I’ve spent enough years within “movement” spaces to have heard it all and at this point, fundamentally reject nonviolence and the American left’s obsession with it.
At best, I’ve heard of people arguing for both sides, needing both whenever the topic emerges. This fails to recognize the status quo in which there hasn’t been “violent” protests beyond riots in decades and the violence of those riots is almost exclusively to property, which is another critique entirely. Not only is this the embodiment of violent protests now, but the imagined strategy of violence is still exclusive to the historical imaginary and we see this in art, in current writings on violence, where violence has been relegated to the myths and truths of radical history.
As someone who does statistics for a living, unwillingly, this is an imprecise measure of what I’ll offer you, but I’m certain if we looked at the actual numbers, that reality would be far harsher. I am ignoring riots in this capacity only because if property violence is the epitome of violence from the left in this country, we’re fucked, but if we look at organized, formal or informal, violence against the state and in the name of liberation, whether this be in the form of actions of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Weather Underground, various assassinations, and random deeds of anarchists, if we were to total the events into a singular timeline, the days spent would not even add up to a year of actual violence.
Why am I making this comparison?
Because, we know from various liberal sources, since 2020, we can easily identify a single year where more than ten thousand demonstrations have happened and protests where we’ve had upwards of a few million in attendance (Hands Off, Women’s March, etc). With all due respect to the militants in Portland holding down street action during the George Floyd Rebellion, just to reference a few, I think we can argue what is perceptibly seen as “violent” protest would account for less than a percent of all movement action within the modern American left. Even when it was flourishing in the historic American left, it was still an incredibly small percentage of the population. At its height, the BLA had less than 100 members most likely in the decade it was active, the Weather Underground even less, and there was absolutely overlap.
All insult to the DSA, their membership eclipses these organizations entirely, and I mean that in the most negative sense.
“What use is it to compare the two? “
To emphasize that organizations committed to liberatory violence hold an outweighed existence both within political history and the imaginative. The American left so readily condemns “violence” when 99% of so-called radicals have never committed it. Even if they don’t condemn it, they are as easily eager to “we should treat both strategies equally” which does not actually uplift “violent” protest or militant strategies, but is another variation of left “unity” which seeks to silence the discussion about actual, militant, meaningful resistance, and does not in fact center violence or militancy. Make no mistake, the status quo of the American left is: non-violent “direct action” and electoralism, which were the two main strategies behind the anti-war movement in the early 2000s, which were the largest protests in American history, and yet did absolutely fucking nothing. Yet these never became nails in the coffin for NVDA, electoralism, or mass movement strategies. Anyone who suggests otherwise is being a scold whose unwilling to actually critique their politics or they’re deeply afraid, which should bring more internalized shame than it actually seems too.
“Why do you keep quoting violence and mentioning militancy? “
Because of radicals who are actually liberals and their sensitivities. Even in their own imaginary, the violence is not violence. Violence is a moral term, one of negative implications (not to me), and to reluctantly cater to who may be reading this, I pivot to militancy. Self-defense as it has been performed within movement spaces is not an act of violence, but it is a threat of violence if violence were to occur. Rather than perpetually making this distinction, I would simply like to move to calling it militancy, which a capability of committing violence, but not always an action of violence. Shooting a gun at someone and having a gun in case of shit going down are two different things, but both are militant. I loathe to even kind of use this comparison because I also don’t think militancy = guns, but again, it is within the left imaginary. Or bombs.
Back to the issue at hand, I’ve been in organizing spaces where we’d organize according to the St. Paul Principle’s as a means of respecting a diversity of tactics, but that actually meant nothing because by nature of who we’d organize with, in the name of unity, and not wanting to scare them off, we’d scale down what actions we were willing to commit. I’m against bomb-throwing simply because its too indiscriminate and I think you should have the courage to use a weapon that demands accuracy, but do you think a democratic socialist would meaningfully share organizing space with a bomb-thrower or would-be assassin? Not even. These spaces are made of up so-called militants willing to degrade their militancy for the sake of a coalition that does nothing.
I’ve been in other organizing spaces where even joking about armed resistance was squashed with raised-voices by people who’d never experienced an FBI or police door-knock. I wasn’t making the joke, but as an observer it was incredibly telling what was allowed to be said by group consensus and what wasn’t out of fear, which is the main driver of counterinsurgency within the “movement” and not by direct agents of the state. They’ve become so obsessed with the notion that anyone speaking of direct, violent action is secretly a cop, that they’ve effectively ensured no meaningful action will occur because any real resistance is now meant with contempt and charges of conspiracy. Leftwing conspiracy theorists are the frontlines of counterinsurgency and should be meant with violent contempt in every space they exist until they’re made irrelevant.
There has never been an overthrow of the state in which militancy was not the primary driver. There is no such thing as a peaceful overthrow and never has been. There’s been erasure of militancy, there’s been overemphasis on nonviolence, and an overemphasis on the failure of “violent” actions or organizations because the risk is higher, but even the “failures” of violence can be more powerful than the greatest successes of nonviolence. The “failure” of John Brown’s raid most certainly was critical in escalating the US into a civil war (hm another act of violence) that ended slavery as we then knew it, could you imagine if it had succeeded as they’d planned?
When non-violence fails, it often looks awfully similar to what it looks like when it succeeds, and if that’s not true, then when has it ever succeeded without the looming threat of a violent uprising in the background?