Back in the mid-1980s, when the African National Congress was still fighting the South Africa’s apartheid regime, I recall Secretary of State George Schultz testifying before some Senate committee. He clutched his pearls at the appearance that “some members of this body are speaking in favor of violence.”
Even then, when I wasn’t an anarchist or anything approaching it, I laughed myself silly. Just what, exactly, did he imagine those American troops were doing in Grenada? “We’re here from the Western Hemisphere Ladies Auxiliary, and here’s a fruit basket with some coupons for discounts at local merchants?” For that matter, what did he think those guys with the flintlocks were doing on Lexington Green?
In the official narrative, the question always concerns whether anyone and everyone but the state should engage in violence. The question of whether the state should engage in violence, or whether state violence should be evaluated in terms of the same standards of reasonableness as violence by nonstate actors, never crosses the threshold of visibility. The legitimacy of violence by the state is never even articulated as an issue.
That’s a shame. The state is not a mystical entity, a sum greater than the human beings making it up. The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes — purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. And violent actions by an association of individuals who call themselves “the state” have no more automatic legitimacy than violent actions by associations of individuals who call themselves “the Ku Klux Klan” or “al Qaeda.”
The violent actions of the state deserve to be evaluated using the same criteria by which we judge the morality of the violent actions of any other grouping of individuals. Alexander Berkman, in “The ABC of Anarchism,” argued that the death and destruction caused by the institutionalized violence of the state was many times greater than that caused by anarchists or other revolutionaries. Who do you think has thrown more bombs — anarchists, or government military forces?
Despite all the mystification of “national security” and “national interest,” the interests served by the state’s military violence are every bit as particular as those served by any other violent actions carried out by other groups of individuals. The state is nothing but an association for armed violence on the part of those who make money at the expense of other people. As Howard Zinn said:
“In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that — not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor — is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.”
So it is with all the hand-wringing over “violence” in recent confrontations between Occupy Portland and the Portland police.
Andy Robinson, a professor at Cambridge who specializes among other things in networked resistance movements, argues that there’s a very pernicious framing going on in news coverage of the issue. “There’s no mention of the fact that police have repeatedly, violently attacked Occupy protests which consisted simply of sit-downs and camp-outs. … The fact that police use violence routinely and with impunity is not mentioned. In fact, police violence as such (as opposed to excessive brutality) is treated as uncontroversial. … Protective moves such as using shields and face coverings are portrayed as proactively aggressive.”
Or as anarchist Occupy activist David Graeber says in response to Chris Hedges’ recent clueless attack, “the US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as ‘violence.’ If the police decide to attack a group of protesters, they will claim to have been provoked, and the media will repeat whatever the police say … as the basic initial facts of what happened. This will happen whether or not anyone at the protest does anything that can be remotely described as violence.”
We saw Oakland mayor Jean Quan, with a straight face, quacking about protestors alleged to have violently invaded a YMCA building, when in fact they were desperately trying to escape through the building after police had “kettled” them and begun the wholesale use of chemical weapons upon them.
Such official lies by politicians and cops, Robinson argues, are a “psyop designed to conceal their own repeated use of violence. … People are quoted as being against ‘all violence’ without the implications for police violence being examined. It’s basically a double standard — we never see it questioned whether supporters of the status quo have a right to use violence (only whether the violence they use is excessive) … a bit like starting a debate, ‘should an invaded country use violence against the invaders,’ without mentioning the violence of the invaders or the act of invasion.”
This last comparison is telling, given the farcical entertainment we get every night on CNN. Iran, a country ringed by military bases garrisoned by a global superpower that spends nearly as much on its military forces as all the other countries in the world combined, constitutes a military “threat” to the country which is besieging it. And the beseiging country, which has military bases in half the countries of the world and has overthrown more governments than any previous empire in human history, is “defending itself.”
What’s more, if you look at the American “Defense” Department’s planning documents, the main “threat” presented by Iran is the horrifying possibility that it might be able to successfully defend itself against an American attack. Which attack, of course, would be entirely justified by the “aggressive” act of defying a direct order by the U.S. (or its UN Security Council proxy).
In this Orwellian conceptual world, the question of whether the state has the right to use violence doesn’t bear looking into. But in the real world, it does. The state is by far the greatest concentration of organized violence, and it almost always employs such violence for evil purposes — whether at Tahrir Square, Hama, or Oakland.
So if you’re arguing over whether Occupy should “use violence,” you’re asking the wrong question.
Citations to this article:
- Brandon Darby, Occupy “Revolutionary Scholar” Begins to Openly Discuss Use of Violence, Big Government, 02/27/12
- Kevin Carson, Should Occupy Use Violence? I Dunno — Should the Cops?, Infoshop News, 02/13/12
- Kevin Carson, Should Occupy Use Violence?, Counterpunch, 02/10/12
police and corporate agents could very well be infiltrating occupy using black bloc as their vehicle. i don't believe it will be effective in this age. but the violence question should apply more to the state, i agree.
The issue is not violence. It is whether the black bloc tactic produces results. Every one of its attorneys, from Graeber to Carson, skirts the question whether it advances the class struggle. For example, did the Narodniks advance the class struggle in Czarist Russia? These are the real questions, not whether "violence" is to be embraced.
"The issue is not violence. It is whether the black bloc tactic produces results."
As being someone who has experienced the wrong end of billy clubs in front of the White House, I think violence is an issue. That was over 30 years ago, so the issue of violence against protesters is not new as anyone alive in the 60s knows.
Do black bloc tactics produce results? Not so much, but there are always many factions within protest groups. Often when one faction claims that another faction's tactics don't work, it is also claimed that their own tactics would work if only everyone else adopts their tactics despite the fact that these tactics are not producing results either.
The strategy of most protest groups is to change public opinion, using a variety of tactics. The real question may be does that strategy produces results? Again, not so much. Politicians routinely ignore the opinions of voters as voters ignore what their leaders do, and pay attention only to what their leaders say (which is all lip service and lies). Many activists pat themselves on the back for achieving success once a few politicians give some lip service to their cause and perhaps implement some minor reform around the margins.
What might produce results are the non-violent actions (and non-action) taken by large numbers of people engaged in non-compliance. The opinions of people matter little if they don't act accordingly.
We could debate whether the Narodniks advanced the class struggle in Czarist Russia. We could also discuss the struggle of pyramid builders in ancient Egypt. I'm just not sure that produces results or will lead to successful tactics. We need to grapple with the current reality and try to correctly analyze what is going on in the present.
How narrowly are you framing the context of "results"?
In each BB I've participated in, the results have always been the same– fewer hurt and arrested protesters than events without a BB. On a broader scope, the BB are offering the same leverage that organizations and figures like the Black Panthers, Bhagat Singh, Malcolm X, etc. all offered that catalyzed small shake-ups.
Yeah, by limiting our tactical options to just one, we can achieve *real* results! 16 million people non-violently protesting the Iraqi War in a single day sure changed a lot, right? Right?
Also, how fucking cowed are you if you're going to non-comply yourself into getting beaten by the police?
You're making victims out of yourselves.
Actually, the state is a mystical entity, a sum greater than the human beings making it up, and it is not simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes; it is just that the things – myths, in the technical sense – that operate here do not provide a justification for either the state or its works. This is not a distinction without a difference, because recognising these things is the beginning of understanding them, including understanding what to do about them, valuable just as any sort of “knowing the enemy” is valuable. There is an analogy at least as old as the Aventine Secession (the original one, not the one boycotting Mussolini’s parliament – though there’s an interesting moral to that, too), comparing classes or individuals in states with organs or cells in the human body, which is most valuable in just where it fails: people can have an independent existence, at least at some level, while cells in advanced organisms can only deviate from the overall structure in either minor ways or destructive, even cancerous, ways and are never fully free standing. It may (or may not) make it clearer to think in terms of how someone once explained the Chinese room, provoking the response, “You mean the room understands Chinese?” For us, the question is how these rooms crop up and keep going in the context of states – and that’s where myths and human nature come in.
As Edward Augustus Freeman remarked in an early study of racism (“Historical Essays”, Third Series, 1879),
He was describing myths in general, before looking into racism in particular; the significance of myths is not that they are falsely believed, but that they act upon people, who in turn accept them, transmit them and act upon them – which may be quite regardless of their factual accuracy (some are actually even true, though this is irrelevant to their significance).
So, just what are the supporting myths of the state in general (not, say, the particular foundation myths of this or that particular state), and what do they tap into? Readers may recall that, in various times and places, I have pointed out that corporations are by and large artificial entities that need a supporting framework provided by the state to hold them together – but I did note that there were exceptions that had an internal dynamic of their own to hold them together, and I gave monasteries and sports clubs as examples. While states retain legitimacy, they too are corporations with an internal dynamic of their own to hold them together, and that dynamic is what makes most people under them accept them; legitimacy is just a short-hand way of saying that most people under them accept them. Napoleon railed at the fact that states he conquered kept their legitimacy, because he didn’t like the way they sprang back after being overthrown even without the rulers having enough force left to compel their subjects’ obedience; the “Napoleonic myth” was deliberately manufactured to give that to his own dynasty and take it away from all the other regimes – which last it had mostly done on the continent of Europe by the Age of Revolutions starting in 1848, a generation later.
But while a state has the myth of legitimacy behind it, whether that rests on some other myth like the myth of the Divine Right of Kings, the myth of the democratic General Will of the people, or whatever, not only does it only need to apply force to a smaller proportion of its subjects but also it has proportionally more, and more compliant, subjects to draw on to get the force that it still does need. (Other tricks are also available in certain fields, both as force multipliers and as ways to create acceptance over time of what started out coercively.)
Yes, yes, but how does this all work, how does it get started in the first place and why doesn’t it simply erode of itself as the French monarchy did? Why did the other European monarchies only fall to a counter-myth?
Because the myths that have emerged and survived do indeed match human nature, albeit channelled into structures that aren’t the ones that humans and their cultures evolved and co-evolved. Confucian theory considered the Middle Kingdom (China under an emperor) to be a generalisation and extension of the family, which was a fairly explicit statement of the dynamics being tapped. Just as dogs are just wolves that have been bred to accentuate certain submission behaviours and apply them to their masters, but the behaviours had to be already present in functioning pack behaviour evolved over far longer times, so also many of these dynamics in people who accept states are distorted applications of pro-survival human behaviours that evolved for real needs of simpler conditions – primitive, in the same technical sense of the word as in “primitive Christianity” (while dogs’ behaviour is more simplistic than ours, yet we can treat it as a simplified cartoon version of ours to suggest what may be happening in us, so long as we remember that the hypotheses still need to be checked as we go – just like any animal study’s use for human study). The most primitive tribes have an age driven authority structure, ruled by literal elders, patriarchs extending and generalising the role of parents in regard to children – but the subordinates gained what the clan gained collectively, not always in absolute terms but sometimes relative to outsiders and at the outsiders’ expense, and also survivors moved on to being elders in their turn, so compliance favoured their genes’ transmission. Celtic clans and advanced African tribes developed inner aristocracies for the authority role, while outer members benefitted relative to complete outsiders with no clan support, who tended to perish if they could not start their own clans; all this reinforced the overall clan system.
… And so on, developing over many strange byways, leading here to feudalism and there to a class system which might or might not co-exist with ethnic divisions, and so down to the nation state, but not according to any pre-ordained and Whiggishly necessary path of “progress”. They are too many to detail here, but they all share in these: human nature developed to allow quasi-pack behaviour as it was pro-survival, and to do this people have the ability to become subordinate in certain situations and stages of life (though this may lessen as life moves on, as the ability to digest milk does in many), an ability that rests positively on an ability to project and identify and negatively on the mechanism of internalising through denial, all interacting with and amplified by peer pressure and other things. Positively, a sports fan “wins” when his team does; negatively, such things as the “jump or be pushed” of complying with seat belt laws lead many into denying they were ever forced so as to stay right with themselves, a denial they can only maintain by continuing to comply even when not forced “because it is the right and sensible thing” (while it may be, that is not the reason for doing it but the rationalisation). States have – must have, to be self sustaining – myths and emergent behaviour that not only allow people to project onto them but create identities that match that, as the image-metaphor Uncle Sam displaced Brother Jonathan when the United States of America transformed into a self sustaining entity in the 1860s. These identities are both created and emergent, artificial in one sense but as natural as beaver dams in another, and they have a reality through myth of the same sort Freeman described, over and above the people and interest groups involved.
All these things, thriving states tap into, so we should learn just what is going on and what we face as best we can. Rather than giving you the whole book I could write had we but world enough and time (how Good Cop/Bad Cop really works is fascinating – submission behaviour and internalising is involved), I will end with an account of a chimpanzee study – one particular cartoon of humanity, with all the strengths and limitations of such things.
Some experimenters once put a group of chimpanzees in a cage, occasionally introducing food through hatches, including some that took a little while to climb to. Naturally, the chimpanzees went for the food whenever it arrived; only, when food arrived through certain of the more inaccessible hatches, all of the chimpanzees were sprayed with water as soon as one of them made a move towards it, or even when one made a move towards one of those hatches when there was no food there. The chimpanzees didn’t like it, and soon learned to stop whichever one made a wrong move (if the food wasn’t taken soon, it was withdrawn). Occasionally, new chimpanzees were introduced and some old ones removed; these didn’t know what to expect, so they tried anyway, only to be stopped by the others. None of these ever got sprayed, as they were all stopped before that happened, but they joined in with stopping yet newer chimpanzees. Eventually all the chimpanzees had been rotated through, so none had ever experienced the spray – yet all were still maintaining and reinforcing the taboo over those hatches.