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Title: The Failure of Nonviolence
Subtitle: From the Arab Spring to Occupy
Source: Provided by the author, based on the first Left Bank Books edition, 2013.
Notes: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Authors: Peter Gelderloos
Topics: nonviolence, direct action, black bloc, violence

Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

<center>

This book is dedicated to Marie Mason, Eric McDavid, & all those who

support them.

</center>

<center>

When they poured across the border

I was cautioned to surrender,

this I could not do;

I took my gun and vanished.

[...]

“Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,

through the graves the wind is

blowing,

freedom soon will come;

then we’ll come from the shadows.

</center>

<center>

—Leonard Cohen, “*The Partisan*”

</center>

Introduction: Nonviolence has lost the debate

Nonviolence has lost the debate. Over the last 20 years, more and more

social movements and rebellions against oppression and exploitation have

broken out across the

world, and within these movements people have learned all over again

that nonviolence does not work. They are learning that the histories of

purported nonviolent victories have been falsified, that specific

actions or methods that could be described as nonviolent work best when

they are complemented by other actions or methods that are illegal and

combative. They are learning that exclusive, dogmatic nonviolence does

not stand a chance at achieving a revolutionary change in society, at

getting to the roots of oppression and exploitation and bringing down

those who are in power.

At best, nonviolence can oblige power to change

its masks, to put a new political party on the throne and possibly

expand the social sectors that are represented in the elite, without

changing the fundamental fact that there is an elite that rules and

benefits from the exploitation of everybody else. And if we look at all

the major rebellions of the last two decades, since the end of the Cold

War, it seems that nonviolence can only effect this cosmetic change if

it has the support of a broad part of the elite—usually the media, the

wealthy, and at least a part of the military, because nonviolent

resistance has never been able to resist the full force of the State.

When dissidents do not have this elite support, strict nonviolence seems

like the surest way to kill a movement, as when pure nonviolence led to

the total collapse of the anti-war movement in 2003[1], or an enforced nonviolence led to the

collapse of the student movement in Spain in 2009[2].

In dozens of new social movements around the

world, people have gone into the streets for the first time thinking

that nonviolence is the way, because contrary to the claims of many

pacifists, our society teaches us that while violence may be acceptable

for governments, people on the bottom who wish to change things must

always be nonviolent. This is why from the Occupy Movement in the US to

the plaza occupation movement in Spain to the student movement in the

UK, tens of thousands of people who were participating in a struggle for

the first time in their lives, who only knew about revolution and

resistance from television or from public schools (which is to say, from

the media or from the government) overwhelmingly believed in

nonviolence. And around the world, experience taught many of these

people that they were wrong, that the pacifists, together with the media

and the government had lied to them, and in order to change anything,

they had to fight back.

This has been a collective learning process that

has taken place around the globe, and the direction of that process has

overwhelmingly gone from nonviolence to a diversity of tactics—the idea

that we cannot impose a limitation of tactics or one method of

struggle on an entire movement, that we need to be able to choose from a

wide range of tactics, that struggles are more robust when such a

variety of tactics are present, and that everybody needs to decide for

themselves how to struggle (peaceful tactics, therefore, are included

within a diversity of tactics, where nonviolence excludes all other

tactics and methods).

Eight years ago, there were frequent debates

between proponents of nonviolence and proponents of a diversity of

tactics. In the fall of 2004, I wrote *How Nonviolence Protects the

State*, one of several similar polemics to appear at the time (the

arguments I make in that book, as well as criticisms of it, are outlined

in the appendix). In the climate of the antiglobalization movement,

which was heavily skewed towards nonviolence thanks to the disappearance

or institutionalization of the social movements that came before us, and

thanks to the heavy NGO participation, the debate felt like an uphill

battle, although most of us were aided and inspired by the discovery or

republication of texts from earlier generations of struggle, like Ward

Churchill’s *Pacifism as Pathology* or Frantz Fanon’s *The Wretched of

the Earth*.

At that time, proponents of nonviolence frequently

emerged from their ivory towers to debate with proponents of a diversity

of tactics. But in the intervening years, something has changed.

Insurrections have occurred around the world, while nonviolent movements

have proven themselves stillborn or morally bankrupt (see Chapter 3).

Even within the confines of the antiglobalization movement, the most

powerful and communicative protests were those that openly organized on

the basis of a diversity of tactics, while the rebellions in the Global

South that kept the movement alive were nothing close to pacifist.

Many of the proponents of nonviolence were drawing

on a rich if somewhat flawed history of peaceful movements for change,

like the Latin American solidarity movement in the US or the

antimilitarist and anti-nuclear movements in Europe. But many of these

older, principled pacifists have disappeared, while those who have

remained active were scarcely present in the emergence of the new

nonviolent mass movements. In the face of its defeats, nonviolence

nourished itself not in the experience of social movements, which

repeatedly counseled against it, but rather anchored itself with the

support of the mass media, the universities, wealthy benefactors, and

governments themselves (see Chapter 8). Nonviolence has become

increasingly external to social movements, and imposed upon them.

As this has happened, direct debate between the

idea of nonviolence and that of a diversity of tactics has become

increasingly rare. The criticisms of nonviolence that were published in

those years made a number of arguments that would have to be either

rebutted or acknowledged for any honest debate to continue. These

include:

- the accusation that proponents of nonviolence, in conjunction with the

State, have falsified the history of the movement against the war in

Vietnam, the struggles for civil rights in the US, and the independence

movement in India to portray movements that used a diversity of tactics

as nonviolent, and to make a partial or limited victory seem like a full

victory;

- the argument that the State was able to prevent the movement from

attaining full victory, both in the case of civil rights and Indian

independence, thanks to the role of pacifists in dialoguing with the

government and attacking others in the movement who used more combative

tactics;

- the fact that proponents of nonviolence, particularly those who are

white and middle-class, have heavily edited the teachings of Martin

Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi to cut out those figures’ own learning

processes and their radicalization in later years, and to silence their

criticisms of white progressive allies or their support for non-pacifist

movements including urban rioters and armed liberation movements;

- documentation of government, police, and media encouragement of

nonviolence within social movements, including government strategy

papers that show that the State prefers to go up against a peaceful

movement rather than a combative movement; --evidence of paternalism and

racism by nonviolent organizations towards the struggles of poor people

and people of color;

- the argument that government and business institutions are

structurally immune to a “change of heart” and that historically a

strictly nonviolent resistance has never provoked massive mutiny from

the military, police, or other institutions, as has combative or diverse

resistance;

- a long list of gains won by movements that used a diversity of

tactics;

- the argument that “violence” is an intrinsically ambiguous category

that enables more analytical manipulation than precision;

- the argument that most of the alleged problems with revolutionary

violence are in fact problems that can be attributed to authoritarian

movements that use violence and not to anti-authoritarian movements that

use violence.[3]

Yet proponents of nonviolence in recent years have

not acknowledged these criticisms, neither to rebut them nor to revise

their own positions. They continue repeating the clichés, the

misinformation, the broad statements, and the name-dropping of Gandhi

and King that sparked the criticisms in the first place. But more often

still, they avoid any direct communication altogether. In social

movements across the world, they have begun spreading the claim that the

Black Bloc in particular, or masked rioters in general, are police

provocateurs and government agents. Never mind that in every single one

of the many countries where this cheap accusation has been made, there

are comrades in the social movements who argue in favor of self-defense

against the police, of taking over the streets, and of smashing banks;

never mind that they have already published explanations of their

actions and that they would also be willing to sit down with those of

another opinion to debate these things; and never mind that many of them

have dedicated their lives to social movements for years—not just to the

task of attacking banks but also to solidarity in all its forms, as well

as many kinds of creation and self-organization.

With increasing frequency, unscrupulous supporters

of nonviolence have spread the accusation, often without any evidence,

that other members of a social movement are police provocateurs, and

they have done this precisely because they are afraid

to debate. They have to rob their opponents of any legitimacy and

prevent bystanders to the debate from realizing that there is indeed any

debate going on, that the social movements contain conflicting beliefs

and practices. And by spreading false rumors of infiltration and

dividing the movement, they expose those they accuse to violence,

whether that is the violence of arrest or the violence of fellow

protesters. On a number of occasions, police have tracked down and

arrested those “bad protesters” who are accused of being infiltrators in

order to clear their names. Supporters of nonviolence have often aided

police in identifying the “bad protesters.”[4] And after

organizing or participating in debates on nonviolence over a hundred

times in Europe, and North and South America, I am convinced that those

who have most often physically attacked fellow protesters have been

supporters of nonviolence. This is certainly confirmed by what I have

seen with my own eyes. The episode has played out so many times that it

has lost all its humorous irony: proponents of nonviolence attacking

those they disagree with for not using peaceful tactics.

There was a time when the only people dishonest

enough to toss around the accusation that the Black Bloc or other masked

protesters are police infiltrators were Stalinists. Now, this has become

a stock argument, not only by conspiracy nuts but also by pacifists who

claim the mantle of Gandhi and King. Lies and manipulations are a resort

of those who have lost an argument but don’t have the decency to admit

it.

In the plaza occupation movement in Spain,

self-appointed leaders imposed strict adherence to nonviolence, even

prohibiting the blocking of streets or the painting of banks, and they

boycotted any debate on the subject. In Barcelona, they even made the

paperwork disappear when anarchists tried to reserve the sound system to

organize such a debate. And during Occupy, a number of mainstream

journalists posing as friends of the movement published

denunciations filled with manipulations and misinformation in a

bald-faced attempt to criminalize a part of the movement.

When one of these journalists, *The New York

Times*’ Chris Hedges, sat down to debate a member of Crimethinc,[5]

he repeatedly contradicted himself, denied some of the arguments

he made in his infamous article, and proved incapable of understanding

that violence is a social construct that is applied to some forms of

harm but not to others, often depending on whether such harm is

considered normal within our society. When some nonviolence proponents

broke the principles of unity and denounced fellow protesters after the

demonstrations against the Vancouver Olympics, one of them subsequently

debated Harsha Walia from “No One is Illegal,” and got soundly

thrashed.[6]

Most proponents of nonviolence have been smarter,

and they have avoided any level playing field. They have not chosen the

terrain of the movement itself, because collective experiences

repeatedly prove them wrong. Instead they have turned towards the elite

and gotten support from the system itself. Mainstream, forprofit

publishing companies print out their books by the millions, in a stream

of titles that increases as combative social movements gain more ground.

Mainstream, for-profit media give nonviolent activists interviews while

they demonize the so-called violent ones. University professors and NGO

employees living off of grants from the government or wealthy donors

(and living lush, compared to those of us who make our living working in

restaurants and bars, shoplifting, teaching in public schools, driving

taxis, doing temp work or sex work, or volunteering for medical

experiments), also tend to weigh in on the side of nonviolence, bringing

a hefty array of institutional resources along with them.

All of these resources overwhelm the small

counterinformation websites, the pirate radio stations, and the

all-volunteer independent presses of the movement. For every book we

print out, often cutting and binding by hand, they can print a thousand

books. The proponents of nonviolence, yet again, have chosen to

unscrupulously work with and for the system in a Faustian pact,

availing themselves of resources, economic security, safety from

repression, and even fame, but make no mistake: they have revealed

themselves as morally corrupt. The closer one gets to the do-ityourself,

the self-organized, and the crowd-funded structures of our movements for

revolution, and the more one is immersed in the streets, in the

struggles of those who are fighting for their own lives, the more likely

you are to find support for a diversity of tactics. And the closer you

get to the ngos, to the corporate publishing houses, to the mainstream

media or the richly funded “alternatives,” to the elite universities, to

the media-conscious careerists, and to the halls of wealth and

privilege, the more likely you are to find strict support for exclusive

nonviolence.

Nonviolence has failed on a global level. It has

proven to be a great friend to governments, political parties, police

departments, and ngos, and a traitor to our struggles for freedom,

dignity, and well-being. The vast majority of its proponents have jumped

ship to cozy up to the media, the State, or wealthy benefactors, using

any cheap trick, manipulation, or form of violence (like attacking

fellow protesters or helping the cops carry out arrests) that comes in

handy to win the contest, even if it means the division and death of the

movement. Many have proven themselves to be opportunists, politicians,

or careerists. And a principled minority who actually have remained true

to their historical movements still have not answered for past failings

or current weaknesses.

In response to *How Nonviolence Protects the

State*, there were a few principled supporters of nonviolence (writing

in *Fifth Estate* or on *Richmond Indymedia*, for example) who

criticized the tone of the book but accepted many of the criticisms, and

called on other pacifists to read it in order to come to terms with

certain mistakes.

In this book also, I argue in favor of a diversity

of tactics. At its most basic, the concept of a diversity of tactics is

nothing more than the recognition that different methods of struggle

exist side by side. My goal is not to make other people think like I do

or support the exact same tactics and methods that I do. To me, not only

is it inconceivable that a movement contain a homogeneity of methods, it

is also undesirable. It is nothing but authoritarianism

to censor a movement for social change so that everyone else uses the

same method as we do. This is why I believe that nonviolence—meaning an

attempt to force nonviolent methods across an entire

movement[7]—is authoritarian and belongs to the State. For

the same reason, I do not want to impose my methods on others. And even

if this could be done through the pure force of reason, simply

convincing everybody (and it couldn’t, for no human group ever thinks

with the same mind, and thank the heavens for that), it would be a grave

mistake. We can never know whether our analysis and our methods are

wrong, except sometimes with hindsight. Our movements are stronger when

they employ diverse methods and analyses and these different positions

criticize one another.

Those of us who have tried to create a more

conflictive struggle have often been wrong, and sometimes we have been

aided by the criticism of those who are more drawn to healing and

reconciliation than to conflict. But that kind of mutual criticism and

support is only possible if those who today separate themselves as

pacifists decide unequivocally to stand always with those who struggle,

and always against the powers that oppress.

My aim with this book is not to convert or

delegitimize every person who prefers nonviolence. Within a struggle

that uses a diversity of tactics, there is room for those who prefer

peaceful methods as long as they do not try to write the rules for the

entire movement, as long as they do not collaborate with the police and

the other structures of power, and as long as they accept that other

people in the struggle are going to use other methods, according to

their situation and their preferences. It would also help if they

acknowledged the historical failings of nonviolence, but that is only

their concern if they wish to develop effective nonviolent methods that

must actually be taken seriously, as contrasted with the <em>hollow,

comforta</em>ble forms of nonviolence that have predominated

in the last decades.

And while any struggle not attempting to enforce

homogeneity must accept the existence of a diversity of tactics, I do not

wish to give anyone the impression that we, collectively, have been

doing a good job of building this struggle, or that the diversity of

tactics framework is adequate to our needs. We need much stronger social

struggles if we are to overcome the State, capitalism, patriarchy—all

the forces that oppress and exploit us—to create a world on the basis of

mutual aid, solidarity, free association, and a healthy relationship

with the earth and one another. To that end, I will conclude by talking

about struggles that have revealed promising new directions, and about

how we can move past a diversity of tactics so that different methods of

struggle can complement one another critically and respectfully.

1. Violence Doesn’t Exist

Perhaps the most important argument against non-violence is that violence as a concept is ambiguous to the point of

being incoherent. It is a concept that is prone to manipulation, and its

definition is in the hands of the media and the government, so that

those who base their struggle on trying to avoid it will forever be

taking cues and following the lead of those in power.

Put simply, violence does not exist. It is not a

• thing*. It is a category, a human construct in which we choose to place

a wide array of actions, phenomena, situations, and so forth. “Violence”

is whatever the person speaking at the moment decides to describe as

violent. Usually, this means things they do not like. As a result, the

use of the category “violence” tends towards hypocrisy. If it is

done to me, it is violent. If it is done by me or for my benefit, it is

justified, acceptable, or even invisible.

In the last eight years, I have organized or

participated in dozens of workshops on the topic of nonviolence.

Whenever I can, I ask people to define “violence.” The curious thing is

that no group of people, whether they number five or a hundred, has ever

agreed on the definition. And we’re not talking about a random sample of

the population, but relatively homogeneous groups who participate in

social movements, who live in the same town and often know each other,

or in a few cases a neighborhood association or study group. Excepting

the occasional university class, we’re talking about a self-selecting

group of people who come out to a talk critical of or in support of

nonviolence. And even in that narrow sample, there is no consensus about

what violence actually means.

Sometimes I would try teasing it out by asking

folks to stand or raise their hand if they thought a specific action or

situation was violent. Then I named cases like, “a protestor punching a

cop who is trying to arrest someone,” “breaking the windows of a bank

that evicts people from their houses,” “buying and eating factory-farmed

meat,” “buying and eating factory-farmed soy,” “a person killing someone

trying to rape them,” “carrying a gun in public,” “paying your taxes,”

“driving a car,” “the police evicting someone from their house,” “making

a cop feel good about their job,” “a predator killing and eating prey,”

“a lightning bolt killing someone,” “imprisonment” and so on.

After doing this exercise dozens of times, I

noticed a few clear patterns. First, as I have already mentioned: there

was no agreement. But even more interesting was what happened if I asked

people to close their eyes while answering. If they could not see how

their peers were responding, there was an even greater divergence. If

people had their eyes open, most questions had a clear majority

describing the case as “violent” or “not violent.” If their eyes were

closed, many more cases were divided clearly down the middle (this

divergence was even more evident if I asked people to position

themselves on a spectrum rather than giving a simple yes or no). In

other words, “violence” is not necessarily a category

that is reasonably defined, so much as one that is defined by the

reactions of our peers. What is considered normal or acceptable is much

less likely to be defined as violent, no matter how much harm it may

cause.

Something that critics of nonviolence have long

said is that nonviolence hides structural violence or the violence of

the State, yet it is this kind of violence, and not riots or liberation

struggles, that harms far more people around the world. It was no

surprise, then, that many people, especially outside the United

States,[8] thought that it was violent for someone to carry a

gun in public, whereas hardly anyone considered working as a cop to be a

violent act, even though being a cop means, among other things, carrying

a gun in public. In other words, the category of violence makes the

legal force of the police invisible, whereas it highlights anyone who

fights back against this commonplace. This is why we say that

nonviolence privileges and protects the violence of the State. This is

why the most respected, longstanding pacifist organizations will

prohibit people from coming armed to their demonstrations (even armed

with things as innocuous as sticks or helmets) but will make no move to

disarm the police, whom they often invite to oversee their protests. And

this is why the police, in turn, try to urge protesters and protest

organizations to be nonviolent, to publish nonviolent codes of conduct,

and to expel or help arrest **any “bad protest**er” who doesn’t

follow the law.[9]

Only people who are involved in radical causes, or

who have experienced it first hand, tend to see structural harm as

violence. People in a typical college class do not identify paying taxes

or buying clothes made in a sweatshop as violent. People who have been

foreclosed, or participants in a group that fights foreclosures, will

identify an eviction as violent. Animal rights activists will identify

eating meat as violent. Small farmer advocates or rainforest advocates

will identify soy as violent. Almost no one will identify driving a car

as violent, even though in objective terms it is the item on the list

that has caused and will cause the most deaths, without a doubt.

What about natural violence? What about the harm

caused by weather, by predators, by lack of predators, by the simple

fact so many people still have not come to terms with, which is that

everybody dies? How much does the concept of a “right to life” owe to

Christian morality, founded in the idea that our lives belong to God and

not to us? What is the relationship between this fear of violence and a

fear of the naturalness and inevitability of harm and death?

Categorically separating harm that is inevitable in nature and harm

caused by humans is inextricable from a separation of humans from their

environment, both philosophically and materially. How much suffering is

caused by this separation?

Does violence mean causing harm? If we participate

in a non-voluntary structure (like the State or the capitalist market)

that tortures, kills, or malnourishes millions of people, are we off the

hook, just because we would face negative consequences for refusal (to

pay taxes, to engage in any market exchange because, let’s face it, even

if you buy green, all economic activity fuels overall economic

activity)?[10] This would make a joke of nonviolence, if those

who fight back against structures of oppression are considered worse

than those who accept them passively. And if complicity with violent

structures is also to be defined as violent, then

how much resistance is required of us so as not to be violent? If we

participate in a protest once a year, that after over thirty years has

still not succeeded in closing one military school, can we now be

considered nonviolent? What if we get arrested for civil disobedience,

even if we know that our arrest will probably change nothing?

These questions are impossible to answer. We are

all forced to participate in a society that is held together by

structural violence, and rewarded for our participation with various

privileges, though these privileges are spread unevenly across society.

Given that those who use some form of visible, antisocial violence are

often the least likely to enjoy the privileges of structural violence,

there is no feasible way to determine who is violent and who is not. And

if we define passive complicity as support for violence, there is no way

to judge which methods of struggle are more or less violent, since a

peaceful method may be more complicit with structural violence. Given

that we do not yet know for sure which methods will be most effective at

finally abolishing the structures that are oppressing us and destroying

the planet, no one can make a solid claim to having a truly peaceful

method, unless we understand “peaceful” as “non-conflictive” and perhaps

also as “at peace with existing structures of violence.”

Therefore, nonviolence is not an absence,

avoidance, or transformation of violence. That would be impossible to

certify. Nonviolence is an attempt to resolve, transform, or suppress

those things in our society and in our social movements that appear to

its practitioners to be violent. Because violence cannot be understood

objectively, nonviolent groups will tend to focus on eliminating or

discouraging the forms of violence that are more obvious, and in their

reach; the kinds of violence that are not normal, but that go against

normality; the kinds of violence that are not invisible, but

spectacular. This means nonviolence will privilege the struggle against

open war, against dictatorships, against military rule, while

downplaying or even cozying up to the less visible violence of

democratic government, capitalism, and structural warfare. This also

means pacifying those who are fighting against power, because the act of

rebellion will always appear to be the most violent act

in our society. For this reason, many proponents of nonviolence denounce

any combative form of rebellion while normalizing and even justifying

the repressive response of the State.[11] This is not by any

means true of all practitioners of nonviolence, but it is the logical

outcome of the contradictions in the idea of nonviolence, and therefore

it is the path that many or most practitioners will take.

It is no surprise, then, that one of the largest

nonviolent movements of recent years, the “*indignados*” of

Spain,[12] declared any illegal actions including blocking

streets or even guerrilla gardening—turning the grassy lawn of a public

plaza into a garden—to be violent. In contrast, many self-described

pacifists I have met have decided that self-defense or even

assassinating dictators would not be violent because they were

aggressors and such an action would avert a much greater harm. Violence

is a very flexible term that people can bend and twist however they want

to morally justify or condemn the actions they have already decided are

acceptable or unacceptable.

Violence is so vague, so hard to define, it is

useless as a strategic category. It would be silly to abolish it as a

word, because it can succinctly describe a certain emotional reality.

But to use it analytically, to use it as a guiding criterion for our

strategies of struggle, is an invitation to confusion.

It can take hours of debating and only sometimes

will a group of people agree to a common definition of violence. But

they have accomplished nothing, because some of them will still not be

convinced whether “nonviolent” lines up with “good” and “violent” with

“bad” as they are intended to. In other words, they still will not have

learned anything about the proper methods for struggle. And more

importantly, nearly everyone else in the world will still be using

another definition.

How was the category of “violence” introduced in

our strategic debates? I would argue that it was introduced by the very

institution that serves as the gatekeeper to people’s perception of

violence: the media. It is the media who constantly discipline social

movements to adopt these categories and defend themselves from the

ever-ready accusation of being “violent.” As soon as dissidents try to

defend themselves by arguing that they are not violent, they have fallen

into the trap, taking up the values of the State and adopting its

preferred category.

There are also histories that suggest the media’s

role in introducing this category in earlier struggles. Even Gandhi, who

saw how the liberation struggles before his time were maligned by the

powerful, and who went to study at an elite university in England, his

country’s colonizer, would have been highly sensitive to how rebels and

revolutionaries were characterized in the discourses and the media of

the ruling class. He certainly would have gotten such a perspective when

he voluntarily rallied his fellow Indians in South Africa to support two

different British wars, winning a War Medal for his efforts.

Discussing the history of popular movements and

elite responses in the city of Barcelona, Chris Ealham reveals the

media’s use of “moral panics” to unify the city bourgeoisie against the

threat of revolution from below.[13] At the end of the 19th

and beginning of the 20th century, the major newspapers were primarily a

tool of communication among the bourgeoisie—the class of rulers and

owners. Because there was no single effective conspiracy uniting all the

elite, especially in Barcelona, where the elite were divided between

Spaniards and Catalans, merchants and landed gentry, Catholics and

progressives, much of the conversation about how to rule had to take

place in the open. But in the face of general strikes, worker

rebellions, and a growing anarchist movement, the factory owners,

politicians, aristocrats, and church officials could not communicate

openly about their need to keep the lower classes down. Doing so in a

newspaper would only hasten their loss of control over the hearts and

minds of their subjects, and it would

also contradict with their own self-image and the philanthropic

discourses they used to justify why they got to sit on top of the social

pyramid. So they turned to moralistic euphemisms. The elite, as has been

the case at most times in history, did not have a single set of

interests, but conflicting interests and differing strategies regarding

how to maintain and amplify their power. Different sectors of the elite

generally had their own newspapers, and these usually held competing

discourses. However, when popular movements were particularly strong,

such that they presented a threat to the social pyramid, it was crucial

for the elites to get over their differences and join their forces to

trample down those on the bottom. Therefore, the newspapers began to

deploy some of the key euphemisms they were already circulating to

signal a moral panic, an ungodly threat to the ruling order that

required the whole ruling class to unite.

Aside from uncleanliness or hygiene, the principal

term used to unleash a moral panic and mobilize elite action was

“violence.” Among the elite, then as now, in Barcelona as in the

English-speaking world, “violence” was a euphemism for a threat to the

ruling order and its illusion of social peace, with which the class

struggle, the brutality of patriarchy, and the murderousness of

colonialism are hidden. The newspapers did not talk about violence when

cops killed strikers, when landlords evicted families, or when poor

people died of hunger. They talked about violence when workers went on

strike, when tenants stopped paying rent, when street vendors refused to

surrender their wares to the cops (who would harass them at the behest

of the store owners), and when anarchists carried out sabotage or held

unpermitted marches.

One of the advantages of moralizing elite

discourses, and of democratic government as well, is that they train the

oppressed to adopt the mentality and the language of the oppressor. Over

time, people fighting to better their situation came to care about their

image in the eyes of the media, which is to say in the eyes of the

elite. They wanted to appear respectable. In some cases, they were

opportunists who formed political parties and cashed in their popular

support at the first opportunity to obtain a seat at the table of power.

In other cases, they were people who took these elite

discourses seriously, bit down on the bait, and tried to prove that they

were not violent or unhygienic. They debated with the hollow hypocrisy

of the elite in an attempt to show that they were not monsters deserving

repression. If the justification for repression could be removed,

wouldn’t the repression also disappear? As the Spectacle grew in

strength, many people became so detached from the reality in the streets

that their own self-image and moral compass were largely crafted by the

media.

As soon as social movements began to listen to the

media, the elite could determine which forms of resistance were

acceptable, and which were unacceptable. Every day of the week, the

media—which are owned by the same people who profit off the current

state of affairs—are telling us what is violent and what is normal. The

category of violence belongs to them. By using the same category as our

moral compass, we are allowing those in power to guide our struggle. One

justification for clinging to the category of violence is that violence

is oppressive, therefore we need to highlight it and avoid it. This

would only have a chance of being true if we controlled the definition

of violence, rather than the powerful. If we choose other criteria for

evaluating our resistance, for example whether or not a tactic or method

is liberating, whether it makes us more free and opens up space for new

social relations, we can avoid the forms of authoritarianism or

self-harm the pacifists wish to avoid, without giving the advantage to

the media. The media do not talk 24 hours a day about what is

liberating, because they do not want us to think about it, and because

we have the advantage in that debate. More often than their occasional

use of “freedom” as the justification for some war, the government and

media have to explain why we need limits on freedom. But when it comes

to violence, in a ten-second sound bite they have the upper hand if they

want to describe a conflictive social movement as violent, or an

austerity measure or capitalist development project seem like a mundane

fact of life. Even in an even debate, and the debate is far from even,

most people will be persuaded that the thing that triggers a release of

adrenaline, that has a sense of danger—a riot, a shooting, smashing

things, shouting and running around, crime—is violent, whereas the thing

that is abstract,

bureaucratic, or invisible—a million slow deaths on another continent,

the price of medicine, a prison sentence—is not violent.

Freedom as a concept sides with those who are

struggling for theirs, whereas nonviolence as a concept sides with the

enforcers of normality and the rulers of the status quo.

By criticizing nonviolence, I am not advocating

violence. Many of us believe that the phrase “advocating violence” has

no inherent meaning, it is just a form of demagoguery and

fear-mongering. Nonviolence requires a strategic usage of the concept of

“violence,” which is moralistic, imprecise, incoherent, and tends

towards hypocrisy. We reject nonviolence because it is pacifying, and

because it is incoherent. The category of violence is a tool of the

State. In using it uncritically, nonviolent activists also become tools.

I do not want to waste any more time by talking

about violence. I will try to talk concretely about the actions we need

in our struggles. If I have to refer to a body of methods or tactics

that are usually excluded by nonviolence, I will talk about “illegal,”

“combative,” “conflictive,” or “forceful” actions, as the case may be.

But I will try to do so with my eyes set on the necessity for a

diversity of tactics.

But “diversity of tactics” should not simply be a

replacement term for “violence.” I think the criticism has sometimes

been warranted that practitioners of a diversity of tactics have done

whatever they wanted without thinking about the consequences for anyone

else. But also, some of the most effective protests in North America in

the last few years—effective in terms of disruption to the summits of

the powerful, in terms of spreading awareness, surviving repression, and

also allowing a diverse range of protest methods to inhabit the same

space in a spirit of respect and solidarity (excepting that method which

tries to dictate how everyone else may or may not participate)—used a

diversity of tactics. These include the Seattle WTO protests in 1999,

the Republican National Convention protests in St. Paul in 2008, the

Pittsburgh

G8 protests in 2009, and the protests against the 2010 Vancouver

Olympics; and one might also add the 2005 protests against the G8 Summit

in Gleneagles, Scotland, or the 2007 protests against

the G8 in Heiligendamm, Germany. And in the aftermath, there were

inevitably some proponents of nonviolence who broke the principles of

unity agreed on beforehand and denounced the “bad protesters” in the

media.

While the debate around a diversity of tactics

most often surfaces in major protests that bring together people with

very different methods, it also applies to other moments and other kinds

of struggle. Likewise, the most effective social uprisings since the end

of the Cold War can be characterized as using a diversity of methods,

whereas the exclusively peaceful movements have resulted in

disappointment. (Chapter 3 is dedicated entirely to this point).

There are other criticisms that have come from the

socalled bad protesters, the violent ones, themselves. While many still

hold to the ideal of a diversity of tactics, and many believe that

combative methods such as sabotage, riots, Black Blocs, or even armed

struggle, are necessary, few are content with our methods to date.

Participants of certain struggles, at certain moments, have criticized a

fetishization of violence in their struggle, or the lack of a next step

once police have been defeated in the street (see, for example, “After

We Have Burnt Everything”[14]). Generalizing these criticisms

to all “violent protesters” would be dishonest and it would also miss

the very valuable and nuanced points they bring up.

In my experience, the unfair and often

manipulative generalizations made by supporters of nonviolence make it

much harder for conflictive anarchists to make these self-criticisms

openly. Ironically, nonviolence advocates have created the exact sort of

polemicized environment that “nonviolent communication” tries to avoid,

in which two sides close ranks and face off. I could decry this as yet

another example of nonviolent hypocrisy, but then pacifists who don’t

deserve that criticism, along with those who do, would be more likely to

block their ears and reload for the counterattack. So, I’ll just leave

the criticism in the open and reiterate the point that those who support

a diversity of tactics are not generally satisfied with our struggle,

many are self-critical, **and many want t**o be more inclusive.

A diversity of methods is necessary in our

struggle because none of us have the answer regarding the one true

strategy for revolution; because there is no one size that fits all and

each of us must develop a unique form of struggle for our respective

situation; and because in fact our movements are harder to repress when

we replace a party-line unity with a broad solidarity, when we attack as

a swarm and not as an opposing army. Whether that army is pacifist or

combative, the discipline required to coerce or intimidate everyone into

following one set of pre-approved tactics, and to exclude those who fall

out of line, is authoritarian. In such a contest, whichever army won—the

army of the government or the army of the movement—the State would

triumph.

A lack of unity does not mean a lack of

communication. We learn from difference, and we are stronger when we

communicate across this difference, criticizing one another but also

helping one another, and all the while respecting our fundamental

difference. There are many totally erroneous or backstabbing forms of

struggle, and these should be criticized vehemently, not protected

behind a polite relativism. But the goal of our criticism should be

solidarity, not homogeneity. There are a thousand different roles to

play within this struggle, if we can learn to support one another in our

differences. There is a place for healers, for fighters, for

storytellers, for those who resolve conflicts and those who seek

conflicts.

All of us can do a better job at seeking this more robust struggle.

2. Recuperation is How We Lose

The reason I am talking about methods of struggle is because struggle is

a vital part of the lives of many people around the world. Sometimes we

meet in the streets—in protests, occupations, demonstrations, festivals,

talks, and debates—and sometimes we are separated by a wide gulf in our

practices. What we have in common is that we want to fight against the

current state of things, but we don’t even agree on how to phrase this.

Some would say we want to liberate ourselves from colonialism, others

that we want to abolish oppression, and others that we want to change

the world. One person might say we are working for social justice, and

others, myself for instance, would counter that justice is a concept of

the ruling system.

I am an anarchist, but I fight alongside many

people who do not define themselves the same way. We may all say that we

want revolution, but we mean different things by this. Many people

believe in political revolution, which would be the overthrow of the

existing political structure and the installation of a new, presumably

better political structure. The revolutions in the American colonies,

France, Russia, China, Cuba, and Algeria were political revolutions.

Anarchists generally believe in a social revolution, which means the

destruction of the existing political structure and all coercive

hierarchies, without the imposition of a new political structure,

therefore allowing everyone to organize themselves freely. But again,

those are my terms; others would describe it differently.

Some people understand revolution as the abolition

of classes, while others see it as the proletariat achieving political

dominance. Some focus on the abolition of the patriarchy, and others on

ending white supremacy and imperialism. The idea of revolution can apply

to all aspects of life. If I do not talk exclusively about my own vision

of revolution, it is because my goal in this text is not to convince

others of that vision, but to deal with a problem that has arisen in

spaces where people with very different ideas of revolution try to work

together.

Even though revolution is a term with many

definitions, it is informed by experiences of the struggle we often

share. This vague commonality, the fact that we are on some level

struggling together even though our reasons and concepts differ, is why

we can criticize one another’s concept of revolution without necessarily

agreeing on what revolution means: because concepts inform practices,

and practices meet with different results when they are put to use in

the streets. When these results are counterproductive, sometimes we

refuse to see our own failings and need to hear criticism from a

different perspective. This, in my mind, is the complicated, suspended

nature of reality, often lacking any objective coordinates but still

full of pressing needs and imminent truths. An academic approach demands

that we establish objective definitions and shared criteria for

evaluation. This method has its uses but it is not always realistic in a

situation of struggle. The criteria we choose might be incorrect, or the

definitions misleading, and we will not know until we put them into

practice. We each know why we are fighting, but perhaps we cannot

articulate it, much less agree about it with others. Perhaps the demands

for a philosophical unity are themselves antithetical to the project of

liberation, since we ourselves are so obviously neither identical nor

unified. Despite lacking a common definition of revolution, we can

criticize the nonviolent vision of revolution for betraying that

nameless refusal, that urge for freedom we all have inside of us.

Through collective debate, we can dismantle visions of revolution that

do not live up to their pretenses of being either liberating or

realistic. The end result of this debate is not a single definition of

revolution nor a common, correct practice, since we do not represent a

homogenous humanity with the same needs and experiences. The result is a

multiplicity of practices that are more intelligent and

more effective, and that either complement one another or clearly evince

the unbridgeable chasm between themselves.

The present criticism of nonviolence, therefore,

does not seek to convert its adherents, but to disprove their pretenses,

suggest new directions for those interested in a revolution against all

forms of domination, and let them make up their own minds.

The primary flaw in a majority of nonviolent

discourses is to view revolution as a morality play. According to their

morality play, revolutions lose because they open the Pandora’s box of

violence, are corrupted, and end up reproducing what they intended to

abolish.[15] But not only the so-called violent revolutions

have suffered this fate. The government of India continued to mete out

humiliation, exploitation, beatings and killings after the victory of

the supposedly nonviolent independence movement. In the United States,

the desegregated South continued to preserve white supremacy northern

style, through gentrification, judicial lynchings, structural

discrimination, and other measures. And in recent years, where the

“Color Revolutions” have forced out the ruling political parties in

Serbia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere, we still find government

corruption, police brutality, the forcible exclusion of common people,

and widespread apathy.[16]

Government violence is not the result of violent

revolutions, but the product of government itself. Any movement that

leaves the State intact will fail in ending the oppressions we are

fighting against. A nonviolent movement that replaces one government

with another—and this is the greatest victory a nonviolent movement has

ever achieved in the history of the world—ends up betraying itself,

allowing Power to change its masks without addressing the fundamental

problems of society. Nonviolence

as an analytical tool has no means of understanding this kind of

defeat—the kind that looks like victory.

When evaluating the possibility for a

revolutionary social change, it is necessary to set our sights on a

complete transformation that does away with coercive hierarchies of any

kind, including governments, capitalism, and patriarchy. Governments are

by their nature aggressive and dominating. No society is safe if its

neighbor is a state. Capitalism, for its part, is based on the endless

accumulation of value, which requires exploitation, alienation, the

enclosure of any commons, and the destruction of the environment.

Capitalism has proven to be the strongest engine yet for state power,

which is why every state in modern history, even those that call

themselves socialist, link themselves to the accumulative processes of

capitalism. And patriarchy is perhaps the most insidious, longest

lasting form of oppression on the planet, constituting itself as a

plague in our own families and communities as much as an external force

to be combated.

An anarchist revolution opens the door to many

different forms of self-organization, but it must do away with all these

hierarchical systems. Being critical of nonviolence is not essential to

being anarchist, as there are many anarchist pacifists, and

participating in social movements does not at all require having an

anarchist vision.

Although some folks participate in social

struggles simply to recover lost privileges (especially in these times

of austerity measures), a deeper unhappiness with exploitation,

oppression, and the destruction of the planet drive many more people to

the streets. Most of these folks understand their problems within the

dominant discourses of the day, which tend to be democratic or

religious. In other words, they reject the problems caused by the

system, but they adopt the language, the philosophy, and the range of

solutions given to them by that same system. As such, they often set

themselves the goal of getting the right leaders in power. But all

social ills flow from the fact that we are robbed of power to make the

decisions and solve the problems that directly affect us. No one knows

what’s best for us more than we ourselves do. Once we are turned into

spectators of our own lives, any manner of abuses can

be heaped on us with ease.

This book is not only for anarchists, but it is

written from an anarchist perspective, based on the belief that no

matter how people understand their problems, rising up to solve them

will necessitate conflict with the State, and those problems will not be

solved until the State is destroyed.

Many readers may not agree with this contention,

but if they continue struggling for their own vision of freedom, the

debate will come up again and again, because their struggle will bring

them into conflict with the State, and if they should ever win, and have

the opportunity to build a better state supposedly compatible with their

liberation, they will be sorely disappointed, and all their dreams will

be corrupted, as has happened so many times in the past. In the

meantime, we can agree to disagree, and focus on the fact that

struggling for a better world means conflict with the current system.

If we are going to challenge that system, it will

help to familiarize ourselves with how governments themselves understand

resistance. The specific strategies vary greatly, but for the last half

century, governments across the world have used the paradigm of

counterinsurgency for defeating rebellious movements. The idea of

counterinsurgency comes from the State itself, based on experiences in

Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam, and urban ghettos in the United States and

Europe. Its basis is the hypothesis that conflict is the inherent

condition of society under the State. The goal of government, therefore,

is not to eliminate conflict, but to manage it permanently, and make

sure it remains at lower, less threatening levels, which according to

the military authors of this idea, includes nonviolence.[17]

Insurrectionary anarchists often divide

counterinsurgency into repression and recuperation. Together, these two

motions constitute a carrot and a stick that can discipline social

movements into adopting behaviors that do not threaten the fundamental

basis of the current system. Nonviolent activists very rarely talk about

recuperation, and some would say this is because they tend to play

the role of recuperators.

Recuperation is the process by which those who

attempt to break away from current power structures to rebel are induced

to rejuvenate those power structures or create more effective ones. They

either turn their rebellion into the mere symbol of rebellion, as a way

to exorcise whatever anger or discontentment led them to rebel, or they

direct it against only a small part of the system, creating a change

that allows the State to function more effectively overall. Recuperation

is when countercultural movements like punk or the hippies become just

new ways of buying and selling, new product lines, a new niche within

the diversity of capitalist democracy. Recuperation is when workers’

movements around the world form political parties that enter into

government and sell out their base, or when labor unions come to

convince workers of the needs of bosses, for example accepting voluntary

pay cuts for the good of the company. Liberation movements in India,

South Africa, and many other countries were recuperated when they

decided to seek common ground with their colonizers and fight for a new

government that would carry out all the same economic projects of the

old government, becoming local managers for international finance.

ngos profit constantly off the State’s need to

recuperate popular rage. Rich donors and government agencies give away

huge amounts of money to pay dissidents to feel like they’re making a

real change in the world by running services that constitute a bandage

on the gaping wounds of poverty and structural violence, while training

those in need to passively accept aid rather than fighting to change

their circumstances. Thanks to charity, the powerful can throw some

crumbs to those who wait obediently, allowing them to more effectively

crush those who rise up to create change directly.

Struggles in democratic societies are defeated by

recuperation more often than by repression. Though a democratic state is

perfectly capable of shooting down protesters in the street or torturing

rebels in prison—and every democratic state does this with more

regularity than many of its citizens suspect—democracy’s greatest

strength is in winning the consent and participation of the

exploited. To do this, a democratic government has to pretend it is open

to criticism. Democracy requires social peace, the illusion that, in a

society based on exploitation and domination, everyone can get along and

nobody’s fundamental well-being is under threat. If a democratic

government cannot successfully project the idea that its use of the

bullet and the baton is exceptional, the social peace is disrupted,

investors grow cautious, and state subjects stop participating.

To preserve the social peace, businesses and

politicians constantly deploy measures to convince those who rise up to

make demands, to instead enter into dialogue, reform the system, play

politics, or turn their critiques and anxieties into something that can

make money. We can’t overcome the destruction of our communities, but we

can have a hundred friends on Facebook. We can’t keep the forest we

played in as children from getting cut down, but we can start a

recycling program. Indigenous people cannot have their land back, but

one or two of them might get elected to Congress. Poor neighborhoods of

color can’t get rid of the police who occupy their streets, harass them,

and occasionally shoot them down, but they might get the city to pay

some NGO to give the cops cultural sensitivity trainings.

For recuperation to work, those who participate in

social struggles must play along in some way. Enough people need to

agree to play by the new set of rules being imposed from above. They

need to accept the new police training requirements or recycling program

as a victory, they need to vote for the new candidate or support the new

worker-friendly business. They will do this only if they do not see the

system as a whole as their enemy; they will accept domination at the

hands of the police as long as it happens in more subtle ways; they will

be content with the destruction of the planet as long as it happens a

little more slowly.

For this reason, nonviolence tends to be a

necessary component for recuperation. Nonviolent resistance is less

likely to help people develop an antagonistic consciousness of the

State. It gives the guardians of law and order more opportunities to put

on a friendly face. And it also prevents the disruption of the social

peace during the necessary period of institutional pressure and dialogue

in which radical movements allow themselves to be recuperated. The Civil

Rights movement in the US was recuperated when it was convinced to fight

for voter registration instead of any material equality or meaningful

freedom. The independence movements in India and South Africa were

recuperated when they set their goal on new capitalist states that

played by the same rules that had enriched investors during the colonial

or apartheid regimes. Popular outrage in Ukraine, Serbia, Lebanon,

Kyrgyzstan, and other countries that experienced the “Color Revolutions”

was recuperated when they identified their enemy as one specific

political party, and declared victory when a new political party came

into office, even though none of the structures that caused their

poverty and powerlessness had changed. Nonviolence played a key role in

all of these processes of recuperation by enabling dialogue between

powerholders and movement leaders, by preventing people from taking

power into their own hands, giving them instead an ideology of glorified

powerlessness, and by ensuring peacefulness and stability in critical

moments of transition from one form of oppression to another.

Anyone who believes in revolution needs to have an

analysis of recuperation and a strategy for how to keep their rebellion

from being twisted to suit the needs of the State. Not only does

nonviolence lack this analysis, it frequently serves as a vehicle for

recuperation.

3. The Revolutions of Today

After demonstrating that the historical victories of nonviolence have not

been victories from a revolutionary standpoint, that they did not bring

an end to oppression

and exploitation, they did not fundamentally change social relations,

much less create a classless, horizontal society, one often hears the

rebuttal, *But violence has never worked!*

Moving past the moralistic simplemindedness

contained in the belief that “violence” is a method, this statement

conceals an important fact. Unlike the proponents of nonviolence, we

(and here I only mean to speak for other anarchists who believe in

revolution, though many other anti-authoritarian anticapitalists as well

as indigenous people fighting for their freedom from colonialism may

identify) have never claimed victory. We have pointed to specific

battles won, ground gained, or small steps ahead as sources of

inspiration and learning, but we are not trying to offer easy solutions,

cheap hopes, or false promises to anyone. If we liberate ourselves in

one area, all we gain will be lost again until the State is defeated on

a worldwide scale.

The State does not brook any independence or

externality to its rule, and that is why it has brutally colonized the entire

globe. The tendency of nonviolence to claim superficial, false victories

reveals its inclination to seek accommodation with ruling structures by

identifying oppression with the spectacular violence of “bad

government,” thereby covering up the deeper mechanisms that “good

governments” use to accomplish the same ends. Supporters of nonviolence

claim Indian independence as a victory for their method, whereas

anarchists who support combative methods do not claim the Russian

Revolution as a victory.

Why should they? Although they participated, along with other currents

of struggle, the world they talked about did not come about, and in fact

they were slaughtered as other elements took over the revolution. Things

clearly changed in Russia, but it was not an anarchist change.

However, these exact same criteria apply to the

nonviolent movement in India. They were but one of multiple currents,

their leaders were killed off, and the peaceful, just society they spoke

about never came into being.[18] Nonetheless, proponents of

nonviolence jump at the chance to declare victory, no matter how many

embarrassing details they have to ignore. This is not simple

opportunism, but an outgrowth of the functional complicity between

nonviolence and the structural violence of the State. The very

philosophy of nonviolence leads to a misleading distinction between good

and bad government, based on whether a government must make use of

shocking, visible forms of violence or whether it can control society

through other, invisible means.

By chalking up the failure of the revolutions in

Russia, Spain, China, Cuba, and elsewhere to one simple factor, the

revolutionaries’ use of this thing called “violence,” they save

themselves the need for any nuanced, thorough historical analysis.

Nonviolence, in sum, encourages superficiality, false expectations,

dishonesty, and sloppy thinking. Even more troublesome, it conforms with

the narratives of those in power, who would also have us believe that a

nonviolent Gandhi carried the day in India, and that the workers in

Russia opened a Pandora’s box by rising up.

Anti-authoritarians who support a diversity of

tactics do not claim a victory in the revolutions in Russia, Spain,

Haiti, and elsewhere. They are forced, therefore, to analyze how people

empowered themselves to defeat the government and begin to self-organize

society, what went wrong, and what was the interplay between different

revolutionary currents. To make sense of their defeat, they have to

investigate whether people achieved a meaningful freedom in the Maroon

villages,[19] the Russian soviets, or the collectives of

Aragón; and whether these liberated zones were effective or ineffective

at defending themselves. This has led to years of research and debate to

hack out nuanced answers to organizational questions regarding movement

unity and coordination, volunteer militias, guerrilla forces,

clandestine cells, and labor unions; socioeconomic questions like the

role of the struggle against patriarchy within these revolutions, the

possibility of alliance between wage slaves and unwaged slaves, whether

the productive logic of the factory can ever be liberated, whether

intensifying attacks on capitalism and efforts to collectivize a

society’s resources strengthen or weaken the attempt to defeat fascist

or interventionist militaries, and a long et cetera. In moments of

social peace, this can seem like an obsessive escapism into the distant

battles of history, but when social movements reemerge in times of

renewed conflict, the people who have participated in these debates have

been able to apply historical lessons to ongoing struggles and avoid the

repetition of old errors.

Social scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria

Stephan are the authors of a study that is among the only statistical

analyses of the effectiveness of nonviolence. Like many social

scientists before them, they use statistics to obscure more complex

truths. They claim to have compiled a list of 323 major nonviolent

campaigns or violent conflicts from 1900 to 2006, and then superficially

rate these as “successful,” “partially successful,” or “failed.” They do

not use revolutionary criteria for success, and in their mind the “Color

Revolutions” and many other reformist, dead-end, or self-betraying

movements were successful. Although they rate campaigns as objectively

violent or nonviolent, they do not define violence, and they also

uncritically use loaded terms like “the international

community.” They credit nonviolence with victory in cases where

international peacekeeping forces, i.e. armies, had to be called in to

protect peaceful protesters, as in East Timor, and they define victory

simply as the achievement of a movement’s goals, as though movements

ever had a consensus on their goals.

They do not publish the list of campaigns and

conflicts with their original study, and after extensive searching I was

unable to find it. They explain that the list of major nonviolent

campaigns was provided to them by “experts in nonviolent conflict,” in

other words, people who are almost exclusively proponents of

nonviolence. Given widespread manipulation by such “experts,” who

frequently describe heterogeneous struggles as “nonviolent,” such as the

independence movements in South Africa and India, the Civil Rights

movement, or the uprisings of the Arab Spring, we can only assume that

many of successful nonviolent campaigns on the list included armed and

combative elements. The violent conflicts that they include in their

study come from a completely different source: lists of armed conflicts

with over 1,000 combatant deaths. In other words, wars. They are

comparing apples and oranges, lining social movements up against wars,

as though these different kinds of conflicts arose in the same

circumstances and were merely a product of the choices of their

participants.

One methodological weakness they do admit to, in a

footnote, is that by focusing on “major” nonviolent campaigns, they weed

out the many ineffective nonviolent campaigns that never assumed large

proportions. But none of the measures they took, ostensibly to correct

that bias, could possibly have any effect. Circulating “the data among

leading authorities on nonviolent movements to make sure we accounted

for failed movements” is useless since there is no objective distinction

between major and minor campaigns, and the biggest failures never become

major campaigns. Running “multiple tests both across nonviolent and

violent cases and within nonviolent cases alone to ensure robustness on

all results” is worthless if the study sample is stacked from the

start.[20]

Their entire method is superficial to the point of

being useless. They are using statistics to obscure complex realities.

But even in this flawed endeavor, they have to manipulate the statistics

in order to affirm their preconceived conclusions. Most of their paper

centers on a detailed explanation of their hypotheses, and

pseudo-logical arguments for why their hypotheses must be correct. For

example, they cite psychological studies on individual decision-making,

with the unspoken assumption that complex social conflicts between

institutions and heterogeneous populations will follow the same

patterns.[21] They provide no evidence for key arguments like

“the public is more likely to support a nonviolent campaign” (p. 13) nor

do they interrogate the figure of “the public.” They also make

convenient use of non sequiturs, as in the following paragraph:

security forces, they greatly reduce the possibility of loyalty shifts.

Abrahms finds that terrorist groups targeting civilians lose public

support compared with groups that limit their targets to the military or

police.[footnote removed] Surrendering or defecting to a violent

movement

[…] [p. 13]

All the subsequent arguments in the paragraph, which are rhetorical

arguments lacking any documentation or data, refer to the topic sentence

of the paragraph. All of them are intended to convince readers that

so-called violent movements are less effective at provoking defection or

“loyalty shifts” among state forces. The only sentence that makes any

reference to evidence is the second one, quoted above. But notice how

the study cited actually has nothing to do with the topic sentence, no

bearing on the question of defection nor the variable

violence/nonviolence (Abrahms’ study only addresses violent groups,

distinguishing between those that do and do not target civilians).

Elsewhere in the study, the authors ambiguously

admit

that the statistics do not reveal more defections in the face of

nonviolent movements, but they structure the entire article to hide that

inconvenience and advance their preconceived arguments.

successes occur among violent campaigns occasionally, but nonviolent

campaigns are more likely to produce loyalty shifts. Although in the

quantitative study these findings are qualified by data constraints, our

case studies reveal that three violent campaigns were unable to produce

meaningful loyalty shifts among opponent elites, whereas such shifts did

occur as a result of nonviolent action in the Philippines and East

Timor. [p. 42]

To put it more plainly, these “data constraints” are a lack of data

supporting their argument, or “insignificant effects” as they admit on

page 20. The three case studies they call in to save the day are three

examples cherry-picked to prove the point they are trying to make. We

can do better: the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,

partisan resistance during World War ii in Yugoslavia and in Italy, and

the anarchist resistance in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. Five

examples of armed movements provoking major defections among the armies

sent to crush them, all of them more definitive and on a higher scale

than the “loyalty shifts” provoked in the Philippines and East Timor.

In one paragraph summing up her research,

Chenoweth acknowledges that the impact of a “violent wing” on the

success rates of a movement is “not statistically significant” and then

in the next paragraph say that “the most troubling possibility is that

the armed wing will reduce the movement’s chances of success.” Later,

she commits the most basic error in statistics, confusing correlation

with causation, to say that “an *armed wing can reduce popular

participation* [her emphasis]” even though her own data do not support

this assertion.[22]

It is significant that mention of this study made

the rounds on a number of nonviolent websites. From what I saw, the

nonviolence advocates who used the statistics to prove the superiority

of their method never linked directly to the study. They probably never

even read it.

In order to evaluate the successes and failures of

the major uprisings of the last twenty-odd years since the end of the

Cold War, we need a fair and sensible set of criteria. We can set aside

the superficial question of “who won?,” given that nobody has won,

except for those who continue to rule us.

We should also avoid the criterion of whether or

not a movement leads to increased repression. I can remember countless

arguments in which supporters of nonviolence have tried to paint a

struggle as a failure on the grounds that it was heavily repressed. The

semi-effective nonviolent movements of the past all provoked an increase

in government repression whenever they could encourage widespread

disobedience. The belief of modern pacifists, which was not shared by

King or Gandhi, that peaceful struggle can avoid brutal consequences at

the hands of police and military, has been effectively used as a selling

point to flood the ranks of nonviolent movements with opportunists,

weekenders, fair-weather friends, cowards, careerists, and naïve

citizens who think that changing the world can be easy and hassle-free.

Repression is inevitable in any struggle against

authority. It is important to be able to survive this repression, but in

the worst case, a struggle that is completely crushed by repression is

still more effective—because it can inspire us today—than a struggle

that allows itself to be recuperated for fear of repression, as happens

with many nonviolent movements. Therefore, because the long-term effects

of repression still remain to be seen, we will not include this as a

criterion, but we will note if a particular rebellion was successfully

defeated by repression or recuperation, so that readers will notice a

pattern if the combative movements truly are unable to cope with

repression, as their critics claim, or if nonviolent movements are

frequently recuperated, as we claim.

One criterion of the utmost importance is whether

a movement succeeds in seizing space in which new relations can be put

in practice. New relations mean: do people share communally and enjoy

direct access to their means of survival, or is the social wealth

alienated; are people able to organize their own

lives, activity, and surroundings, or is decision-making authority

monopolized by government structures; do women, trans, and queer people

enjoy means of self-defense and self-determination, or are they fully

exposed to the violence of patriarchy; do people of color and indigenous

people have means of self-defense and autonomy, or are they at the mercy

of colonial structures like the market and the police? While the forms

are different, the social relations are fundamentally the same between

one capitalist state and another, whereas there is a marked difference

in the social relations in a stateless commune or an independent

indigenous territory. Even though autonomous space will usually be

reconquered by the State, we take the experiences of self-organization

away with us. The more of these experiences we win, the more powerful

our struggles become, the greater our capacity for selforganization on a

higher level, and the more people there are who know that obedience to

the existing system is not the only option. This suggests a second

criterion: to what extent a movement spreads awareness of its ideas. And

this, in turn, needs to be evaluated in terms of whether those ideas are

spread as passive information, or whether they are communicated as ideas

worth fighting for (or in the case of the nonviolent, taking action and

making sacrifices for).

Because of the importance of recuperation in

defeating social movements, one important criterion is whether a

movement has elite support. If a part of the elite supports a movement,

it is much more likely that the movement appears to achieve a victory,

when in fact the victory is insubstantial and allows the elite to

improve their own situation. This criterion can also show if the

pacifists are right when they say the government wants us to be violent,

or if the opposite is true, that the elite want us to be nonviolent.

Finally, did a movement achieve any concrete gains

that improve people’s lives, restore their dignity, or demonstrate that

struggle is worth it and that the government is not omnipotent? From

this criterion, we must exclude strictly formalistic gains, like

pro-democracy movements that achieve free and fair elections, because

this is a redundant victory that can only matter to those

who have allowed themselves to believe that democratic government is

somehow analogous to freedom or a better life. When the Soviet Bloc

countries transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, citizens’ freedom

of action did not at all increase, whereas their quality of life

suffered dramatically. In other words, the achievement of democracy is

solely a question of how power organizes itself, and not one that

necessarily impacts how normal people live. If, however, successful

resistance to a dictatorship means that people can take to the streets

without fear of being arrested and tortured, then we can clearly count

this as a concrete gain. Hopefully, the critical difference is

obvious.[23] In sum, the four basic criteria are:

1. whether a movement seized space for new social relations;

2. whether

it spread an awareness of new ideas (and secondarily if this awareness

was passive or whether it inspired others to fight);

3. whether it had elite support;

4. whether it achieved any concrete gains in improving people’s lives.

Because all of us are still at the mercy of an

oppressive system, our focus must be on the strengthening of our

struggles for freedom, dignity, and well-being. The above criteria

measure the health of our struggles, and whether different methods avail

us of what we need to have any chance of creating a new world.

The Oka Crisis

In 1990, mohawk warriors took up arms to prevent a development project on

their lands. According to *Warrior Publications*:

The Oka Crisis of 1990

involved the Mohawk territories of

Kanehsatake/Oka & Kahnawake, both located near Montreal, Quebec. The

standoff began with an armed police assault on a blockade at Kanehsatake

on July 11, 1990, which saw one police officer shot dead in a brief

exchange of gunfire. Following this, 2,000 police were mobilized, later

replaced by 4,500 soldiers with tanks & apcs, along with naval & air

support… The armed warriors at both Kanehsatake & Kahnawake inspired

widespread support & solidarity from Indigenous people throughout the

country. Protests, occupations, blockades, & sabotage actions were

carried out, an indication of the great potential for rebellion amongst

Indigenous peoples.

This manifestation of unity & solidarity served to

limit the use of lethal force by the government in ending the standoff.

Overall, Oka had a profound effect on Indigenous peoples and was the

single most important factor in re-inspiring our warrior spirit. The

77-day standoff also served as an example of Indigenous sovereignty, and

the necessity of armed force to defend territory & people against

violent aggression by external forces.[24]

The Oka Crisis was an armed conflict.

1. It succeeded in seizing space.

2. It spread ideas of indigenous sovereignty and inspired many others

3. It did not have elite support.

4. The golf course expansion on their lands was defeated, and the

The Zapatistas

In 1994, the zapatistas, an indigenous army based in Chiapas,

Mexico, rose up against the North American Free Trade Agreement and

neoliberalism in general. They are an armed movement, though they have

also carried out a large number of peaceful actions. In other words,

they have employed a diversity of tactics.

Although critiques exist of hierarchical organization, nationalism, and

other problems among the Zapatistas, for the time being they seem to

have distinguished themselves considerably from other guerrilla

movements that proved to be authoritarian.

1. The Zapatistas have seized space for new relations, liberating a

</em>for over a decade.

2. The Zapatistas did more than most any other group in the ‘90s in

3. The Zapatistas do not have any significant elite support in Mexico.

4. Although

The Pro-Democracy Movement in Indonesia

In May 1998, thousands of people in Indonesia protested and rioted

against the Suharto regime and economic conditions. Soldiers cracked down, and more than a thousand people were

killed. The military negotiated with a protest leader to cancel a major

rally. When the pro-democracy political groups demonstrated they had

control over the movement by successfully canceling the rally, Suharto

stepped down. In sum, the movement was not peaceful, but its leadership

tended towards nonviolence.

1. The movement seized the streets, and student protesters held

2. Although the movement succeeded in ousting Suharto, it was

not linked to any social critiques that spread beyond Indonesia.

3. Suharto stepped down after receiving a call from the US Secretary of

State, and pro-democracy groups received government support in pushing

for a democratic transition. It was also alleged that elements of the

military redirected crowd violence away from government buildings and

against ethnic minorities. In sum, pro-democracy elements of the

movement did have elite support.

4. The movement did succeed in getting rid of a particularly brutal

dictatorship. However it did not succeed in changing the underlying

economic conditions that was the main grievance of many participants.

The Second Intifada

In september 2000, palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation

and apartheid system, immediately in response to

a visit by then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon (the highest

official responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982) to the

site of the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest place in Islam, annexed by

Israel in 1980. In the first five days of fighting, Israeli security

forces killed 47 Palestinians, while Palestinian rioters killed five

Israelis. The uprising, or intifada, spread across the country and

lasted some five years. Palestinians used mass protests, general

strikes, slingshots, suicide bombings, and homemade rockets, while the

Israelis tried to crush the uprising with tanks, infantry, helicopter

gunships, snipers, missiles, starvation, and mass imprisonment. Over

3,000 Palestinians and around 1,000 Israelis lost their lives. The

intifada ended in an impasse.

Because of the nature of the conflict, it is

extremely hard to evaluate the results of the intifada in liberatory

terms. Most of the losses suffered by the Palestinians, both to their

quality of life and in terms of the degree of oppression and

dispossession they suffer, can only be attributed to the viciousness of

Israeli repression. Some proponents of nonviolence would blame the

repressive conditions on the violence of the Palestinian struggle but

this hides

the fact that the idea of Zionism has always been predicated on the

obliteration of whatever people happened to already be living in the

“promised land,” and that in moments when Palestinian resistance has

been relatively peaceful, the Israeli government has only been more

aggressive in stealing Palestinian lands. I would argue that thanks only

to combative Palestinian resistance and international solidarity, is

there still a Palestinian people left to speak of. But because we are

dealing with historical hypotheticals, this argument cannot be proven.

It is not without meaning, though, that the

intifada was a popular and spontaneous struggle that had the

overwhelming support of Palestinians. People who live in other

situations and are not fighting for their own survival—both individual

and collective—cannot make the argument without a great deal of

arrogance and paternalism about whether or not the struggle was worth

it. As outsiders, if we respect their cause the best thing we can do is

respect the choices they make for how to struggle.

From a distance, I cannot venture to say whether

the struggle opened up more liberatory spaces than the reaction closed

down. We can state with certainty that a greater part of the global

elite opposed the intifada, though it did have the support of a few

governments such as Iran, and that domestically, the much more powerful

Israeli elite uniformly opposed the uprising while one wing of the

Palestinian elite (Fatah) tried to moderate the uprising and the other

wing (Hamas) supported it. As for the spreading of ideas, the Second

Intifada is probably directly responsible for bringing the plight of the

Palestinians back to the attention of people around the world,

generalizing critiques of Israeli apartheid, and spreading theories and

debates about neocolonialism, statehood, urban combat and social

control.

It would be extremely difficult to talk about

concrete gains in such a bloody struggle, but a few things can be

pointed out with clarity. Israel was unable to decisively crush the

uprising, despite enjoying what may be the most competent

military/security apparatus in the world, in terms of being able to

project force on a domestic and localized level. Not only that, it

proved unable to guarantee the security of its privileged citizens, to

rescue hostages,

or to protect its own economy. According to the Israeli Chamber of

Commerce, in 2002 the intifada caused as much as $45 billion in damage,

mostly in tourism losses. This constitutes a whopping one-third of the

total gdp.

Because the Palestinian resistance raised the

costs of occupation, the Israeli government cannot avoid the

consequences. The costly impasse in the Second Intifada cannot be

separated from Israel’s subsequent failures in its 2006 invasion of

Lebanon and its 2009 invasion of Gaza, nor from its decision not to

invade Gaza in 2012, nor from its budget crisis in 2013.

In the near invasion of Gaza in 2012, many media

analysts declared the conflict a victory for Hamas, the armed

Palestinian group that was able to stare down the Israeli military. One

mainstream journalist, Chris Hayes, went further to say that the

conflict was a victory for violent tactics. In his analysis, Hamas had

policy victories to show for their use of rocket attacks. Mahmoud Abbas

of Fatah, who for years have been counseling non-militant,

non-conflictive forms of resistance, along with the nonviolent

protesters trying to stop the construction of the Apartheid Wall, have

nothing to show. Their nonviolence has failed. Hayes goes on to advise

US policy makers to reward nonviolent action so that the violent

currents of the Palestinian resistance do not continue winning support.

In Hayes’ analysis, Palestinians are still the terrorists, the ones who

have to prove they are not violent, while Israel is let off the hook.

Hayes’ advocacy for nonviolent Palestinian resistance is clearly

predicated on a view that privileges Israeli power and that sees violent

action as the greater threat to existing hierarchies. Because Hayes is

not an ideologue of nonviolence, he can be honest about its total

ineffectiveness. What he argues for is the modification of the current

political system to create the *illusion* that nonviolence is effective,

a philosophy of power that rewards nonviolent action and encourages a

practice of dialogue in which the needs of those in power will always be

honored first and foremost, but a greater number of well placed crumbs

are allowed to fall to the floor, into the hands of those at the bottom

of the social pyramid who protest in the ways the powerful dictate they

should

protest.[25] The lesson is clear: nonviolence is ineffective,

which is why those in power want us to use it.

Although applying such straightforward criteria to

such a complex situation is necessarily reductionist, we can assert in

broad strokes that:

1. The intifada seized and defended spaces.

2. It globally spread a critique of Israeli apartheid, militarization,

3. The intifada received support from the Palestinian elite as well as

4. The

The Black Spring in Kabylie

Kabylie, a Berber territory occupied by the state of Algeria, was the

site of a major uprising in 2001. The police murder of Guermah

Massinissa, a Kabyle youth, provoked months of intense rioting that

police and military were unable to suppress. In fact, rioting Berbers

pushed government forces out of their

territory, which remained largely autonomous years later. Around 100

youth were killed while fighting with government forces, and 5,000

injured.

1. In the space of the uprising, people brought back the Arouch, a

2. The initial riots, conducted by a small number of people, quickly

3. The uprising did not have elite support, not even within Kabylie. In

4. The uprising won a large measure of autonomy for Kabylie, led to the

The *Corralito* in Argentina

In December 2001, the Argentine government froze all bank accounts and

floated its currency in response to a mounting

debt crisis. As a result, many people lost their savings while private

businesses were able to decrease their debts and buy up suddenly cheap

properties. A massive social uprising followed on the heels of the

• corralito*, forcing out one government after another in a few short

weeks. Many participants have noted that the rioting, in which tens of

thousands of people took to the streets, smashed banks, looted

supermarkets, and fought with the police, finally shattered the terror

that the military dictatorship of 1976–1983, which murdered around

30,000 dissidents, had left in its wake:

only by rising up were people able to conquer their fear, and since then

Argentine politics have not been the same. Whereas previously, the

country had remained in the military’s shadow, with the government

controlled by the rightwing and the neoliberals, since 2003 Argentina

has had a leftwing government that has supported the prosecution of

figures from the dictatorship and opposed the Free Trade Area of the

Americas (ftaa) and other free trade agreements with the US. In the

streets, many things also changed. Neighborhoods in all the major cities

formed assemblies to facilitate their self-organization on economic,

cultural, and political levels, upgrading neighborhood infrastructure,

organizing soup kitchens, food and clothing banks, libraries, and

theaters, and coordinating protests. Workers took over factories and

other workplaces that had been paralyzed by debt, often linking these

occupied factories in a productive network, and defending them from

police with the help of neighbors.

The uprising had diverse roots that predated the

• corralito* by many years. One root was the struggle of people from poor

suburbs who seized unused land and built their own communities, or

blockaded highways to win their demands. These were the people who made

up the bulk of the revolt, until it was taken over by middle-class

families who generally only got involved once their bank accounts were

frozen.

Another root was the association of Mothers of the

Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers whose children had been disappeared by

the military dictatorship, who began gathering weekly in the Plaza de

Mayo in central Buenos Aires in 1977, demanding to know what had

happened to their children. The Mothers are largely credited with

drawing attention to the atrocities of the dictatorship and creating

pressure for the transition to democracy. Pacifists seize on this as an

example of the force of nonviolence, but they leave out the bigger

picture. Many of the people disappeared by the dictatorship, whose

disappearance the Mothers were protesting, were members of armed

leftwing organizations that made up a larger anticapitalist movement.

The resistance of the Mothers only makes sense in the context of their

struggle and sacrifice. Furthermore, the Mothers were not able to put an

end to

the dictatorship. The democracy that followed continued the exact same

political project that the military had pursued with an iron fist during

the Dirty War. Many of the exact same people stayed in power and the

dominance of the military remained unquestioned. It was not until people

fought the police in the streets and toppled one government after

another in 2001, that the military’s immunity was finally revoked. The

Mothers played an important part in this process, but in all fairness it

was a process that used a diversity of tactics, from blockades to riots

to peaceful vigils.

1. By rioting, taking the streets, occupying land or factories, and

2. There can be no doubt that the uprising in Argentina spread an

3. Until the popular movement was co-opted by Nestor Kirchner,

of the dominant, North American model of capitalism), it did not have

significant elite support, although the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

enjoyed important support from ngos and international legal

organizations.

4. The revolt probably led to the defeat of the ftaa in South America,

The Day the World Said No to War

That is how many proponents of nonviolence refer to the

multitudinous—and almost exclusively peaceful—global protests on February 15, 2003, against the then-upcoming invasion of Iraq.

“Our movement changed history,” writes progressive journalist Phyllis

Bennis for the Institute for Policy Studies on the tenyear anniversary

of the protests. She notes that the protests made it into the *Guinness

Book of World Records* for their unprecedented size. But what the

protests did not accomplish was to stop the war. The peaceful protesters

demonstrated that “millions were now willing to show their opposition by

marching in the streets,”[26] but the dozens of governments

preparing the war shortly proved that people marching in the streets did

not matter. Did members of the anti-war movement take that as a lesson

to change their tactics? Not at all. Protest leaders and proponents of

nonviolence declared “victory” while continuing to exclude non-pacifists

and to silence the debate about tactics. The vast majority of

participants would quickly disappear, unmotivated to continue protesting

in the face of its apparent uselessness, although ten years later

nonviolent activists would refer to the day as “inspiring.”

In the US, relatively small numbers of anarchists

would

carry out acts of sabotage against military recruiting centers and

infrastructure used in the war mobilization, while also participating in

open protests and counter-recruiting drives, sometimes together with war

veterans. Proponents of a diversity of tactics worked together with

proponents of nonviolence to blockade the ports of Olympia and San

Francisco, stopping military shipments. However, on the whole the latter

excluded the former from broader movement spaces, denied them support,

and left them to fend for themselves when they were targeted by

repression. Practically the only case of a broad movement using a

diversity of tactics was the San Francisco port blockade, though in a

typical betrayal nonviolent organizers later described the action as a

victory for peaceful methods.

The movement failed to stop the war. The people in

Iraq had to resist the invasion and occupation as best as they could,

and the methods they chose overwhelmingly involved the use of arms. Some

of these groups were fundamentalist and authoritarian in ideology, many

were leftist, and a few were anti-authoritarian. Nonetheless, pacifists

and proponents of nonviolence who were ostensibly opposed to the war

never spoke of Iraqi resistance. For them, Iraqis only gained mention

when they became victims. It is noteworthy that public opinion in the US

did not turn against the war and occupation—eventually becoming a major

election issue that helped Obama win on a platform of troop

withdrawal—until US casualties started piling up thanks to the effective

armed resistance of the Iraqis. This should not be a surprise, as the

same thing happened in the Vietnam War.

The armed resistance of the Iraqis and the global

protest against the war were separated by a broad gulf. Focusing on the

protest movement, we have to admit that it was overwhelmingly

nonviolent.

1. On the whole, this was exclusively a movement of protest, and did

2. What the movement communicated was a simple word, “No,” which can

colonization, domination, and mass murder can be carried out with many

means aside from military invasion, means which were already being used

against Iraq. And given the fact that the movement vanished almost

overnight, this peaceful “No” cannot be considered inspiring, not even

to the bulk of the movement’s participants.

3. The protest movement was supported by cultural elites (actors and

4. The movement accomplished nothing. It did not stop or limit the

The Color Revolutions

In 2000, the civic youth organization Otpor in Serbia led a movement

that brought about the ouster of President Slobadan Milosevic. This

became known as the “Bulldozer Revolution.” The movement was nonviolent,

organized according to the same model that later brought about regime

change in Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003, and Ukraine’s “Orange

Revolution” in 2004. Because of their overwhelming similarity, I will

deal with these three movements simultaneously. All of them were

nonviolent, all of them succeeded in ousting the political party in

power, and all of them do rather poorly when evaluated by the criteria

for an effective revolutionary movement. Chapter 4 is dedicated to a

more thorough study of these movements.

1. These movements did not put new social relations into practice.

2. These movements did not spread new ideas. They mobilized people on

In Ukraine, for example, their slogan was “Yes!” and their symbol was

the color orange. Their social critiques remained at a superficial

level.

3. These movements not only received elite support, they thrived on it.

4. These movements did not improve the quality of life in the countries

Kuwait’s “Blue Revolution” and Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution”

In 2005, nonviolent movements inspired by the methods of the Color

Revolutions sprang up to win women the right to vote

in Kuwait, and to end Syrian military occupation in Lebanon.

1. The movement in Kuwait did change social relations by giving women

2. Neither of these movements spread new ideas or social critiques. The

3. Both of these movements received elite support. Kuwait was something

independence from Syria.

4. Voting does not usually improve people’s lives, although being

The 2005 Banlieue Uprisings

In October 2005, youth in the *banlieue*, or urban slums, in cities

across France began a month of rioting, triggered by a police killing.

They burned cars, government buildings, and schools, and attacked

police. The media, government, and the Left treated the riots as an

entirely irrational phenomenon, and repressed them in a series of police

and political operations. The rioters made no demands, nor could anyone

claim to lead them.

1. The rioters seized the streets; however, the unrest centered almost

2. This point is also inconclusive. The rioters made it obvious that

3. They received absolutely no elite support.

4. Although the banlieue residents were cynically criticized by the

Bolivia’s Water War and Gas War

In 2003, hundreds of thousands of residents of the Bolivian city of

Cochabamba rose up against the police and the military to take over the

city and prevent the privatization of the water supply. For years,

poorer neighborhoods, organized into water committees, had already been

using direct action to build their own water infrastructure, providing

themselves drinking water without the interference of government or

private corporations. In 2005, the whole country rose up, blocking

highways and fighting with the military to prevent the privatization of

the natural gas reserves. Dozens of people died in the fighting, but

they held their ground and defeated government forces. In the meantime,

in numerous indigenous villages throughout the country, residents would

lynch the mayor—often the only representative of the government in their

village—as a direct action for the preservation of indigenous autonomy

and against neocolonial interference.

The cumulative effect of these actions was to

defeat the legacy of decades of dictatorship and military government,

preserve indigenous autonomy in the face of ongoing colonialism, and

reverse the advance of neoliberalism at a time when the experts insisted

there were no alternatives.

1. These violent movements successfully seized and defended spaces for

2. The earlier battles of a local character inspired the later battles

3. Up until 2005, the movement did not have substantial elite support.

given elite support, and elected into power. That political party has

succeeded where the military failed, recuperating the social movements

and putting neoliberal development projects back on track.

4. These

various uprisings achieved multiple concrete gains, in people’s quality

of living, in their psychological ability to stand up to the government,

and in their cultural resistance to colonialism.

Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution

The tulip revolution was intended to be another nonviolent

Color Revolution, but the opposition was neither united nor disciplined

sufficiently to enforce strict nonviolence or herd the masses into a

single strategy. In fact, they had not even agreed on a slogan and a

color, and the same uprising was sometimes referred to as Lemon, Silk,

Pink, or Daffodil. The name “Tulip Revolution” actually comes from the

Kyrgyz president who was ousted.

In March 2005, when police tried to suppress a

protest against a disputed election, rather than responding

nonviolently, crowds threw rocks and molotov cocktails, beat up cops,

and seized government buildings. The regime change was consummated when

huge protests in the capital fought past police and soldiers, seized

numerous government buildings, and forced President Akayev to flee the

country by helicopter.

However, as their demands were purely electoral,

they proclaimed victory once an opposition politician was installed in

power. They did not attempt to put new social relations into practice or

spread social critiques, and within a few years they were all thoroughly

disillusioned with the new government, under which all the same problems

continued. Nothing had changed.

1. They did not put new social relations into practice.

2. They did not spread social critiques, beyond complaints of

3. They enjoyed partial elite support.

4. They succeeded in ousting a government but not in changing the

The Oaxaca Rebellion

In 2006, indigenous people, teachers, and workers in the southern

Mexican state of Oaxaca rose up against the government. They set up

barricades, kicked out the police, held assemblies and indigenous

cultural festivals, and liberated villages. Much of Oaxaca was

autonomous for six months. At the very end of the rebellion, movement

politicians who had succeeded in taking over the central assembly

convinced people not to fight back against the military invasion,

although as a whole the movement was not nonviolent, and for months had

fought with stones, fireworks, slingshots, and molotov cocktails.

1. The rebellion was one of the most dramatically successful in recent

2. The rebellion spread ideas and served as an example of

3. The movement did not have elite support. It was slandered in the

4. While it lasted, the rebellion greatly improved people’s quality of

The 2006 CPE Protests

Throughout france in February, March, and April of 2006, millions of

young people rose up against the new cpe law, an austerity measure which

would undo decades of hard-won labor protections, allowing bosses to

fire younger workers with hardly any restrictions and greatly increasing

workers’ precarity. They occupied universities and government buildings,

blocked streets and highways, protested peacefully, rioted, burned cars,

went on strike, and fought with police. In the occupied universities,

students held assemblies and debated topics that went far beyond the

particularities of the cpe law, to talk about wage labor, capitalism,

and the organization of life in general. In the end, they defeated the

law.

1. The strikers, protesters, and rioters seized space in which they

2. Throughout France, this movement helped regenerate anticapitalist

3. It did not have elite support, and was generally infantilized or

4. It defeated a law that would have greatly worsened living conditions

2007 Saffron Revolution

When the dictatorial government in Burma removed fuel subsidies in

August 2007, leading to a 66% price increase, students, political

activists, women, and Buddhist monks took to the streets in nonviolent

protest and civil disobedience. They were careful not to directly

challenge the military regime, in consideration of the 1988 coup when a

mostly peaceful prodemocracy movement was utterly crushed, with 3,000

killed and many thousands more tortured. Within a few months, the

military

government had gotten the protests under control, arresting thousands

and killing between 13 and hundreds, depending on the source.

1. The protest movement was unable to hold the streets or open up space

2. The protest movement succeeded in expressing opposition to economic

3. It is rumored that the Burmese military was divided on its response

4. The movement was a failure in restoring government fuel subsidies or

a global capitalist market.

The 2008 insurrection in Greece

On the 6th of december 2008, Athens police shot and killed a teenager in

the largely anarchist neighborhood of Exarchia. That same night, riots

began in several major cities, quickly transforming into an insurrection

that gripped the entire country for a month. Millions of people

participated, young and old, immigrants and citizens. The arson attacks

on banks and police stations that in the previous years had been the

sole practice of anarchists instantly generalized to the point of

becoming common. By some accounts few police stations in the whole

country escaped attack. The insurrection made a joke of the pacifist

claim that “violence alienates people” by bringing together people from

across Greece and inspiring people all over the world. The momentum of

the uprising galvanized social struggles in the country and brought them

to a new level.[27]

1. The momentum created by the insurrection led directly to the

2. The insurrection in Greece generated a powerful new cycle of

as Chris Hedges, who later would run back to the side of law and order

as soon as windows started shattering closer to home (see Chapter 8).

3. The insurrection enjoyed zero elite support. The most leftwing

4. The insurrection made it clear to the police that they could not get

Bersih Rallies

The Bersih rallies were a series of democracy protests in

Malaysia, occurring in 2007, 2009, and 2012. The demands of the movement

are purely formalistic, all related to electoral reform and motivated by

the desire to see an end to the decades-long rule of the Barisian

Nasional political coalition. The first two rallies,

numbering in the tens of thousands, were exclusively peaceful, whereas

the so-called Bersih 3.0 rally was preceded by a *fatwa*, a call for

revolt, issued by one of the Muslim organizations participating. This

rally was much larger, drawing hundreds of thousands of participants and

including some rioting, self-defense against police, and the injury of

some 20 cops (providing another example that belies the claim that

violent movements will scare away supporters). As of 2013, because of

continued media support for the movement, the Malaysian government has

softened its crackdown on the movement and allowed rallies without

carrying out arrests.[28]

1. As a formalistic democracy movement, the Bersih rallies constitute

2. The Bersih rallies are not connected to any social critique or

3. The rallies are supported and organized by media organizations,

4. As a purely democratic movement, it is intentionally substituting

Guadeloupe General Strike

In January 2009, a general strike broke out in the French colonies on

the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. The strikes were

triggered by poor living conditions, the high cost of living, and low

wages, though racial tensions and anticolonial sentiments were also

major elements, as the population of these

French colonies, reserved as vacation resorts for rich white tourists,

are primarily black descendants of African slaves. Due to forced

economic dependence on tourism, island residents had to deal with high

prices, low wages, short-term, precarious employment, and exotification

in their own homes for the amusement of foreign vacationers.

Because unemployment already topped 50%, the

strikers wisely chose to complement their attempted economic shutdown

with more forceful tactics. After four weeks of failed negotiation,

islanders began rioting, burning cars and businesses, throwing rocks and

eventually opening fire on the police.

After just three days, the French authorities came

back to the negotiating table with a much better offer: raising the

lowest salaries by a whopping 200 euros a month, and acceding to all of

the strikers’ top 20 demands. President Sarkozy, a hardliner and

law-and-order politician through and through, took on an apologetic tone

with rioters and promised to review French policy in all its overseas

possessions.

1. Although self-organization and collectivization were not primary

2. The strike in Guadaloupe and Martinique inspired solidarity strikes

3. The strikes and the riots were opposed both by the island elite and

4. As stated, the actions achieved strikers’ demands and changed the

UK Student Movement

In the autumn of 2010, tens of thousands of students in the

UK began to protest a new law that would slash funding for higher

education and raise university tuition caps to more than double the

current amount. The major protests of the movement, held in November,

were jointly organized by the National Union of Students and the

University and College Union, which called for nonviolence. In the

beginning, most students were peaceful, carrying out sit-ins or simple

protests. Other students committed property damage, fought with police,

and occupied government buildings. Far from a “small minority,” several

thousand protesters pushed past police during the November 10 march,

surrounded and occupied the Conservative Party campaign headquarters,

smashing windows, lighting fires, spraypainting, throwing objects at

police, and chanting “Greece! France! Now here too!”

In its attempt to control the protests, London

police brutalized peaceful and illegal protesters alike. The leaders of

the nus and the ucu, along with the mass media, politicians, and

spokespersons for the police, all spoke up in favor of nonviolence,

condemned the acts of property damage, and attempted to blame it all on

an outside minority. However, despite extra police preparation, this

troika of government, media, and would-be protest leaders was not able

to enforce nonviolence at later protests, as rioting, attacks on police,

vandalism, and property destruction occurred with increasing frequency.

When the government approved the proposed austerity measures on December

9, student protesters engaged in another wave of rioting, smashing out

the windows of Her Majesty’s Treasury, trying to break through police

kettles, and lightly attacking the motorcade of Prince Charles and

Duchess Camilla.

The popularity of student union leaders suffered

dramatically as a result of their collaboration with police and

denunciation of the rioters. At one point, students booed and rushed the

stage to interrupt a speech by nus president Liam Byrne. Outside of the

virtual majority created by the media, ever in favor of people at the

bottom of the social pyramid staying peaceful, it would be hard to say

that the property damage, occupations, and fighting with police were not

a part of the collective will of the student movement. As always, the

first to break out of the legally sanctioned forms of protest were a

minority and their actions generated great controversy, but this

minority quickly grew and had a dynamic effect on the movement.

While nonviolence advocates were quick as always

to claim that violent protest was the domain of young, white males

(often accompanied by the adjectives “spoiled” or “middle-class”), the

Daily Mail expressed its surprise (on November 25, 2010) that many of

the most aggressive rioters “leading the charge” were young women.

1. The student movement was focused exclusively on presenting demands

2. In general, the student movement did not communicate any social

3. The nonviolent wing of the student movement enjoyed largely symbolic

4. Although the austerity measures were passed in England, the Welsh

Tunisian Revolution

The tunisian revolution was the first revolution of the so-called Arab

Spring, sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December

17, 2010. Bouazizi, a vegetable vendor, had been abused and robbed by a

cop, deprived of his sole source of income. In response, he went to the

police station and set himself on fire. His death sparked small

protests, which police tried to quash with tear gas. A couple other

destitute protesters killed themselves, and police bullets killed a few

more. Day after day, small groups of protesters returned to the streets,

fed up with police humiliations and brutality, poverty, and lack of free

speech. Trade unions and students began to get involved. On January 3,

when a police tear gas canister landed in a mosque, protesters burned

tires and attacked the offices of the ruling party. From that point on,

the uprising exploded (which once again, to beat a horse that should

have died long ago, disproves the pacifist cliché that “violence

alienates people,” and shows how rioting and fighting back against

authority galvanizes social struggles and wins support from those who do

not see the system as their friend). Protests, strikes, and riots spread

across Tunisia. Eleven days later, President Ben Ali, in power since

1987, had to flee the country. Protesters continued to hold the streets

in defiance of a military curfew, until the ruling party crumbled

entirely. 338 people had died, mostly killed by cops.

1. It does not seem that self-organized spaces played a major role in

“labor flexibility”—shorthand for the vulnerability of workers

visà-vis bosses.

2. Although the Western media tried hard to portray the North African

3. Initially, the Tunisian revolution did not have elite

4. The Tunisian revolution opened a new

The Egyptian Revolution of 2011

Sparked by the tunisian revolution, the Egyptian revolution began on

January 25, 2011, and as in Tunisia, it continued after the February 11 ouster of President Mubarak. Also like the

Tunisian revolution, the movement in Egypt addressed many

economic and social issues that were censored by the international

media, which wished to downplay the largely anticapitalist nature of the

uprising. And in another similarity, proponents of nonviolence

(including anyone from Gene Sharp to the US government) blatantly

falsified the reality of the struggle to portray it as a nonviolent

movement.

Millions of people across Egypt participated in

strikes, blockades, peaceful protests, riots, attacks on police,

self-defense against government paramilitaries, handing out flyers,

running blogs, and organizing the occupations of central plazas. They

were primarily influenced by the (violent) struggles in Tunisia and

Palestine, though white nonviolence guru Gene Sharp shamelessly tried to

take credit. Protesters in Egypt burned down more than 90 police

stations, they sent the police running time and again, they defended

themselves from government thugs with clubs and rocks, and in Tahrir

Square young volunteers went around taking up collections to buy

gasoline for the molotov cocktails that were a staple of the movement.

1. As a result of their direct experiences in the assemblies and

2. Even more than the Tunisian revolution, the uprising in Egypt spread

3. As in Tunisia, the movement lacked elite support in the beginning,

1. People empowered themselves, negated the ability of the government

The Libyan Civil War

Though the 2011 revolution in Libya started out as a spontaneous

uprising, because it ended in large part due to foreign military

intervention it is difficult to analyze as a social struggle. The

militarization of the conflict and a lack of direct communication

between the participants and social rebels in Europe or North America

(which was not the case with Tunisia or Egypt, where we were in direct

contact with participants as the uprisings unfolded) makes it very hard

for me, from my vantage point, to know about the social content of the

uprising. From what I have been able to ascertain, it seems that

whatever social content the revolution might have contained was largely

eroded by military concerns and realpolitik. Hopefully I am wrong, but

it seems the war had an exclusively military character. This is not an

intrinsic problem of combative revolutionary movements, as the

nonviolent Color Revolutions were even more devoid of social content,

but a problem of movements that focus primarily on the conquest of

political power, whether peaceful or armed, democratic or military.

Revolutionary movements that actually wish to end oppressive social

relations must never allow questions of political power or military

victory to take precedence. This does not mean that revolutionary

movements cannot take up arms, only that a revolutionary movement,

whatever tools or weapons it finds itself obliged to use, must always

focus on creating emancipatory social relations rather than seizing

political power. In any case, the example of the Libyan Civil War is

another reminder that when the State decides to unleash its full

military force, movements cannot maintain any pretense of nonviolence.

They must either fight back, or disappear.

Due to a lack of information and the way the

conflict in

Libya became a proxy war between external powers, it would be especially

reductionist to apply criteria measuring its effectiveness as a struggle

for liberation.

The Syrian Civil War

In march 2011, an uprising began in Syria after police arrested

schoolchildren painting revolutionary slogans on a wall in the city of

Deraa. A relatively small group of people took to the streets in

peaceful protest, and soldiers opened fire with live ammunition. The

next day people returned to the streets, and again soldiers tried to

crush the protests. The revolution spread from there. Peaceful methods

proved incapable of holding the streets against bullets and tanks.

Government forces even murdered Ghaith Matar, the activist who began

handing flowers to soldiers, demonstrating the unsustainability of that

tactic (as I stated in *How Nonviolence Protects the State*, a flower

does not in any way impede the ability of the gun to fire). People began

to arm themselves, and gradually the uprising turned into a civil war.

According to Lina Sinjab, writing for the bbc:

But amid the violence, there is a great sense of hope. Among civilians,

there is an unprecedented sense of solidarity. People are sharing homes,

clothes and food —notably with the hundreds of thousands displaced by

the fighting. The sense of freedom is palpable, with opposition voices

speaking out. More than 30 new online publications are promoting

democracy, despite the crackdown. In some opposition-controlled areas,

civilians and rebels are establishing local councils to get the services

working. And as people start to look past the civil war, some are

protesting against rebel groups that have committed abuses or which,

like the Nusra Front, are seeking to Islamise society. Syria has risen

against tyranny and will never be the same again.[29]

1. Having liberated a large part of the country, there is no doubt that

2. Along with the other Arab revolts of 2011, the Syrian uprising has

3. In the beginning, the uprising did not have elite support, though it

4. In the midst of a bloody civil war, which has claimed 70,000 lives

15M Movement and General Strikes

On the 29th of september 2010, millions of people across

Spain participated in a general strike against the first round of

austerity measures, protesting, carrying out blockades, sabotaging

transportation infrastructure, and in a few cities, rioting, looting,

and fighting with police. Anarchist labor federations played an

important role in the preparation, as did horizontal neighborhood

assemblies. The force of the day’s events initiated an intense cycle of

other protests and strikes, with a largely anticapitalist character.

Further general strikes were held the 27th of January 2011, and in 2012

on the 29th of March, the 31st of October, and the 14th of November.

Concurrently, there was heavy rioting on May Day, 2011, and two weeks

later, on May 15, plaza occupations directly inspired by the uprising in

Egypt spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the country, winning

the participation of millions of people. In the plaza occupations,

people organized protests and matters of daily survival in open

assemblies. The movement also led to the expansion of neighborhood

assemblies, the occupation of empty buildings by people who had lost

their homes to

foreclosures, the occupation of hospitals, the blockade of highways and

government buildings, and collective resistance against evictions,

layoffs, and the privatization of healthcare and education.

The 15M movement (the plaza occupations beginning

on the 15th of May) was an attempt by nonviolent activists in Madrid to

refocus the growing anticapitalist movement on strictly political

demands, primarily the reform of the electoral laws. This attempt was

based on a manipulated version of the Egyptian uprising that portrayed

it as a nonviolent movement constructed around exclusively political,

electoral demands. There was a major debate around nonviolence within

this movement (though would-be leaders generally tried to suppress the

debate). The mass media, politicians, and police consistently weighed in

on the side of nonviolence. After the plaza occupations began in May

2011, what had been at least a partially combative anticapitalist

movement suddenly became an overwhelmingly nonviolent democratic

movement. But this began to steadily change. The critical participation

of labor unions, anarchists, and others, and the struggles against

mortgage evictions and hospital privatizations soon replaced naïve

demands for electoral reform with far-reaching critiques of capitalism

and government. And in Barcelona, the brutal police eviction of Plaça

Catalunya and the absolute inability of nonviolent resistance to defend

the plaza was a first step in eroding the stranglehold of nonviolence on

the movement’s strategic discourse. Similar experiences in other cities

had the same effect.

Within months, more and more people openly

supported a diversity of tactics. Pacifists in the movement tried to

criminalize anarchists who assaulted politicians in the blockade of the

Catalan parliament in June 2011, but when those anarchists were

identified and arrested later that year, thousands of people came out to

protest in solidarity with them. By the time of the March 29, 2012

general strike, people were fed up with nonviolence, and hundreds of

thousands participated in riots that rocked cities across the country.

The labor unions, pressured by the government, took steps to prevent

riots in the subsequent general strikes, such as organizing their own

volunteer peace police to help cops maintain order in the protests.

Though many people did not go to work that

day, police controlled the streets, and people generally left with a

sense of defeat and powerlessness. The pacified strikes are universally

recognized to be less significant than the earlier, combative strikes.

The riotous general strike of March 29, 2012 created a palpable sense of

freedom in the streets, with people smiling, playing amidst the fires,

and laughing with strangers; and it sparked a whole new cycle of

activity, with an energetic anticapitalist May Day protest and another

round of general strikes in October and November. But those pacified

strikes, even though they achieved a similar level of participation in

terms of work stoppage, failed to inspire many people to throw

themselves into organizing after the smaller, radical unions announced

they would join the major unions in establishing peace police and

working with the police to prevent riots; the mood in the streets was

more often one of desperation, fear, or defeat; and the experience did

not inspire a new wave of activity in its aftermath, but months of

stagnation, directionlessness, and social peace. The government reaction

also shows how much less threatening they considered the peaceful

strikes. After the March strike, they were on the defensive, trying to

place blame and justify their loss of control, using the media to

villify the strikers and announcing new repressive measures (some of

which were repealed after generating heavy resistance). After the

relatively peaceful November strike, the government was much more calm

and composed. They did not have to deal with a challenge to their rule,

nor reveal their antagonistic relationship with society in such clear

terms.

1. The diverse movement which in reality includes the 15M movement, the

anticapitalist projects.

2. They have spread anticapitalist and anarchist ideas throughout

3. In general,

4. The neighborhood assemblies allowed many people to meet their

neighbors and gave them practice in direct decision-making. The plaza

occupation assemblies gave people practice in selforganization (if not

in decision-making, due to their unwieldy size) and they also created

police-free zones where immigrants and others could be safe for over a

month. The related movement against home evictions has saved many people

from foreclosure and homelessness, the supermarket sackings have given

workingclass people free food, and the movement against the

privatization of healthcare has maintained primary care access for

several neighborhoods that otherwise would have lost it.

2011 United Kingdom Anti-Austerity Protests

Although the 2011 anti-austerity protests hardly constitute an uprising

or a revolutionary movement, I am including

them to make it clear that I am not weeding out nonviolent movements.

After all, many proponents of nonviolence believe that simply by being

large and peaceful, an event becomes important. This movement was marked

by a major day of protest on March 26, with 500,000 people marching in

London, a protest and

day of strike on June 30, and another one-day strike in November. The

protest movement was entirely peaceful. According to polls, 52% of the

population supported the protests, though 55% believed the government

spending cuts were necessary. However, we should be clear that in polls,

“support” does not mean that someone would participate in a movement,

only that they like the idea of the movement enough to say or click

“Yes,” depending on whether the poll is verbal or written. This is

democratic support, where ideas are alienated from actions. The results

of the movement show exactly how powerful a passive majority can be, and

how wise are those activists who seek the support of the majority over

that of a committed minority.

1. The movement neither attempted nor managed to seize space for new

2. The movement did not talk about ideas, only about budget cuts, and

3. The movement was organized primarily by major trade unions and the

4. The movement achieved zero changes in government policy, zero

2011 England riots

In august 2011, people in cities across England rioted after police shot

and killed Marc Duggan, an unarmed black man, in a traffic stop. As per

the standard procedure, police initially lied to the media, claiming

that Duggan had opened fire on them, and media uncritically repeated the

lie as they always will. When friends and family spread the truth of the

incident, rioting and looting broke out in Tottenham, spreading to other

neighborhoods in London and then across England. Participants were

multiracial, and their targets included the police, government

buildings, public infrastructure, stores, and people perceived to be

rich or

middle-class. The rioting, which was described by many as an allout

insurrection, also included a significant amount of poor-onpoor violence

or simple opportunism. Regardless of a perceived lack of social analysis

or political criticism on the part of the rioters, some of the basic

causes were obvious, and the immense costs to government and police

constitute an effective punishment for the police murder. The

insurrection also divided English society into one camp that stood on

the side of law-and-order, attempting to criminalize or pathologize the

rioters and favoring harsh measures like the very stop-and-search

policies that triggered the rioting in the first place, and another camp

that rejected the government discourse of security and sympathized with

the rioters, while perhaps trying to encourage a sense of solidarity and

a revolutionary perspective.

1. As far as I can tell, the movement did not seize space for new

2. Although the insurrection made a rejection of the police, the

3. Unsurprisingly, the insurrection did not have the slightest bit of

4. I

Occupy

Similar to the plaza occupation movement, but on a smaller scale and

with more wingnuts, the Occupy movement in the US

spread to cities across the country and centered around assemblies in

public parks and the inevitable confrontations with authorities. Occupy

Wall Street, the original franchise, began with a commitment to

nonviolence, but Occupy in a few other cities respected a diversity of

tactics. Occupy Boston, one group that supported a diversity of tactics

and that used some light forms of self-defense to resist an attempted

police eviction, outlasted Occupy Wall Street by a whole month. Occupy

Oakland, which was far from nonviolent, triggered a general strike,

spread critiques of capitalism that surpassed ows’s populist rhetoric,

and disrupted the functioning of the government and economy far more

than any other Occupy.

1. In a hyperalienated society, the Occupy movement gave people (in

2. It is sad that the watered-down, populist concept of the 99%, a weak

cities around the country.

3. Numerous academics, media outlets, and even some city governments

4. During the course of Occupy, hundreds of homeless people could sleep

The 2011–2013 Chile student protests

Millions of high school and university students took to the streets of

cities across Chile starting in May 2011, protesting the underfunding of

education and the lack of public universities. Students carried out

massive protests, strikes, and riots. They erected barricades, fought

with police—sometimes sending them running—attacked banks, and even

burnt down a department store. Anarchists have played an influential

part in the movement, and many students have begun adopting anarchist

tactics. As of this writing, the movement is still ongoing.

1. The students have occupied schools and public places, though

2. The first student protests quickly inspired others and spread across

3. The students have not had significant elite support, although some

movement.

4. Although structural changes have not been won at the time of this

The Quebec Student Movement

In February 2012, students in Quebec, first at one university, then

others, voted to go on strike in response to a government

proposal to increase tuition. The strike soon involved 300,000 students,

and included protest marches with over 400,000 participants, a quarter

of the population of Montreal. The movement organized itself in

assemblies and also engaged in heavy confrontations with the police,

with many injured on both sides. “Prevented from occupying buildings as

it had in 2005, the student movement shifted to a strategy of economic

disruption: blockading businesses, interrupting conferences, and

spreading chaos in the streets.”[31]

1. The Quebec student movement has given hundreds of thousands of young

2. The movement spread critiques of debt, austerity, and capitalism

universities. The students linked their movement with ongoing indigenous

and environmental struggles, denouncing and attacking elite structures

as a whole rather than only those structures exclusively concerned with

university tuition decisions.[32]

3. The student movement received support and funding from major labor

4. In September 2012, the pressure and disruption created by the

The Mapuche struggle

The mapuche, an indigenous nation whose territory is occupied by the

states of Chile and Argentina, have been fighting back since the arrival

of the Spanish colonizers, who were never able to conquer them. The

Mapuche, a horizontal or “circular” (meaning reciprocal,

non-hierarchical) society, effectively used armed resistance to defend

their independence long after most other South American indigenous

populations had been conquered or exterminated. They were finally

occupied during a joint invasion by Chile and Argentina, backed by Great

Britain, at the time the most powerful state in the world.

Mapuche resistance continues to the present day,

with sabotage actions against multinational mining and logging companies

as well as against major landlords who have usurped their <em>lands.

They also </em>carry out protests, road blockades, skirmishes with

police, hunger strikes, cultural activities, religious ceremonies,

riots, and the forceful retaking of usurped lands. In January 2013, on

the five-year anniversary of the unpunished police murder of Matias

Catrileo, a young Mapuche *weichafe*, or warrior, Mapuche youth rioted

in Santiago, the Chilean capital. In the countryside, unknown people set

fire to the mansion of major landlord and usurper of Mapuche territory,

Werner Luchsinger, whose cousin owned the estate police were protecting

when they shot Catrileo in the back. Werner and his wife were killed in

the fire. At the time of this writing, the Mapuche have resisted the

attempted criminalization of their struggle.

1. Within the autonomous Mapuche communities, community members revive

2. The Mapuche struggle has popularized methods of resistance to

3. Although the Mapuche struggle is heterogeneous and includes

4. The Mapuche struggle has made an impressive number of concrete gains

environmentally destructive exotic tree species planted by timber

companies, protecting their territory from environmentally harmful

development projects, and achieving food sovereignty in multiple

autonomous villages.

A Cumulative Evaluation

The foregoing evaluations are neither perfect nor indisputable.

Subjecting the successes and defeats of social rebellions and

revolutionary movements to a rigorous scientific objectivity destroys

what is most valid in them and produces only the illusion of knowledge.

My goal was not to produce a framework with the pretension of

objectively or more accurately understanding such movements, but to take

a moment to compare in a simple way, with clear criteria and without

double standards, the accomplishments of nonviolence and those of

heterogeneous struggles. All of the rebellions mentioned above are more

complex than a single book could do justice to, much less a few

paragraphs, but by highlighting central features and obvious

achievements, we begin to see a number of patterns.

Some of my characterizations could definitely be

disputed: I do not claim to be an expert on the struggles presented

above. However, after a fair evaluation based on the readily available

information, what becomes indisputable is that since the end of the Cold

War, nonviolent movements have had their greatest successes in effecting

regime change, helping to inaugurate new governments that subsequently

disappoint and even betray those movements. They have not succeeded in

redistributing power in any meaningful way, or putting revolutionary

social relations into practice, despite claiming victory numerous times.

On the other hand, heterogeneous movements using conflictive methods and

a diversity of tactics have been the most effective at seizing space and

putting new social relations into practice.

I would also argue that these movements have been

most effective at inspiring other people and spreading new ideas, but

different people are inspired by different acts. A pacifist could

argue that being peaceful is a new social relation. To an anticapitalist

that argument should be entirely unsatisfactory as it does not in any

way address the question of power or alienation in society. Nonetheless,

if one believes in revolution as the end of all violence, and

understands oppression as a cycle of violence, simply being peaceful is

a way to break the cycle and spread an important new social

relation.[34] But one could make the opposite argument that

fighting back spreads a new social relation, since our relationship with

authority is supposed to be one of obedience and passivity. In an

attempt to be fair, I have not included a redundant spreading of ideas.

A nonviolent movement that only inspires other people to be nonviolent,

or a combative movement that only inspires other people to fight back is

doing nothing more than spreading its own methods. Therefore, I have

only included the spread of practices of self-defense (either violent or

nonviolent) as an achievement where they directly conflict with other

ruling structures, for example when marginalized and oppressed people

whom our society trains to be defenseless and to accept their

victimization reject this role. Nonetheless, I have not encountered any

movement in the last two decades that has spread an effective practice

of nonviolent self-defense, as existed to a certain extent in the Civil

Rights movement.

The forms of self-defense that have been spread by

marginalized people in the rebellions mentioned above have

overwhelmingly tended towards the decidedly not pacifist. This may be

because the exclusively nonviolent movements have tended to be movements

of citizens, a normative identity that further marginalizes the

marginalized.

Moving beyond the extension of peaceful or

combative methods, there can be no doubt that heterogeneous, conflictive

movements have consistently been connected to the proliferation

of profound social critiques and ideas of new ways to live, while

exclusively nonviolent movements have been systematically linked to

superficial, populist, lowest-common-denominator politics. In fact, such

politics are a key feature of the most “successful” nonviolent movements

of the last two decades, the Color Revolutions, which will be discussed

in more detail in the next chapter.

In sum, a review of revolutions and social

uprisings since the end of the Cold War demonstrates the following:

1. Movements that use a diversity of tactics are overwhelmingly more

2. Movements that use a diversity of tactics are more likely to spread,

3. Nonviolent movements are exponentially more likely to receive

4. Excluding the achievement of free elections, which both

combative and peaceful movements have proven effective at winning,

movements that use a diversity of tactics have a better track record of

achieving concrete gains.

Beyond these four criteria, we have seen that peaceful movements are

much more likely to fade away after winning a token gain like electoral

reform, whereas combative movements are more likely to continue in the

pursuit of deeper, more meaningful social changes; combative movements

are more likely to be connected to a critique of capitalism and state

authority whereas nonviolent movements hold democratic government,

regardless of actual conditions, as the absolute good; movements with

the greatest participation tend to display a diversity of tactics,

whereas strictly nonviolent movements tend to be smaller or

shorter-lived (bringing huge crowds together for a protest, but rarely

for more extended action); within the time period under examination,

nonviolent movements have never been able to stand up to military force,

whereas under certain circumstances, combative movements have been able

to defeat police and military; democratic as well as dictatorial

governments sometimes do use lethal police and military force against

peaceful protesters, contrary to pacifist claims that governments cannot

effectively repress nonviolent movements because public opinion would

prevent them.

And aside from the dramatic examples of

revolutions and uprisings, we can also perceive a similar pattern in

simple protests and movements that have not achieved the same

dimensions.

Although nonviolent organizers frequently claim

that protesters who use combative or illegal tactics ruin “their”

protests—clearly demonstrating an ownership issue—anticapitalist

protests in which people damage corporate property, fight with police,

and interrupt the spectacle of social peace or disrupt whatever elite

summit world leaders have planned, are clearly more effective than

protests in which people get arrested, carry out civil disobedience,

hold witty placards, but do not go on the attack.

Compare the various antiglobalization protests in

Washington, DC or New York City between 2000 and 2004—where there were

huge crowds but little or no rioting—with the

the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. No one even remembers the former anymore,

whereas the latter is often referred to (incorrectly, but capitalism

tends to have a corrosive effect on memory) as the birth of the

antiglobalization movement. Hardly anyone disputes that Seattle did more

to spread an awareness of the antiglobalization movement than any other

summit protest in North America or Europe, and no one nominates the

strictly peaceful protests such as the ones in Washington, DC for that

honor.[36] In the heart of the empire, at the pinnacle of

Clintonian peace and prosperity, people were rioting.

Some proponents of nonviolence have claimed that

the resonance of Seattle was caused by the major participation of

organized labor, or by the nonviolent lockdowns of activists. Nonviolent

organizers Rebecca and David Solnit have written critically about the

media and Hollywood portrayals of the protesters, but with an evident

desire to erase the participation of those who rioted. David writes

about “50,000 ordinary people” and “tens of thousands” who “joined the

nonviolent direct action blockade” but takes a big eraser to the Black

Bloc and the many others who practiced forms of property destruction and

self-defense against police.[37] Writing on the Stuart

Townsend movie, *Battle in Seattle*, he objects to the portrayal of the

protesters as professional activists (ironic, really) lacking “everyday

grievances shared by most Americans,” but expresses no problem with the

portrayal of Black Bloc anarchists as unsympathetic thugs or police

infiltrators. In

his “People’s History,” ideological competitors evidently deserve to be

whited-out, and in this regard media lies suddenly become acceptable.

One seemingly intentional effect of the Solnits’

intervention in historical revisionism is to portray the Black Bloc as a

mere blip, a few dozen people who smashed a few windows during the space

of a few minutes. Speaking with other people who were in Seattle,

including one who also organized with dan (the Direct Action Network

that had established nonviolent guidelines, though it was not

responsible for all the blockades, much less all the forms of protest),

we get a very different picture of the day’s protests. First of all, the

Black Bloc lasted the whole day, carrying out decentralized attacks in

the morning, and converging on Nike Town in the afternoon for another

bout of well-justified smashing. When the union leaders refused to march

downtown in an effort to help police restore order and segregate their

supporters from the rioters, a large contingent of the labor march broke

away and came downtown. Though labor leaders and supporters of

nonviolence are loathe to admit this, “they were mad [...] and some of

them were also smashing stuff—windows and newspaper boxes. And then

just a lot of people not in black joining in as often happens.” My

recollection, though it was a long time ago now, was that as the day

descended into what felt like an apocalyptic war, nonviolence was not

the main sentiment in the air–anger and shock were. That does not mean

people were ‘violent’, whatever that means, but some were definitely

angry and defending themselves in the street with dumpsters and

rubbish.[38]

It is absolutely true that the marching workers

and the locked-down activists were important parts of the Seattle

protests, and the cancellation of the first day of WTO meetings would

not have happened without them. Equating Seattle with the Black Bloc is

narcissistic at best. But it is hard to trust people who complain about

media manipulations and police brutality and then join sides with the

media and police in criminalizing people in the **movement whos**e

tactics they disagree with.

This is especially the case when it is

self-evident that those tactics deserve the lion’s share of credit for

the victory activist leaders subsequently wish to manage. If it was the

union march that was the most decisive, important element in the Seattle

protests, the element that inspired the most people across the country

and energized a new cycle of struggle, why did union activity only

continue to stagnate in the aftermath of the Seattle protests? If it was

the nonviolent civil disobedience, was there a boom in such practices

after the whopping success outside the Kingdome? In the years after

1999, there was in fact a major upsurge in “nonviolent direct action”

trainings all across the country, though the pool of people conducting

these trainings was decidedly small, such that one saw the same faces

coast to coast. As to the actual practice of what some seedily referred

to as nvda, it seems that the upsurge was minor at the most. Part of

this is probably due to several facts: that those who learned these

tactics on the fly, rather than through years of experience blocking

clearcuts, did not tend to use them very well; the police quickly

learned to dismantle such blockades with ease; in practice, few people

were actually inspired by the experience of submitting themselves to the

mercy of the police and subsequently having their eyelids swabbed with

pepperspray, such that for most people, once was enough; people were

also disillusioned by nvda because of how frequently they were treated

like sheep or cannon fodder by the professional organizers giving the

trainings or conducting the meetings. I have seen with my own eyes how

well David Solnit can manipulate a large consensus meeting to get a

bunch of hyped-up college students excited about locking down and going

to jail to satisfy a strategy plan formulated in advance.[39]

In short, after Seattle there was a modest upsurge

in nonviolent actions that quickly fizzled out on its own shortcomings.

And how about the Black Bloc?

Curiously, the Black Bloc tactic exploded,

becoming a commonplace at protests across the country. If the tactic

really were unimportant, if the resonance of Seattle truly had nothing

to do with its masked rioters, why is it that this tactic more than any

other has resonated with people across the country since 1999? Even now,

13 years later, the use of Black Blocs has continued to expand. 13 years

later, proponents of nonviolence, including the Solnits, still have to

use the same tired lies and manipulations to try to minimize or

criminalize a practice that continues to leave their nvda in the dust.

The lesson is clear, for those willing to face the

music. In order to show people that we are serious, that we are

committed, that we are fighting for our lives, it is better to express

unambiguously that we are the enemies of the established order, that we

negate their laws, their offers of dialogue, and their false social

peace, it is better to attack (and to come dressed for the occasion)

than to dress up as clowns, tote about giant puppets, play hard to get

with the police, locking down and expecting them to treat us humanely,

or wait for the cameras to give our witty protest signs a close-up.

This is not to say that we must be ever grim and

serious, nor that our only activity is to smash. Just as we need the

full range of tactics, we will express a thousand emotions in our

rebellion, from street festivals to funeral marches to riots. But it is

our negation of the present system that gives everything else its

meaning. Only because we do not frame this as a popularity contest, but

as a revolution, as a struggle to destroy the present system and create

something wholly new, do all the festive and creative aspects of our

struggle break out of the usual cycles of loyal dissent and

counterculture that are co-opted from the beginning.

4. The Color Revolutions

Since 2000, the most prevalent method of nonviolent action has been,

without a doubt, Gene Sharp’s method for regime change, as laid out in

his bestselling book, **From Dictatorship **

• to Democracy*. No other method has been explained in such concise,

unambiguous terms, and no other method has been as reproducible. Whereas

the previous heroes of nonviolence, people like Mohandas Gandhi or

Martin Luther King, Jr., made complicated, intuitive strategic decisions

in the midst of a movement that can inspire but that cannot be

reproduced, what Sharp offers is not an example, and not a strategy, but

a template. It is no coincidence, then, that so many people have seized

upon this most reproducible of methods and attempted to reproduce it.

• From Dictatorship to Democracy* (*FdtD*) was published in English and

Burmese in 1994, and since then has been translated to over thirty

languages, especially after 2000 when it was used as “the Bible” of the

Serbian Otpor movement, in the words of its members.

The main “Color Revolutions” have already been

mentioned: Serbia’s “Bulldozer Revolution” in 2000, Georgia’s “Rose

Revolution” in 2003, Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004, and,

following a slightly different model, Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolution” and

Kuwait’s “Blue Revolution” in 2005.

Sharp’s method offers unique opportunities for

analysis because, unlike any other nonviolent method since the end of

the Cold War, it has achieved success in its own terms. And unlike other

nonviolent methods, such as that of Gandhi or King, which overlapped

with and are ultimately inseparable from contemporaneous combative

methods, the use of Gene Sharp’s method has in fact occurred in a

vacuum, in the near or total absence of competing methods for social

change. In other words, the histories of the

Color Revolutions can tell us accurately what a strict adherence to

nonviolence can accomplish.

Otpor, the Serbian movement to overthrow Slobodan

Milosevic, was the first real articulation of this nonviolent template,

for which Sharp’s book offers the materials but not the precise

configuration Although Otpor activists seem content to give him all the

credit—they were, after all, personally trained by Gene Sharp’s Albert

Einstein Institute—they also drew on numerous characteristics of

Philippine’s 1983–86 Yellow Revolution, not explicitly dealt with in

• FDtD*. The specific configuration of tactics they chose served as the

undisputed model for all subsequent Color Revolutions.

The nonviolent Yellow Revolution used a disputed

election and years of frustration with a longstanding chief executive

for political leverage; it was protected from government repression by

elite support, including the media, an opposition political party, and

none other than the archbishop of Manila; it was exclusively a regime

change effort with no revolutionary perspectives or social content, only

the demands for the abdication of the current ruler and electoral

reforms that would allow for the regular cycling of rulers; subsequent

regimes were also plagued by corruption and politics as usual; victory

did not lead to any structural changes in Philippine society; and the

new regime did not close down the sweatshops, obstruct private property

or foreign investment, refuse to pay the national debt, or do anything

else that might have upset world leaders (they did end the lease on the

US military base at Subic Bay, but only after the end of the Cold War;

in 2012, with the growth of Chinese naval power, they invited the US

military back).

To its credit, this method did lead to people in

the Philippines overthrowing another unpopular government in 2001,

though this lack of respect for democratic process that the use of

disruptive mass protest evidently inculcates should be most embarrassing

to Mr. Sharp, who holds democratic government as the highest good. When

Filipinos used the methods of the Yellow Revolution to oust

then-President Joseph Estrada, the US government immediately recognized

the new regime as legitimate with

a diplomatic agility that some might regard as suspicious. In fact, many

international and domestic critics regarded the 2001 movement as a form

of “mob rule” and alleged a conspiracy among top politicians, business

leaders, and military and church officials. The *International Herald

Tribune* aptly expresses elite sentiments:

neighbors and allies will be visibly happier dealing with a hardworking,

well educated, economically literate president used to mixing in elite

circles and behaving with decorum. However, far from being the victory

for democracy that is being claimed by leaders of the anti-Estrada

movement such as Cardinal Jaime Sin, the evolution of events has been a

defeat for due process.[40]

This criticism opens up much larger questions

about democracy that are the focus of another book. For now, we can

dismiss this journalist’s handwringing with the simple historical

recognition that democratic due process has always been imposed by

force. With regards to nonviolent methodology, several questions arise

that must be dealt with: if nonviolent regime change is best suited to

achieving democracy, how can it be that the same method also tramples

basic democratic principles like due process? If it is democratic to

oust fraudulently elected dictators using mass protests and obstruction,

but a “de facto coup” to oust an unpopular, corrupt but elected and

impeachable president using those same methods, what is the line between

dictatorship and democracy? If due process can be twisted or stacked by

dictators, but respect for due process is the elemental characteristic

of democracy, then are mass protests and disobedience fundamentally

democratic or anti-democratic? And why would business, military,

political, and religious elites conspire to use a nonviolent movement

for greater democracy? The answer to all of these questions is in fact

simple, but not within the framework of Gene Sharp, Otpor, or any of the

Color Revolutions.

In order to understand that framework, it would

help to emphasize a fundamental characteristic of every single Color

Revolution. The more obvious features of the Color Revolutions

relate to unified, nonviolent mass action subordinated to a viral media

strategy. Receiving directions from above, movement members take to the

streets in protest, occupy a public square, or carry out some other form

of mass disobedience on the same day. They adopt an aesthetic designed

to transmit easily via television and internet. A color and a simple

slogan, often just one word, are chosen to represent the movement (in

Ukraine, for example, the color was orange and the slogan, “yes!”). The

movement discourse is equally symbolic, such that discourse, slogan, and

color are interchangeable. It is a marketing strategy *par excellence*.

To understand the meaning of the color, the public, watching on the

television or surfing on the internet, need not read any text or

understand any social analysis that the color and slogan refer to. (By

contrast, the circle-A or the hammer and sickle designate certain

concepts—anarchism and communism—that are not self-explanatory in the

present context; to understand them a viewer would have to conduct a

certain amount of investigation, ceasing, therefore, to be a passive

spectator).

This marketing strategy requires the discourse of

the Color Revolutions to be as simple as a color or a slogan:

opposition. They are against the current politician in power. The social

critique of all the Color Revolutions goes no deeper than that. This

lowestcommon-denominator politics serves another function. The only way

for a media-savvy activist organization to bring together such diverse

crowds in a mass and create the pseudo-movement they need to ride to

power is to ardently avoid any theoretical debate, any collective

discussion of strategy, any envisioning of new worlds or elaboration of

social critiques, any truly creative processes. What they want are

sheep. Sheep who will dress in orange or pin a rose on their t-shirt,

baaa “yes” or “no” in unison, and go home when those entrusted with the

thinking have decided it is time.

A Color Revolution is nothing but a putsch, a

bloodless coup, a regime change. And this regime change is not in the

interests of those who take to the streets. The nonviolent protesters in

a Color Revolution never stop being spectators. They are spectators to

their own movement, and at no point are they allowed to collectively

formulate their interests. The interests, like the strategic

decisions, come from above. Because the fundamental characteristic of

every Color Revolution, the glue that holds the strategy together, is

elite support.

The mass protests and encampments would come to

naught if the government simply sent in the military and cleared them

out. Not only do nonviolent movements have a track record of

powerlessness in the face of police or military force, the particular

kind of nonviolence promoted by Gene Sharp and put into practice by

Otpor and other groups is the cheapest, flimsiest, most prefab brand of

nonviolence imaginable. Gene Sharp is the Sam Walton of nonviolence.

Passive participants in Color Revolutions do not go through years of

civil disobedience, arrest, and torture to learn how to conduct a sit-in

when the police come in with dogs, batons, or tear gas to kick them out.

And they are not allowed to have any ideas, properly speaking, that

might give them the strength of conviction to stare down the barrel of a

gun and accept the possibility they might get killed. The only thing

they have is the assurance that the military will not shoot them because

it is already on their side. Every successful Color Revolution has been

able to count on either the support of the military or military

neutrality from the very beginning, not because they battled for the

hearts and minds of the common soldiers, but because the top brass was

already amenable to the regime change.

The clever media strategy of the activist

organizations behind the Color Revolutions would be so much wasted time

if the media simply did not give them any coverage. For decades, the

media have disappeared anticapitalist movements from the public eye and

edited out any reference to the histories that show a continuity of

struggle against capitalism. In the absence of the television cameras, a

crowd of people all wearing the same color and holding signs that

proclaim “Yes!” would only appear to be a strange sect to the occasional

passerby, rather than something to join. The alienated masses of a Color

Revolution have not even begun the process of debate, self-education,

and expression (not to mention any apprenticeship in writing, editing,

layout, printing, broadcasting, and so forth) necessary to assume

responsibility for spreading their own ideas without the help of the

media. They do not have to

do any of this work because the media is already on their side.

In every single Color Revolution, the movement had

a large portion of the domestic elite on their side from the beginning.

This includes rich people, the owners of the mass media, opposition

political parties, academics, religious authorities, and so on. No

military organization in the world is going to open fire on protesters

who are supported by the country’s business elite. Whether in democracy

or in dictatorship, military hierarchies form close relationships with a

country’s “business community.” And it is not only the domestic elite

that have supported the Color Revolutions. It’s no coincidence that

every single Color Revolution has replaced a government that had a close

relationship with Russia with a government that wanted a closer

relationship with the United States and European Union. Each and every

Color Revolution received positive media coverage in Western media,

usually beginning before the revolution had even started, so that the

public was already trained to think of Ukraine, Georgia, or Kyrgyzstan

as a corrupt regime in need of changing. (As friends and I discussed at

the time, whenever a previously ignored country started getting ink in

the *New York Times*, from Haiti to Georgia, it was clear that regime

change was on the way). And in every case, the organization responsible

for conducting the so-called revolution received funding from

progressive capitalists like billionaire George Soros, or from US and EU

governmental institutions like usaid, the National Endowment for

Democracy (ned), the International Republican Institute (iri), the

National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and Freedom

House.

Gene Sharp’s own think tank, the Albert Einstein

Institute (which trained activists from Otpor in Serbia and Pora in

Ukraine), receives funding from some of these same institutions. The aei

refutes the charge that they are funded by the government. Stephen

Zunes, writing in defense of Sharp for *Foreign Policy in Focus*, claims

that “Absolutely none of these claims is true […] Such false allegations

have even ended up as part of entries on the Albert Einstein Institution

in *SourceWatch*, *Wikipedia*, and other reference web sites.” On

• SourceWatch*, we find the information that aei has received funding

from the Ford Foundation, the International

Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy (the

first name should be well known to readers, the latter two are funded by

the US Congress). Are these false claims? Buried in a single paragraph

in the middle of his 42-paragraph article, Zunes mentions in passing “a

couple of small grants” from the iri and the ned. Evidently, these

allegations are not so false after all. We also find the interesting

tidbit that Gene Sharp’s doctoral dissertation was funded by the Defense

Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.

But these evasions, and the ultimately true and

factual assertion that Gene Sharp’s activities in support of nonviolence

are funded by the government, along with several very rich people,

ignore the bigger picture: the Albert Einstein Institute works in

parallel with these elite institutions. Although the aei is a small

operation, it works alongside much bigger players for the same ends. In

both Serbia and Ukraine, the aei trained the activists, but the US

government and a number of business foundations funded those activists.

For the most part, they did not funnel their money through Gene Sharp or

the aei, they gave it directly to the activist and media organizations

that were conducting regime change efforts.

The fact of elite support for these movements is

inseparable from their results: the Color Revolutions have not improved

the lives of their participants (except for the opposition political

parties to come out on top) but they have improved the prospects of

Western investors and governments.

The Color Revolutions in general, and Gene Sharp’s

method in particular, are completely lacking in social content and

revolutionary perspective. Sharp gives us “a conceptual framework for

liberation” that does not even begin to address the concept of liberty.

He assumes, uncritically, that a democratic government sets its people

free and allows them to change the fundamental social relations that

govern their lives.

This is why governments and capitalists support

the method and have become its primary backers: because it does not

challenge any of the fundamental power dynamics of society, and it does

not seek to reveal or abolish the unwritten laws that allow

them to profit off of our exploitation and powerlessness. As an added

bonus, the method is nonviolent, and because nonviolence is

intrinsically weaker, those who use it will never be able to take over

space and change the basic power dynamics of society, they can only

present an obstacle and demand that others change those dynamics for

them. Because nonviolence is helpless, it will not deliver those who

fund it any unexpected surprises, as when an armed movement overthrows

an unwanted regime, but later misbehaves rather than being the obedient

puppet (the Taliban is only one of numerous examples of this outcome).

Ironically, the weakness of nonviolence is exactly what makes it a

fitting tool, what wins it funding, and what allows it the appearance of

strength and effectiveness, thereby seducing social rebels in other

countries to take up a method designed to fail.

This brings us back to the earlier questions.

Democracy is merely another way to organize exploitation, oppression,

and social control. Democratic governments have coexisted with slavery,

colonialism, warfare, the most patriarchal societies with some of the

most unequal concentrations of wealth, the destruction of the

environment, starvation, extreme poverty, the pathologization or murder

of trans people, labor exploitation, job and housing precarity,

homelessness, exclusion from healthcare, genocide, and any other bad

thing we can think of. The most brutal forms of poverty and the worst

destruction to the environment have occurred since democracy became the

predominant form of government on the planet. The US government is a

democracy. The German government is a multi-party democracy in which

even the Green Party has been in power. Take a moment to think about the

horrible things that democratic governments do on a regular basis.

Democracy in and of itself isn’t worth toilet paper.

This list of abuse and misery is a result of a

host of structures related to capitalism and government. Capitalism is

based on the endless accumulation of wealth, extracted from the

environment and from our labor, and government is based on the

accumulation of power and control directly stolen from all the rest of

us. A marriage between these two systems, which has defined the

social reality for at least 500 years, means everyone gets

fucked.[41] Governments can be democratic or not, more or

less corrupt, but they will still pursue the same basic goals, and they

will still be controlled by an elite. Government by its very nature

concentrates power and excludes people from making decisions over their

own lives.

The line between democracy and dictatorship is

fictitious. Whatever difference there is is primarily one of formalism

and ritual. The two classes of government are often interchangeable, and

when a government changes from one to the other, many of the same people

tend to stay in charge.

The truth is, revolution is anti-democratic.

Revolutions in their beginnings are always opposed by the majority,

which is nothing but a virtual herd controlled by the media. A minority

of one knows its own interests better than the rest of society, and the

rest of society can only be convinced of a truth if people start putting

it into action rather than waiting for validation from the majority. The

struggle for a world free of domination is the insistence that we are

the only ones who can define and meet our needs, and that our needs are

more important than the ever-manipulated bylaws, due process, and sacred

pieces of paper that democracy holds so dear. The principle of direct

action is fundamentally at odds with following the rules and getting

permission. Gene Sharp has taken the strike, in various pacified forms,

and wed this fundamentally anarchic practice to its antithesis.

Only through the pacification of direct tactics

can democracy be presented as freedom, but from the Philippines to

Serbia, the contradiction is still there. There is no real contradiction

in the forcible imposition of democracy. More than anything else,

democracy is a good business model, and it has always been spread by

invasions or bourgeois coups. The contradiction is in using the masses

to overthrow one government (one that has become an obstacle to

business) without letting them lose their respect for government or

think they could overthrow it again on their own initiative. But if they

are only ever given experience in nonviolent

methods, they will never become an independent threat. And if they are

encouraged to rise up in the name of democracy, they will reject the

current government only on the grounds that it does not live up to the

ideal of legitimate government. As long as future elections regularly

cycle out candidates, they will think freedom has another chance of

flourishing with each new change of masks.

On inspection, a peaceful coup in the name of

democracy is only a contradiction if we swallow liberal rhetoric about

the rule of law. Law is always coercive, but it is legitimized through a

variety of illusions or rituals. The nonviolent coup, in which people

are mobilized without being empowered, provides the perfect illusion. It

is democratic, *par excellence*.

The Color Revolutions put nonviolence at the

service of democracy without questioning the underlying power dynamics and unwritten rules that actually affect people’s lives. By being

exclusively political movements that only seek a legal reform or a

change of politicians, they can accomplish no real change. In this

context, nonviolence is revealed not only as a naïve practice that has

been co-opted to provide an illusion useful to government, but as an

illusion in its own terms as well.

Compare a violent (Tulip) and nonviolent (Orange)

Color Revolution, and you will find there is no difference in the

results. In both cases, the movement accomplished a regime change, and

within a couple years, everyone was disillusioned because the new

government proved to be the same as the old government. This is an

especially critical observation, given how proponents of nonviolence

frequently insist that the presence of violence exercises an almost

magical effect in turning on police repression, driving away support, or

reproducing authoritarian dynamics. In a direct comparison between two

highly similar political movements, we see that violence is a

non-factor.[42] If the pacifist hypothesis were

correct, we would see quite different results between the Tulip

Revolution, where people rioted, beat up cops, and took government

buildings by force, and the Orange or Rose Revolutions, where people

were entirely peaceful. That difference is absent. Violence is a false

category. It is only a question of what actions are effective at

overcoming structures of power without reproducing them.

5. Nonviolence Against Dictatorship

There is no clear distinction between dictatorship and democracy. All

governments dictate, many dictators are elected, and the subjects of

typical dictatorships often have ways to influence the government that

are more direct than the means enjoyed by citizens of typical

democracies. Paid hacks in the media, universities and think tanks make

the distinction that democratic elections are “fair and free” whereas

the elections that confer office on dictators are manipulated. But all

elections are farcical, and all elections are manipulated. That is the

nature of elections. No democracy in the world allows everyone a chance

to vote, and the very rules that determine the legality of elections are

set by those who are already in power. Every set of voting rules, in its

turn, allows a whole range of legal and extralegal means for

power-holders to influence the outcome of the vote.

Nonviolent movements that replace supposed

dictatorships with supposed democracies do power a great service. They

mistake the dictator for the center of power in a dictatorship, when

dictators are really only charismatic figures (or puppets placed by

charismatic figures) who succeed in linking together a coalition of

power-holders strong enough to keep down other power-holders not

included in the coalition, and to control coalition members who might

want more power than the present arrangement grants them. If a dictator

is ousted in favor of a democracy, this represents the expansion of the

ruling coalition and the development of a more stable ruling structure.

The power-holders who backed the dictator usually remain in the ruling

coalition, but that coalition now includes potentially everybody, as

long as everybody prioritizes social control first, and their personal

interests second. In governments recognized as democratic, charisma is

invested in the institution of government itself, rather than in

individual leaders. By ousting a dictator and demanding elections, a

nonviolent movement allows a government to clean its image, rebuild its

legitimacy, and mask a smooth transition to a more powerful form of

government as though it were some kind of grassroots revolution or

responsiveness to popular pressures.

There is another de facto distinction between

dictatorship and democracy. It is the common understanding of democratic

citizens nearly everywhere, that one of the principal rules in the

unwritten, unsigned social contract holds that democratic governments

will not use lethal force against unarmed social movements. Of course,

in the whole world there is not a democratic government of any size that

does not occasionally kill dissidents, protesters, prisoners, and

others. Since democracy is a question of form and image, what this means

in practice is that democratic governments need to be able to portray

their violence against social rebels as exceptional, accidental, or

justified on grounds of national security.[43]

It follows that the greater the control over

public opinion and information a ruling structure can exercise (and this

depends on the degree of saturation by mass media and whether any part

of the mass media will act critically towards the government or subvert

the social peace), the more a democratic government can get away with

using useful lethal force. This hypothesis is confirmed by the record.

In the US, where the media toe the line of all government policy that is

fundamental (roughly speaking, bipartisan) and their saturation of

social dialogue is so advanced one must more accurately speak of a

social monologue, the democratic government can get away with murdering

people every day. In countries like Greece, where the media until

recently were less cooperative with the government and where there are

many networks of communication that do not rely on mass media as

intermediaries, killings by police are less frequent and cause a greater

erosion to the democratic peace.

To simplify, although a powerful media apparatus

can allow a democratic government to wriggle past this contractual

limitation on lethal force, as a generalization let’s say that

democracies cannot carry out domestic mass killings to keep order,

whereas dictatorships can.

In this sense of the word, dictatorships are

immune to nonviolent movements for change. In every case since the end

of the Cold War, peaceful movements that went up against a government

perfectly willing to torture and kill them in large numbers failed.

Every time.

The Color Revolutions, so successful against

governments that decided to tolerate the protests, failed in Belarus and

Azerbaijan when those governments decided to crack down. The initially

peaceful uprising in Egypt adopted the use of gas masks, clubs, rocks,

and molotov cocktails in order to defend themselves against the brutal

attacks of cops and government thugs. When the governments of Libya and

Syria went so far as to use the military against protesters, the

movement had to take up arms. The government of China successfully

crushed the nonviolent Falun Gong movement, torturing to death 2,000 or

more practitioners, and they used equally harsh methods to put an end to

the peaceful Free

Tibet movement, which can hold concerts with popular bands in the US and

Europe but inside occupied Tibet people can’t even get away with hanging

up a picture of the Dalai Lama.

In Burma, the country that was in some ways the

target audience for *From Dictatorship to Democracy*, people were

crushed by repression any time they attempted to put the nonviolent

method into practice. Ironically, the unwritten part of Gene Sharp’s

method—reliance on businessmen, international media, and powerful

governments—is the only thing causing an impact, as the Burmese

government slowly begins to liberalize. But because it is the Burmese

state’s desire for investment and not the actions of oppressed Burmese

people that is achieving this liberalization, the operative concern is

what is good for the Burmese elite, what will help them get richer, what

will help them cement their power in the eyes of “the international

community.” Given that the desire for cheap labor in southeast Asia is

explosive, we can imagine just what a “free” Burma will look

like.[44]

The case of Belarus, one of the failed Color

Revolutions, is particularly interesting. The rulers of Belarus have

little interest in cultivating business relations with the West, because

their economy is fully integrated with Russia’s. Elite support, that

secret weapon of the Color Revolutions, could not make a showing here,

and the police did not have their hands tied in dealing with

demonstrators. To get rid of the peaceful protesters, the government did

not even have to use the military. Beatings, arrests, kidnappings, and

death threats sufficed. Laws are so harsh in Belarus that participating

in any unregistered organization or organizing activity is a crime. To

have a simple public gathering, you need to register your organization

with the government and get permission. In response to the situation of

totalitarianism, some anarchists turned to a clandestine practice,

carrying out secret actions and even firebombing the kgb headquarters.

Their attacks garnered a great deal of attention and sympathy.

In the cases of the independence movement in India

and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the government

used a great deal of violence, but they allowed the nonviolent segment

of the movement to choose its own level of confrontation. Often, the

police inadvertently created situations that helped protesters set up a

media-friendly spectacle and a clear moral contest: a line of police,

beating down any marchers who tried to step forward; cops attacking

activists who refused to get up from the “whites only” lunch counter.

These strategies of repression allowed proponents of nonviolence to show

off their bravery in an unmistakable way in front of the cameras, and to

choose their own degree of engagement.

It is no coincidence that police rarely create

such situations today. In countries described as democratic, police do

not generally go after nonviolent protesters in their homes, try to lock

them up in large numbers and for long periods of time, or try to kill

them off. Democratic strategies of repression against nonviolent

movements usually attempt to discipline them, to encourage them to

dialogue and coordinate their protests with the police, to give them

easy opportunities to express their conscience by being arrested for

symbolic civil disobedience in a way that does not disrupt the flow of

the economy or the functioning of the government, and to beat them up or

press criminal charges if they cross the line and cause an actual

disruption. In the last two decades, such light forms of dissuasion have

nearly always been enough to keep nonviolent movements in line, a loyal

opposition to the ruling order rather than a real threat.

In a few countries, however, the government has

taken off its gloves, and in every case, nonviolent activists have been

unable to defend themselves. If a government is willing to open fire on

unarmed protesters who refuse to fight back, those protesters cannot

hold the streets. If they are very brave, they may return the next day,

but if the government still shoots at them, they will run away all over

again, and in short order no one will come back into the streets, and

the movement will disappear. A government will rarely have to shoot more

than a hundred bullets to get rid of a movement that insists on being

nonviolent. Other methods are to arrest the most active organizers, and

torture them, kill them, disappear them, or give them long prison

sentences. Some

totalitarian governments complement this with mass arrests of supporters

and participants. Once the most active organizers are out of the way and

everyone else has seen that they might go to jail if they don’t keep

their mouths shut (with the mass arrest of hundreds or thousands of

supporters) the resistance disappears. This has happened dozens of

times, including in recent decades, from Burma to China to Belarus.

Nonviolent movements have no way to protect themselves, once the

government decides to eliminate them.

The only protection for nonviolence has come from

members of the elite. If no one in power will prevent the decision to open

fire, to open the torture chambers, or to carry out mass arrests,

nonviolence is defenseless. This is why nonviolence systematically tries

to preempt its own repression by currying favor with the people in

power, by appealing to values they share with the dominant system

(peace, social order, lawfulness, democracy), by minimizing critiques of

capitalism, the State, and other foundations of power, and by disguising

a reformist, pro-authority movement as “revolutionary,” communicating to

the elite that they can serve a useful purpose. The systematic tendency

of nonviolence towards reformism, cowardice, bootlicking, and the

betrayal of other currents in a social struggle stems from its

unconscious recognition of its own defenselessness and need to gain

favor with the authorities.

Some ideologues of nonviolence have attempted to

mask the powerlessness of nonviolence in the face of dictatorship by

making bold claims of nonviolent successes against the Nazis or other

brutal opponents. Aside from the historical and analytical flaws in

these claims, which will be dealt with later, advocates of nonviolence

cannot offer examples of a nonviolent movement that survived the guns,

the torture chambers, the prisons, and the death camps. The anecdotes

from the Holocaust all deal with groups that managed to avoid the

violence of the Nazi regime by escaping rather than confronting it.

Some proponents of nonviolence claim that this

evasion is a strength of their peaceful practice; that a government

cannot risk the negative image of annihilating peaceful opponents. But

we

have numerous examples of governments doing just that, even in the

21st century. What’s more, most states around the world,

democratic or otherwise, annihilated totally peaceful groups at some

point in their territorial expansion. That’s what states do.

Other proponents of nonviolence imagine that they

are protected not by the elite and those that give the orders, but by

the possibility that soldiers ordered to open fire on them will desert

and mutiny against the government. Nonviolent methods pretend to change

the conscience of an institution, which is an impossible task. Countless

psychological studies have demonstrated that institutional power

succeeds in making its members feel free of responsibility and immune

from any pangs of conscience.[45] Institutions have been

designed and perfected over the years with precisely this objective in

mind: to foster an inhuman loyalty to the campaigns of the State, no

matter how brutal or absurd. In the last half century, there is no case

of nonviolent resistance causing massive defections from powerful

institutions and halting a government’s efforts to subdue and

dominate.[46] One of the most effective instances of

disobedience and defection was the wave of revolt that incapacitated the

US military in Vietnam and led directly to the end of the war. The

soldiers participating in that revolt were faced with the effective

armed resistance of the Vietnamese and were influenced not by the

overwhelmingly white peace movement in the States but by the

combative black and latino liberation

movements. Furthermore, their disobedience took on decidedly

non-pacifist tones.[47]

We have argued that a nonviolent movement cannot

stand up to a government that decides to use mass incarceration to

repress it. This brings us to the important question of struggle within

the prisons. What better example of a totalitarian system than the

prisons, and what better indication of democracy’s proximity to

totalitarianism, as at the heart of every democracy what we find is a

prison. From one country to the next, those who continue their struggle

behind bars rarely frame that struggle in terms of nonviolence, since

self-defense in prison becomes a matter of survival. In many cases,

prisoners will engage in hunger-strikes or sit-downs, but this is

generally understood on the inside as the result of a situation of

weakness, in which the prison regime has succeeded in winning so much

control over the prisoners that there is hardly anything they can do to

resist besides refusing to eat. But most prison struggles use a

diversity of tactics, combining protests, strikes, and legal appeals

with attacks on guards, riots, and property damage. Radical prisoners

and people supporting them in the state of Indiana have put out an

invaluable book, *Down*, that rescues some of these stories from

oblivion. In 1985:

At Pendleton Indiana State Reformatory, a prisoner named Lincoln Love

was badly beaten by guards, who also used tear gas in the cellblock. In

response, two inmates, John Cole and Christopher Trotter, fought the

guards who beat Love, stabbing two. They also fought guards in the

infirmary, where Love had been taken, then held three staff members

hostage in a cellblock for 17 hours. 6 guards were hospitalized with

stab wounds; four in critical condition. The standoff ended when

Department of Corrections agreed to the 22 demands of the prisoners,

including an FBI investigation into abuse by guards, establishing a

grievance committee, setting minimum wages for inmates, allowing

prisoners to be politically active without intimidation or reprisals and

ending censorship of all letters, magazines, and newspapers. At least

100 inmates participated in what reporters described as a “full-scale

riot.”

Some of the principal instigators in these actions have spent the last

25 years in solitary confinement isolation units.

[…]

2001: Hundreds of inmates from Indiana riot at a private prison in Floyd

County in southeastern Kentucky, tossing sinks out of windows and

burning their bedding. All Hoosier [Indiana] inmates were later moved

out of the facility, although the IDOC [Indiana Department of

Corrections] claimed there was no connection between the riot and the

decision to move.[48]

There is also the case of a major resistance movement at Walpole State

Prison in Massachusetts in 1973. Through years of confrontation,

protest, riots, and strikes, the prisoners at Walpole overcame racial

divisions to build solidarity and fight against their abuse at the hands

of guards and bureaucrats, eventually taking over the entire prison for

several months. Their supporters on the outside, largely pacifists, used

their position of privilege to manipulate the prisoners’ struggle and

portray it as nonviolent. But the prisoners did not have the luxury of

nonviolence. In addition to numerous peaceful actions, they rioted, they

fought with guards, and many of them went around armed.[49]

In 2009, anarchists in Barcelona struggling for

the freedom of long-term prisoner Joaquin Garcés won his release after a

campaign of over a year that used a true diversity of tactics: hunger

strikes, legal appeals, posters, graffiti, radio shows, protests,

sabotage, road blockades, the smashing of banks, and arson. Garcés, an

anarchist bank robber, had participated in the struggle of prisoners in

Spain in the ‘80s, a movement that included mutinies, protests, and

other actions, and for that reason, the authorities were punishing him

by keeping him locked up after the completion of his sentence.

Against the totalitarianism of the prison system,

the need for a diversity of tactics becomes obvious.

Nonviolence is a defenseless methodology for

social change. Nonviolent movements cannot stand up to a government that

has decided to annihilate them. Against a dictatorship, a government

that has decided not to let questions of image or a fictitious social

contract stand in the way of its power, nonviolent movements have always

been powerless. And against democracies? In truth, there is no

fundamental difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. These

forms of government exist on the same continuum. Democratic governments

have all the capacity for violence, repression, mass murder, torture,

and imprisonment as their dictatorial counterparts. In moments of

emergency, they can and do use this capacity. However, democratic

governments tend to tolerate nonviolent movements, to keep them around,

because such movements can be most useful to those in power.

6. Real Democracy Now

In the 15th of may 2011, thousands of people took to the streets in

coordinated protests in cities across Spain. That night or the next, the

protesters held assemblies in the

central plazas of their respective cities and began encampments. The

protests had been convened by a Madrid activist group called

“*Democracia Real Ya*” or “Real Democracy Now,” which had been

influenced by the nonviolent Color Revolutions, the watered-down,

pacified media version of the uprising in Egypt, and—if appearances are

any indication—by the third installment of the populist/ conspiracy

theorist *Zeitgeist* videos. What happened next, though, went far beyond

their designs. The plaza occupations multiplied in size and number,

growing from just a few dozen or a hundred people in each to upwards of

100,000 in the larger cities, spreading

to little towns across Spain, sparking similar movements in Greece, the

Netherlands, and elsewhere, leading to a year of major mobilizations

domestically and across Europe, transforming the Spanish social

movements, and eventually serving as a major influence for the Occupy

movement in the US.

Two founding principles of the 15M or

“*indignados*” movement were its rejection of political parties and its

use of self-organization through open assemblies, showing how widely

anarchist ideas had spread over the years, given that they had even

taken root in the stridently anti-anarchist “Real Democracy Now” group.

But these fundamentally anarchist practices clashed with the democratic

demands of the movement’s founders. They had called for the protests on

the 15th of May to coincide with the date one week before the general

elections, in the hope that the plaza occupations would continue to

election day. As the Spanish Constitution expressly prohibits any

political demonstrations on election day or the day before—the legally

mandated Day of Reflection—the move was presumably designed to provoke a

constitutional crisis that could force the adoption of their demands:

electoral reform aimed at ending the historical dominance of the two

leading parties (the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Popular Party).

Another founding principle of the 15M movement was

nonviolence, and true to democratic form, this principle was never put

up to debate nor were participants allowed to collectively decide what

constituted “violence.”[50] Because of the size, scope, and

duration of this movement, it is to my knowledge the most important

manifestation of nonviolence so far this century. The Color Revolutions

or the anti-war movement of 2003, though some of them might have been

quantitatively larger, were hardly more than flashes in the pan that

lacked the complexity and the breadth of practice of 15M.

While we can speak of the *indignados*—those who

never went beyond the indignation of concerned but loyal citizens—as

nonviolent, it is not at all accurate to describe the 15M

movement

itself as nonviolent, as hard as its would-be leaders tried to keep it

that way.

In reality, the 15M movement arose at a time when

other social struggles with much older roots—and a much greater pool of

experience, to point out the obvious—were already gaining ground. These

other movements tended to be anticapitalist, whereas Real Democracy Now

were superficial democrats, reducing complex problems of oppression and

exploitation to the corruption of bad politicians, which they proposed

could be solved with the reform of the electoral laws (ironic, since at

that moment, Germany, the government that might be most to blame for

Spain’s austerity measures, already had an electoral system similar to

what Real Democracy Now was demanding). The previous autumn, a general

strike had shut down the country for a day and brought the concepts of

solidarity and struggle back into common parlance. And just two weeks

before May 15, thousands of anticapitalists in Barcelona celebrated the

centuries-old tradition of May Day by marching to the wealthy

neighborhood of Sarrià and dedicating an hour to the burning of

dumpsters and the smashing of banks, car dealerships, and luxury

boutiques. The media suppressed news of the march, despite their

profit-driven hunger for dramatic images, precisely because they knew

how popular that act of violence would be among the lower

classes.[51]

Real Democracy Now avoided any mention of this

rich history of struggle against capitalism and authority, neglecting

everything from the experiences of the previous century to the

accomplishments of the prior months, specifically in order to resituate

a potentially revolutionary movement in the reformist terrain of

electoral demands. And when their baby turned out to be a giant, some of

them (in a pattern that has been repeated so many times throughout

history) contemplated forming a political party to ride this giant into

power, but they were stopped cold in their endeavor by a sharp backlash

from the base.

Nonviolence in the 15M movement, as in so many

other movements, meant amnesia, the suppression of a collective memory

of struggle and all the experience and wisdom that comes with that

memory. People who remember hundreds of years of struggle against

authority cannot be tricked into a simple reform that promises to make

things better by changing the election laws. People who remember

hundreds of years of struggle know that what little they have, they won

by fighting. They remember how to make barricades, how to assemble

molotov cocktails, how to use guns, how to survive in clandestinity, how

to protect themselves against infiltrators. Just as the reformists of

Real Democracy Now erased the true history of the uprising in Egypt,

full of street battles and burnt police stations, they tried to erase

the rich history of anticapitalist struggles in Spain. They tried to

tell people who had spent their lives in the streets that the only way

to win was to be peaceful because that’s what the television says.

It is no coincidence that in precisely those

places where social struggles were still alive and well—Barcelona,

Madrid, the Basque country—nonviolence failed to control the movement.

In cities that did not have strong social movements at the outbreak of

15M, the *indignados* bought into the reformist and nonviolent discourse

en masse, and often disappeared after about a month. In Barcelona, it

was disconcerting to suddenly shift from one reality, in which the 100

or 1000 people you might meet in the streets all knew that nonviolence

was a bad joke, to another one in which the streets were suddenly filled

with 500,000 people and 90% of them thought that to accomplish anything

we had to

discourage vandalism and look good in the media. Given that most of

these hundreds of thousands were fresh off the couch and new to the

streets, the situation confirmed our argument that authority trains

people in nonviolence whereas experience trains people in an antagonstic

approach, but it was frustratingly slow going. But little by little,

people overcame nonviolence. The stronger parts of the 15M movement

reconnected with a longer history of struggle, and the weaker parts blew

away like dust in the wind.

Those who already had experience in the struggle

debated, argued, passed out flyers, put up posters, painted the walls,

thought up chants, and carried out actions designed to break the

stranglehold of nonviolence. The police, for their part, tried to put an

end to the movement with a heavy use of the truncheon, helping people to

realize that unlike on the silver screen, in reality the idea that

sitting down and getting beaten is dignified is a load of crap. When

police brutality successfully overcame the nonviolent resistance of

crowds of thousands in Plaça Catalunya, many people started checking

their assumptions. Little by little, people began to realize that the

police were their enemy, they began supporting the vandalism of banks

and political party offices, and they began supporting a diversity of

tactics. The debate is still ongoing at the time of this writing. Those

who favor pacification still enjoy superior resources and can

occasionally mobilize large but passive crowds. And in a few places,

activists that flirt with combative methods but still set a limit on

acceptable tactics have developed practices of civil disobedience and

confrontation interesting enough to maintain an independent activity.

But on the whole, the two years since the beginning of the 15M movement

have demonstrated a loss of support for strictly nonviolent practices

and an exponential growth of support for combative practices.

In October of 2011, when police arrested a number

of anarchists accused of assaulting politicians during the June blockade

of Parliament—organized from within the framework of the 15M

movement—3,000 people came out in a spontaneous solidarity protest

(larger than any other spontaneous protest seen in Barcelona in years)

and marched down a central street that is usually closed to protests,

interrupting the spectacle of commercialism

and spraypainting all the banks. In January 2012, a massive protest

during a student strike broke out of the control of its self-appointed

leaders and deployed an effective diversity of tactics that confounded

the ability of the police to control the streets. The development is

especially significant considering that the student movement had

previously been controlled by proponents of nonviolence and with the

massiveness of 15M, nonviolence was supposedly in a moment of triumph.

Two months later, on March 29, 2012, a general

strike brought out crowds that easily rivaled the masses summoned by

15M. But in many cities, these crowds had decided that nonviolence did

not meet their needs. In Barcelona, to name the most potent of many

examples, as many as 10,000 people participated directly in heavy

rioting, the burning of banks and multinationals, and intense fighting

with police that lasted for hours. The number of rioters represented a

critical growth from earlier occasions. But even more important was the

fact that tens of thousands of people remained on the scene, indirectly

supporting the rioters, whereas in past riots in Barcelona everyone who

was not an ardent supporter of combative tactics would run away at the

sound of breaking glass or the arrival of the police. This time, people

stayed on, refusing to abandon the rioters, preventing police from

surrounding them, cheering, arguing with pacifists and journalists, and

helping to remove the injured.

And in the months after this, people upheld

solidarity, opposing the new repressive measures the government adopted

to crush resistance, and supporting the dozens of people arrested.

At the beginning of the 15M movement, most of the

people who responded to the call of Real Democracy Now were content to

submit themselves to a nonviolent discipline. But nonviolence proved

insufficient to defend the space they had begun to conquer, and the

accompanying democratic rhetoric lacked the words to describe all the

ways power was screwing them over.

This insufficiency cannot be attributed to an

incomplete development of nonviolence. Far from being just a passive

mass, the *indignados* attempted to develop a full repertoire of

peaceful tactics. Protests, sit-ins, blockades, press conferences,

refusal to

pay new taxes, marches to the European Parliament or to Madrid, internet

protests, and campaigns to “hit them where it hurts the most” by

withdrawing from personal bank accounts all on the same day (not the

place where it really hurts them the most). None of it worked.

The nonviolence of the *indignados* quickly became

a parody of itself. Blocking the streets became “violence,” writing on

the walls became “violence,” even turning a bit of lawn in the plaza

into a guerrilla garden became “violence” because it was a violation of

the law. Quickly, they turned “violent” into a synonym for “illegal,”

which was especially hypocritical given that the very premise of the

plaza occupation movement—to maintain the protests throughout the

election weekend—was a violation of nothing less than the Spanish

Constitution (at the last minute, a judge decreed—in the face of the

size and determination of the protests—that according to some loophole,

the occupations were legal and the police therefore did not have to

evict them; which would have marred the elections with a huge scandal

that neither of the political parties wanted, proving once again that

law and justice are nothing but theater, the formalized negotiation of

underlying power relations).

On more than a few occasions in the name of

nonviolence, activists tackled, hit, or tried to arrest people guilty of

spraypainting, wearing a mask, or committing some minor form of

vandalism. Their commitment to nonviolence also compelled them to

justify the actions of the police, declare that the police were friends

and public servants, while simultaneously claiming that masked

protesters were “police provocateurs.” In the name of nonviolence, they

formed committees charged with keeping out antisocial elements, and they

organized citizen patrols that attempted to kick out the illegal

immigrants that took refuge in the occupied plazas or to hand them over

to the police.

drunkards who had taken up residence in the plaza and constantly

harassed or even assaulted women. Pacifist organizers and the

Convivencia Commission tried to prevent the feminist

assembly in the plaza from organizing self-defense classes and taking

care of the problem on their own, instead paternalistically offering to

protect them.[52]

This interpretation of nonviolence is not a

perversion particular to the 15M movement in Spain. In countries across

the world, nonviolence has constituted a slippery slope towards

increasingly pacified tactics. As explained in Chapter 1, placing

strategic importance on the category of violence surrenders power to the

media to tell us which tactics are acceptable and which are not.

Nonviolence, by being anti-conflictual in a society predicated on an

irreconcilable conflict, seeks reconciliation with the same authorities

who dominate us, and this means a tendency to avoid that which is most

controversial in the eyes of power. It was only a matter of time until

pacifists define “violence” as a “violation of the law.” After all, law

and peace are related concepts. In practice, they do not refer to

freedom or well-being, but to order, and in this society order is

founded on subjugation to authority by any means. Finally, because

proponents of nonviolence defer the task of building popular support for

difficult methods of struggle, it is natural that they rely on the media

to win a virtual popularity or to spread their message (which must be

reduced into an image). This reliance on the media requires them to

adopt certain values of the media, and these are the values of the

corporations that own the media.

Nor is it a contradiction that proponents of

nonviolence would physically attack other protesters in the name of

their peaceful method. The first time I was ever assaulted in a protest,

it was not at the hands of the police but by a peace cop, a pacifist

appointed to prevent disorder in a protest. This is a logical extension

of the nonviolent position. A fundamental tenet of nonviolence is that

it is legitimate to impose a singular method and a limited set of

tactics over an entire movement. This is authoritarian thinking.

Nonviolent activists confer upon themselves the right to force other

people to participate in a particular way, or to exclude them. As such,

nonviolence is the usurpation of a social

movement, of public space, of a collective activity. Whether they carry

out this coup by hitting protesters they disagree with, silencing or

ostracizing them with peer pressure, or exposing them to arrest by

police, they are only acting out the authoritarian nature of

nonviolence.

Real Democracy Now believed that it owned the 15M

movement and could therefore impose decisions on it, like the commitment

to nonviolence. But the movement was not created by Real Democracy Now,

even though they authored the call-out. It was created by the many

people who took to the streets and began to self-organize, for a

diversity of reasons and with a diversity of goals. If they can,

nonviolent activists will use the decision of some assembly or coalition

to legitimize their enforcement of one method of struggle on a diverse

movement. But when there is no such façade of legitimacy, their ideology

will still compel them towards the same act of enforcement. In numerous

protests where organizers have agreed to a diversity of tactics, from

the Toronto G8 to the rnc in St. Paul, without fail there have been

nonviolent activists who have broken the agreement and denounced the

“bad protesters” in the media. In the 15M movement, the ideologues of

nonviolence imposed a decision made in an assembly of a few dozen on an

entire movement that came to include hundreds of thousands.

If a speaker in the general assembly criticized

the practice of nonviolence, the moderators would often cut them off,

saying “We have agreed to be nonviolent, and besides if we are violent

we will lose,” before ending the debate and handing the microphone to

the next person waiting in line. When anarchists reserved the sound

system and the central space in the plaza to hold a debate on

nonviolence, the paper on which the reservation was written down

suspiciously disappeared. When they reserved it again, it disappeared

again, and a new paper appeared with another event written down for the

same day and time. Without the sound system, no more than 100 people

could participate in the event, which had to be held on the margins of

the plaza. The group that assembled included anarchists as well as

democrats, and no few supporters of nonviolence, but none of them were

in favor of the kind of

nonviolence imposed on the movement. However, the debate was unofficial.

Shunned to the margins, it had no weight in the general assembly and

could not contradict the decisions of movement leaders. Nonetheless, the

movement would eventually come to disobey those leaders and abandon the

practice of nonviolence. After about a month, most people had left the

plaza occupations to the die-hard activists and would-be politicians.

Those who had not given up on the struggle, and these were still a

numerous group, began to participate in the neighborhood assemblies, in

a labor union, in the mobilizations to resist home foreclosures, in the

occupation of universities, hospitals, and primary care centers, or in

other areas of struggle. All of these were structures or spaces that

predated the 15M movement and included a deeper critique of capitalist

society and a better sense of history.

But the experience of the 15M movement had entered

into that history of struggle, and the lesson was clear: nonviolence

served the interests of the media, the police, and would-be politicians,

but for people who wanted to get to the roots of the problems they faced

and transform society, nonviolence did not work.

7. Policing the Black Bloc, Disappearing the Ghetto

One of the main functions of nonviolence, both in the last two decades

and historically, has been to attack currents of struggle that actually

threaten the State. In recent

years, this has meant that nonviolent activists increasingly assume the

role of peace police who help criminalize and marginalize those who

riot, whether they be anarchists in a Black Bloc or residents of an

urban ghetto.

When they take on the role of peace police, they

are acting in tandem with the government and the media, and in multiple

cases they have in fact been working directly with or for the police or

the corporate media.

In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, people throughout

the US Midwest struggled against the construction of i-69, one of the

new nafta superhighways designed to accommodate an increase in

north-south traffic with the intensification of market integration from

Canada to Mexico. Centered in Indiana, farmers, environmentalists, and

anarchists tried to stop the construction. Their resistance included

blockades, protests, awareness-raising, and sabotage. Some farmers

destroyed construction equipment or shot at surveyors, while a number of

sabotage actions were carried out by radical environmentalist and

anarchist groups. As the resistance grew, it also became fashionable,

and a large number of people from the folk-punk music scene who had been

influenced by environmentalist and anarchist ideas flocked in and began

to take part. However, these musicians and folk punks showed a strong

adherence to nonviolence and shied away from any real social conflict.

On a number of occasions, they spoke out against property damage, in

favor of the right of bankers to be bankers, explaining that sabotage

against banks was a violation of that right, and at one major protest

they organized patrols to prevent vandalism against companies connected

to the highway construction. This was especially hypocritical because

many of them, aspiring to be professional musicians, sang about

resistance, some would say exploiting histories of struggle where people

had used the very tactics that they were trying to criminalize.

Nonviolent activists in the Bay Area joined

religious leaders and politicians in trying to discourage riots in the

aftermath of the police murder of Oscar Grant on January 1, 2009. During

the protest on the day of Grant’s funeral, would-be protest leaders

tried direct the crowd in a non-confrontational direction. White

activists tried to protect property and discourage rioting. Afterwards,

the media, politicians, ngos, and nonviolent activists blamed the

rioting on white anarchists from outside Oakland. A look at the photos

confirms what participants themselves asserted:

that the majority of those rioting were not white, and in fact many were

friends and neighbors of Oscar Grant. But proponents of nonviolence,

together with politicians and the media, disappear all of these people

in order to portray rioting as something inappropriate, opportunistic,

privileged, and even racist. In the end, what they are criminalizing is

solidarity, by reinforcing the idea that when the police murder someone,

it is only the concern of the family members, and the rest of us should

look the other way. But far from being a bad idea, the riots in response

to Oscar Grant’s murder brought results. They generated a strong new

cycle of struggle across the West Coast, gave birth to a practice of

fighting back against police violence, and directly influenced Occupy

Oakland to transform into something more powerful than any other Occupy.

More immediately, they led to the first case in California state history

of an on-duty police officer charged with murder. In the seven days

after the shooting, prosecutors made it clear they preferred to look the

other way. Only after the riots did they decide to press charges.

In the wake of the Oscar Grant riots, stronger

resistance against police killings spread across the West Coast,

sometimes thanks to the family or friends of those killed, in part

thanks to anarchist activity, and in part thanks to lone individuals

such as Christopher Monfort or Maurice Clemmons shooting back and

killing cops in retaliation for various acts of police brutality or

murder. On the whole, the reaction of leftists, ngos, and even many

anarchists—people who supposedly condemn police violence or the

institution of the police as a whole—was silence or even condemnation.

People were not supposed to resist *like that*, nor should we sympathize

with “cop-killers” nor explore their common-sense reasons for shooting

back. Monfort, for his part, explained his actions eloquently, referring

to several high-profile cases of police brutality that had occurred in

prior months, in a speech the media passed off as “rambling,” their

typical strategy of portraying rebels who go beyond protest as insane.

Activists nominally opposed to police brutality did nothing to counter

this misinformation.

Obviously, many people sympathized with Monfort,

Clemmons, and others who dared shoot back at cops, interrupting the

weekly cases of killings by police, but their applause had to occur in

silence. Anarchists were probably the first in the Pacific Northwest to

openly speak out in support of the men of color who had shot back at the

cops. And starting in 2010, they began taking to the streets and

carrying out attacks against the police in direct response to police

murders. In part, they were influenced by anarchist participation in the

Oscar Grant riots at the beginning of 2009, and by the dignified

response of anarchists in Greece to the police murder of a young comrade

with a month of heavy rioting. But already back in 2001, anarchists had

participated in riots in Cincinnati in response to the police murder of

Timothy Thomas, at a time when many were debating why anarchists were

often absent from urban rebellions or unresponsive to police murders. On

March 23, 2010, 50 to 100 anarchists in Portland, Oregon, responded with

a spontaneous march when police murdered a homeless man, Jack Collins.

An article from anarchistnews.org details how the protest developed, the

psychological atmosphere it created, and how a few supporters of

nonviolence attempted to control the actions of others:

When word spread that the Portland police had just shot a man to death

at the Hoyt Arboretum, we knew we had to make a choice: to allow

ourselves to be human, or to participate in our own murders, to hide

away in sleep and the unfolding of a routine that ends, for all of us,

in death. It’s a choice that has been made for us so many times before:

by the media, by community leaders, professional activists, bosses,

teachers, parents, friends who do not push us to confront this fear with

them. We are killing ourselves with so much swallowed rage.

Tonight, we would not go to sleep with this sour

feeling in our stomachs. Tonight, we gave a name to what we feel: rage.

This is how it started.

Within hours of word getting out, local anarchists

met in a park, and decided we had to march on the police station. Not

the central precinct: that neighborhood would be dead at this hour. We

wanted to shout at the police, but also to find our neighbors, to talk

to the other folks in our community, to let them know what happened and

call them down into the

streets with us. To not let them find out about this murder in the

sanitized commentary of the glowing screen but to meet them and cry out

to them, the rage and sadness plain in our faces: we cannot live with

what has happened. We cannot allow this to go on.

The march left the park and headed through a

residential neighborhood, interrupting the dead Monday night silence of

consumer-workers recovering from another day ripped from their grasp.

Chanting at the top of our lungs, we encountered our own anger, our own

sense of power. “And now one slogan to unite us all: cops, pigs,

murderers.”

Many expected this march to be only symbolic. Few

were prepared for anything more. But we encountered a collective force

that amplifies the individual rather than smothering each one of us in

the mass. The two who took the initiative to drag a dumpster into the

street changed the history of this city. This small sign of sabotage

spread. We all made it our own.

When the first little garbage containers were

brought into the road, a couple people put them back on the sidewalk,

trying to clean up the march, to make it respectable. They were

confronted, shouted at. “This doesn’t send a message,” they said. “You

can do that if you want, but go somewhere else,” they said. But we have

nowhere to go, except for the spaces we violently reclaim. And our

message is unmistakable: we are angry, and we are getting out of hand.

People continued to be uncontrollable, and soon those who had appointed

themselves the censors of our struggle saw that it was they who were in

the wrong place. No one attempted to control their participation. They

were not allowed to control ours.

Once we got on Burnside Avenue, dumpsters were

being turned over every hundred feet, blocking both directions. Folks

had scavenged rocks and bottles and sticks and drums. One person had had

the foresight to bring a can of spraypaint, also changing the history of

our moment. We were no longer a protest. We were vengeance.

When the crowd passed the first bank, a few

individuals erupted into action, while others watched their backs. The

atm got smashed. A window got smashed. Rocks and bottles

were thrown. Sirens began ringing out behind us. A Starbucks appeared

one block ahead. A race: could we get there before the pigs arrived? We

won. More windows broke.

When the police tried to get us on to the

sidewalk, they were shocked by the intensity of rage they faced. “Fuck

the police!” “Murderers!” Their lights and sirens had no effect. Someone

shoved a dumpster into the lead cop car. They were temporarily

speechless.

Only when the cops outnumbered the people did they

try again, with some pepper spray and brute force finally succeeding to

push us onto the sidewalk. But we were smart. We knew we couldn’t win a

fight just then, and every chance we got we took the street again. We

didn’t surrender: they had to work for it. And never did we surrender

our power over the mood of the night. Louder than their sirens were our

ceaseless screams, our chants, focusing our range and wiping the

arrogant smiles off the pigs’ faces. They were visibly upset by the

level of hatred they encountered.

We got to the police station and yelled at the

line of police waiting there for us, yelled at the media parasites

standing by with their cameras, calling out their complicity in police

violence and racism. Most of us didn’t worry about sending the proper

message or appearing respectable. We expressed our rage and the power of

our analysis, our ability and willingness to take initiative and change

this world.

The first TV news clips, ironically, were the best

we could have hoped for, but we do not put our hope in the media. We

will communicate our critique of the police to the rest of the city with

our protests, our fliers, our bodies, our communiqués. With graffiti and

smashed windows.

It should also be noted that the police have not

yet released the race of the person killed. We don’t know yet which

community is “most affected” by this murder. We respond because police

violence affects all of us, because we want to show solidarity every

time the State executes someone. We know that racism is a critical

feature of control in this society, and we also believe we must find

ways to act responsibly as allies to communities that are not our own.

But solidarity must be critical, and it can only be practiced by those

who are struggling for their own freedom. It is clear from tonight’s

actions that we fight against police violence because we feel

rage and sadness whenever they kill someone.

We fight in solidarity with everyone else who

fights back. And by fighting, we are remembering what it is like to be

human.

In these moments when we surprise ourselves, we

catch little glimpses of the world we fight for. Running down the

streets, stooping to pick up a rock, we realize that in our hand we have

nothing less than a building block of the future commune.

Our commune is the rage that spreads across the

city, setting little fires of vengeance in the night. Our commune is the

determination that comes back to the public eye the next day, meeting in

the open, not letting the rest of society forget this murder, not

letting our neighbors numb themselves with routine. Our commune rattles

the bars of our cages, and this noise is our warcry: “out into the

streets.”[53]

Anarchists continued with multiple sabotage

actions, attacks against police stations, protests, open assemblies, and

occupations. Authorities took the unusual step of firing the cop who two

months earlier had killed an unarmed black man, Aaron Campbell, shooting

him in the back with an assault rifle. Not content with any reforms,

anarchists across the West Coast organized the “West Coast Days of

Action Against State Violence” on April 8 and 9, which connected ongoing

efforts of solidarity with those arrested in the Bay Area during the

Oscar Grant riots, and with responses to recent police killings in the

Pacific Northwest. In Seattle, the “Days of Action” saw an anti-police

protest with a Black Bloc that took the streets and engaged in scuffles

with the police. However, in the fallout of the protest many fractures

appeared among those who had participated. One part, focused largely on

music and cultural activities, denounced the distribution of a pamphlet,

“Some People Shoot Back,” that offered a critical but sympathetic

perspective on the case of Christopher Monfort. These activists,

disturbed that anyone would sympathize with a cop-killer, subsequently

distanced themselves from political activity outside of their immediate

diy scene. Others, including NGO employees, criticized the

Black Bloc for endangering youth of

color who were participating.

Many of those who preferred nonviolent methods

subsequently avoided street protests against police violence. Evidently, they

preferred not to be associated with a movement against police that used

combative methods, instead of finding ways to comfortably participate

using their own methods. For a few months, the brief upsurge of struggle

in Seattle disappeared. But then in the space of just one week between

August and September of 2010, police murdered five people in the Puget

Sound (between Seattle and the smaller cities of Tacoma, Olympia, and

Federal Way).

When the protests, Black Blocs, and attacks

resumed, many more people began to appear in the streets, some of them

marginalized youth or friends of those who had been murdered by police.

The “alienation” caused by using forceful tactics drove away a large

number of college-educated activists, among them NGO-employees and

members of the “creative class,” but attracted at least as many people

from other social strata, people who were more comfortable with putting

the idea of revolution, of the negation of state authority, into

practice.

In the meantime, anarchists tried to make

connections with other people protesting the police killings. In

response to the most visible of the murders, by Seattle cop Ian Birk

against homeless Native man John T. Williams, some activists formed the

John T. Williams Organizing Committee.

coalition of various groups focused on winning small reforms in police

department operations: cultural sensitivity trainings, policy changes,

appointed liaisons with the Native community. They also asked that

“consequences for Officer Birk may include loss of his job and badge but

must at least take him off the streets until he has demonstrated he

understands the newly instituted protocols developed in this

process.”[Footnotes from original text have been removed.] Their

strategy was to work with city officials, as demonstrated by the

committee’s decision to deliver their demands to a city council member

along with a gift —an offering of peace. The Committee’s analysis of

police violence indicated that they accepted the brutality of the larger

system. They shied from

the word murder, instead referring to Williams’ death as “a tragedy that

could have and should have been avoided,” if police could “serve to

increase public safety and peace in our community by employing a variety

of de-escalation tactics with the greatest potential to avert violence

against the public and the police.”

Despite apparent political differences, anarchists

did attend Organizing Committee protests, bringing their own banners and

leaflets and seeking to make connections with other angry groups and

individuals. The primary significance of these protests was the

involvement of John Williams’ family and other members of the Native

community. His brother, Rick Williams, spoke at most Organizing

Committee events; the Committee had moved to make sure the Williams’

family was on their side almost as fast as the politicians of the

spd[Seattle Police Department] had. Most of the other speakers at these

rallies were mainstays from Seattle’s liberal-left NGO scene. These

activists —some salaried —lectured the crowd on responsibility,

civility, and non-violence. In a context where no violent tactics had

yet been used except by police [this was before the new cycle of

resistance had started up, and half a year after the mildly combative

protest in solidarity with Portland and Oakland], this betrayed the

activists’ fear of losing control of the situation. Their aim was to

channel others’ anger into their strategy to achieve meager reforms —a

strategy doomed to fail. As shown in Oakland and in Greece, the state

only turns the legal system against murdering police to the extent that

it fears an actual upheaval. But the managers of social revolt [e.g. the

ngos, reformist activist groups] fear this as much as city officials

do.[54]

Another organization that tried to co-opt popular

anger at the police killings was the October 22nd Coalition, a front

group for the Maoist personality cult, the Revolutionary Communist

Party. The rcp called and tried to lead several protests calling for

police reform. One member suggested that police should use their tasers

more (never mind that two of the deaths in the week

of police killings were in fact caused by tasering) or shoot people in

the knees first (never mind that Jack Collins, killed in Portland in

March, died after a police bullet severed an artery in his pelvis, not

his abdomen or his head). For the rcp, taking to the streets was not

about struggling against the police, but about creating a space where

they could pass out the texts of their leader and try to win recruits.

And this required that the protests be not only nonviolent, but

completely passive.

The attempted management of the protest continued

to tire the crowd throughout the evening. The strategy for the march,

the event managers announced, was to proceed through busy areas in an

attempt to draw more numbers. But no passersby paid attention to the

small procession. After the crowd subverted the chants of those holding

bullhorns —changing the answer following *What do we want?* from

*Justice!* to *Dead cops!* —the sidewalk march throughout downtown was

halted for a reminder: *This is a non-violent protest aimed at building

a mass movement!* The anarchists very nearly left at this point —the

course seemed set for as disheartening an outcome as the previous rally.

But something unexpected happened. As the march

wandered through the crosswalk of a busy intersection, a woman —unknown

to the anarchists, unaffiliated with the rcp, and holding only an

umbrella —refused to leave the crosswalk. She blocked a city bus, which

in turn blocked several lanes of traffic, which quickly backed up for

blocks. While she stood there defiantly, she began to mock the other

demonstrators for their passivity and cowardice. The few anarchists

quickly joined her in the intersection. Next, a handful of street youth,

known to congregate on that corner, walked into the middle of the street

and sat down. As one stepped off the sidewalk, another cautiously

commented, eying the nearby cops, “Hey, I don’t want to be around here

if something is gonna go down.”

His friend replied, “I don’t want to be around

here *unless* something is gonna down!” Talking to the anarchists, some

of the youth explained that John Williams had been a friend of theirs,

and that tonight they were ready to fight and go to jail in his honor.

Dismayed at their failure to corral the

demonstrators and

their anger, rcp members used their bullhorns to announce that this

blockade was not the organizers’ intention and that anyone in the street

could be arrested. But it was no use. Now passersby were interested in

what was happening. Anarchists insisted that the bullhorns be passed

around to allow anyone to speak out against the police. One woman came

running from down the block and upon reaching the bullhorn announced, “I

just want to say —fuck the police!”

Anarchists and others intent on using a diversity

of tactics outmaneuvered the professional NGO activists and obscure

vanguardists who insisted on pacifying popular responses to police

murders. Their forceful attacks put the police on the defensive, smeared

their image, and developed tactics of direct response to police violence

that made it impossible for police to do what they had done in all the

preceding years—kill with impunity. And those who took to the streets

accomplished this without trying to play to the media, without limiting

themselves to calls for police reform based on the absurd idea that

police violence is the result of professional mistakes or bad apples. In

fact, they put up posters, published online articles, printed

newspapers, painted walls, and distributed flyers in a large quantity,

spreading the idea that police violence is an integral part of a racist

system based on elite ownership of our collective means of survival.

What did nonviolent activists have to show? The

increase in sensitivity trainings police might have to take can hardly

be considered a step in the right direction. Such measures only allow

the police to clean up their image, to win greater trust from oppressed

communities, and to carry out their job as thugs for the ruling class

with greater efficiency. Cops don’t kill homeless people, trans people,

black, latino, Asian, and Native men because individual officers are

prejudiced, although the patriarchal, racist subculture in most police

departments can certainly lead to especially flagrant acts of brutality.

The police are the institution that protect those who have stolen

everything from all of us—the commons, our ability to decide over our

own lives, clean air and water, a future, our history, our dignity—and

they are the ones who stand between those who have been rewarded some

small privileges and comforts in exchange for obedience, and those who

have nothing. Teaching

the police to be more sensitive to the most exploited and oppressed is

only a strategy designed to prevent police heavy-handedness from

unintentionally sparking rebellions as they trample people in the

performance of their duties.

As Kristian Williams documented in his monumental

study on the evolution of the police, “soft” or community policing

developed hand in hand with the first swat teams and othermanifestations

of the militarization of police. The one would be used to reduce

conflict between the police and heavily policed communities, and the

other would be used to destroy those who insisted on seeing the police

as their enemy.[55] Activists who try to reform the police

help to isolate those who resist the police.[56]

During the general strike organized by Occupy

Oakland on November 2, 2011, there were multiple cases of nonviolent

activists attacking fellow protesters who damaged property. When the

Anti-Capitalist March stopped at the Oakland branch of Whole Foods, the

major corporate supermarket that engages in greenwashing and

gentrification, and in this case had allegedly threatened workers with

termination if they participated in the strike, several people wearing

masks to protect their identity began spraypainting “STRIKE” on the side

of the building, breaking windows, and throwing chairs. The action

successfully effected the temporary closing of Whole Foods, which had

remained open in spite of the strike. But nonviolent activists in the

crowd were displeased. One supporter of peaceful means, enraged by the

damage to corporate property, tackled a protester who was trying to

break a window. Talking to the media later, a privilege he could afford

with no risk despite having just committed assault—a crime for

which anyone but a pacifist or a cop would be facing several years in

prison—he justified his actions:

people cause violence then they are going to disrupt the narrative and

they are going to take focus away and they are going to give police the

justification to crack down... Violence does not change. Non-violence is

the most powerful weapon that we have as citizens...I don’t know who

these people are, but they have masks, they have black flags, and

they’re trying to smash up. And I’m going to stop that if I can [by

attacking people] because I want this march to remain

peaceful.[57]

Another protester defended the window smashing,

claiming she had not seen it take place but did not understand what the fuss

was about:

people outside that are being hurt by the police, that have been hurt by

the city, by the police, by the banks. And I see workers inside that are

being screwed by their employers and also screwed over by the banks. so

seeing a window smashed [as violent], a window that whatever insurance

company is going to replace tomorrow, seems ridiculous to me.

Who do you think was more effective at spreading

their message? The pacifist assaulter did not mention any of the issues

at stake, he only flung mud at other protesters. The one in favor of a

diversity of tactics, on the contrary, focused on the harm caused by

capitalism and the police. Over and over again, nonviolence proponents

put all their emphasis on an authoritarian insistence that everyone

adopt their form of protest, often devoid of any content. Even in the

heart of nonviolent movements, one is often hard-pressed to find any

real articulation of a critique against exploitation, domination, or the

power structures that create these problems. Those who support a

diversity of tactics, on the other hand, tend to remain on point, with

no alienation between their ideas and methods, attacking capitalism in

their discourse as well as in moments of protest and action. The macho,

authoritarian

nonviolent tackler spent both his physical energy in the protest and his

ten seconds in the media spotlight attacking other protesters.

Nonviolent activists in the 15M movement in Spain lined up in front of

banks to protect their windows from vandalism, and in front of cops to

shield them from the insults of the crowd. It should be no surprise that

when the police started shooting rubber bullets at the crowd, these same

activists ran away instead of putting their bodies on the line. They

protect the State, and not the movement. And while a minority of them

were brave enough to stand in the way of bank representatives trying to

deliver foreclosure notices, none of them stood up to police when it

came time to actually enforce the evictions. At most, a handful sat

down, “blocking” an eviction until the cops pulled them on the arm and

led them away. In protests throughout the country, these peace police

tried to pull off the masks of people protecting their identity, or they

took pictures of rioters which they shared with police, exposing people

to the violence of prison and in numerous cases endangering immigrants.

In the strike of October 31, 2012, the cgt labor federation organized a

security cordon in collaboration with the authorities, a member of which

at one point punched and expelled someone who threw eggs at a bank. As

the group “Nihilist Anarchists” pointed out in a communiqué claiming

responsibility for sabotage actions carried out against over a hundred

banks, if it had been the police who had punched the demonstrator,

everyone would have yelled about what a shame it was when such things

happen under a democratic government, but when the protest leaders take

on the functions of the police, everybody watches in silence.

The general strikes of October 31 and November 14,

2012, in which the supposedly alternative or anticapitalist labor unions

conceded to government and media pressure and imposed nonviolent

discipline on their crowds, were largely seen as failures, and were

followed by an evident decline in activity in the streets. On the

contrary, the general strikes of September 29, 2010, January 27, 2011,

and March 29, 2012, in which anarchists, anticapitalists, and

marginalized youths had free rein and used that leeway to riot or carry

out sabotage, were applauded as major events in the struggle,

and were followed by clear upsurges in movement activity. What’s more,

because many different sectors—from neighborhood assemblies to the

alternative unions—showed solidarity with the arrested rioters, the

repression did not have its intended effect of chilling the social

movements. This effect was only achieved when the alternative unions

began enforcing nonviolence. The overlap between this activity and what

the police were trying to accomplish through repression, or the media

through fear-mongering, is remarkable.

In the UK student movement, the president of the

student union went before the media to denounce and insult students who

had chosen to protest tuition hikes by trashing the offices of the

ruling party. President Aaron Porter stated that he was “disgusted that

the actions of a minority of idiots are trying to undermine 50,000 who

came to make a peaceful protest.”[58] The General Secretary

of the University and College Union also tried to present the rioters as

a “minority,” a category that in her mind connotes a total lack of

legitimacy or freedom of action. Most upsetting for these bureaucratic

leaders was that those who were supposed to be followers had taken

action on their own initiative without receiving any orders. For the

student president, a position that generally serves as a stepping stone

on the career track to professional politician, the failure to control

the herd constituted an embarrassing resumé-killer. Fortunately, the

black students’ officer and the lgbt students’ officers of the National

Union of Students, along with several lower-level student bureaucrats, a

trade unionist, and a playwright, released a criticism:

ruling party offices were occupied and trashed by a crowd that fought

with police] as small, “extremist” or unrepresentative of our movement.

We celebrate the fact that thousands of students were willing to send a

message to the Tories that we will fight to win. Occupations are a long

established tradition in the student movement that should be defended.

It is this kind of action in France and Greece that has been an

inspiration to many workers and students in

Britain faced with such a huge assault on jobs, benefits, housing and

the public sector. We stand with the protesters, and anyone who is

victimised as a result of the protest.[59]

Student President Porter was booed off the stage

when he tried to scold his herd. Needing a figurehead down in the

streets, those who own the media turned student Zoe Williams into a

temporary celebrity. Williams and some classmates helped protect a

police van that was being vandalized by fellow protesters, yelling at

them “It’s not going to help our cause!” As she later told the media, “I

was just trying to get across to [the vandals] that the cause that we’re

here for today isn’t about ‘I hate the police, I want to burn the police

and I want to destroy everything they represent.’”[60] For

Williams, who is from a posh neighborhood in London and whose parents

were able to send her to a private high school where tuition ran to

nearly $20,000 a year, taking to the streets may have just been a matter

of going with the flow or freeing up some more cash to spend on her

wardrobe, but for many other students, struggling against the policies

handed down by the rich has everything to do with fighting against the

police who enforce those policies and protect those rich people.

In the protest against the G20 political summit in

Toronto in 2010, a coalition of protest groups had agreed to a framework

based on a diversity of tactics, in the hopes of allowing people and

groups with very different methods to participate. They released a

statement explaining the philosophy behind their diversity of tactics

framework:

We believe that we must embrace honest discussion and debate. We trust

that our movement is strong enough, resilient and mature enough to

embrace open differences of opinion. We believe that if we are to truly

build a socially just world, it will take many different tactics, much

creativity and many different approaches. It is this that allows us to

work together even when we disagree.

We work together in solidarity and respect. This

does not mean we endorse everything each of us does, or that we agree

on all things. But we will listen to each other, we will discuss our

differences openly and honestly, where necessary, we will agree to

disagree and we will support each other when attacked.

We understand that people have different needs

regarding safety. That while one person may need to be on the streets in

a situation where someone else’s actions do not put them in danger,

another person may need to know that if they are arrested, they will be

supported, regardless of what the state may allege they have done. We

know that the way to work through these needs is to hear each other with

respect, to strive to understand each other and support each other even

if we do not agree.[61]

This spirit of respecting different forms of

participation was put into practice. The Black Bloc that engaged in

major rioting—burning police cars and trashing Canada’s major financial

street—broke away from the main march so as to avoid taking refuge in a

peaceful crowd, “ruining” a nonviolent action, or doing other things

that might have harmed or upset other protesters. In fact, many city

residents not connected with the protests came out to participate in the

riots, showing just what kind of atmosphere the Black Bloc succeeded in

creating. Regardless, proponents of nonviolence bashed them all the

same, showing that in at least some cases, their criticisms of the Black

Bloc are not real concerns but just opportunistic ways to attack a group

that they evidently prioritize as their political enemy. When police

brutalized protesters many blocks away and hours later, nonviolent

activists used the internet or the media to blame the masked anarchists,

breaking the diversity of tactics agreement. Several of them went so far

as to claim that the masked protesters were police provocateurs. It was

perfectly reasonable of them to resort to such underhanded attacks,

because it would be difficult for them to argue that carrying out a

major sabotage in the heart of Canada’s preeminent financial district

and temporarily overcoming police during the most expensive security

operation in the history of the world does not constitute a strong

message of rejection of the authoritarian and

exploitive policies of the world’s leading governments. Perhaps the more

problematic message the actions of the anarchists sent was a clear

indication that we would not behave, we would not negotiate, and that

the world we are fighting for has no place in it for them. That is

exactly the kind of message that would-be politicians and ngos cannot

find any way to profit off of.

In the aftermath of the riots in Toronto, at least

one conspiracy theorist blogger who claimed that the Black Bloc

anarchists were police provocateurs contradictorily helped police

identify and arrest one such anarchist.

When indigenous people, anarchists, and immigrants

fought with police or carried out property destruction in the protests

against the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, protesting the capitalist

spectacle, the gentrification that always accompanies such mega-events,

or the fact that the Games were being held on stolen indigenous land,

some nonviolent activists denounced the riots, portraying them as the

work of privileged white male anarchists endangering more “vulnerable”

people. Subsequently, activists in Vancouver organized a debate on the

controversy, and Harsha Walia, of the “No One is Illegal” immigrant

march, tore apart her adversary’s arguments point by point.

February 13th was explicitly called as a diversity of tactics. As

someone who marched on the 13th unmasked, I did not feel endangered. I

can’t speak for everyone else, but I can speak for myself. I was happy

to be there and I was happy to see the black block doing their thing.

For those who did not know what to expect there were various spokes

councils, some of which were publicly announced, for anyone who was

interested in getting information beforehand. Within the demonstration,

there was an escalation of zones from green to red and at no point did I

see the black block trying to hide under the cover of other zones. And I

think that’s important to reiterate because the people who were actually

arrested on February 13th from the green and orange zone have not

denounced the black block, so why are other people doing it? […]

There is this idea that because we have now been

denounced in the media, we have lost our credibility. As far as I am

concerned, the media was never on our side! The

media is not the gauge of the success of our protests, and the corporate

media and the police should not be let off the hook by us replicating

their smears and their denunciations. Instead, we should be very clear

about not denouncing our comrades as violent. The fact that the media is

not picking up on why there is property destruction against the Hudson’s

Bay Company is not the fault of the black block. The media has not

picked up for seven years on why people are protesting the

Olympics.[62]

The 2008 protests in St. Paul against the

Republican National Convention were also organized with a

diversity-of-tactics framework, the “St. Paul Principles.” To undermine

what was on the whole a powerful protest that included a diverse group

of people and partially interrupted the spectacle of the Republican

convention, one activist went far beyond working *with* the police.

Brandon Darby, an activist who had previously participated in the Common

Ground Collective in New Orleans, was working *for* the police since

2006 or earlier. Riad Hamad, a Palestinian activist he informed on, had

his house raided by the FBI and turned up dead a short while later,

bound and gagged in a lake (the police ruled it a suicide and the FBI

refuses to release their files). Multiple times, he had suggested

carrying out arson attacks to anarchists in New Orleans and in Texas, in

an effort to entrap them. In 2008, in direct collaboration with the FBI,

he successfully convinced two younger anarchists to make molotov

cocktails for the Republican National Convention protests. They were

arrested before they could use them. It was only in the course of their

trial that Darby was outed as an informant.

The example of Darby may seem like a strawman to

principled proponents of nonviolence, because Darby is not a pacifist.

However, to those of us who have to share the streets with pacifists,

the distinction is not always so clear. We have been hit by pacifists,

snitched on, filmed, turned over to the police, or ejected from

protests, all in the name of nonviolence. The fact of the matter is,

violence is an ambiguous category, so nonviolence inevitably becomes

an exercise in hypocrisy. Even Gandhi organized a volunteer

effort

to support two British colonial wars in South Africa. The same criteria

that can label Gandhi a supporter of nonviolence can also be applied to

Brandon Darby. Darby might have been a fan of Che Guevara, but nowadays

most people who side with nonviolence also fetishize Guevara or the

Zapatistas or violent rebellions that happen far away. This is the “Not

In My Backyard” tendency, and it has long been a part of nonviolent

practice on the Left. Violence over there is always seen as exciting,

violence here is seen as dangerous and inappropriate. Furthermore, a

large part of Darby’s violent posturing was intended to entrap activists

who might be inclined to use combative, illegal means.

The fact of the matter is, Darby was motivated by

a political condemnation and a philosophical rejection of violence in

social movements. In a December 29, 2008 open letter he published on

• Indymedia*, Darby denounced those who take action motivated by “anger

and hatred” and explained how “The majority of the activists who went to

St. Paul did so with pure intentions and simply wanted to express their

disagreements with the Republican Party,” making a distinction between

good protesters who only want to voice their opinions, and bad

protesters who wanted to take action and, in his mind, deserved to go to

prison. In subsequent writings about the Occupy movement from his new

column on the rightwing Breitbart.com, Darby’s rejection of the use of

violence by political movements is crystal clear.

Trying to score an easy point, many proponents of

nonviolence will argue that since an FBI informant like Darby convinced

people to make molotov cocktails, the government wants us to use violent

means, and that by “using violence” we are doing the work of the

government. This thinking is superficial. Darby and other FBI informants

convince people to break a law so that they can be caught in the act.

The two Texas anarchists arrested in St. Paul thanks to Darby’s

snitching were arrested just for conspiring to make molotov cocktails,

similar to how Eric McDavid is serving 20 years in prison just for

conspiring to bomb a dam, in a plot concocted, funded, and advanced

entirely by an FBI informant. In his case, no bomb was even constructed.

The FBI does not try to spread combative tactics

within

a social movement, they try to catch people red-handed and lock them up

for life. Because they aren’t the sharpest crayons in the box, nearly

the only way they have been able to do this is by threatening people

until they agree to snitch, or by using psychologically manipulative

informants to convince impressionable targets to take on an action they

are not ready for. The FBI focus on those willing to go beyond peaceful

protest clearly shows what kind of activities worry them more.

Nonetheless, Darby’s action took advantage of a

major weakness in the practice of anarchists who reject nonviolence. By

posing as a supporter of extreme tactics, he was able to get two people

imprisoned because the broader scene left themselves vulnerable to

someone who used intimidation, bullying, and macho posturing, someone

they did not know well enough to trust in a situation of such great

risk. For this reason, the damage that Darby caused reflects more poorly

on the supporters of a diversity of tactics in the two cities where he

was active than on the supporters of nonviolence.

The actions of another person working for the

system show how much damage can be caused by someone taking advantage of

the weaknesses of nonviolence. Chris Hedges, a *New York Times*

journalist, posed as a movement participant when writing his opinion

piece, “The Cancer of Occupy,” a poorly researched hatchet job on the

Black Bloc. Supporters of nonviolence were willing to let this elite

journalist pass himself off as one of us and redefine movement debates.

Once Brandon Darby was revealed as a snitch, he was ostracized by the

movement. But after Chris Hedges carried out a dishonest attack on

anarchists in the Occupy movement, many supporters of nonviolence not

only continued to take him seriously, they helped him win a larger

audience. Evidently, nonviolent activists consider fellow protesters who

reject nonviolence a greater enemy than opportunistic, highly paid

journalists from the most powerful newspaper on the planet. Brandon

Darby succeeded in feeding information about a few dozen activists and

anarchists to the FBI. Chris Hedges succeeded in spreading

misinformation about one part of the movement (another common repressive

tactic) to tens of thousands. What’s more, his discourse

dovetailed perfectly with FBI efforts to criminalize anarchists and the

Occupy movement, supplying the repressive machine with more fodder.

Hedges’ yellow journalism and FBI repression had the same aims, to

pacify the movement, and the fears they produced fed into one another. I

talk more about Chris Hedges in Chapter 8.

All of these cases involve very different types of

people, from committed, principled pacifists, to opportunistic NGO

activists or journalists, as well as would-be protest leaders,

authoritarian socialists, and random wingnuts. The attempt to control or

marginalize those who riot is an activity that unifies a broad spectrum

of participants in social movements, together with the journalists,

police, and politicians who want to pacify or destroy those movements.

At the heart of this activity is a desire to control and a fear of the

rebellion of the most oppressed. This authoritarianism is shared by

proponents of nonviolence, who predicate their participation in social

movements on a desire to impose one methodology on everyone else, and

agents of the State, who want to make sure that all efforts to change

society pass through the legal channels sanctioned by the same people

who own society and are responsible for its worst problems. Because

activists in the very social movements that supposedly oppose police

violence, precarity, poverty, exclusion, and a host of other problems

actively spread the value of nonviolence, politicians, police

spokespersons, and reporters can subsequently utilize the principle of

nonviolence to rein in social movements that are starting to misbehave.

And they can pressure proponents of nonviolence to adopt the functions

of police by attacking or marginalizing Black Blocs and other rioters

and troublemakers.

Some of these peace police operate by physically

attacking lawbreakers in the name of nonviolence. Others by unmasking or

filming those who try to protect their identities, and making these

videos available to police (whether by handing them over directly, or

putting them on Facebook, which has become the primary investigative

tool of police agencies across the planet). Still others form cordons to

control protests and keep people on the sidewalk or prevent them from

vandalizing banks and corporate

stores. Here we see another common trait that many principled supporters

of nonviolence share with police: more concern for the well-being of

corporate property than for the well-being of fellow protesters.

These heterogeneous supporters of nonviolence use

a wide range of discourses to justify their actions or to further

exclude those who fight back. It is interesting to note how some will

comment to the media about the merits of nonviolence, but very few

willingly debate in favor of nonviolence with its critics. In the Occupy

movement in the US, the student movement in the UK, or the plaza

occupation movement in Spain, most of the people to engage in these

debates were those who had no prior experience in social struggles.

Those with experience either justified themselves in other ways, used

arguments that made debate impossible, or avoided debate while using the

media to spread the typical clichés of nonviolence.

This was a major change from the years after the

Seattle protests of 1999, when the “nonviolence/diversity of tactics”

debate was held ad nauseum.[63] It became clear in more

recent movements that proponents of nonviolence knew they had already

lost the debate.

Many anti-authoritarians who denounce the Black

Bloc claim not to be pacifists, and in fact they often fetishize armed

revolutions or insurrections in other countries, but as soon as any kind

of disturbance or property destruction happens anywhere near them, they

freak out and invent all sorts of reasons why property damage,

self-defense, or fighting back are wrong, short of condemning these

things categorically.

Critique of this Not In My Backyard tendency has

circulated widely for decades. In a widely distributed pamphlet written

in 2002, one anarchist wrote about critics of “violence” who were:

supporting the violent struggles of non-white people abroad, fear its

implications at home (Chiapas but not here;

East Timor but not here; Colombia but not here, etc). In fact, many

North American Leftists strongly condemn the State’s increasing war

against the farc and other violent authoritarian communist groups while

effectively blaming the anarchists here in America for the police

repression at mass actions. Until the World Economic Forum protest in

New York and the September 11th attacks weeded most of them out, the

Left has claimed exclusive ownership over the major protests, while the

presence of unruly anarchists has elicited much hand-wringing concern

from them, especially when anarchists steal the show with their violent

antics (which, by the way, not once causes the least bit of

introspection among Leftists about why their politics and tactics are

just so damn uninteresting in the first place).[64]

Notwithstanding the widespread critique of their

behavior, NIMBYs continue to express their absolute rejection of any

tactics of struggle that might put them in danger. Usually, this happens

as an emotional condemnation that is not juxtaposed with their

hypocritical support for revolutionary movements in other countries,

allowing the NIMBYs to hide the contradiction. But on the few occasions

that they express both contradicting poles of their position, they never

explain why people over there can fight back and suffer the consequences

of an uncompromising struggle, while over here people should stay calm,

not do anything that might provoke repression, and follow the law,

except for the occasional misdemeanor.

One of the most common discourses to demonize the

Black Bloc is the argument that they are outside agitators. During the

Oscar Grant riots, the media, the police, and proponents of nonviolence

spoke with the same voice, claiming that the rioters were white

anarchists from outside Oakland, come to take advantage of the situation

and cause trouble. Delegitimizing rioters as outside agitators, and

equating the categories of “anarchist” and “outside agitator” is nothing

but the regurgitation of a longstanding government smear tactic. The US

government used it when anticapitalist struggles heated up

after World War i to justify the

Palmer Raids and their deportation of thousands of immigrant anarchists.

And they used it again during the Red Scare. Given the history of

nonviolent support for repression, it should be no surprise that some

proponents of nonviolence are using it now.

A more virulent strain of this discourse has

suddenly become popular over the last few years, spread by conspiracy

nut bloggers like Alex Jones. This is the conspiracy theory that the

Black Bloc is infiltrated by police provocateurs, or even that the bloc

is entirely a creation and tool of the police, used to “discredit

legitimate protests.” Stalinists have been making this claim for years,

first against anarchists in general and then against Black Blocs in

particular when these appeared on the scene. The accusation dates back

at least to the Spanish Civil War, when Stalinists tried to neutralize

anarchists by claiming they were secretly fascist agents. An especially

hypocritical claim, given how it was later revealed that Stalin was

partially supporting, partially sabotaging the antifascist effort in

Spain in order to draw out the conflict and convince Hitler to sign a

non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. With such a great pedigree,

it was only a matter of time before the less principled proponents of

nonviolence began using this argument. The website *In Defense of the

Black Bloc* (violentanarchists.wordpress.com) documents and disputes

examples of this conspiracy theory used by pacifists, journalists,

rightwing bloggers, Stalinists, and others, in dozens of cases in

Canada, the US, Mexico, Chile, Spain, France, Greece, the UK, Italy, and

elsewhere. They also compile histories showing how practices of masking

up or carrying out anonymous attacks or acts of sabotage have

constituted a legitimate part of social struggles from below for

hundreds of years.

Harsha Walia, in her “Ten Points on the Black

Bloc,” hits the nail on the head once again:

susceptible to provocateurs. The entire movement is susceptible to

police provocateurs. The actual police provocateurs that were ousted on

February 12th were posing as journalists, not the black bloc. Another

very clear example of this is what happened in Montebello when police

provocateurs did present themselves as the black block, they were first

outed

by the black block themselves.

The most upsetting part of this conspiracy theory

is that it is clearly designed to sabotage debate. It becomes impossible

to debate masking up or damaging property if such tactics are presented

as police provocation strategies. And the mass media themselves help to

spread the theory in a clear attempt to discredit enemies of the State.

In one case after a protest in France, the conspiracy theory against the

Black Bloc was so widely spread by bloggers, nonviolence proponents, and

the corporate mass media themselves, that the police got angry about

this attack on their reputation. Mobilizing all their resources, they

identified, tracked down, and arrested the masked anarchist who

conspiracy bloggers had supposedly proven was a cop (in a typical stunt,

they took advantage of a grainy video to claim that a stick the

anarchist was holding was a police club). Once the person was arrested

and proved to be a fellow protester, the nonviolent activists and

conspiracy nuts suddenly went silent.

Conspiracy bloggers have been extremely effective

at using underhanded means and the superficial medium of the internet to

fabricate “proof.” In the case of a protest in Madrid, they circulated

proof that the masked protesters were police infiltrators by showing a

video of an undercover cop mistakenly tackled and beaten by fellow cops.

The remarkable thing that no one commented on despite hundreds of

thousands of views, is that the video shows an undercover cop who is not

wearing a mask and not even dressed in black. The simple fact that the

video was tagged by a title claiming that an “*encapuchado*” (“masked

one,” practically synonymous with anarchist) was in fact an undercover

cop allowed the power of suggestion to alter what hundreds of thousands

of people were seeing.

There are many people out there who want to

destroy banks or kick the police off the streets, and they have

impeccable reasons for doing so. The fact that proponents of nonviolence

have been using any means necessary to hide those reasons only shows how

incapable they are of justifying their own practices.

Another common discourse that serves to

criminalize rioting is the idea that breaking the law, rioting, or using “violence” is

a privileged activity that puts oppressed people in danger. Taking

advantage of the fact that people in a Black Bloc are often so well

masked that it is impossible to tell their race or gender, some

aficionados of identity politics have made the claim that Black Bloc

anarchists are all white males, even coining the term “manarchists” to

describe them. To ridicule this idea, someone created the website, *Look

At These Fucking Manarchists*[65], featuring hundreds of

images of riots and armed struggles from around the world, showing

women, people of color, people with disabilities, transgender people,

and queer people building barricades, fighting with police, burning

banks, or physically defending themselves, juxtaposed with ironic

captions. A picture of armed women from an anarchist militia in the

Spanish Civil War is captioned, “C’mon manarchists, fascism has to be

fought by using our nonviolent feminine wiles, not hypermasculine

aggression!” A photo from a February 2013 protest in Bolivia in which

people in wheelchairs fought with riot police after traveling hundreds

of miles to the capital was captioned, “This week in Bolivia, a bunch of

ableist manarchist rioters clashed with police forces over the country’s

broken welfare system. Don’t they know that fighting cops is really

privileged and fucked up?”

During the January 14, 2009 protests for Oscar

Grant, a week after the first riots, white activists from the Catalyst

Project, together with people from different churches and ngos, donned

bright vests and linked arms to protect property and prevent rioting.

Many accused any white person they saw (some of whom were Oakland

residents, some of whom were not) of irresponsibly endangering youth of

color. They didn’t say anything about all the white people who stay home

every time the cops kill a young black man. It’s only natural that when

people go into the streets, they will join up with those who want to use

the same tactics. Combative anarchists who came in solidarity rioted

alongside black youth. Proponents of nonviolence from outside Oakland,

on the other hand, joined up with religious leaders, ngos, and black

Democratic Party figureheads to try to control the protests. The

claim that outside white anarchists were responsible for the

riots is

the truly racist one, as it silences the many black youth—some of them

friends and neighbors of Oscar Grant—who were the main protagonists of

the clashes in the streets.

The Oscar Grant rebellions gave us a little

glimpse of people in the Bay Area doing just this. In the riots we saw

the collective power of Black and Brown young people battling with

little fear, against the established white supremacist order.

Surprisingly there was also a small showing of white people in the

rebellion as well. This brief show of solidarity from white folks—both

those who do have experiences of being criminalized poor young people

and those who grew up with relative comfort—reveals that white people

can have agency to violently oppose a clearly racist institution

side-byside with non-whites without pretending to share identity or

experience with them when it is not the case.

Also, contrary to dominant narratives that paint

the essence of riots as male-dominated affairs, many queer and female

(mostly non-white) comrades took their place at the front-lines,

participating in the supposedly masculine rebellion without

apprehension. Their participation is significant as it throws a wrench

into the logic of peace-loving, docile femininity and what

self-determination looks like for some who live on the axis of gender

tyranny and white supremacy.

Although most police shooting victims are Black

and Brown men, the Oscar Grant rebellions show us that their deaths

affect and outrage masses of people across race and gender lines. During

each demonstration and riot where folks gathered to express their rage

in the face of Oscar Grant’s murder and what his death represented, the

chant “We are all Oscar Grant!” rang through the downtown streets of

Oakland. For those indoctrinated into the logic popularized by the

non-profit organizing culture that treats identity and experiences of

oppression as one in the same, it is inappropriate for anyone other than

people of color to yell this slogan. This critique falls flat for many

as it is assuming that we yell this to declare collective victimhood

rather than a collective proclamation to not be victims. We’d be hard

pressed to find any individuals in this society who are victims, but

have never been victimizers or vice-versa.

For those of us who are poor and Black or Brown,

anarchist or not, we cannot claim to share every experience with Oscar

Grant, but we do live our days with the knowledge that we could have the

same fate as him if this class-society, with its racialized

implications, is not reckoned with. For women and queers, especially

those of us who also are not white, our experiences may not mirror Oscar

Grant’s life and death, but we too live with the sick threat of violence

on our bodies by both the patriarchal, trans misogynist, and racist

system and the individuals who replicate the attitudes and oppressive

actions of the state. For any of us who are not poor and Black or Brown,

anarchist or not, we may not usually fear for our lives when police are

near, but it is plain as day that if we don’t all start acting like it’s

our very lives at stake as well, not only are we an accomplice to these

racist deaths, we foolishly assume we will not be next. For whites who

joined in this chorus of “We are all Oscar Grant,” this declaration

meant that we refused to be another white person, if being white means

letting this shit continue to slide for the bogus justification that

this racist violence keeps society (read: white people) safe.

The naïveté of identity politics fails us in this

way, both in its obsessions with ranking and compartmentalizing

privileges and disadvantages and in ignoring instances where actual

human beings, their struggles and relationships to one another are far

more complex than their identities would tell us.

The spirit behind “We are all Oscar Grant” is

indicative of the attitude of the Oscar Grant rebellion as a whole.

Despite the fact that many of us did not generally know each other

before those nights because of the racial divisions imposed by society

and maintained by ourselves, we found glorious moments of struggling

with one another in the streets where our identities or experiences were

not collapsed into a faux sameness.[66]

A similar process of racist silencing happened at

a protest in Phoenix in 2010. Indigenous people in struggle together

with anarchists called a “Diné, O’odham, anarchist/anti-authoritarian

bloc” at a January 16 demo against the notoriously racist sheriff, Joe

Arpaio. Threatened by this example of direct, unmediated cross-racial

organizing, their willingness to use self-defense, their embrace of a

diversity of tactics, and their dissemination of a radical, anti-state,

anti-colonization critique, ngos and reformist immigrant movement

leaders claimed the indigenous youth in the bloc were ignorant and

manipulated pawns being used by their white allies. In the name of

anti-racism, they used a paternalistic, racist trope to silence Diné and

O’odham protesters, stripping them of their agency.

Identity politics were also used at Occupy Oakland

to divide participants, preserve the mediating role of ngos and

professionals, and discourage direct attacks on the system. A number of

critiques of this discourse arose from the space of debate that

Occupiers had created. I want to quote one such critique at length:

Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical

political opinions. There is no single unified antiracist, feminist, and

queer political program which white liberals can somehow become “allies”

of, despite the fact that some individuals or groups of color may claim

that they are in possession of such a program. This particular brand of

white allyship both flattens political differences between whites and

homogenizes the populations they claim to speak on behalf of. We believe

that this politics remains fundamentally conservative, silencing, and

coercive, especially for people of color who reject the analysis and

field of action offered by privilege theory.

In one particularly stark example of this problem

from a December 4, 2011 Occupy Oakland general assembly,

“white allies” from a local social justice nonprofit called “The

Catalyst Project” arrived with an array of other groups and individuals

to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, in order to speak in favor of a

proposal to rename Occupy Oakland to “Decolonize/Liberate Oakland.”

Addressing the audience as though it were homogeneously white, each

white “ally” who addressed the general assembly explained that

renouncing their own white privilege meant supporting the renaming

proposal. And yet in the public responses to the proposal

it became clear that a substantial number of people of color in the

audience, including the founding members of one of Occupy Oakland’s most

active and effective autonomous groups, which is also majority people of

color, the “Tactical Action Committee,” deeply opposed the measure.

What was at stake was a political disagreement,

one that was not clearly divided along racial lines. However, the

failure of the renaming proposal was subsequently widely misrepresented

as a conflict between “white Occupy” and the “Decolonize/Liberate

Oakland” group. In our experience such misrepresentations are not

accidental or isolated incidents but a repeated feature of a dominant

strain of Bay Area anti-oppression politics which—instead of

mobilizing people of color, women, and queers for independent action –

has consistently erased the presence of people of color in interracial

coalitions.

White supremacy and racist institutions will not

be eliminated through sympathetic white activists spending several

thousand dollars for nonprofit diversity trainings which can assist them

in recognizing their own racial privilege and certifying their decision

to do so. The absurdity of privilege politics recenters antiracist

practice on whites and white behavior, and assumes that racism (and

often by implicit or explicit association, sexism, homophobia, and

transphobia) manifest primarily as individual privileges which can be

“checked,” given up, or absolved through individual resolutions.

Privilege politics is ultimately completely dependent upon precisely

that which it condemns: *white benevolence*.[67]

The examples

keep coming. Just as this book was undergoing the final edits,

anarchists and other folks in Seattle commemorated May Day 2013 with a

little riot. The media quickly deployed the discourse that nonviolent

activists had prepared for them: the rioters were clearly privileged

white youth throwing a temper tantrum. But it later came out that many

of those arrested for smashing windows or fighting with police were

homeless.

In the above cases, opponents of combative methods

had to take a position because spaces of revolt were being claimed and

justified on a political and social level. They had to lie about these

revolts, whether by portraying them as racist or alleging them to be

police conspiracies, in order to distract attention from the eloquent

justifications by which social rebels explained why they were rising up.

In other situations, when revolts erupt without their participants

expressing a written social critique or justifying themselves to the

outside world, proponents of nonviolence frequently ignore them, while

leftist academics seek to explain them away. When such revolts make

themselves impossible to ignore, nonviolent activists and academics

typically victimize them, denying them agency or a legitimate position

of attack against the system. When the major wave of rioting spread from

Tottenham to the rest of England in 2011, websites and magazines

inclined towards nonviolence took up the opposite pole from the

mainstream media, which typically shifts to the right in instances of

lower class revolt and true to form was calling for the merciless

punishment of the “nihilistic and feral teenagers.” But this opposite

pole is based on a presentation of the rioters as mere victims of an

unfair system who are engaging in an activity that is paternalistically

assumed to be ignorant and counterproductive. By casting rioters as

victims, whether they know it or not, proponents of nonviolence are

preparing the way for the structural violence of a sociological

intervention in which the government further invades the life processes

of potentially rebellious subjects, imposing surveillance and welfare

measures that have control as their fundamental criterion.

To authoritarian leftists like Slavoj Žižek, David

Harvey, and Zygmunt Bauman the UK riots were the “meaningless outburst”

of “mindless rioters” and “defective and disqualified consumers.”

Then there are the commentators who see the riots

as simply misguided, rather than as reflections of capitalist ideology.

Such writers understand the riots as an engine lacking the proper

tracks. The failure then belongs to the decrepit left in general, who

have failed to provide an “alternative” or “political programme” which

might harness, shape and direct the rage of the rioters. Asks Žižek:

“Who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor?”

Forget the possibility that the poor might be able to direct their own

rage.

One can see the fundamentally patronizing lines

common to all these responses. In each, the intellectual imputes a kind

of false consciousness to the rioters, in order to make himself (and it

is usually a him) all the more necessary as the voice of missing

authority. These intellectuals hear in the riots a question to which

they must provide the answer. They do not realize that the riots are,

rather, an answer to the question they refuse to ask.[68]

Similarly, after the insurrection in Greece in

December, 2008, which proponents of nonviolence together with

sociologists also tried to explain away, the leftwing media aided the

subsequent anti-immigrant policies and pogroms by casting the immigrants

as victims of inhuman conditions. By helping to produce a discourse of

humanitarian crisis, they required the government to take action with a

predictable combination of reforms and police operations; simultaneously

by focusing on the poor conditions and unconscionable hygiene in

immigrant ghettos, they only aided fascist propaganda that portrayed the

immigrants as dirty and subhuman. By presenting the immigrants as

victims, they denied the very methods many immigrants had chosen to

respond to their situation, and they made them that much more vulnerable

to whatever solution the government would impose, which clearly would

not be for the good of the immigrants.

State responses to the UK riots will follow a

similar track. If the riots brought up very real problems of

self-destructive behavior or poor-on-poor crime, those need to be

addressed by people who are not outside spectators. Other people in

struggle can offer criticisms of the rioters’ practice, but only if we

first recognize it as a practice, a position of attack against the

system or a strategy for coping with systemic oppression. And to

criticize a struggle we do not directly participate in, we should

acknowledge its unique perspective, along with the probability that we

do not share the exact same goals and analyses. As long as those who are

supposedly critical of capitalism and police delegitimize the responses

of

those most negatively affected by precarity and police violence, those

who riot will be alone in resisting the solutions imposed by the

combined force of the government, the media, and the nonprofits. Whereas

anarchists embracing a diversity of tactics have been developing a

practice of direct solidarity with spontaneous riots, and an ability to

spark riots of their own, proponents of nonviolence have cozied up to

the institutions of government, the media, and the ngos that continue to

discipline the most marginalized as victims and to impose solutions that

always prioritize the interests of power.

8. Who Are the Pacifists?

Nowadays, nonviolence is promoted by a very diverse group of people. I

have tried to select the examples of those individuals who have been

most influential, either

on a world scale or domestically, in spreading the exclusive insistence

on nonviolent tactics, or in providing a functioning example of

nonviolent action. Additionally, I have also provided examples that

represent certain categories of people that have been instrumental in

spreading ideas of nonviolence or discouraging the use of any other

methods of social change. I came up with this list of exemplary

proponents of nonviolence, supporters of nonviolent methods, or

enforcers of nonviolent discipline before analyzing the traits they

might have in common. In other words, I did not select examples that met

preconceived criteria; I came up with a list of those who (at least as

far as I could tell) have done the most to spread nonviolence since the

end of the Cold War.[69]

Despite the vast differences that separate the members of

this group, readers might notice a few common traits. First of all, none

of the people listed have faced grave consequences for their commitment

to nonviolence, and in fact nearly all of them have been rewarded by

dominant society, several of them holding positions of power that are

based in part on their espousal of nonviolence. This should disprove the

pacifist claim that our society encourages us to be violent. In the

moment we rebel, the dominant institutions all insist that we remain

peaceful.

Another common trait is that many of those listed

pass themselves off as experts and attempt to exercise authority over

social movements on the basis of that expertise. This trait is closely

related to a third one, that most of these people, especially the

experts, do not participate directly in social movements or the

struggles they attempt to instruct from their positions of expertise.

Writing as distant spectators, they often reveal themselves to be

extremely ignorant about the struggles they attempt to counsel. A final

trait is that many of these people get paid to participate—in the

limited ways in which they actually do participate—in the social

movements they push towards nonviolence. They are professionals and

careerists, and their flirtation with social movements is often a step

on the road to personal advancement.

Gene Sharp

Probably the most prominent advocate of nonviolence today is Gene Sharp.

Between 1953 and 1954, Sharp spent nine months in jail for protesting

conscription in the Korean War. In the following years he served as

secretary for pacifist A. J. Muste and Assistant Editor for London’s

• Peace News*. Since then he has acted primarily as an academic

(receiving the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in 1968) and an analyst of

social movements rather than a direct participant. He is a Professor

Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts

Dartmouth, where he has taught since 1972, and he has held research

appointments at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs.

In 1983, he founded the Albert Einstein Institute, a non-profit

dedicated to “advancing the study and use of strategic nonviolent action

in

conflicts throughout the world” and exploring “its policy potential, and

to communicate this through print and other media, translations,

conferences, consultations, and workshops.” As noted earlier, the Albert

Einstein Institute has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the

International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for

Democracy (the latter two funded by the US government), while Sharp’s

doctoral research was partially funded by the Defense Department.

Gene Sharp has been richly rewarded by dominant

society for his commitment to nonviolence. He has not been the target of

repression, unless one can consider as such a voluntary, conscientious

prison sentence that has largely served as a springboard to a lucrative,

prestigious career. Sharp is a member of the intellectual elite, and in

2012 he was even the favored nominee to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,

an award he would have shared with mass murderers and war leaders like

Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, and Menachem Begin. In Sharp’s case, the

prize would have been another element in the international operation to

portray the Arab Spring as a series of nonviolent movements obediently

following the tutelage of Western experts on democratic social change.

Sharp was shamelessly being given and taking the credit for revolutions

he had nothing to do with and that were not following his template for

regime change. Western media coverage of Gene Sharp’s influence in the

Egyptian revolution produced a backlash from some Egyptian bloggers.

One, journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, stated that:

people, but parallels were always drawn between the situation of the

Egyptian people and their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The latter

have been the major source of inspiration, not Gene Sharp, whose name I

first heard in my life only in February after we toppled Mubarak already

and whom the clueless *NYT* moronically gives credit for our

uprising.[70]

While some democracy groups and the authoritarian Muslim Brotherhood distributed his work, his nonviolent

methodology was barely present in the uprising. This is a far cry from

the self-serving claim Sharp makes on the jacket of his book, which

talks about “Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, where the leaders

of the Arab Spring view Sharp’s ideas as the guiding light of their

movement.” While he may want to be a Great White Father shining his

“guiding light” for the benighted Arabs, by claiming any affinity

between his nonviolent methodology and the uprisings not only in Egypt

but also in Libya and Syria, he only comes off as a megalomaniac clown.

What Gene Sharp promotes is not revolution but

regime change devoid of any social content. The same forms of

oppression, exploitation, poverty, and state violence occur in all the

countries where successful “revolutions” following his method have taken

place. His legacy has not been revolution or the betterment of

humankind, but his own self-promotion and the spread of a different form

of domination. It is hard to tell if Sharp is motivated by a desire for

fame (in addition to the multiple Peace Prize nominations, he has been

proclaimed “the most influential proponent of nonviolent action alive”

by *Progressive Magazine*) or by an aesthetic obsession with democracy,

a sort of formalistic neurosis that people across the world should be

exploited, marginalized, starved, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated—in a

word, ruled—by democratic governments and never by dictatorships. This

could be reasonably classified as a form of insanity.

Perusing the pages of *From Dictatorship to

Democracy*, we find abundant evidence of his authoritarian thinking and

lack of concern for vital questions like freedom, health, and

well-being.

His only concern with elections is that they be

“free,” by which he means not rigged in favor of one political party or

another. He expresses no critique of political parties, of the power of

mass media to limit the range of acceptable political opinion and to

marginalize any political party that exceeds this limit, or of the very

concept of representation as inimical to freedom.

He entertains no criticism of capitalism or

democratic government, the structures by which the commons—the land, the

water, the forests, knowledge, skills, history—have been robbed from all

of us, enclosed, privatized, professionalized, and sold back

to us as commodities. Given these basic economic laws, which are not

questioned or put to the vote in any democratic system, all of us are

denied what once was inalienable from us, what we require for our

survival. Capitalism and the governments that deploy and subsidize it,

whether democracies or dictatorships, have forced us into dependence on

the institutions and economic classes that were constituted by the

conquerors, by those who robbed us of our survival and now force us to

work for them to buy back lifeless pieces of what was ours.

Sharp does not even discuss poverty in the

superficial, reformist framework of helping the poor, forgiving debt, or

creating structures that will protect people from the worst ravages of

economic exploitation. In fact, he views interclass alliances—between

those who exploit and those who are exploited—as a fundamental part of

his nonviolent method. His list of nonviolent actions include action by

the upper classes, by property owners, capitalists, and bosses:

withdrawal of money from bank accounts, severance of funds and credit,

revenue refusal, refusal to let or sell property, a merchants’ “general

strike,” and even workplace lockouts. It’s amazing, because several of

these are tactics historically used by the wealthy to control the

working class.

Sharp also lists a number of actions that can be

carried out by governments to effect nonviolent change, showing that he

has no critique of the State as a coercive power structure. Neither does

Sharp propose the abolition of the military. Having a civilian

population trained in his nonviolent method can “avoid the need to

establish a strong military capacity” for national defense (p. 121), but

clearly, nonviolence is a complement to the military, not a replacement.

Nor does he propose the abolition of murderous

institutions like the police and the prisons, institutions for social

control like the mass media or government-run schools, or any other

oppressive institution. Far from it, the mass media are an essential

element in his template.

He claims that “nonviolent struggle contributes to

democratizing the political society” because it “does not reproduce a

means of repression under command of a ruling elite” (p. 57), but

Sharp’s superficial “political society” never addresses questions of

self-organization, and therefore it never replaces or eliminates the

“means of repression” forming a part of every government, whether

democratic or dictatorial. On the contrary, the political parties that

come into power after a nonviolent campaign on their behalf take charge

of the coercive institutions—the police, military, prisons, schools, and

so on—that already existed in society. In none of the Color Revolutions

did the movement lead to the abolition of those institutions (nor even

to suggesting such a radical action).

If proponents of nonviolence can fault

authoritarian, armed revolutions of the past for creating *new*

institutions of repression (and we make the same criticisms, no less

because we anarchists were often the primary target for liquidation), we

can fault them for neither abolishing nor fundamentally challenging the

• existing* institutions of repression. Society, as it undergoes a

process of revolution as conceived by Gene Sharp, does not change in any

way whatsoever, except to multiply the number of political parties that

are actively fighting over the spoils.

And the nonviolent movement itself reproduces

authoritarian thinking. “One must develop a wise grand strategic plan for

liberation” (p. 12). Sharp’s method is based on a hierarchical

resistance movement with a pyramidal structure and undisputed leaders.

He never discusses the possibility of multiple plans, of other currents

in the movement that have different strategies, and he does not discuss

the possible problem of dealing with strategic or theoretical

differences within the movement. In fact, in his book on creating

democratic “liberation” movements, the concept of debate is suspiciously

lacking. On the contrary, “resistance leaders,” also referred to as

“resistance planners,” create the grand strategy, draft the plan, and

“[make] it known” (p. 81). Sharp clearly envisions a command structure

befitting a political party or an army, in which a small cabal of

leaders make unitary decisions, and sheeplike masses carry them out.

“The large numbers of people required to participate may be more willing

and able to act if they understand the general conception, as well as

specific instructions” (p. 81). The masses, in this framework, are

simply a required element,

who should be educated as to the general conception (evidently

formulated without their input) and whose “instructions” should be

explained to them.

Sharp is a shameless authoritarian and militarist.

Appropriately called the “Clausewitz of Nonviolence,” he uses hard talk,

like the term “political jiujitsu” (p. 49) to beef up the image of his

anemic method. Sharp’s nonviolent masses are nothing but a disciplined,

paramilitary force, civilians who are not trusted with the use of

violence, which is the property of the state institutions they must work

in tandem with. They are not trusted to formulate their own ideas, but

must be convinced of the appropriate strategies.

Any use of “violence” (he does not explain what

this actually means), is “counterproductive.” “Nonviolent discipline is

a key to success and must be maintained despite provocations and

brutalities by the dictators and their agents” (p. 49). Debate and

political difference do not figure into his method, and violence, if it

appears, is presented as the result of provocations by government

agents. Sharp trains his disciples in a practically Stalinist mindset in

which any dissent is blamed on the machinations of an external enemy.

Dissent, in this framework, must be suppressed and expelled. If Sharp is

the most influential proponent of nonviolence alive today, no wonder

that so many supporters of nonviolence have attacked those of us who

choose to struggle by other means, or have exposed us to the brutality

of the police. It is worth noting that in his book Sharp never condemns

using violence against fellow protesters.

He claims that “political defiance, unlike

violence, is uniquely suited to severing” the obedience that governments

need to rule. This is a bizarre claim, and he does not explain how a

riot, an insurrection, or an armed revolutionary movement does not

constitute a much greater severing of obedience. In fact, those who use

nonviolence often maintain allegiance to the ruling system and only

attempt to function as a loyal opposition. But those who position

themselves in the social war,[71] not as victims but as

combatants, unmistakably negate their obedience to power. Sharp’s other

superficial argument against “violence” (we can only assume that with

this vague concept he means any tactics that do not appear in his

approved list) is simply that it will “shift the struggle to one in

which the dictators have an overwhelming advantage.”

And here we find the central contradiction of Gene

Sharp’s work. He pretends to win the debate against other methods of

struggle with an absurdly simplistic cliché. In Chapter 1 he explains

that military resistance hits a government where it is strongest,

whereas nonviolence hits a government where it is weakest. This falls

short of a reasoned argument for several of reasons. Contrary to the

manichean reasoning of most pacifists, there are more than two methods

of struggle, and many methods that embrace a diversity of tactics do not

adopt a military resistance, but rather popular insurrection, widespread

sabotage, and other means. We could also look through the thousands of

examples in history in which governments were in fact overcome by

military resistance, disproving Sharp’s claims about the impracticality

of this option. But taking his cliché seriously, as though it were an

idea with which to debate, is missing a larger point.

Gene Sharp’s central thesis is that all

governments, even dictatorships, rule not by military force but by

winning the participation and compliance of those who are ruled, by

manufacturing consent, to borrow a phrase. In other words, even

according to Sharp’s own framework, military or police force is not a

government’s strong suit. If we elaborate this idea that Gene Sharp

mentions only in passing, probably to keep his theoretical house of

cards from crumbling, we see that the most developed aspect of social

control, that which all governments use most in order to stay in power,

are those means that win hearts and minds, spread elite values,

misinform people, convince them that government has their best interests

in mind, persuade them to participate or at least to obey. This activity

of the State is primarily carried out by

the very institution that Gene Sharp never questions, that he relies on

to carry out his pseudo-revolutions: the media.

It seems that the State, in an impressive act of

political jiujitsu, has used its strong suit, its ability to spread

elite values (nonviolence) and to convince people of the need for

obedience (with the option of protesting, but never fighting back) to

successfully hijack the social movements that are meant to oppose it,

twisting their arm and getting them to serve the State’s own purposes.

And while nonviolence has always served to protect the State, in the

last decades elite support has succeeded in eliminating every vestige of

critical or conflictive practices from nonviolent movements, which in

the past had at least constituted an inconvenience or a stepping stone

to real forms of struggle, leaving nothing that in any way challenges or

questions the social hierarchy.

US Military

We can learn something about the nature of nonviolence from the fact

that, on a worldwide scale, the institution that has probably dedicated

the most resources towards the promotion of nonviolent resistance

movements has been the US government. In 2005, during the height of

armed resistance to the US occupation of Iraq, the Pentagon got caught

running a multimillion dollar covert propaganda campaign, paying to

plant articles in Iraqi media made to appear as though they were written

by locals, urging Iraqis to use nonviolent tactics to resist the

Americans. This fact alone should suffice to discredit all the arguments

and pretensions of nonviolence, were not an ability to ignore

embarrassing facts a prerequisite for believing in nonviolence.

And those facts pile up. We also have the example

of US government funding for the Color Revolutions, Defense Department

grants to doctoral students researching nonviolent regime change, and

the US government’s intervention in the Egyptian uprising, encouraging

nonviolent pro-democracy groups and attempting to portray the movement

as nonviolent.

On a domestic level, there are also numerous cases

of city

mayors and police chiefs working together with nonviolent activists to

ensure the peacefulness of a major protest. During the 2012 Republican

Convention in Tampa, Florida:

for presiding over a peaceful Republican National Convention in 2012.

Working closely together with ngos and pacifist-inclined protesters, she

made sure that no negative incidents that could have disrupted the

Convention or given the city a bad image took place. According to the

Tampa Bay Times, the protest was “Less anarchy, more parade.” Castor

herself gloated that she “needed a box of beads. It was actually a

festive atmosphere.” The good results for police, the Republicans, the

city government, and Democratic politicians or high-paid NGO directors

who don’t want to be associated with street fighting or revolutionary

social movements can be attributed to the pacifist protesters who gladly

worked hand in hand with the cops.[72]

Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama, an international celebrity and the spiritual leader of

the Tibetan people, is a renowned figurehead for nonviolence. Unlike

Gene Sharp or Gandhi, he has not contributed to the development of a

pragmatic nonviolent method, though he is a tireless spokesperson for

the principles of nonviolence and compassion.

Due to the brutal Chinese occupation of his

homeland, he has lived most of his life in exile, a tribulation I do not

wish to minimize in any way. But within the hard reality of exile, he

has been richly rewarded for his advocacy of nonviolence. His general

lack of criticism for those in power (excepting the Chinese government,

whose reach he is beyond) makes his message of peace nonthreatening,

equally palatable for world leaders, business elites, middle-class

altruists, and people at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Some people find his nonviolent philosophy moving,

perhaps for the very reason of its universal, non-critical palatability

mentioned above. Others would point out that his rhetoric is trite and

superficial, or that his commitment to peace has never led him to put

himself in harm’s way or intervene in any of the brutal wars or

occupations occurring around the world, except to lightly scold world

leaders from time to time, without ever naming names, framing every

conflict as an engagement between two equal sides incapable of

understanding the other, and using the same language of peace and

dialogue that those same world leaders employ to hide the unequal nature

of the conflicts they are responsible for. Compassion, in the end, is a

meaningless concept if we do not embrace the reality of certain

antagonisms or take a clear position against ongoing systems of

oppression.

In 1989 the Dalai Lama was given the Nobel Peace

Prize.

George Soros

George Soros is a billionaire investor and philanthropist who has given

away $8 billion to charitable causes. Soros has

amassed billions of dollars through currency speculation and business

deals, and dedicated a part of that money to encourage the spread of

democratic capitalist governments. In 1993, he founded the Open Society

Institute, primarily to make grants to his multiple foundations in

eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. On numerous occasions, Soros

has funded nonviolent social movements that work for more democratic

government within a Western and capitalist framework. Several of the

activist groups that organized Color Revolutions and received training

from Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute also received funding from

Soros. Soros is largely credited with aiding the transition to

neoliberal capitalism in Hungary. It is clear what this billionaire’s

vision of an ideal world consists of.

Generally, major capitalists (banks and

speculators) prefer democratic governments because these increase their

profits and minimize their risks. Whereas dictators can impose capital

controls or default on loans without warning, democracies usually allow

bank technocrats to control their monetary policy, and they lack a

potentially erratic strongman figure who might defy investors.

The political class in a democratic government

have made themselves voluntarily dependent on financial backers. Up for

reelection every few years, a politician who has not made investors

happy will not receive the money they need to stay in power. This is a

brilliant mechanism, because the members of the political class are also

rich people with their own investments to worry about, and because

effective statecraft rests on acquiring sufficient funding, so one of a

state’s principal concerns is to constantly procure that funding.

Bono and Bob Geldof

Both famous pop musicians, both founders of major charities, both

advocates of peaceful tactics, both knighted by the English crown, and

both nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Bono and Bob Geldof are

celebrity activists who have used their fame to insert themselves into

leadership positions in the antiglobalization movement. Charity

reproduces dynamics of power that maintain the dominance and reproduce

the values of the one giving the charity over the one receiving it (and

the one giving often acquired their wealth through the same processes of

exploitation that led to the poverty of the one receiving). It is only

consistent, then, that these two pop stars tried to exercise power

within major movements against poverty that had grown up over the course

of years in Africa and Europe, despite their lack of experience or

participation in these movements on the ground.

Their brilliant solution to poverty was the

organization of televised charity concerts to direct world attention to

the problem, as though it were a simple question of ignorance or public

opinion. They denounced people struggling in the streets, people who put

their lives on the line in the fight against the effects of capitalism,

preferring to turn everything into a big show. A perhaps megalomaniac

Bob Geldof claims to have mobilized world leaders to take poverty

seriously. Several years later, we have yet to see any results of this

supposed change of heart, although Geldof and Bono have

been repeatedly celebrated and rewarded for their commitment to peaceful

reform, a process that in their minds has to be directed from above.

“Like it or not the agents of change in our world are the politicians.

Otherwise you’re always outside the tent pissing in.”[73]

Chris Hedges

On february 6, 2012, journalist Chris Hedges published his now infamous

article, “The Cancer of Occupy” on the website *Truthdig*. His article

was a virulent attack on the anarchist Black Bloc within the

then-ongoing Occupy movement. Hedges, writing as though he were a

movement participant and someone with the movement’s best interests in

mind, makes a number of claims: that the Black Bloc is a group or

movement inspired by John Zerzan, who wrote for the magazine *Green

Anarchy* which was so dastardly that it even criticized the Zapatistas;

that the Black Bloc members hate the Left more than they hate the 1%;

that the Black Bloc is a sexist group based on “hypermasculinity”; that

the violence of the Black Bloc is a perfect excuse for police

repression; and that people should take action to purge their movement

of this cancer. He extensively interviews author Derrick Jensen, who had

previously supported violent tactics but subsequently denounced socalled

Black Bloc anarchists because they had the gall to criticize him (for

acting like a celebrity, for saying that some people should write books

in favor of dangerous tactics and other people should carry out those

tactics, for supporting authoritarian methods in the environmental

movement, and so on). Jensen, audibly nursing a wounded ego, goes on

record to portray Black Bloc anarchists as intolerant thugs who use

others as “human shields.” In a word, Hedges portrays the Black Bloc

anarchists as “criminal.”

The responses to Hedges’ article were immediate

and widespread. Nearly everyone commented on Hedges’ embarrassing ignorance of the subject. The Black Bloc is not a group or

a movement, but a tactic, and as a tactic it is primarily used for

anonymity and visibility, and only sometimes used for property damage or

confrontation with the police (these latter are the preferred motives of

many participants, but the fact is many Black Blocs have occurred

without such incidents). John Zerzan and *Green Anarchy* have very

little to do with the Black Bloc. Although some Black Bloc participants

have no doubt read the writings of Zerzan or *Green Anarchy*, there is

no single political perspective or theory that pertains to the Bloc. Its

participants over the years have held a far wider range of opinions than

what we might find in, for example, *The New York Times*, Hedges’

employer (and, if I’m not mistaken, another rag that is not terribly

sympathetic to the Zapatistas). Furthermore, Zerzan and *Green Anarchy*

are not the wingnut fanatics Hedges presents them to be, but publishers

of a number of sensible critiques of industrial society.[74]

Some Occupiers responding to Hedges pointed out

that in Occupy Oakland, probably the most radical, diverse, dynamic, and

influential of all the Occupy encampments, and also the one with the

greatest presence of the Black Bloc, the Black Bloc generally positioned

itself between the police and the other protesters, literally shielding

them rather than using them as “human shields”; far from a space of

“hypermasculinity” the Black Bloc included a Feminist and Queer Bloc

that was among the most active during the combative march on “Move In

Day”; and that old people and young, including parents with babies,

participated in the anarchist marches. Ironically, Hedges claimed that

the Occupy movement was so strong that it had created spaces where

“mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.” He does not mention that

anarchists were a part of this phenomenon, nor that nonviolence was not

a prerequisite for it.

Hedges claims that the occupations were shut down

because they were nonviolent and this presented a threat. It’s curious

reasoning, since at other moments he claims that the use of violence

allows the police to shut down the movement. And even more curious

since, without a doubt, the far-from-nonviolent Occupy Oakland was the

most threatening version of the movement in the country, the one the

authorities tried hardest to shut down, the one that proved most

difficult to shut down (being much more resilient than the nonviolent

Occupy Wall Street), and the one that generated the most opprobrium from

journalists on the right and the left. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan was one

of multiple authority figures who asked the national Occupy movement to

“disown” Oakland because they were combative and

uncompromising,[75] and the proponents of nonviolence came

running to the call, eager to do the work of the ruling class.

Chris Hedges was not an Occupy participant, but he

used

his social position as an elite journalist to try to act as a

spokesperson for the movement. Because his article was so full of

mistakes and misinformation, and because his rhetoric so closely

mirrored the media attacks by the rightwing, many readers saw through

him. But many more continue to take Hedges seriously, and he continues

to publish articles for the movement, to advocate nonviolence, and to

work towards the criminalization of the anarchists.

The only difference, in this regard, between the

rightwing attacks against ongoing social struggles and the pacification

campaign carried out by supporters of nonviolence like Hedges is that

the rightwing tries to criminalize any social movement that attempts to

change society whereas the supporters of nonviolence only attempt to

criminalize the most radical elements, the parts that seek to do away

with the existing power structure rather than negotiate with it.

And Chris Hedges is a part of that power

structure. A long-time journalist with *The New York Times*, Hedges’

loose relationship with the facts makes it clear how much he deserves

the Pulitzer Prize—named for the inventor of yellow journalism—that he

was awarded for his work as a war correspondent.

In typical fashion, he tried to use his

professional status as a paid spectator of warfare to pass himself off

as an expert on

war, and by extension, on violence. This was exactly the stance he used

to defend himself from the criticism of his atrocious article, in a

debate with a proponent of Black Bloc tactics. In this debate, he

refused to acknowledge how he was exposing other people to the violence

of repression by helping to criminalize them (making it easier for the

police to arrest them, beat them, shoot at them, or lock them up in

prison for a long time); and he refused to see, or was mentally

incapable of seeing, how violence is a category that conflates very

different situations.

The wars that he has covered have been conflicts

between different authoritarian powers, and he was always present as a

privileged, protected outsider. Although war correspondent is a somewhat

risky job (though never as risky as they make it out to be), it is still

just a job. Hedges has never had a personal stake in the conflicts he

has observed, and he has never fought for his own freedom or for the

lives of his loved ones. In sum, he cannot in the least understand the

conflicts he has been handsomely paid to write about.

But in typical elitist fashion, he passes himself

off as an expert. Cashing in on his years of war voyeurism, Hedges wrote

the book *War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning*, released in 2003 by an

imprint of megapublisher Random House. Evidently, that giant corporation

did not find what he had to say threatening, nor did the many magazines

that reviewed the book and helped it become a bestseller. In this book,

Hedges tries to make a psychological argument about how people can

become addicted to warfare. He does not make a distinction between wars

of conquest and wars of liberation, nor any other distinction that could

make his findings useful for those who are engaged in a struggle for

their own freedom. (In that regard, the works of Frantz Fanon, who

actually participated in such struggles, are far better). He does little

more than allow a comfortable audience to vicariously partake in his

voyeurism.

Hedges seems to lack the strategic clarity that

might allow him to extract anything useful from a lifetime of vicarious

experiences. As many critics noted, when he witnessed the fierce social

struggles in Greece in 2010, Hedges nearly swooned:

loot their country [...] Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city

centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of

class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the

citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike

most of us, get it [...]Think of the Greek riots as a struggle for

liberation.

But when people in the US, learning directly from

the comrades in Greece and struggling in direct solidarity with them

(rather than being a spectator, like Hedges), use some of the same

tactics, but not even approaching a tenth of the intensity, Hedges and

other NIMBYs freak out, denounce it, try to scare other people away from

supporting it, and call it “criminal.” This is not someone whose

opinions we can trust.

Perhaps what is most disturbing about the whole

sordid affair is that Chris Hedges had any credibility to begin with

among people who supposedly want to change the world. If we really want

to regain power over our own lives, abolish capitalism, get rid of the

government, get rid of all the obstacles that prevent people from

organizing their own affairs and meeting their own needs, if we really

want to realize the centuries-old dream of *omnia sunt comuna*,

“everything for everyone!,” then whenever some highly paid journalist

(and from one of the most powerful media organizations on the planet, no

less) comes around and starts telling us how we should be struggling,

our response should be a pie in the face.

Many proponents of nonviolence lack a critique of

the media, despite the fact that this has been one of the most important

parts of the power structure, one of the most important mechanisms for

social control, for the last 120 years. Noam Chomsky and many others

have published numerous studies showing how corporate media misinform us

or train us to view the world through a lens that privileges the

interests of the powerful. But the problem goes deeper.

The mass media need to be abolished. They turn

something that should be a daily activity shared by everyone—informing

us about our world, fact-checking, sharing stories—into a

professional activity controlled and profited off of by elite

institutions. They alienate the sharing of stories and information and

enclose it within a separate space—the television screen, the

newspaper—that creates passive spectators and privileged narrators who

direct their gaze. The specific medium of a radio broadcast, a printed

newspaper, or an internet article could have a different social meaning

if they were projects we could all engage in, but in the current,

hierarchical society, the totality of the media can only serve to keep

us passive and train us to view the world through the eyes of the

powerful. The truth is, all of us have lives that are newsworthy, even

and especially if we have nothing more to share than how boring or

miserable our lives are. If news were simply sharing, then we would have

a good idea of how powerless and unhappy most of us feel, and if we

could spread this information as news, that would be a first step

against our powerlessness. But as things stand, “the news” is a produced

sphere that places all importance on the actions of politicians or

bankers and the dramas of celebrities. The news is the mechanism that

silences us.

And it is exactly this institution that proponents

of nonviolence expect to spread images of our dignified resistance and

win us more support. The media will never do this. Not in a million

years. In Spain, the coverage they gave to the peaceful 15M movement was

meant to distract people from the growing wave of strikes and riots, to

show people how they should protest. As soon as the 15M movement started

misbehaving, the media flicked the switch and either cast it in a

negative light or simply made it disappear from the screen. At no point

did they ever spread the actual ideas that were being circulated in the

movement. A similar thing happened with the Occupy movement in the US.

The media are owned by the same corporations that

rule the world. They are not our friends. They want us to lose. If we

really want to do something as bold as changing the world, we cannot be

so lazy that we rely on the existing institutions to spread our message.

A vital task of the struggle is to create our own means of

communication, counterinformation, and dissemination of radical ideas.

Without this we are doomed. Rather than catering to superficial or safe

visions of social change, we have to challenge

our ideas about how to win and above all we have to build popular

support for the methods of struggle we will need to use in order to take

on the rich and powerful. There can be no doubt; in those countries

where the struggles against oppression are strong, those countries whose

struggles we admire, people are not afraid of sabotage, they do not run

away when a riot starts, and they do not wring their hands when people

fight with the police. Their struggles are stronger precisely because

they have carried out the vital task of keeping their collective memory

alive, resisting the amnesia spread by the mass media. They remember the

long history of combative methods and remember that those methods belong

to them, that sabotage has always been the best friend of the underdog,

that what little we still have, we have won by fighting back.

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca solnit is one of the few influential proponents of nonviolence

who actually participate in social movements on

the ground, rather than as an elite journalist, academic, or celebrity.

To her credit, she actually puts her money where her mouth is. It is

worth noting that her influence is probably due to her being an

accomplished writer, rather than (as far as I can tell, having

overlapped with her to a certain extent) an inspiring example of the

development of an effective practice in actual nonviolent movements. I

point this out only to clarify her role, and to underline my earlier

argument that Gene Sharp’s is perhaps the only nonviolent method that

has effectively been put into practice, though with horrible results as

we have seen. Rebecca Solnit advocates a more radical, involved, and

committed form of nonviolent action, though I get the feeling that,

given the stagnation of such action in practice, she has turned largely

to slinging mud at ideological opponents.

Rebecca Solnit is not a careerist or an elitist

like Gene Sharp and Chris Hedges. But I do want to cite a few

less-thanhonest arguments she makes in favor of nonviolence, in order to

point out the sort of underhanded discourse that even sincere

proponents of nonviolence sometimes engage in.

Solnit weighed in on the debate around nonviolence

that came to the fore during the Occupy movement in an article published

on the website *CommonDreams* on November 14, 2011, “Throwing Out the

Master’s Tools and Building a Better House: Thoughts on the Importance

of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution.”

She begins her article with the conventional

pacifist argument that “Violence is Conventional. Violence is what the

police use. Violence is what the state uses.” I doubt that she is

unaware that the category of violence, the idea that rebellion and

repression are the same, has already been roundly criticized, disputed

in numerous studies, essays, and personal accounts. And I doubt she

could point to any source where proponents of nonviolence have been able

to show that all violence is the same either historically, socially, or

psychologically. I suspect that for many it is a religious conviction,

but in any case the argument functions as a form of manipulation, the

demagogic use of a category that cannot be defended.

From the beginning of her article she is

categorically stating that what the police do and what rioters do are

the same, but she does not make the assertion explicit because she

cannot back it up. In other words, Solnit is consciously lying to her

audience and hoping that they are too accustomed to demagoguery and

pseudologic to notice.

Solnit goes on to claim that images of New York

City police pepperspraying peaceful protesters, who do nothing more than

raise their voices, “brought the nation along with” them. Her evidence

for this is the number of views videos of these incidents received on

• YouTube*, not, tellingly, any increase in action against police

brutality. If it is true that the “nation [came] along,” then perhaps

they just stayed at home raising their voices and being just as

ineffective at stopping police brutality as the peaceful protesters in

New York who complained but let it happen.

In the next section, she makes the claim that “The

state would like us to be violent” (I believe I have demonstrated the

opposite to be true, with reference to a large body of

evidence[76] which Solnit does not provide). Then she

misleads her audience by saying that “when the FBI or other government

agencies infiltrate a movement or an activist group, they seek to

undermine it by egging it on to more violence.” In all the recent cases

of FBI provocations that have been documented, what actually happened

was the FBI informants convinced a closely monitored group of people to

commit a crime, and arrested them before any act of violence was

committed. Proponents of nonviolence have not provided, to my knowledge,

any documentation for police agencies encouraging the spread of

combative, illegal tactics across a movement, and we, on the other hand,

have provided a large number of documented examples of government and

police doing the opposite: encouraging the spread of nonviolent tactics

across a movement.

I doubt Rebecca Solnit is unaware of all the

evidence and analysis that contradict her claims. Rather than engaging

in honest debate, though, she hides all the counterarguments and erases

all the evidence with an avalanche of clichés and unsupported

allegations.

Elsewhere in her article, Solnit props up two

harmful myths that we have already dealt with: that when “episodes of

violence break out as part of our side in a demonstration, an uprising,

a movement” it is the work of either “a paid infiltrator or a clueless

dude.” Here she is feeding into the conspiracy theory that masked

rioters are police provocateurs, a theory that has directly led to

multiple people getting assaulted or getting arrested and subjected to

the violence of the prison system. This is a phenomenon that Rebecca

Solnit cannot help but be aware of, revealing yet again that supporters

of nonviolence are willing to use violence to silence their ideological

opponents. Solnit must also be aware of the many feminist and queer

critiques of nonviolence, and feminist and queer participation in

combative and illegal methods of struggle, including at the heart of the

Occupy Oakland movement that she is criticizing. Yet again, the

imperative of nonviolence trumps both honesty and any qualm she might

have as a feminist in silencing

her sisters.

Solnit is also trying to mislead her audience when

she attributes a refusal of nonviolence with “clueless[ness].” She can

claim that criticisms of nonviolence or justifications of other methods

of struggle are mistaken, but she would be lying if she openly said that

these currents do not have richly elaborated theoretical backing.

Honesty, though, is not her strong suit. She

clearly prefers the tropes, clichés, stereotypes, and false dichotomies

of the demagogue. This seems to be a trait inherent to nonviolence.

Instead of taking on the arguments of those she disagrees with, she

tries to make them disappear. Another clear sign that she is knowingly

spreading a lie.

Piling up lie upon manipulation, she uses the

authoritarian trope of the majority to delegitimize the actions of those

she claims to be a minority:

causing pain, injury, or death. It steals another’s bodily integrity or

very life as property to dispose of as the violator wishes. Since the

majority in our movement would never consent to violent actions, such

actions are also imposed on our body politic against our will.

Moving past her questionable use of such emotionally triggering language

and her metaphorical conflation of a person’s body with “our body

politic,” we might also point out that Occupy Oakland, which she claims

to represent though she was not a participant,[77] agreed in

its general assembly to a framework of a diversity of tactics, and

rejected attempts to enforce a commitment to nonviolence. Like most

democrats, Rebecca Solnit’s commitment to “direct democracy” does not

apply when a majority makes the wrong decision. Demagogues, populists,

and authoritarians like her always believe the majority is on their

side. We could reveal how absurd her reasoning is by claiming that,

since the majority of the US population would never consent to the

admittedly radical visions that Solnit is working towards, her political

activity

constitutes a violent imposition on the body politic.

It is no coincidence that Solnit chooses the only

body politic in which the majority might feasibly agree with her: not

the US population, not the world population, not the general population

of Oakland, and not Occupy Oakland, but the national Occupy movement. I

wonder if she would ever be willing to honestly answer, at what point

did the Occupy movement agree that the decisions of all local Occupys

had to be ratified in a general Occupy congress? Of course, Occupy never

had such a decisionmaking structure. All local Occupys made their own

decisions, based on their unique situations. Another fact that gets in

the way of Solnit’s argument.

Like many other proponents of nonviolence, Rebecca

Solnit is a nimby.[78] She employs a double standard between

movements in the Global North and in the Global South that some might

call racist or colonial:

with the ways the Zapatista rebels in southern Mexico have defended

themselves and notice how sadly necessary it sometimes is, and I sure

wouldn’t dictate what Syrians or Tibetans may or may not do. But petty

violence in public in this country doesn’t achieve anything useful.

That depends on one’s definition of “useful.” When she talks about

“tactics learned from Argentina’s 2001 revolution” she does not mention

that that revolution was violent. Evidently, we are not meant to learn

from struggles in other countries or develop true solidarity with them.

They are only useful insofar as they can be mined to provide ideological

fodder for the political positions that are comfortable in a privileged

North American context.

*Let the poor people in Argentina or Syria face

down the military and give their lives in the struggle,* says the nimby.

<em>It doesn’t matter that they are fighting the same system we are, or

that in some cases the guns and economic policies turned on them

originated here in North America or Europe. It is simply irresponsible

to learn from their struggles and to fight in this country—not even with

the same </em>

<em>tactics but just with the same sense of antagonism—because all the

people here who want their cheap soy or cheap oil, the people who side

with the police against the poor when urban residents in this country

rise up, would stop supporting us, stop occasionally coming out to the

hassle-free protests we organize, and stop writing checks to the ngos we

work with. </em>

In a later paragraph, she packs several false

claims in just a few short sentences. The anarchist group CrimethInc.,

which wrote an open letter criticizing nonviolence in Occupy,

actually cite examples of violence achieving anything in our recent

history. Can you name any? The anonymous writers don’t seem prepared to

act, just tell others to (as do the two most high-profile advocates of

violence on the left). And despite the smear quoted above that

privileged people oppose them, theirs is the language of privilege.

White kids can do crazy shit and get slapped on the wrist or maybe

slapped around for it;

In many other texts that CrimethInc. makes widely available, they do

cite such examples. Her claim that the anonymous writers don’t seem

prepared to act is patently false. In fact, CrimethInc. bases its

political writings on direct experience in social struggles to a far

greater extent than Rebecca Solnit does. In comparison with them (a

large, amorphous, and not exclusively white or young network of people

who have participated at one time or another in a CrimethInc.

publication), she is nothing but a well paid writer, careerist, and

voyeur.

She also claims that the “two most high-profile

advocates of violence on the left” only talk the talk. She does not name

them, probably because she is afraid of being proven wrong, but I would

assume she is referring to Derrick Jensen and Ward Churchill. Derrick

Jensen, for his part, was roundly criticized by anarchists for just

that. Since he evidently could not take these criticisms, he went to the

other side, aiding journalist Chris Hedges in a smear article against

anarchists. Meanwhile, many people have put into practice the

eco-anarchist ideas Jensen made himself a figurehead for. They have

taken great risk, and some of them have gone to prison, while most of

them have never been caught. Judging by the few who have been caught,

eco-anarchist saboteurs also participate

in aboveground campaigns, free clinics, gardening, outreach, workplace

organizing, and a range of other activities. Ward Churchill, on the

other hand, does participate in social struggles and organizes

solidarity for people like Leonard Peltier who are paying the price of

repression for participating in non-pacifist struggles. But far more

influential than Churchill and Jensen, for those of us who believe in a

diversity of tactics, are anonymous texts that arise in the heart of

uprisings and insurrections that have been occurring around the world.

They are communiqués that are published to claim responsibility for

attacks against the system, or the writings of people sitting in prison

for putting these beliefs into practice.

That’s the whole point: unlike proponents of

nonviolence,proponents of combative methods of revolutionary struggle

cannot be high-profile. We cannot flirt with the movement and also

become respected, professional writers like Solnit. While the question

of clandestinity versus anonymous visibility is an ongoing debate, being

high-profile is neither an option nor a goal.[79]

Her self-serving use of identity politics again

leads her to butcher the truth. A little research would show that some

of these “white kids” who put their beliefs into practice include Eric

McDavid and Marie Mason, anarchists serving 20-year and 22-year prison

sentences respectively, for doing the sort of things she claims only

result in a slap on the wrist. Even if she knew about Marie Mason, a

mother and someone who has participated in the struggle for decades, she

would not have mentioned her, since part of her politics includes

silencing any woman who contradicts her dogma that violence is a dude

thing.

And though Solnit is talking about Oakland, she

ignores the 100 people who were arrested, with three facing serious

felony charges—not slaps on the wrist—for their participation in the

Oscar Grant riots two years earlier. Those people were white, black, and

brown, women, men, and queer, and she ignores them because they

contradict her preconceived notions. Nor does she mention the

anarchists—proponents of a diversity of tactics—who were supporting the

Oakland 100, making sure that they were not alone. And then she has the

gall to talk about solidarity.

Unmasking every single false or misleading

statement Solnit makes in this one article would take up more pages than

I think she deserves, and the further I go in her article, the more I

start to believe I am making a mistake in taking her seriously at all.

With startlingly few exceptions, it seems that pacifists’ use of

rhetoric is just a complement to their authoritarian and often violent

use of the mass media, the police, social convention, or their fists to

get rid of us “bad protesters” and “troublemakers.” If what they say has

any resemblance to the truth, it is at most a coincidence. I know from

personal experience that there are many practitioners of nonviolent

action who are sincere in their commitment to revolution and honest in

their criticisms of different tendencies in the struggle, but as I look

out over the panorama of the major manifestations of nonviolence in the

last few years, I have to ask: where are they?

Movement musicians

A problem that may be particular to the US is a sharp divide between the

artists and the militants in the struggle. In many other countries,

those who sing about fighting authority don’t stop when they step down

from the stage, in fact they put those ideas into practice. In

Barcelona, one of the better known anarchist hiphop artists was a part

of the circles that were targeted by police in their 2003 repression

against anarchists who had formed an armed group. In La Paz, Bolivia,

three people were imprisoned and framed by the Evo Morales government in

2012 in an anti-terrorism investigation looking into several acts of

sabotage, arson, and nonviolent bombings[80] carried out as

part of the resistance to a new superhighway. All three of them were

members of different punk bands.[81] Timur Kacharava, the

antifascist and anti-authoritarian of immigrant origins murdered by

fascists in St. Petersburg in 2005, played in a rock band. Mauricio

Morales, the anarchist who died in Santiago de Chile while transporting

an explosive device in 2009, was also a musician.

But it seems that in the US, artists will sing or

paint or make plays about struggle without directly taking part in those

aspects of a struggle they most romanticize. And in many cases, it seems

their relation to the movement is strictly parasitic. In the beginning,

they live off the movement, playing shows or selling posters, and if

they “make it,” they start selling to a wider audience and no longer

have to depend on the solidarity of their former comrades. In the

absence of a success story, they play a pacifying role, discouraging

people from actually putting what they often romanticize into practice.

On numerous occasions, supposedly radical marching

bands have led a protest through the streets, but when people start

breaking things, they stop playing and demand that the violence stop.

This is odd, because in other places people use music

specifically to create a combative mood. In Chile, on the popularly

celebrated Day of the Combatant Youth, traditional *tinku* dancers and

marching bands make noise to get the crowd riled up and ready to fight

with the police. Bands play at May Day in Berlin to rev people up for

the riot. I’m not sure if the US marching bands envision their form of

activism as simply a free, mobile venue, and the other marchers as mere

spectators, or if for some unexplained aesthetic reason they think that

music and riots don’t mix. Even when artistic activities can be

separated in time and space from destructive activities, radical artists

throw on the brakes, as when Plan-it-X—a DIY folk punk record label that

at least in its beginnings posed as radical—took on the role of peace

police during the resistance against the i-69 highway construction.

And then there was Ryan Harvey, the anarchist folk

singer from Baltimore who wrote an article denouncing the 2009 riots

during the protests against the G20 in Pittsburgh. His article has

already been taken apart. He bases his criticism primarily on the false

dichotomy between rioting and community organizing, which is especially

superficial given that Harvey did not participate (a common pattern: see

Chris Hedges, Gene Sharp, and Rebecca Solnit) and he apparently did not

know that one of the anarchist groups organizing for the protests had

engaged in months of community outreach of the exact type that Harvey

seems prepared to recognize. Moreover, in a rebuttal that group wrote of

Harvey’s piece, they mention that in the working-class neighborhoods

where they centered their outreach, a lot of people were supportive of

the anticapitalist protesters and even joined in on the streets. Harvey

also fails to mention that the most violent bloc in the protest was the

queer anarchist bloc, shattering another stereotype about violence.

I want to share a story about one of these

anarchist musicians who passed through Barcelona after touring in Egypt

in the aftermath of the uprising there. This was someone who sings about

revolution, about rising up and fighting power, who writes songs and

sells CDs about heroic struggles that have happened in the past. He had

gone to Egypt supposedly in solidarity with the recent uprising there

(this was in 2012), he had played concerts

and spoken with many participants. What I gathered was that, on arriving

and learning more about the uprising, he learned that the movement was

not nearly as peaceful as he had been led to believe, but that people

had had to use a great deal of violence to defend themselves from police

and government thugs, they had incurred many sacrifices, and now they

had to keep on struggling because a new authoritarian government was in

power.

Two things were evident from his story. The

Egyptians he met were enthusiastic and committed to their struggle, but

he on the other hand was shocked and scared by what it actually means in

practice to rise up against power. He pointed out all the violence, all

the buildings burned down, all the people injured and killed, and kept

asking, **was it worth it? What was achieved? **These were not

questions being asked by the participants in that struggle, who all

seemed to agree that it was indeed worth it, and who are evidently still

committed. They were the questions of someone who had a naïve vision of

what is meant by “struggle” and all the sacrifices that go along with

revolution, someone who is finding out that we cannot win in the space

of a few months and our path will not be as easy or as pretty as it

sounds in the songs, someone who has the possibility of living

comfortably in coexistence with an oppressive system, and maybe prefers

that to the immense commitment of fighting for our lives.

Before I could approach him to question him more

thoroughly on these sentiments that had troubled me so, the musician ran

off to Asturias where the miners, with full social support, were engaged

in pitched battles against the police, masking up, blockading roads,

swallowing tear gas, setting fires, and shooting at the cops with

slingshots, powerful fireworks, and homemade rockets. In the process,

they inspired all of Spain, attracted more people to the struggle

against austerity,[82] and encouraged others to adopt

more combative tactics, proving the supporters of nonviolence wrong once

again.

Judge Ann Aiken

US Federal Judge Ann Aiken is just one of many

government authorities who believe that dissidents must be nonviolent.

It’s really a no-brainer about why they would want those they rule to

remain peaceful, even though nonviolent conspiracy theorists continue to

pretend that the FBI is engaged in a secret plot to make us all violent

(see Rebecca Solnit and Chapter 7).

Aiken was the judge who sentenced radical

ecologist Daniel MacGowan to seven years in prison for a series of Earth

Liberation Front arsons that harmed no one but damaged property

connected to businesses and institutions that were destroying the

environment. After September 11, 2001, the FBI named radical ecologists

and anarchists as the domestic counterterrorism priority. One of the

primary blows of repression that made up the Green Scare was “Operation

Backfire,” which targeted 18 people for participation in such arsons.

Their case was based entirely on the word of snitches—many of whom were

people who no longer had the support of a community that accepted the

validity of illegal direct action. Daniel was one of those who refused

to snitch, but because he and his legal team were threatening to

subpoena government records about illegal spying, prosecutors agreed not

to seek the life imprisonment they were initially aiming for.

While sentencing Daniel MacGowan, Judge Aiken told

him didactically:

your website and tell who you were, what you did. […]To the young

people, send the message that violence doesn’t work. If you want to make

a difference, have the courage to say how the life you lived was the

life of a coward… It is a tragedy to watch these extremely talented and

bright young people come in and do damage to

industries.[83]

Fortunately, most of the people targeted by this repression could see

the hypocrisy of a judge calling a person a coward when they are about

to be locked up in a cage for acting on their beliefs. Judges, after

all, are the ultimate cowards, bureaucrats who force moral lectures down

the throats of those whose freedom they hold captive,[84] who

make their living sending people to prison to endure forms of

psychological and sometimes physical torture they cannot even imagine.

“Talented and bright young people” should be able to see why someone in

authority would want those on the bottom to believe that “violence

doesn’t work,” and be able to conclude that a judge who has never

participated in social movements is talking out of her ass when she

tries to instruct us about what methods work and what methods don’t.

Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky is a journalist and writer. He worked for major

newspapers such as the *International Herald Tribune* before turning

largely to the writing of books. In 2006, he weighed in on the side of

nonviolence with his sweeping text, *Nonviolence: The History of a

Dangerous Idea*, published en masse by a division of Random House.

At the beginning of his tome, Kurlansky does not

define “violence,” but he does claim that all of us are indoctrinated in

its use, whatever it may be. His only evidence for this is a spurious

linguistic proof: the claim that there is no word for “nonviolence”;

that in our culture we can only conceive of nonviolence as the negation

of violence and not a constructive practice in its own right. This is

completely false. The words “peace” and “peacefulness” represent

positive states and behaviors, respectfully, and “peace” probably took

on its current meaning long before “violence” did. Our culture gives us

many ways to say what Kurlansky claims to be inexpressible: *to spread

peace, work for peace, turn the other cheek, turn swords into

plowshares, to reconcile, to make reparations, to restore harmony, to

carry out civil disobedience*, and so on.

It is true that “pacifism” now means something

different from “nonviolence” and that it has come to be associated with

passivity. However, “peace,” “peacefulness,” and “pacifism” used to be

more all-encompassing terms before some pacifists decided to

differentiate themselves from others with the term “nonviolence.” If

pacifism has come to be associated with passivity, it is due to the

complacence of pacifists themselves. If “nonviolence” expresses the

negation of violence rather than something positive in its own right,

that is the fault of its proponents and those who introduced the term.

Kurlansky blames these failings on the dominant culture, which he claims

constantly trains us to accept violence and blind ourselves to

nonviolence. It is curious, then, that children in public schools are

taught about Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi, but not about Malcolm

X, Angela Davis, Bhagat Singh, or so many others.

In fact, there are very different kinds of

violence, and the violence of the powerful—the prisons, the police, wage

labor, working conditions, pollution, deforestation, sex reassignment

surgery on infants, structural adjustment programs, rising food costs,

the forcible reeducation of queer youth at “ex-gay” boot camps,

gentrification, and a long et cetera—is not legitimized as violence. It

is normalized, hidden, and justified as natural and necessary, as an

element of the social peace (social peace being the basis of consent and

acceptance that allows the dominant power structures to function). In

the dominant discourse, the term “violence” is reserved for those acts

that disrupt the social peace. Contrary to Kurlansky’s claim, we are

trained to see nonviolent rebellion as comforting,

and violent rebellion as threatening or stupid. World leaders and

politicians from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to New York City mayor

Michael Bloomberg have congratulated protesters who remain peaceful.

Major corporations also do their part. In one of the coveted commercial

spots during the 2013 Superbowl, a CocaCola ad featured a hooded person

spraypainting “PEACE” on what appeared to be a bank window, as part of a

collage of images all designed to be heart-warming and reassuring.

Although Kurlansky notes the violent tendency of

states and the incompatibility of nonviolence and government, when

talking about violent revolution he only focuses on revolutionaries who

were trying to create new states. Thus, he entirely avoids the critical

question that could make or break his hypothesis that authoritarianism

is caused by the use of violence: do those who struggle forcefully (in

his terms, violently) against all forms of authority end up recreating

authority? Kurlansky sidesteps the question. His examples of violent

revolution, therefore, come from authoritarian movements. On the Russian

Revolution, he cites Trotsky but not Makhno, and he makes only passing

reference to the Spanish Civil War without discussing the

accomplishments of the anarchists who fought there.

In the hundred-plus examples he mentions

throughout his book, he builds an aura around nonviolence to make it

seem effective, even though many of his examples end in defeat. His

analysis tends to be superficial, and he does not cite or back up most

of his claims. I will take apart three of his examples to reveal the

sort of argumentation he uses.

Unlike many proponents of nonviolence, Kurlansky

does not argue for a contextual use of nonviolence within democratic

societies. Instead, he claims that nonviolence also makes sense in the

face of an enemy bent on your extermination. Colonization of the

indigenous was one such process of extermination. Generally, the

indigenous nations that resisted colonization peacefully or tried to

accommodate European settlers were exterminated, whereas the indigenous

nations that resisted forcefully, using a variety of tactics, are still

around today, and they also tend to be the nations with the strongest

liberation movements. The Mapuche, Six Nations

(Iroquois), Lakota, and Coast Salish all went to war against

colonization, many still consider themselves to be at war, and they

represent some of the strongest indigenous struggles on the planet. Some

of those peoples, such as the Mapuche, have recovered a significant part

of their stolen lands in the face of heavy government repression.

At one point, Kurlansky lauds the pacifist Quakers

in Pennsylvania for the kind of relations they established with the

native inhabitants:

that of Pennsylvania, the history of North America […] might have been

different […] In North America they not only tried to teach Quakerism to

the Indians by example, they also directly preached it to them” (p. 64).

This is his example of resistance to colonialism? A case of colonialism

by pacifists? WTF?

In the next paragraph, Kurlansky relates how one

Quaker prisoner tried to convince a group of indigenous prisoners of the

merits of pacifism. The latter were skeptical given that as long as the

British and French empires did not turn to pacifism, they would be

exterminated if they did not defend themselves. And on the previous

page, Kurlansky notes that the Pennsylvania colony, while controlled by

the pacifists, “assigned land on the western frontier to the warlike

settlers” whereas colonists from pacifist sects “were given more secure

eastern lands.”

What we have here is a very disturbing, albeit

accurate, picture of nonviolence. The Quaker pacifists do not question

their role as colonizers. On the contrary, they settle on stolen land,

they colonize, they let the non-pacifists do the dirty work on the

western frontier and directly benefit from these acts of genocide, they

unquestioningly carve out a niche in an oppressive system while trying

to shelter themselves from the conflict generated by that oppression.

And what’s more, they choose a position of moral superiority with

respect to the natives, *preaching* to them and trying to convert them.

Given that the anabaptists as a whole had utterly failed to make a

revolution in their homeland—Europe—and were now taking refuge in North

America deploying

a combination of pacifism and colonization, a little bit of wisdom would

have shown them that they were not the ones with something to teach, but

something to learn. They might have mutinied from colonial society, run

off with the native inhabitants, learned how to live in harmony with

nature and how to fight back against oppression, as did the thousands of

kidnapped Africans and poor Europeans who joined or formed new

indigenous nations, such as the Seminole who waged a partially

successful guerrilla war for independence that lasted decades.

In the end, the Quakers of Pennsylvania were much

like the pacifists during the invasion of Iraq, who did not want there

to be a war, but who also did not want the Iraqis to fight back, did not

want to stop driving cars, and did not want the property of the

companies most directly involved in the war to be smashed or burned to

the ground. They are also, significantly, the main protagonists of

Kurlansky’s chapter on colonization. The Quakers could not convince the

British and French empires to be nonviolent. They cannot be faulted for

this: no one has ever convinced a leading state to be nonviolent, nor an

entire institution to see reason. But some of us do not attempt to

convince brick walls. Our proposal, rather, is to destroy them when they

confine us. The only thing pacifists can accomplish is to convince those

of us who actually care about doing the right thing—and neither states

nor institutions nor abstract forces such as Capital have ever been

included in this category—to disarm ourselves, and refuse the only

possibilities we have of taking apart the structures that dominate us.

Kurlansky cites Cherokee nonviolence as an example

of dignified peacefulness winning over a hostile authority: Chief

Justice John Marshall ruled in favor of Cherokee sovereignty and

Congressman Davy Crockett left Washington in protest of the Removal Act.

“This would have been a great triumph for nonviolence and the rule of

law, except that President Andrew Jackson” et cetera et cetera. The rule

of law has always been on the side of those who rule, and those who rule

have never been on the side of those who are ruled. Institutions have

always been able to overcome the decisions of conscientious individuals.

That is in fact the primary purpose of an institution: to ensure that

rulers need not

cultivate personal ties in order to ensure loyalty, a formula that only

works in hierarchies much smaller than the State.

The Cherokee were forced on the Trail of Tears,

thousands died, and if all their hopes were pinned on the decision of a

judge, they never had a chance. Beyond Kurlansky’s pathetic “except,” we

should also examine Cherokee nonviolence. Many indigenous nations were

far more peaceful than the Cherokee, and they were exterminated

entirely, without any legal ritual or chance for protest. Why were the

Cherokee given this dubious courtesy? Because they were the “civilized

Indians,” who gave up a large part of their culture to imitate European

dress, economy, language, and social institutions. The myth of the

“pristine Indian” or “noble savage” has done almost as much harm as the

myth of the dangerous savage. It is not at all my place to criticize

them for adapting to genocidal pressures. But it is worth pointing out

that this strategy was controversial among the Cherokee themselves, that

it was a strategy designed to accept cultural genocide in an attempt to

avoid the loss of their homeland or their complete extermination, and

that this strategy failed.

The Cherokee won their first defensive war against

British invasion, but they lost the second war, and the British burned

many villages in the aftermath. Subsequently, most of the Cherokee

decided to assimilate on the premise that they were not powerful enough

to resist. They opted for what Kurlansky characterizes as nonviolence

out of pragmatism, but also out of weakness and defeatism—in an attempt

to stay safe, not realizing that no one is safe from the State. They

also, and this is no small detail, fought alongside the British against

the indigenous nations allied with the French during the Seven Years

War, and then they fought alongside the (white) Americans—led by none

other than Andrew Jackson—to put down a rebellion by the Creek in 1814,

which was part of a larger indigenous uprising against settler expansion

organized by Tecumseh.

In conclusion, Cherokee nonviolence was a blatant

failure, and rather than a decision based on pure principle, it was a

decision that came on the heels of military defeat and that entailed

economic, cultural, and military collaboration with the conquerors.

Kurlansky claims that

nonviolent resistance by indigenous people, leaving unanswered the

question as to whether this would have worked.” (p. 65).

This is false. On countless occasions, indigenous people ran away rather

than fight, they protested attempts to steal their land, they gave gifts

to European settlers and sought reconciliation, they avoided

participation in imposed slavery, they sang in the face of firing

squads, and on and on. These peaceful tactics had their usefulness, and

some of them, especially running away, prolonged survival, but none of

them stopped the onslaught. Kurlansky continues: “What is answerable is

that nothing they did try worked.”

It is remarkable that this bestselling author, who

makes a considerable amount of money spreading the gospel of peace, has

the gall to call indigenous resistance a failure. Kurlansky talks as

though indigenous people are extinct and their struggles are all lost.

Indigenous people are still in struggle. Many battles they have fought

throughout history slowed the assault of European settlers and won small

pockets of autonomy, some of which they still hold on to today.

Indigenous people made tough choices about how to

resist, and those choices shaped their possibilities for resistance

today. Sometimes they resisted with peaceful means, and sometimes they

took up arms and fought back. There is no objective criterion for

measuring that resistance, especially for those of us who are not

indigenous and therefore stand outside looking in. At certain moments,

one must choose between dignity and survival, and what may seem like a

suicidal course of action was necessary in the struggle for freedom, or

what may seem like capitulation was necessary for living to be able to

fight another day. Hopefully we can be forgiven for criticizing Cherokee

resistance, since it included going to war for the colonizer against

those who were fighting back. It is important to differentiate between

criticizing as an outsider and criticizing as someone directly affected

or directly involved, but in the end we must always maintain our

critical capacities and be true to our own point of view. Part of this

means

choosing what inspires us, but it is hard to see why Kurlansky is

inspired by the choices made by the Cherokee. It seems his admiration is

predicated on the erasing of indigenous struggles that continue to this

day, and that have included a diversity of tactics within combative

methods.

But Kurlansky does not talk about these struggles.

He instead shifts his gaze to another continent and relates how one

Maori leader, Te Whiti, led a campaign of nonviolent resistance to the

theft of indigenous lands in Parihaki, a small part of the northern

island of what is now called New Zealand. At least he is honest enough

to admit that the campaign failed.[85] Te Whiti was arrested,

the Maori who resisted alongside him removed, and all their lands

stolen. But Kurlansky arrives at a curious conclusion.

might the Spanish and French have done in the face of nonviolent

resistance on Hispaniola? What if there had been a Te Whiti among the

Cherokee or the Iroquois?”

(p. 71).

It is hard to grasp what he imagines might have

happened had there been more Te Whitis among the Maori. According to his

own account, resistance in Parihaka continued after Te Whiti’s arrest,

so evidently the campaign was not dependent on him. What happened to

these other people who were doing the same thing Te Whiti did? They were

arrested and dragged away, just as he was, and they lost their lands,

just as he did.

What would have happened had there been a Te Whiti

among the Cherokee? If the history of the original Te Whiti is anything

to go by, then the Cherokee would still have lost their lands, but maybe

fewer of them would have taken up arms against native people in

resistance, which, in the best possible scenario, would

have meant that Tecumseh and the Creek would have won more battles

against the settlers. A happy outcome indeed, although not a victory for

nonviolence. More probable, though, is that Andrew Jackson would have

just killed the Cherokee Te Whiti.

And if there had been a Te Whiti among the

Haudenosaunee (the Six Nations, referred to by settlers as the

Iroquois)? They would probably have less land than they have today, as

they saved themselves from extermination in part through effective armed

resistance and in part by effectively playing different colonial powers

off one another. More recently, a Te Whiti might have kept them from

renewing indigenous resistance against the Canadian state through their

successful armed standoff at Oka in 1990. But they might have had the

consolation of being mentioned favorably in books by rich white

journalists.

The Maori have survived, and some of them continue

to resist colonization. Kurlansky claims that “Te Whiti and his movement

in Parihaka are credited with stopping a war of genocide that would have

meant the end of the Maori people” (pp. 70–71) but true to form he

provides neither citation nor argument to back this up. On the whole,

Maori resistance to colonization was armed and combative, both before

and after Te Whiti. They did not make it easy for the European colonists

to take away their lands. Their survival is a consequence of the

totality of their choices of resistance, along with other factors. It is

hard to make hypotheses with history, but a contemporaneous example

shows that not taking up arms is no guarantee for safety or survival.

Around the same time as the Maori were being colonized, the peaceful

Tasmanians were exterminated to the last man, woman, and child.

Mark Kurlansky does not conduct any comparative

analysis. He does not look into whether the Maori in Parihaka retained

more of their lands than in regions of armed resistance. He does not

investigate the possibility that what the peaceful Maori gained, if

anything, was the consequence of the authorities trying to stave off

armed resistance by rewarding peacefulness. Many times in history,

governments have conceded minor victories to peaceful movements because

they feared that not-peaceful movements would grow; these are,

therefore, victories achieved through

a diversity of tactics, because without the presence of the scary

radicals, the government would have no need to bargain with the harmless

pacifists.

If Kurlansky cannot make any of the distinctions

mentioned, the only honest conclusion to his research is that Maori

survival was won by the diversity of methods the Maori employed, from

shooting colonists to peacefully plowing the lands they had usurped. But

Kurlansky is not interested in honesty, he is interested in proving his

preconceived notions.

Kurlansky’s take on the Holocaust is even more

dishonest. He makes the very good point, backed by actual research, that

the Allied governments were not at all interested in stopping the

Holocaust, and that before the war Allied governments and industrialists

actively supported the fascists in the interests of profit and

anti-Communism (or in the case of Spain and Italy, their crusade against

the anarchists). World War ii, as Kurlansky rightly shows, was only a

“just war” in the most warped, patriotic of imaginations. But his

preconceived conclusion, that nonviolence was the answer both to fascism

and to the Holocaust, is seriously flawed. “Contrary to popular postwar

claims, the Holocaust was not stopped by the war. In fact, it was

started by it” (p. 135). Kurlansky tries to prove this point by showing

that the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews was put into effect after the

war had begun. But he makes no argument to show that the war caused the

Nazis to institute the Holocaust. The simple fact that one thing came

first does not make it the cause. He mentions that before the plan to

start death camps, the Nazis pondered the idea of deporting all the Jews

to Madagascar, but the plan could not be enacted because the war

disrupted the possibility for mass deportation. The reader is left to

imagine that if World War ii had been averted, the European Jews might

have been saved. However, Kurlansky himself mentions that the Madagascar

plan was formulated after the war had already begun, meaning it was

never very serious since it was impractical in the moment it was

suggested. Furthermore, mass deportation is still an act of genocide,

and hardly a favorable outcome.

A few pages earlier (pp. 131–132), he notes that

already in the 1920s, “Hitler had made clear […] his intention to invade

France, take Austria and Czechoslovakia, and destroy ‘inferior races’.”

At that moment, this little bit of information helps Kurlansky make his

point that Western support for Hitler counteracted the Allied attempt to

avoid war. But just a few paragraphs later, he ignores how the death

camps are consistent with the earliest formations of Nazi ideology,

formulated in peacetime. In Kurlansky’s argument, it is logical that the

Nazis went to war despite a policy of appeasement, because they were

promising war as far back as the 1920s, yet it is a mere coincidence

that the Nazis began exterminating non-Aryans, something they also

promised to do in the 1920s, since we are meant to believe that the

Nazis could only have conceived of the Holocaust in the violence of

wartime. Kurlansky tries hard to pass the Holocaust off as a product of

the violence of the war itself: “Only in the isolation and brutality of

wartime […] did Germany dare to turn concentration camps into death

camps” (p. 136). Yet the Nazis had dared to carry out the systematic

murder of political opponents before the war broke out. They had dared

to herd all the Jews, Roma, and others into ghettos in peacetime. Allied

powers like France and Belgium had certainly dared to carry out mass

murder during peacetime in their colonies in Africa and Asia. Peacetime,

it turns out, offers no special protection to those who are powerless.

One might accept the argument that the State constitutes a permanent war

against society, but that analysis tends to render Kurlansky’s

formulation—and nonviolence in general—meaningless.

There is another flaw in Kurlansky’s argument

(such a concise writer, to fit so many errors into two little

sentences!). Kurlansky has to change the meaning of the Holocaust in

some disturbing ways in order to make the claim that the Holocaust

started *after* the war, which is then twisted into the claim that the

war *started* the Holocaust. He only considers the Jewish victims of the

Holocaust. On page 130, he mentions that the Nazi regime had already

begun its campaign of systematically murdering leftists, but evidently

this does not fit into his conception of the Holocaust, despite the

well-known phrase, “first they came for the communists....” And he does

not mention that the Nazis had already begun the ethnic cleansing of

other populations before the war

broke out. These people simply do not count. Literally: Kurlansky uses

the figure of 6 million victims of the Holocaust, which is curious,

because 12 million or more people were killed by the Nazi death machine.

In fact, the figure of 6 million is usually only used by the ignorant

(which clearly does not include Kurlansky) or by those who widely

publicized the figure—Zionists. The motivation of Zionists is clear:

they are interested in creating an exceptional status for the state of

Israel as the homeland of the victims of what is billed as the single

worst episode in human history. This posture requires them to ignore

other acts of genocide and to ignore other victims of the Holocaust. It

has also been convenient to a number of European states that support

Israel and continue some of the same policies used by the Nazis

(including pogroms, deportation, and concentration camps) against

African immigrants and Roma. I doubt Mark Kurlansky is motivated by

homophobia or hatred of the Roma or anyone else. He is only doing what

seems to be inevitable when you believe there is only one method, as

opposed to a diversity of methods, that people can use to liberate

themselves: mashing up the facts, and cherry- picking through history to

find factoids that—if assembled in the right way—seem to support your

argument.

And what was his argument? With all the

misinformation we have to wade through to examine the claim that the

Holocaust was caused by the war, we miss Kurlansky’s central bait and

switch. “Contrary to popular postwar claims, the Holocaust was not

stopped by the war. In fact, it was started by it.” He goes on to argue

the second point without ever backing up his allegation that the war did

not end the Holocaust. Because even if he were right, even if the war

intensified the Holocaust, we would still be left with the conclusion

that armed action put an end to the Holocaust, and that would contradict

Kurlansky’s dogmatic belief that all violence is wrong.

Instead of admitting that the Holocaust was

brought to an end decisively and singularly by the destruction of the

Nazi state, he makes the valid but unrelated argument that the British,

American, and Soviet governments made no attempt to save the Jews (or

Roma, or lesbians, or little “c” communists). But he notes

that many Jewish and Polish resistance organizations repeatedly

pressured the Allied governments to bomb Auschwitz and the other death

camps. That’s odd. Did we read that wrong? Did Kurlansky make a mistake?

Are we sure that these resistance organizations did not ask the Allies

to boycott German products, or to sing songs to the Nazi soldiers and

plant flowers along the train tracks to Treblinka? Why on earth would

those targeted by the Holocaust want a military assault against the Nazi

death machine?

The answer is obvious to everyone. Except to

Kurlansky, who believes that “more Jews were saved by nonviolence than

by violence” (p. 133). What are his examples of nonviolence? The Danish

government helping smuggle several thousand Jews to neutral Sweden,

whose government shelters them. The Bulgarian government refusing to

deport its Jews. Swedish diplomat Wallenberg giving papers to 100,000

Hungarian Jews. A Protestant minister in France helping thousands of

Jewish children escape across the border into neutral Switzerland. Every

single case centers on resistance by a government. Governments that have

massive resources, and borders, and police, and an army. And while these

armies may have been no match for the Nazis, Germany was not about to

open another front in Scandinavia, Switzerland, or Bulgaria when they

were getting trounced in Russia, bogged down in Africa, shot down over

Britain, invaded in Normandy, and confounded if not seriously bruised by

communist and anarchist partisan movements in France, Italy, Belarus,

Greece, and Yugoslavia.

Kurlansky does not give a single example of

grassroots, nonviolent resistance carried out by normal people without

the help of any government. But there are examples. German Jews

protesting. Lithuanian Jews carrying out a massive sit-down against

their deportation. The Jewish councils in several cities refusing to

comply. None of these tactics worked.

Kurlansky claims that “Dictatorships are prepared

to crush armed resistance, it is non-cooperation that confounds them”

(p. 135). This is patently false. The Nazis forced the Jews engaged in a

sit-down onto cattle cars, and they executed non-cooperating council

members, without blinking an eye. The partisan guerrilla movements, on

the other hand, confounded the hell out them.

From the Balkans to the Pyrenees, they sabotaged rail lines, rescued

prisoners, assassinated officers, blew up factories, defeated entire

divisions, liberated cities, and then melted back into the population

that supported them, ready to strike again where least expected. These

partisans saved thousands of Jews and others from the death camps, often

without the support of any government. They liberated trains of

deportees, they hid Jews and radicals. In Poland, one group of partisans

sheltered over 1,000 Jewish refugees, keeping them safe while fighting

back against German occupiers. Interestingly, no one would claim their

actions as a victory for nonviolence, whereas the Swedish government,

protecting Jewish refugees within a set of borders that are defended

with the force of arms, seems to be Kurlansky’s main agent of

nonviolence. And then there are the acts of sabotage and insurrection in

the ghettos and the death camps themselves. Multiple death camps were

entirely or partially destroyed by prisoner insurrections. Given that

these camps were killing thousands of people every week, for every month

that just one of Auschwitz’s crematoria was out of commission, huge

numbers of people were saved. Sobibor and Treblinka were closed down by

rebellion in 1943, early in the extermination phase of the Holocaust,

and some 60 of the Sobibor rebels survived. Kurlansky does not mention

these victories. Instead, he declares the majority of resistance a

failure: “They met their fate either passively or with violent

resistance, either of which responses resulted fairly quickly in their

deaths.” As we have seen, this is another lie. Grassroots nonviolence

did exist, and it was ineffective, whereas violent resistance saved

countless lives. I deal with this resistance more extensively in *How

Nonviolence Protects the State*, and a much better book on the subject

is Yehuda Bauer’s *They Chose Life*.

In one final gamble to prove his point, Kurlansky

turns to the scoundrel’s last resort: statistics. Denmark, which

resisted nonviolently, saved the vast majority of their 6,500 Jews. On

the other hand, France lost 26% of its 350,000 Jews, Netherlands lost

threequarters of its 140,000 Jews, and Poland over 90% of its population

of 3.3 million Jews “despite an armed Polish resistance and armed Jewish

uprisings” (p. 134). He does not explore any contextual

factors. Readers are presented with two facts and two facts alone:

whether a country resisted Nazi occupation violently, and what

proportion of the resident Jews were saved.

I have already pointed out that Denmark’s Jews

were saved by the actions of two governments, which can hardly be

considered peaceful forces, although pacifists have always been more

comfortable with the violence of the oppressor than with the violence of

the oppressed. There are some other factors that deserve mentioning.

Firstly, Denmark, with that impressive statistic, had roughly only 2% as

many Jews to save as did France. If Kurlansky really thinks a nonviolent

France could have secretly shipped 350,000 people across the heavily

militarized 21-mile width of the English Channel—a bit more of a feat

than getting 6,000 across the peaceful two miles of the Oresund between

Denmark and Sweden—then he is welcome to say so in writing, but he would

only be a laughingstock. He is also mistaken if he thinks Great Britain,

or any of the other places France could have sent refugees, would have

accepted hundreds of thousands of homeless Jews.

As it stands, the French partisans and Jewish

resistance achieved an important accomplishment: France had the best

rate of survival of any country with a major Jewish population under

Nazi occupation. They accomplished this by fighting back using a

diversity of methods, from hiding and transporting refugees to attacking

the Nazis. Additionally, a large number of Jews were rescued by Catalan

anarchists fighting with the French partisans. The routes the anarchists

used to smuggle fugitives across the Pyrenees were later used to smuggle

weapons and literature necessary in the fight against the Franco regime.

The French partisan movement had roles for those who wanted to take up

guns or plant explosives, and for those who wanted to heal the wounded,

hide fugitives, pass information and supplies, and encourage

disobedience. It was so effective precisely because these diverse forms

of resistance were made to complement one another. This would have been

impossible if those carrying out the peaceful activities had denounced

those carrying out the combative and more dangerous actions, as

Kurlansky implicitly does.

The Dutch partisan movement was not nearly as

effective

in saving the Jewish population. Kurlansky makes no explanation as to

why, only mentioning that there was “armed resistance” in the

Netherlands. In fact, the Dutch partisan movement was rather small, and

before the war the Dutch Left and anarchists had largely turned to

pacifism, meaning they were much less prepared to resist the Nazis (see

Chapter 9 for more on this topic). What’s more, the Netherlands was one

of the countries with the most developed bureaucracies, so that when the

Nazis occupied the country, they had an easy time locating all the

Jewish citizens.

Poland’s miserable record cannot be explained by

the fact of armed resistance, as Kurlansky tries to do. Any critical

mind would ask, if the presence or absence of armed resistance versus

nonviolent resistance is the key factor, what explains the huge

discrepancy between 25% and 90% of the Jewish population killed in two

countries where armed resistance was overwhelmingly the method of

choice? More cogent explanations include Polish antiSemitism and Nazi

tactics themselves. At the outbreak of World War II, the Poles were

perhaps even more anti-Semitic than the Germans, meaning that the 3.3

million Jews there, unlike in France, could not count on anyone else to

protect them. They would save themselves or perish, and considering how

large a population they were, this was a difficult feat, especially

since they had no safe country to escape to. The Polish Jews who

survived—and the 10% who did are far more than the Danish, Swedish,

Bulgarian, and Dutch Jews combined—did so because they took up arms,

because they killed Nazis, because they blew up a crematorium in

Auschwitz, and because they created liberated zones deep in the forest.

And unlike the Jews in other countries, they had to go up against the

brutal Nazi *Einsatzgruppen*, mobile killing units that were even more

effective than the death camps. The Nazis turned all of Poland into a

killing field, quite unlike the situation in blond Denmark or unoccupied

Bulgaria. Next to the accomplishments of Polish Jews, Kurlansky’s happy

stories about diplomats coming along and whisking children away to

safety is something of a fairy tale.

But since he gives us the example of Denmark as

effective nonviolent resistance to Nazi occupation, we can investigate

his hypothesis more empirically. Who slowed down the Nazi war effort

more? The Danes or the Yugoslav partisans? Did Danish noncooperation tie

down as many Axis divisions as Yugoslav armed resistance? Even for the

times when the size of the liberated area or partisan population in

Yugoslavia was comparable to the size and population of Denmark, the

answer is a resounding “no.” The Nazis took over Denmark with ease (it

was one of the shortest ground campaigns in history), and the soldiers

they left there were mostly busy with dissuading an allied invasion, not

trying to overcome domestic resistance. Throughout World War ii, Denmark

was a great asset for Nazi Germany, serving as an important source of

food, armaments, and raw materials for the war machine. Yugoslavia, or

partisan areas in France such as the Vercors, were not an asset but a

thorn in their side.

“If they had wanted to save the Jews, the best

chance would have been not going to war,” Kurlansky says (p. 136). But

he is living in a dream world. The war was already going on long before

Germany invaded Poland. The Holocaust is one of many histories that show

peaceful means are no defense against those who want to destroy you. It

also shows that there are no good guys and bad guys in a war between

states. Just as Stalin signed a deal with Hitler and Western

industrialists invested heavily in Nazi Germany, the US and British Cold

War regime recruited Nazi and Vichy officials by the hundreds to prop up

their new order. The real heroes of World War II were the dissident

communists, anarchists, Jews, Roma, and dissident Christians who

subverted or openly fought back against occupation (including, on some

occasions, Allied or Soviet occupation at the war’s end) using a

diversity of means.

The major players of World War ii—the Communists,

the Fascists, and democratic capitalists—were all bad guys. They were

all mass murderers, they were all authoritarians, and every single one

of them carried out acts of genocide. Those that won—the Communists and

the democrats—continued to carry out acts of genocide in the decades

after the war.

The atrocities of the Fascists tended to be

gruesomely obvious. The atrocities of the Communists have been made

obvious to those who grew up amidst Cold War propaganda. The atrocities

of the democratic regimes of the West are less visible, though they have

claimed a higher body count than all the rest. The violence of mass

incarceration, the brutality of colonialism, the blood spilled to uphold

imposed economic orders in Algeria, Kenya, South Africa, Korea, Vietnam,

Iraq, and a hundred other countries, are only the beginning. In the era

of the triumph of American-style democracy and capitalism, millions of

people die every year because companies refuse to sell medicine at

affordable prices (which would still be well above the costs of

production). Even more die because very deliberate policies of

colonialism and neocolonialism have robbed food security from almost

everyone on the planet, privatizing land and forcing people to produce

cash crops or turn to factory work when once they fed themselves.

The regime of democracy and capitalism does not

kill with death camps (although concentration camps have been standard

fare). It kills silently, with policies and structural adjustments,

always covered in humanitarian motives. Hannah Arendt argued that the

violence of the Holocaust was “banal” precisely to keep it from being

exceptionalized, turned into something special, spectacular, unique, and

therefore, distant. The holocaust carried out by capitalism has caused

many more deaths, although the violence has been more banal, even easier

to ignore.

The system that organizes and profits from this

killing was imposed by the winners of the Second World War, who

recruited useful Nazi spies and scientists, who protected colonial

regimes in Africa and Asia, who disarmed and slaughtered anticapitalist

partisans in Greece, Italy, France, and elsewhere, and who sided with

the Franco regime to help suppress one of the original antifascist

movements: the Spanish anarchists.

Any discussion of freedom in the Cold War must

start with this understanding. Kurlansky, however, mines the history of

resistance to the Communist regime for examples of nonviolent resistance

without mentioning what exactly freedom from Communism means if the

alternative is Western democracy. He makes some of his typical false

statements and logical magic tricks, such as when he credits the failed

nonviolent resistance in Czechoslovakia in 1968 for the collapse of the

Soviet Union,

without mentioning the Soviet military loss in Afghanistan after a

protracted and bloody struggle in 1989. Let’s look at that again. In

1968, people in Czechoslovakia resist Soviet power nonviolently, but the

Soviets invade and win. In 1989, after years of bloody warfare, the

Soviets lose to armed resistance in Afghanistan. At the end of that same

year and continuing into 1990, Soviet power collapses. What possible

motive can Kurlansky claim, besides dishonesty, for mentioning a

nonviolent movement twenty years before the fall of the Soviet Union,

but staying silent about a major Soviet defeat the same year as the

fall?

When Kurlansky claims that suppressing the Czechs

in 1968 damaged the Soviets’ legitimacy more than when they crushed an

armed Hungarian uprising in 1956, one wonders whom he has in mind. After

the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Revolution, their intentional mass

starvation of peasants, their gulags and polit-isolators, their betrayal

of the revolutionary cause in Spain, their appeasement of the Nazi

regime, and their conservative stance towards revolutionary movements

around the world in the ‘50s, their military suppression of the

revolution in Hungary in 1956 was the nail in the coffin, robbing them

of what little support among critical leftists they still had. It caused

important splits in the Communist Party in Italy and Britain, was

censured by the UN, and was criticized by internationally influential

communists like Camus, Sartre, and E. P. Thompson. I have never heard of

any apologists for Stalin excuse the invasion on the basis of the armed

nature of the uprising, and Kurlansky does not cite any. Except for the

most unrepentant of Stalinists, who just as easily excuse the

suppression of nonviolent Czechoslovakia, nearly everybody believes the

Hungarians were justified in taking up arms.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 awoke a

whole new generation to the jackboot tendencies of the Soviet Union, but

for anyone with a sense of history that government’s legitimacy was

already damaged beyond repair. One thing the nonviolent resistance in

Czechoslovakia did not accomplish was to open space for the organization

of new relations, or shake the myth of Soviet invincibility. By putting

up barricades and seizing weapons, rebels in Hungary did just that. They

defeated the first Soviet

invasion, destroying tanks with molotov cocktails. Russia had to

mobilize a much larger force in order to put down the uprising. But in

the meantime, popular assemblies had spread across Hungary, creating an

important experience in horizontal self-organization. Hungarians’

ability to self-organize, creating something wholly different from the

obedience and servitude of everyday life, went hand in hand with their

decision to forcefully seize space and defend that space.

Kurlansky’s misinformation, however, is benign

next to the central flaw in his Cold War argument. Evidently, he views

the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet regime as the liberation of

the people under that regime, whether in East Germany, Poland, or Russia

itself. In this way, he can view nonviolent resistance as a success. But

the wave of nonviolent resistance that preceded the dissolution of the

Soviet Union was the popular recognition that the Soviet Union was

losing its power to command obedience. This recognition did not spread

on the heels of the failed nonviolence campaign in the Prague Spring of

1968, but on the heels of the Soviet military defeat in Afghanistan.

Nonviolence did not force the Soviet government out of power; it merely

signaled that the game was up. Rather than sending in the military,

which might have triggered a real resistance, the Communist Party elite

decided to stage-manage a regime change. In most of the countries of the

Soviet Union along with several Warsaw Pact countries, the same people

stayed in power, but they were able to multiply that power and enrich

themselves far beyond what was possible under the previous regime. Even

20 years later, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Romania and

other countries are still ruled by elite figures from the Communist

Party, and the wealth gap in those countries has increased dramatically.

The people have been more fully integrated into a cut-throat capitalist

economy, with even fewer social protections. Their lives are still every

bit as controlled by powerful institutions as before, with no

possibility for self-organization. What exactly did nonviolence

accomplish?

Repeating a common pattern, Kurlansky leaves out

another important part of the story. The Berlin Wall fell in November

1989, and with it, the Warsaw Pact and eventually the Soviet Union. The

protest movement in East Germany in late October and November was

nonviolent, and in the end the government decided to let the Wall come

down rather than ordering the military to open fire, as Kurlansky points

out. But he does not look at what was going on immediately prior to the

nonviolent protests. In the previous weeks, crowds in Berlin and Dresden

had rioted, fighting police with their fists, sticks, rocks, and molotov

cocktails. On the heels of Mikhail Gorbachev’s historic visit in early

October 1989, people again took to the streets and rioted. Soldiers were

mobilized, and in preparation they were shown footage, not of Prague ‘68

but of Hungary ‘56 and of Tiananmen Square (which contrary to official

history and pacifist mythology, included major riots, armed resistance,

and the lynching of several soldiers by the crowd). It was clear what

sort of resistance worried Party officials more. The protest movement

that crystallized out of these riots was largely peaceful, even in the

face of arrests and beatings, but it had already expressed a threat and

shown what it was capable of. When General Secretary Honecker prepared

to use the military to put down the movement, moderate Communists in the

Politburo argued that using the military could lead to a fullblown

uprising (read, not peaceful), and they asked Honecker to step down. The

fact that the movement remained peaceful meant that it could be

controlled during the subsequent transition from one form of

authoritarian government to the next.

Mark Kurlansky tells some interesting and

sometimes beautiful stories about nonviolent resistance. The problem is,

he frames those stories as an argument for the superiority of

nonviolence and the inferiority of other methods of struggle. He never

analyzes those other methods, he never makes any but the most

superficial of comparisons, he attributes undesirable outcomes to

violence and desirable outcomes to nonviolence without demonstrating any

chain of causation or exploring contextual factors. Every time he goes

beyond simple storytelling to actual argumentation, he engages in

manipulation, omission, generalization, and pure fabrication.

Kurlansky tells stories that are inspiring but by

no means practical. He does not enter into the details or strategic

thinking

useful for people who participate in actual struggles. One can assume

that the major publishing company that printed off who knows how many

hundreds of thousands of copies of his book was not terribly interested

in encouraging more effective revolutionary movements. I would also

assume that the mass audience consuming the book acquires above all

peace of mind. In these times of increasing social conflict, everyone

will be safer if they hold hands, sing songs, and above all, do not make

war against the Adolf Hitlers and Christopher Columbuses of the day.

Why is it so important for Kurlansky to convince

people of the power of nonviolence? Whatever the reason, his convictions

and his arguments do not come from personal experience in social

movements. Kurlansky is a highly paid journalist and author who has

written for some of the biggest mainstream newspapers and whose

royalties have been signed by some of the biggest publishing companies.

He has not risked or even dedicated his life to the idea he is

comfortably (and profitably) espousing. This does not mean he is a bad

person or that his ideas are automatically invalid. However, when we

debate methods of resistance like nonviolence, we are not engaged in

some disinterested quest for an abstract truth. We are participating in

a struggle in which many people have died, been tortured or imprisoned;

a struggle in which many people’s lives are on the line.

Because experience is the best teacher of lessons

of life and death, it absolutely matters whether someone is talking from

a place of dedicated participation, risk-taking, and sacrifice, or

whether they are speaking from the comfort of an armchair and the safety

of the sidelines.

The Old School

Even though they seem to have diminishing influence despite their

superior dedication, having decisively lost the battle to even define

what is meant by the terms pacifism or nonviolence, I would be remiss if

I did not mention the old school peace activists. In the US and UK,

these are primarily Christian activists such as

Catholic Workers, Plowshares activists, or Christian Peacemakers,

some of them—especially the former—Christian anarchists.

They are nearly the only proponents of nonviolence

who have made any kind of showing in the last couple decades who can

reasonably claim to have a revolutionary vision. They also tend to be

more dedicated than other proponents of nonviolence, often living in

communal settings, risking their life doing humanitarian work, or going

to prison for protesting on military bases or sabotaging military

equipment.

While I have more differences than similarities

with members of this tendency, I also think they deserve respect. As

such I will limit my criticisms to those that explain why I believe this

tendency does not have answers to the major questions faced by people in

struggle.

Firstly, what this world needs is not more

Christianity. The humanitarian work of anti-authoritarian Christians

only helps Christianity get a better image than it historically

deserves, and unintentionally goes hand in hand with the growing tide of

evangelism or the renewal of the Catholic Church that has been an

instrumental accessory to neocolonialism and the defeat of social

struggles. Especially in Latin America, where such Christian pacifists

are most active, the continuing onslaught of resource extraction

companies and the extension of snitches or paid informants throughout

poor and indigenous communities have been based in part on the erosion

of indigenous or syncretic spirituality, the new influx of converts to

increasingly fanatical churches, and the fundamental Christian view that

the Earth is here for our exploitation and that our lives are only a

passing phase on the way to paradise. Where I currently sit writing

these lines, in an indigenous community in South America in the process

of recovering its lands through direct action, the spread of evangelical

Christianity—and the two new churches built here in recent years are

testament to this—is directly linked by community members in resistance

to the collapse of the struggle within the community (the other major

factor they note is the election of an indigenous mayor for the county).

The community no longer sticks together, and many are seeking individual

economic advancement in European terms over food sovereignty, collective

control of their own land, and the

recovery of their culture. A few years ago, they had forced out the

police and seized several thousand hectares of their traditional land

from a timber company, but the effort to cultivate that land to feed

themselves has stalled. It also seemed likely that they were set to

block a new mine that a transnational wanted to build in the region, to

the absolute detriment of their water and air, but now a part of the

community (including the Christians and the new mayor) favors the mine

in the name of jobs and progress. Even the extension of a much more

progressive vision of Christianity would mean the further erosion of the

community and the completion of the genocidal, colonial project.

Christianity is inextricably tied to its history

of domination. These links are even apparent among some of its more

progressive proponents. A large part of radical Christian “solidarity”

is no more than charity reproducing preexisting power inequalities, and

some of it so paternalistic as to border on racism. This racism often

plays out in the imposition of nonviolence on other people’s

struggles.[86]

Secondly, Christian pacifists suffer from a

longstanding lack of strategy, probably due to the fact that they view

struggle in predominantly moral terms, and simply by enacting struggle

they achieve their primary goal. The effects of their lack of strategy

are apparent in how they—perhaps the most dedicated and potentially

inspiring proponents of nonviolence—have been so marginalized and

excluded from the very definition of the practice of nonviolence.

Nonviolence has come to mean press conferences, massive protests, media

strategies, an occasional sit-in, trying to get people all around the

world to withdraw the same amount of money from their bank accounts on

the same day, flooding the streets while dressed in the same color,

“tweeting,” snitching, and punching or unmasking people who are trying

to smash banks. Most current proponents of nonviolence do not really

know what is meant by turning swords into plowshares (depending on their

country of origin they may not even know what a plowshare is), they

would consider it outlandish and even a little pathological to pour

their blood on a jet fighter, they might consider it violent to

deliberately

crash a jeep into a nuclear submarine being prepared for launch, they

generally do not talk about “living in community,” and they probably do

not know where the nearest nuclear weapons facilities are nor how they

might go about sabotaging the instruments of war.

In other words, thoroughly outmaneuvered by a much

more savvy kind of nonviolent activist, Christian pacifists have ended

up as the reclusive, eccentric, and embarrassing uncle of the

nonviolence family. They have not been terribly useful for movement

politicians seeking power, and they have been something of a nuisance to

government, so they have been largely abandoned.

The lack of strategy is also evident in the

battles where they have dedicated most of their energies. In the US, two

of the movements that have had the greatest participation by Christian

pacifists have been the movement to close the US Army School of the

Americas and the immigrant solidarity movement around the US-Mexico

border. I talk more extensively about the first movement in *How

Nonviolence Protects the State*, but suffice it to say that in its

decades of existence, it has not significantly impacted the training of

Latin American soldiers and paramilitaries. Several countries have

stopped sending soldiers to the school, but as a pragmatic policy

decision by new leftwing governments that were brought into power by

domestic social movements, and not by nonviolent activists in the US.

The socialist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, for example, was

not working towards peace when it stopped participating in the soa. It

was simply eliminating a risk, given that the soa had in its history

trained plenty of military officers who went on to launch coups against

leftwing governments. Like his colleagues on the Right, Chavez used

paramilitaries and the military against his critics and opponents (nor

did he have any problem with military coups). The difference was he did

not have them trained at the soa.

In the movement to stop the deaths of immigrants

along the US-Mexico border, Christian pacifists have been major

participants. But if their intervention had been based on some concept

of strategy rather than one of charity or “bearing witness,” they could

have achieved some major gains that have so far remained out of

reach. Unbeknownst to most Americans, helping someone cross the border

illegally even by just giving them directions has been heavily

criminalized and can result in prison sentences. By “putting their

bodies on the line,” they could probably win the effective

decriminalization of abetting border crossers within a matter of years.

Given that Christian pacifists overwhelmingly come from the most

privileged and normalized demographic in the country—older white

Christians—if just a few of them were to face long prison sentences

every year for the simple act of giving an immigrant directions or a

bottle of water, the government would be hard-pressed to justify its

application of that law. Subsequently, solidarity with immigrants—and

the situation of the very people crossing the border—would become

substantially easier.

But in general, when Christian pacifists choose to

break what they consider an immoral law and go to prison, the objective

is not to delegitimize the State’s repressive apparatus. The objective

is the prison sentence itself, which confers moral fulfillment on the

lawbreaker for “bearing witness.” Within this logic, it does not make

sense to risk prison and then appeal the prison sentence because the

activist in question has already made a decision to go to prison. This

attitude legitimizes prison as a neutral terrain where moral growth can

occur—the proverbial lion’s den—and it legitimizes the judicial

apparatus by distinguishing between good laws and bad laws, hiding the

coercive nature of law in itself (by this I mean that even a supposedly

good law is morally corrupting because people follow it to receive some

social reward and to avoid punishment).

Such a practice also creates a peculiar—some might

say false—vision of struggle and psychologically separates the

nonviolent prisoners from all other prisoners. Only nonviolent activists

of this order can choose when to go to prison. In many cases, by

choosing their crime they can even choose the length of their prison

sentence, a sort of tailor-made moral test. This is a completely

different reality from the one faced by other prisoners, who generally

don’t even know when they will be released.

The Christian pacifist method also eliminates the

specter of repression. By choosing discrete moments to break the law and

surrendering themselves to legal punishment, they do not have to face

the blows of police frame-ups, raids, and arrests. They do not have to

worry too much about being spied on or having the State learn of their

plans because they only attempt to sabotage the machinery of war on a

symbolic level (in court cases, some of them have openly argued for

lighter sentences because the damage they caused by hammering on this or

that missile was “symbolic” in their own words). They really do not need

to know how to survive repression, because practically the only

consequences they face are the ones they choose. What they are involved

in is a morality play. If they ever become more than a nuisance to the

“Masters of War,” they will have no practice or experience that allows

them to withstand the sort of methods the police use against those who

enter into implacable conflict with the existing system.

9. Seizing the Space for New Relations

The question of whether our tactics are violent is a waste of time.

Assigning such labels is the job of moralists, journalists, or cops, and

frankly we should not care how they

decide to categorize us.

It is time to start asking a new question of the

tactics we use in the struggle for a better world: are they liberating?

Taking over a space in a world in which we are only meant to be obedient

laborers or passive consumers always comes with the euphoria of a taste

of freedom, that newfound sensation that lets us know, in case it wasn’t

already obvious, that we are not free within the false peace of

democracy and capitalism. This can happen when we kick the police off

our blocks and start a party in the streets, when we occupy a park or

plaza to hold an assembly, or when we take

over our school or workplace—a site designed to serve as a sort of

prison for us—and decide how to transform it. When people who are

trained to be victims fight back against those who are given the social

privilege to harm them (whether those are cops, frat boys, husbands,

businessmen, soldiers, or others), they often feel a similar sense of

liberation.

The moment the rebel becomes victorious and

decides to continue to attack their former oppressor in the form of an

authoritarian persecution, they belie their anti-authoritarian

pretensions. If we occupy our workplaces only to keep them running in

pursuit of the same objectives of productivity, if we make the mistake

of becoming our own bosses, the self-exploitation of endless meetings

dedicated to profit margins shows clearly that we have lost our way. The

criterion of liberation is useful at all points in the struggle, whereas

the criterion of nonviolence only causes confusion. It is no coincidence

that those who have substituted the question of violence for that of

liberation have ended up allying with the forces of coercion and order,

whereas throughout history, those who have struggled for total

liberation have not tried to annihilate their enemies when they had the

power to do so.

In Red Cloud’s War from 1866–1868, or the Mapuche

struggle against Spanish colonizers from the 1500s all the way to the

1800s (and continuing nowadays against the Chilean and Argentine states

that first successfully usurped their lands in the 1880s), indigenous

nations took up arms against a hostile power that wanted to dominate or

annihilate them. This was nothing like a war between states. The Lakota

and Cheyenne in the first case, and the Mapuche in the second, were not

authoritarian societies and they were not fighting to dominate the

European settlers, only to defend their freedom and independence. The

nonviolent hypothesis (and they never pose it as a hypothesis, because

that would require testing it against the historical record) claims that

violence begets more violence, but these two histories prove that

hypothesis flatly wrong. By taking up arms and killing a few thousand

genocidal, rapacious, greedy settlers who had invaded them, the Lakota,

Cheyenne, and Mapuche did not open a Pandora’s Box, create an

authoritarian system, or start using violence more often

against one another. On the contrary, they won peace and the ability to

live in freedom, with their own culture on their own lands. In the first

case, that peace lasted for less than a decade before the aggressive US

government invaded again, this time successfully. In the case of the

Mapuche, their victory over the Spanish led to 300 years of

independence, marked by small intermittent wars or skirmishes in which

they defended against new incursions. Thanks to their determination to

fight back, the Mapuche struggle is still alive today, and using

protests, blockades, direct action, farming, sabotage, arson, and

sometimes guns, they have succeeded in winning back a part of their

territory from the landlords and international timber, mining, or energy

companies that occupy them. In their reclaimed lands, they practice

their culture and their traditional collective agriculture, putting

liberated social relations (back) into use.

In all the reputed victories of nonviolence, its

proponents never claim a fundamental change in social relations, a

change at the economic level, or a clear and generalized step away from

the despoliation of capitalism or the domination of government. Those of

us who favor a diversity of tactics can lay claim to such a social

transformation. There has not been any final victory. As long as

capitalism and the State continue to exist, none of us are free. But in

a number of important battles we have strengthened our struggle for

freedom, temporarily liberated a space from state control, and put

communal or horizontal social relations into practice. These battles

constitute important lessons that we need to carry with us as part of

our collective memory.

Because so many revolutions have been perverted in

the past, we need to speak clearly. Freedom does not mean winning a new

ruler or a new ruling class. Freedom does not mean winning a new system

of government or organization, no matter how ideal. Freedom is not a

final, perfected state that everyone must be convinced to accept.

Freedom is a process that never ends. Freedom is the ability to shape

our own lives, in concert with our peers and our surroundings. In a free

world, all social organization arises from the ground up from the

efforts of those who formulate it, and no organization is permanent

because every successive generation

must be able to change and renew its surroundings.

Many anarchists speak of revolution as a rupture

with the present order. A revolution that imposes a new order erases all

that it has gained. Revolution must be a step towards a society that is

in permanent revolt, that accepts no masters and that constantly

recreates itself, not as a homogeneous body but as a collectivity held

together by bonds of mutual aid, voluntary association, and harmonious

conflict.

Some have argued that changing the world must

occur as a gradual evolution or incremental victory. I think this view

is deeply flawed. Complex systems move from one stable state to another

in sudden shifts. Harmony in nature is not an unchanging state of

peacefulness but a field of change and conflict that holds itself

together in dynamic tension. The ideals of mutuality and

selforganization or self-sustenance from the old vision of harmony

remain valid, but the ideals of changelessness and peacefulness do not.

Conflict, it turns out, is a good thing, and destruction, as Bakunin

pointed out about 150 years ago, is a creative force.

Not even evolution is a gradual evolution but a

process marked by periods of placidity that change in sudden shifts.

When the complex system in question is a society in which an immense

amount of power is concentrated in very few hands, and the governing

structures try to suppress or harness every force that threatens their

imposed equilibrium, it’s a pretty safe bet that any real change will

occur in a sudden, dramatic, and violent shift, whereas anything that

appears to be part of an incremental victory, a step in the right

direction, is simply a reform that has already been harnessed by the

ruling system without upsetting its equilibrium. Of course, the forces

that will cause the rupture will have been hundreds of years in the

making. The visibly identifiable moment of rupture may come and go in

just a few years, but we will only develop the strength to overcome the

current power structures and the wisdom to create a better world through

a lifetime of struggle. And after destroying those power structures it

will take generations to decontaminate the planet (thanks to capitalism,

some places will never be decontaminated), to unlearn authoritarian,

racist, and patriarchal behaviors, to heal from millennia of

accumulated trauma, and to learn to take care of ourselves from within a

rich web of relationships, both with other human beings and with the

Earth itself.

A part of the theory of rupture is the recognition

that things will get worse before they get better, so even though

revolution is a long-term proposition, placing our hopes on incremental

change is illusory. Currently, capitalists hold every country on the

planet hostage, and they always play (with our lives) where the odds are

best. Any country with a strong popular struggle is a country where

capitalists face higher risks and lower profits. One of the reasons why

Greece did not experience such an intense development of capitalism that

might have bought off its population with the hollow consumerist

prosperity that reigns in Germany or Italy is because social struggles

remained strong there, so large, fixed capital investments were too

risky.

If we start to struggle effectively against the

control that the rich have over our lives and the alienation, pollution,

and exploitation they inflict on us, we will be rewarded with poverty as

capital flight sends investors to places where the people are easier to

dominate.

Precisely because states are not as flexible or

mobile as Capital, they are so vindictive in their repression of social

struggles. The territory and the people ruled over by a state are the

only thing it has, and it’ll be damned if it lets them go free. For that

reason, stronger struggles also mean stronger repression, as the police

or even the military try to intimidate us, jail us, torture us, or

massacre us into compliance. This is another cause for things getting

worse before they get better. In order to overthrow the existing power

structure, we not only need to get strong enough to threaten it –

something that has happened relatively few times in the last twenty

years; we need to get strong enough to survive the starvation capitalism

will inflict on us and to overcome the brutality the State will unleash

on us.

The Spanish Civil War provides one invaluable

history of revolution. In July 1936, General Francisco Franco launched a

military coup with the intention of imposing a fascist government to

annihilate the revolutionary movements that had been rocking

the country. But the military was stopped cold in about half of the

country, leading to the collapse of state power in certain regions, the

outbreak of a revolution, and a civil war that finally ended with a

fascist victory in 1939. How did this come about?

The greater part of the rebellious workers were

associated with the cnt anarchist labor federation, which had over a

million members. They had armed themselves over the previous years and

learned how to use those weapons in bank robberies, skirmishes with the

police, and self-defense against hired thugs and strikebreakers. Due to

this experience, in many parts of the country they were able to defeat

the military in open combat. Although in places like Barcelona, the

fighting was over and the revolution in full swing in a matter of days,

it is important to note that anarchists there had been building up their

ability to fight the State for decades, surviving failed insurrections

in 1909 and 1934, passing through years of dictatorship, repression, and

clandestinity. The revolution, therefore, was both abrupt and gradual.

In some parts of Spain, police and military units

that remained loyal to the elected government stopped the coup, while in

other parts—primarily Catalunya, Valencia, Aragón, and Asturias—it was

armed proletarians. In these areas, the lower classes collectivized the

land and the factories, and they organized volunteer, non-hierarchical

militias to combat the fascists. They created what many saw as the

beginning of a new world, a world outside of and against the

exploitation of capitalism. In cities like Barcelona, workers had the

city running again a few days after the fighting stopped. The workers

collectivized their workplaces—everything from the trams to the

factories, hotels, fishing fleets, and hospitals—kicked out the bosses

and started organizing production on their own, increasing salaries and

benefits, lowering prices in the case of public services like

transportation, and forming delegations to procure materials and arrange

distribution. Throughout Catalunya, the union of medical workers,

primarily anarchists, established several new hospitals and health

centers and provided medical care to everyone, including to small

villages the capitalist healthcare system had never bothered servicing.

In the countryside of Aragón, Catalunya, Valencia,

and

Castile, peasants collectivized the land, they kicked out the landlords

and priests, and they abolished money. Sometimes they arranged the

distribution of food and other goods with vouchers, supplying every

family with as much as they needed while also sending food to the

workers’ militias on the front, and in many cases they created communes

in which people could go into the storehouse and freely take whatever

they needed, writing it down in a notebook for the sake of keeping

track.[87]

In the fight to liberate their villages, the

peasants killed a good number of priests and landlords, a fact some

detractors use to portray them as authoritarian. But these executions

should be contextualized. At the time, the Catholic Church was a major

part of the ruling structure, and it was common practice for priests to

act as snipers and open fire on workers or farmers from the church tower

(this was exactly what sparked the burning of churches in Barcelona

during the “Tragic Week” insurrection of 1909). What’s more, in the

workers’ and peasants’ insurrections between 1932 and 1934 in Casas

Viejas, Figols, and Asturias, peasants simply declared libertarian

communism, burned the land titles, and informed the priests and

landlords that they would be welcome to farm alongside the others and

live in peace, but that they could no longer hold onto their authority.

When the military came in and brutally repressed the communes, it was

those same priests and landlords who gave the military the names of

dozens of radical peasants, leading to their execution. By killing the

most fascistic of the priests and landlords when they rose up in 1936,

the peasants were doing the right thing.

Another example vindicates the strategic choice of

those who took up arms in 1936. Two of the cities with the most

anarchist workers were Barcelona and Zaragoza. In Barcelona, the

anarchists were armed and had already decided on a course of

insurrection. In Zaragoza, the anarchists were generally unarmed and

favored a strategy of union organizing to create a larger union that

could

win improvements gradually. In Barcelona, the anarchists defeated the

military and were able to carry out a revolution. In Zaragoza, the

fascists triumphed in the first days of the coup and lined up all the

radicals and rebellious workers before the firing squad. In a few

months, there were no anarchists left in Zaragoza.[88]

Where the workers and peasants had weapons and

knew how to use them, they were able to seize space and begin creating a

new world. But they did not trust themselves to take their revolution to

its conclusions. There was a great debate among the anarchists about how

to defeat the fascist threat and how to support the revolution.

Unfortunately, those who supported an antifascist common front with

leftwing political parties won the debate. Using the Russian Revolution

as an example, they wanted to avoid becoming authoritarian like the

Bolsheviks. Conscious that they were the strongest force in Catalunya

and Aragón, but fearful of creating an “anarchist dictatorship,” they

deliberately decided not to forge ahead with their vision of an

anarchist revolution. What they did not realize was that the revolution

was being carried out spontaneously by peasants and workers organizing

themselves to meet their own needs, and the anarchists had already done

their part by defeating the armed force of the government. Now they only

had to prevent the revolution from being recuperated by authoritarian

revolutionaries. But the more the cnt delegates dealt with political

parties to organize a common defense against the fascists, the more they

came to see the revolution from the perspective of political power. In

time, they became distanced from the base and began to put the brakes on

the revolution in the name of antifascist unity and the need to win the

war.[89] Other anarchists tried their best to change this

course of action, but the most radical were killed off or repressed by

the reconstituted state. Ironically, the cnt delegates’ desire to avoid

becoming like the Bolsheviks

turned them into bedfellows with the Stalinists.[90]

Although in the beginning, the Communist Party was

a tiny force in the workers’ movement, it soon grew into the dominant

force that controlled the Republican government from behind the scenes.

Because the ussr was practically the only country to send weapons to the

antifascist side, they could dictate policy in Madrid. The fascists had

the generous support of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, along with

clandestine aid from Great Britain, whereas all the other countries

stayed neutral, eager to see Spain’s anarchist menace wiped out. But the

Stalinists also wanted to wipe out this revolutionary menace, just as

they had wiped it out in Russia. And it is important to note that they

did not necessarily want the fascists to lose, so much as they wanted to

prolong the conflict so they could strike a deal with Germany: the

NaziSoviet Non-Aggression Pact. Accordingly, Soviet support was tepid at

best. They sent planes and tanks only in exchange for the Spanish gold

reserves, and organized the International Brigades more to provide

themselves with an underhanded way to kill off Trotskyists, council

communists, and dissident socialists, and to suppress anarchist

communes, than to effectively combat the fascists. They also set up

secret police units and outlawed the volunteer worker militias, another

threat to state authority.

In the end, the anarchist revolution was crushed

by

Stalinist repression and cnt bureaucracy before the fascist troops

finally managed to subjugate the whole country. But the revolution,

insofar as it flourished, provided an inspiring example of liberation

and self-organization that still lives on today, as well as a number of

lessons about the strategies of revolution.

One problem George Orwell mentioned in his *Homage

to Catalonia* was the difficulty of gaining international support for

the revolution in Spain. The Stalinists were the main obstacle to this

support. They controlled the International Brigades to filter

volunteers, to support their own zones of influence, and even to crush

communes and collectives in anarchist areas. Perhaps even more damaging

was their international propaganda. Through the

Communist Parties and affiliated unions in other countries, they spread

misinformation about the ongoing revolution, specifically accusing the

anarchists of being fascist provocateurs, a smear they have modified and

maintained over the years, recently handing it off to the proponents of

nonviolence.

One of the few countries in which Communism had

not become the dominant tendency in the anticapitalist movement after

the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Revolution was the Netherlands.

Like Spain, the Netherlands had a thriving anticapitalist workers’

movement in which anarchists were perhaps the most active, dynamic

current. If the proletariat of any country was poised to give the

Spanish and Catalan anarchists the aid they needed to overcome the

Stalinist repression that ultimately suffocated the revolution and

handed victory to the fascists,[91] it was the Netherlands.

However, after the horrors of World War i, the Dutch anarchist movement

had gone in a decidedly different direction from that of their Spanish

comrades. Antimilitarism became the prime focus, the obsession even, of

the Dutch anarchists, and they made the theoretical and strategic

mistake of confusing antimilitarism with nonviolence. Catalan anarchists

were not so daft. In what started as a general strike in protest of

recruitment for the Second Melillan Campaign in the Rif War, a colonial

war the Spanish military was fighting in northern Africa, anarchists in

Barcelona launched a full-scale insurrection that took control of the

city for a week in 1909. Antimilitarism is even more effective if it is

combative.

Unfortunately, the Dutch anarchists obsessed over

war as the singularly worst feature of capitalism, and they arrived at

the simplistic conclusion that to oppose capitalist war they had to use

nonviolence. Their interpretation of the Russian Revolution followed

these lines: the Revolution was corrupted not because it was taken over

by an authoritarian party, but because it was militaristic, and because

the comrades there had tried to forcefully overthrow the State.

Therefore, when their comrades in Spain took up

arms to stop the fascists, the Dutch anarchists stood by and watched

them be slaughtered, occasionally publishing a criticism of their

militaristic means. On the whole, they did not make any differentiation

between a war among states and a war for freedom from the State, or

between the volunteer militias—in which officers had no special

privileges and were chosen and revoked by the troops—and the

professional army imposed by the Stalinists. Perhaps because of a lack

of information, they did not differentiate features of the Russian

Revolution like the authoritarian Red Army or the murderous secret

police of the Bolsheviks, and liberated anarchist areas in Ukraine,

Kronstadt, and Siberia where there were no pogroms, no gulags, no

torture chambers, and people fought on a voluntary basis.

The Dutch anarchist movement, one of the largest

in

Europe, did not go to fight fascism in Spain. Because Germany and Italy

were using Spain as a training ground, Franco’s victory served as a

green light for war in the rest of the continent. Dutch antimilitarism

was powerless to stop it. The radicals that would constitute the Dutch

underground, thanks to their nonviolent past, were notably less

effective. The Allies successfully used World War ii to wipe out

anticapitalist movements across Europe, in some instances massacring

radical partisans at the war’s end (perhaps, and this is a subject for

future study, they were directly following the example set by Stalin in

Spain). Across the continent, the war was followed by decades of social

peace in which revolutionary movements were absent and the capitalists

increased their power and their wealth exponentially. The Dutch

anarchist movement fell apart, and the antimilitarist current, once

immense, gradually gave up all its revolutionary principles and social

critiques, adopting reformist politics and eventually fading into

oblivion, as seems to be the fate of nonviolent

movements.[92]

There were similar experiences of anarchist

revolution in the Shinmin Province of Manchuria that thrived for a few

years and was finally crushed early in World War ii by the combined

forces of the Japanese imperialists, the Soviet Union, and the Maoists,

although the only detailed sources are in Korean; and of liberated areas

defended by anarchist partisans in Ukraine and central Siberia that

thrived for years during the Russian Revolution.

Today’s examples of liberating space and taking

steps towards a revolution are less grandiose, but they are far more

useful to the present situation.

In the insurrection in Greece in December 2008,

hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, attacked police,

burned banks and police stations, and occupied or destroyed government

buildings. In the months afterwards, the reality in many cities had

changed. Groups of neighbors organized themselves in assemblies and

began supporting one another in the face of economic hardship, or they

took over parking lots and turned them into gardens without asking

permission from anyone. Autonomous base unions ransacked the offices of

their employers and forced them to relinquish back pay or improve

conditions. Students prevented the implementation of repressive laws or

austerity measures in the universities. Artists occupied commercial

theaters, and anarchists took over abandoned buildings to start new

social centers. Rural communities fought against garbage dumps, dams, or

other development projects.

All of these cases in which the status quo was

interrupted and new social relations were being put into practice were a

direct result of the seizing of space. The ability of common people to

seize space hinged entirely on their capacity to defeat the police in

open confrontation and wrest control of the streets away from the State.

Throughout 2009 and 2010, the Greek government had the martial ability

to suppress any one of these experiments in freedom, but doing so would

have risked sparking another round of clashes and riots that would have

further undermined its authority and reduced the profits of its

financial backers. The possibility we have

of creating a new world rests on our ability to fight.

A similar example arose in an entirely different

context: Oaxaca, Mexico. When, on June 14, 2006, the police tried to

crush a teachers’ strike that had occupied the center of Oaxaca City for

several weeks, most of Oaxacan society fought back: teachers, students,

workers, and indigenous. They defended themselves with slingshots,

powerful fireworks, rocks, molotov cocktails, and barricades. In a

common pattern, peace activists and would-be movement leaders tried to

describe the movement as nonviolent, but as in Egypt, any claims of

nonviolence originating from within the rebellion simply meant that they

did not have any weapons other than these. But they used them with

determination and bravery, fending off the police and paramilitary, and

occupying much of the state of Oaxaca for six months. In that occupied

space, they created assemblies and collectives, challenged the

commercialization of indigenous culture, overcame the patriarchal

dynamics that would have relegated women to the role of second-class

participants, and created an entire microcosm of self-organization.

Their ability to accomplish this is inextricable from their decision to

fight back against the police and to hold the streets even after over a

dozen people had been killed by live ammunition. When the Mexican

government sent in the military, would-be movement leaders who had

created a bureaucracy within the appo—the Popular Assembly of the

Peoples of Oaxaca—counseled nonviolence and succeeded in spreading fear,

convincing people that they could not win and had to take down the

barricades. But everything they accomplished in that half year was due

to their ability to seize and defend space.[93]

On a much smaller scale (and for that reason

perhaps more inspiring for people who are unlikely to experience an

insurrection where they live like the ones in Greece or Oaxaca), we have

the example of the squatted social centers in Europe. In these social

centers, anticapitalists can hold meetings, debates, film evenings,

dinners, performances, concerts, and parties, or set up libraries, hack

labs, workshops, free stores, gyms, self-defense groups, alternative

medicine and therapy centers, gardens, and bike repair shops, animated

by a spirit of mutual aid and solidarity rather than profit and

alienation. And whether in Berlin, Amsterdam, Torino, or Barcelona,

these social centers have preserved their autonomy and defied state

regulation thanks to their tradition of self-defense, fighting back

against state attempts to evict or institutionalize them. In 1986 and

1987 in Hamburg, there were major riots when the government announced

plans to evict the Hafenstraße squats, and anonymous supporters of the

squat even firebombed several major department stores (at night, when

they were closed), causing millions of dollars in damage. The damage to

the city’s image was so bad, the mayor resigned.

In 1996, when Barcelona police evicted the squat

Cine Princesa, squatters rioted for hours in the city center, forcing

authorities to think twice before evicting future squats. A mostly

nonviolent resistance centered on lockdown tactics prevented the

eviction of the rural Barcelona squat Can Masdeu in 2002, though we

should not forget the anonymous supporters who trashed a McDonalds and

other businesses in the city center.[94] In later years police

quickly learned how to circumvent nonviolent lockdown tactics, which

have not been successful on any other occasion,

nor do they constitute a solid threat for authorities, as do riots.

Throughout Europe’s squat scenes, nonviolent defense tactics have spread

since the late ‘90s, while forceful resistance has progressively

disappeared. In the new situation, city governments are able to evict or

regulate squats at will. With nonviolence as their ally, squatters are

defenseless on all but a symbolic level.

The spread of capitalism around the world has been

accomplished by a symphony of fundamentally military operations. The

smooth functioning of capitalism requires the effective police

occupation of a territory. What it all comes down to is that in order to

be exploited and ruled, we must be deprived of everything. The process

of deprivation has taken hundreds of years, but it is realized in an

ever more intensive way. By force of arms and leaving a trail of bodies,

the State has enclosed communal lands, privatized the forests and the

water, professionalized traditional skills—like healing, midwifery, or

teaching—within exclusive institutions, and punished unlicensed

practitioners, asserted its control over public spaces and limited the

ways we can use them, criminalized autonomous networks of exchange, and

imposed regulations that favor big industry, making self-sufficiency,

food sovereignty, or artisanal handicrafts all but impossible.

The citizen of a prosperous democracy must be

surrounded by spectacles of *having*, without really being able to

directly affect their surroundings or having control over anything. The

only activities permitted are buying and selling. The cityscape in its

entirety is dedicated to consumption. Cities are increasingly being

designed without spaces of encounter or public space, and even what is

public is owned by the State. Trying to change just the surface of this

carefully arranged ensemble is punished as vandalism. Acquiring a legal

right to any bit of space can only come about through

purchase—everything is reduced to its status as property—and even then,

those who can afford it must put it to an economically productive use,

following the accumulative logic of capitalism and private property,

because governments levy taxes on ownership. Often, that taxation is

specifically calculated to put “unproductive” property back

into market circulation.[95]

The only way to alter this world, insulated by

invisible layers of protection, as though frozen in glass, is to break

something.

And the only way to open up space to create

something wholly new and sustaining is to seize that space, to disrupt

the control of the agents of law and order, and to smash through the

asphalt.

It is also worth noting how versatile capitalism

is at coopting initiatives that seek to provide an alternative.

Capitalism makes sure that nothing is free, but there are always plenty

of options for renting or buying. People can encourage whatever

different kind of lifestyle they want, as long as that lifestyle pays

the rent. All of the means we are presented with for gathering together,

for building a community, for creating, sharing, and communicating, must

rely on the logic of accumulation, and at some point pass through the

activity of buying and selling.

Eating local, countercultural movements like punk

or hip-hop, environmentalism, or even the idea of the social center or

the anarchist bookfair, can all become the latest consumer fad tolerated

or even encouraged by capitalism. Local food becomes another overpriced

market niche; punk or hip-hop are absorbed by major record labels and

give rise to big companies selling the fashion accessories while the

music loses its political content; environmentalist organizations

quietly begin applying the factor of development as its chief

criterion, replacing the question “How

can we save this forest?” with “How can we save a part of this forest

while allowing the companies that have invested in it to continue making

a profit?”; and social centers or bookfairs cease to orient themselves

towards the opening of a space for the sharing of ideas and

conversations about struggle and instead reduce all their operations to

the central question of how to pay rent, a conundrum that is usually

answered through the selling of products.

When the participants of a struggle who engage in

creative acts—the very acts that capitalism can co-opt and turn a profit

off of—wholeheartedly embrace the destructive parts of the struggle,

they create a force that cannot be easily recuperated. The negation of

the current system, the commitment to destroy that which oppresses us,

and a practice of attacking power allow all of those creative acts that

might otherwise be mere lifestyle choices or even entrepreneurial

initiatives to hold on to their revolutionary potential.

In sum, a combative practice, by which I mean the

use of sabotage, a capacity for self-defense, an ability to confront the

forces of law and order, and a determination to attack the existing

power structures, allows people in struggle to seize space in which the

seeds for a new world can begin to take root, and helps prevent those

experiments in freedom from being co-opted by the dominant system.

The need to create new social relations also has

an immediate aspect that cannot be resolved in a future utopia. We don’t

fight against the present system because we expect to one day be

rewarded with a better world. The State is so powerful, it is very

possible that we will never win, that capitalist civilization will make

the planet uninhabitable or that new technologies will make revolt or

even simple transgression impossible. Or, less dramatically, that we

continue to fail in our revolts and we have to put up with this

miserable system forever.

Without creating any false hopes, I think it is

important to fight to win, but much more immediate than the question of

the future is the fact that many of us fight for our lives, that

struggle is survival and that no life worthy of living can be had in

complicity with a society that steals everything that is ours and gives