Our Tragic Flaw

This is a continuation of my review of Peter Gelderloos' 2007 book, How Nonviolence Protects the State (see Part 1 and Part 2). I have chosen to devote considerable space to a critical review of this work not because it represents a formidable challenge to nonviolence in itself, but because it appears to collect under one title many of the grievances and frustrations of militant activists toward those who advocate nonviolent tactics. To the extent that Gelderloos captures these concerns and articulates their rationale, this review aims to clarify misunderstandings, and show a way forward that avoids the pitfalls Gelderloos mistakenly ascribes to nonviolence as a whole.

Here I will examine the claims of his third chapter, "Nonviolence Is Statist." Gelderloos begins with the obvious: "Put quite plainly, nonviolence ensures a state monopoly on violence." He concludes, therefore, that "Pacifists do the state's work by pacifying the opposition in advance."

Not for the first time, Gelderloos has willfully conflated nonviolence with pacification and passivity, both words strongly associated with submission-to-authority. There is nothing submissive, pacificatory, or passive about revolutionary nonviolence (the only kind worth talking about, in my opinion). It's absolutely true that a position of nonviolence concedes all violence to the state, of course. But revolutionary nonviolence embraces and enables strategies of resistance, noncooperation, and diversion of resources that systematically weaken not only state power itself, but violence in general.

There is a disturbing circularity to Gelderloos' logic here and throughout this work. If you believe that nonviolence is ineffective, as Gelderloos argues both in Chapter 1 and 5, then none of the arguments favoring nonviolence make any sense. But if you disagree with Gelderloos and believe nonviolence can be effective, then nonviolence isn't racist, patriarchal, or statist. So Gederloos, having argued (inconclusively) that nonviolence is ineffective, spends the rest of the book beating his dead horse with every epithet he can think of.

Calling nonviolence statist, for example, completely misstates the case. No serious proponent of nonviolence wishes to support the state, especially the state's oppressive use of violence, as Gelderloos well knows. According to him, however, nonviolence is totally ineffective, bound to fail, and thereby supports state violence whether it wants to or not. By this logic, however, you might just as easily announce that the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s were actually fascists, since their failed anarchism "resulted" in the ascendency of Franco.

Gelderloos argues in this chapter that, contrary to the claim that nonviolence is the state's biggest nightmare, the state enjoys nonviolent activism (because it does their pacifying work for them) and really fears violence. I believe this is probably true, but trivial. Just as Gelderloos himself remains blind to the power of nonviolent strategies, it's entirely unsurprising that the state would, too. Black men with guns have terrified law enforcement since colonial times, and it shouldn't shock anyone that the FBI took the Black Panthers, among other black militant groups, extremely seriously. Violence is a mindset which Gelderloos and law enforcement share. In that mindset, guns and bombs command your attention, to be sure!

Nevertheless, the question remains: is there not a better way to wage the revolution for a fair, just, and indeed nonviolent world? Can you get there at all using guns and bombs? I don't see how. Gelderloos fails to show me how.

I also agree with Gelderloos that the police manipulate nonviolent methods to pacify and render impotent protesters. Why wouldn't they try to appropriate nonviolent techniques just as they have always appropriated violent ones to their own ends? This is to be expected, but not tolerated.

In my book, Our Tragic Flaw: A Case for Nonviolence, I argue that nonviolence does not work equally well for all causes. The power of nonviolence resides wholly in its resonance with what's true. If you really have truth on your side, nonviolence becomes extremely powerful. If you don't, then it doesn't amount to much. So, nonviolence in the hands of the police is nothing more than a shallow marketing campaign for obedience to a violent state. There's zero resonance in that.

The key here is for nonviolent activists to do more than merely eschew overt violence and cooperate with the authorities. Admittedly, this is precisely what defines most "nonviolent protests" today. Like Gelderloos, I find this utterly inadequate. The appropriation of nonviolent techniques by police requires the activist to expose the hypocrisy of this strategy in their hands, and to reveal the resonance of nonviolence in the pursuit of real fairness and compassion.

Gelderloos makes an interesting and valid point when he observes:

Pacifists claiming to eschew violence helped to desegregate schools and universities throughout the South, but, ultimately, it was the armed units of the National Guard that allowed the first black students to enter these schools and to protect them from forceful attempts at explusion and worse.

That's absolutely true. Indeed, King and other civil rights leaders in the nonviolence camp worked very hard with the Kennedy administration to get them to send troops to protect protesters throughout the movement with very limited success. In other words, had King been more successful, the federal government would have armed the movement to the teeth.

This represents an underlying hypocrisy, or lack of confidence, in the nonviolence of that movement. I regard it as evidence of the relative immaturity of nonviolent organizing at the time. Nonviolence is the most radical of all stances known to me, when understood in all its ramifications. Accordingly, there was a basic mismatch of nonviolence with the stated goals of the civil rights movement to incorporate people of color into mainstream American life without discrimination. When mainstream American life itself is rife with violence, complicit with a system of global domination and exploitation and the very mechanisms which threaten the future of human civilization and perhaps life itself, this goal appears shallow at best, if not insidious.

But, then, we can only take one step at a time. For the many people of color who were marginalized, disenfranchised, and poverty-stricken, even the modest gains of desegregation and the civil rights act of 1964 made a big difference. Though the nonviolence of the movement may have been imperfect and incomplete, it is only by passing through these stages that we will ever be able to practice nonviolence in its truest, purest form. 

I will address one final point from this chapter. Gelderloos accuses nonviolence advocates of siding with police against their fellow radicals who embrace the use of violence, such as when they condemn violent confrontations during intended nonviolent events. The Dalai Lama, for example, seemed to side with China in condemning the violence of Tibetans in recent uprisings. Gelderloos reads this as a kind of disloyalty, as if to ask, "What side are you on?"

I agree that sometimes the in-fighting among different factions within the radical movement can be petty, poorly executed, and self-destructive--even, may I say, violent. On the other hand, if you believe as I do that violence ultimately only entrenches the root problems of the world, then it is encumbent upon us to counsel fellow radicals to give nonviolence a chance. It makes sense, I think, to say, "If you want to practice violence, then do so in your own zone of activism, but please don't crash our party. Because our effectiveness is greatly reduced when you impose your strategy upon our event."

And if someone asks me whether I admire violent activism, or support it, I must tell the truth, no? And the truth is: Often militant radicals have the best of intentions, and we often share the same ultimate goals of a free and fair world, but I regard their methods as self-defeating. I cannot support violence, especially when it is willful and premeditated, no matter what the cause--unless no other alternative exists (which is rarely, if ever, the case).

Update on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 11:25AM by Parke Burgess

This review continues here.