he remarked that the tragic thing about revolutions is that they
are always robbed of their fruits by the governments they set up. While
in America, there was a minimum of government, in France everything was
growing more and more centralized, in order that it might pass through
the hands of the State. In his brochure, Au Fait ! au Fait ! (1848) he
described how bureaucracy ate up everything a person earned. It is the
modern Minotaur, who sucks the masses’ blood and swallows up billions !
Nothing is actually changed when Socialist Governments replace the
bourgeois, all Étatisme being in flagrant contradiction with
self-government, which is the essence of all true revolution.
So the non-violent methods of struggle are not bound then either to a
particular religion or to a special race or people. European and
American lovers of freedom discover its worth just as much as Hindu
mystics, rebellious Negroes and warlike Sikhs. Besides, the general
strike, practised as much by English, Russian and Scandinavian
Socialists as by French, Italian, Spanish and South American anarchists
and syndicalists, and regarded since the beginning of the century as a
typically proletarian means of struggle, is in itself a way of action
foreign to the traditional violent method.