Lessons from the Crackdown (Counterpunch)

On violence and the crackdown:

It is understandable that Americans have such a strange fixation with non-violence. Every schoolchild grows up hearing about Gandhi and Dr. King and peaceful protest. For many, images of Dr. King speaking at the Washington monument represent the high water mark of American protest politics. These historical images, worthy in and of themselves of course, have infected the consciousness of many American political movements, and hampered the Left, forcing it to abide by an old, completely ahistorical American political myth, that non-violent protest is the sine qua non of protest movements, or a panacea applicable to all political situations. This plays right into the hands of the media-spectacle and the interests of the power-elite. The inherently unstable and imprecise definition of violence makes it possible for almost any behavior to be called violent, and, conversely, for any obviously violent act perpetrated by the state to be declared nonviolent. Again, witness Berkeley: it is apparently sometimes violent to hold hands.

 It is essential that the Left not get caught up in the rhetorical snares that the spectacle-media-sphere attempts to cast around those who dare to interfere with the logic of capital accumulation. In order to avoid this, it is necessary to mobilize a ruthless critique of the rhetoric of violence/nonviolence. I’ll contribute a few points- by no means exhaustive- to this critique.

 First, as Mike King and others have pointed out, the belief that so-called non-violence works and that it is the legitimating feature of a protest, is part of a delusion that afflicts the more privileged- which often means more white- members of the occupy movement. I myself have fallen prey to this in the past. “Protest non-violently and everything will be ok. Remember Dr. King and all he accomplished. If you work with the system it will bend to your needs.” This is all part of the ideology of a privileged though often well intentioned group of people who simply don’t have to deal with the violence that ensures the domestic order of the US-led capitalist-imperialist machine. Are the unemployed, homeless, under-paid and overworked, imprisoned, and dispossessed masses not subject to brutal levels of violence on a daily basis? Is the American capitalist system not propped up by imperialist adventures that tally their casualties in the millions? Indeed, have the nonviolent protest movements of the past actually brought to fruition a free and equal society? Adhering blindly to the rhetoric of violence/nonviolence is a de facto denial of the brutality suffered by literally billions throughout history, and it unfortunately does little to bring about historical justice.

 

Second, there is a fundamental misrecognition of the role of the state in a capitalist society at work in the ideology of nonviolence. The state, as Marx once said, is the bourgeoisie’s internal committee for the handling of its own affairs. One of the biggest affairs to be handled in a capitalist society is, of course, the fundamentally unjust and unequal class-relationship between capital and labor. Capital, by its very nature, relies on this unequal relationship; and history, by all accounts, has shown that the owners of capital, and its managers and representatives within the state, will consistently apply the most brutal levels of force to maintain this class relationship. What could be clearer than the fact that this power will not be relinquished without a fight?

 Finally, non-violence could never be more than one tactic amongst a variety of tactics for the Left to employ in pursuit of broader strategic goals. In American protest politics, however, it often appears as an end in itself. This is a fallacy, which mistakes means for ends, and it needs to be rooted out aggressively as a hindrance to the ultimate goal, which, for revolutionaries, is the end of an oppressive, class-based, racist, sexist, violent system that has its roots deep in the capitalist mode of production. This is where the real violence is, and it is the collective desire to see this system confined to the dustbin of history- not the adherence to an empty ideology, come what may- that is the true litmus test for any revolutionary struggle.

Patrick Madden lives in Oakland and can be contacted atpatrickjmadden@hotmail.com

Comments

[Chris Ruth]

Well, historically the basic strategy of nonviolence isn't to ignore state violence, but to provoke it (which makes the ensuing outrage, for example the crowd screams at Davis, a little disingenuous).

[Jaspergregory]

The important thing is to make clear to the 99 percent that the state is being violent. This is a media war. Everyone who sees the UC Berkeley, UC Davis or Oakland Tear Gas videos and photos can see the extreme violence of the system.
Pictures of Oakland Protesters breaking windows and lighting barricades on fire muddy the Message. Articles like this fetishize violence and and give support to the Vandals who destroy local support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

[Robert Allen]

"This is a media war".

well then it was lost before it began, as the ruling class owns the media. My priveleged white co workers let the media tell them what to think. It is in the OWS camp where human solidarity and real action for systemic change plays out; I guess what I'm saying is "local support" means support from petit bourgeois aspirant white homeowners with all their fetishes who do not favor any real revolutionary change as long as Dancing with the Stars is on. The OWS movement is both a reaction by petit bourgeois layers to the crisis AND a petit bourgeois liberal do gooder-led movement, hence the mantra about non violence and the misguided tropes about reform with its nebulous airy-fairyness. Beneath the surface however, we have some new militant young rebels in those tents ready to fight, along with homeless and marginalized folks who are sincerely depending on this movement to deliver for them in real, urgent ways. The degree that violence as a tactic is used may be determined by material conditions as the class continues to move. Handwringing of the type E.J. Dionne purveys is the default postion of garden variety liberals. I hope this thing spins out of their control, and it very well may....