While we’re on the topic of the kind of lawbreaking ‘civil’ society frowns upon, let’s say out loud for a moment that rioting in response to injustice works.
Is it dangerous? yes. Will the media lie about it? yes. Will people in our own communities tell us that we’re ruining it for the good activists? probably.
But when every police shooting is answered with riots, smashed windows, burned trashcans, the direct result is that police departments find themselves under pressure to not create more ‘incidents’ because riots are expensive, cost politicians votes and break through the illusion of total state control.
Riots actually make cops think twice about the consequences of their actions while politely appealing to recognition of our humanity and reforms and sensitivity trainings generally achieve fuck all.
Further reading:
skye-is-blu: Really? You’re advocating violence? Civil disobedience works, just look at history. Nonviolent protests work. Look at Ghandi, Montgomery bus bycott, women’s suffrage, MLK washington march. There are so many examples of peaceful protests that have either sparked conversation about the way we do things and treat others or have even contributed to the end of the injustice in question altogether.
I’m gonnna quote Peter Gelderloos
How Nonviolence Protects the Statehere because he said it better than I ever could:
The pacifist history of India’s independence movement is a selective and
incomplete picture. Nonviolence was not universal in India. Pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate
the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead
and rudder of Indian resistance. Ignored are important militant leaders
such as Chandrasekhar Azad, who fought in armed struggle against the British colonizers, and
revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh, who won mass support for bombings
and assassinations as part of a struggle to accomplish the “overthrow of
both foreign and Indian capitalism.”The pacifist history of India’s struggle cannot make any sense of the
fact that Subhas Chandra Bose, the militant candidate, was twice elected
president of the Indian National Congress, in 1938 and 1939. History remembers Gandhi above all others not because he
represented the unanimous voice of India, but because of all the
attention he was given by the British press and the prominence he
received from being included in important negotiations with the British
colonial government.and
The common projection is that the movement
against racial oppression in the United States was primarily nonviolent.
On the contrary, though pacifist groups such as Martin Luther King
Jr.‘s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had considerable
power and influence, popular support within the movement, especially
among poor black people, increasingly gravitated toward militant
revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party.Pacifist, middle-class black activists, including King, got much of
their power from the specter of black resistance and the presence of
armed black revolutionaries.
In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Birmingham campaign was
looking like it would be a repeat of the dismally failed action in
Albany, GeorgiaThen, on May 7 in Birmingham, after continued police violence, three
thousand black people began fighting back, pelting the police with rocks
and bottles. Just two days later, Birmingham — up until then an
inflexible bastion of segregation — agreed to desegregate downtown
stores, and President Kennedy backed the agreement with federal
guarantees. The next day, after local white supremacists bombed a black
home and a black business, thousands of black people rioted again,
seizing a 9 block area, destroying police cars, injuring several cops
(including the chief inspector), and burning white businesses. A month
and a day later, President Kennedy was calling for Congress to pass the
Civil Rights Act, ending several years of a strategy to stall the civil
rights movement.
Perhaps the largest of the limited, if not hollow, victories of the
civil rights movement came when black people demonstrated they would not
remain peaceful forever. Faced with the two alternatives, the white
power structure chose to negotiate with the pacifists, and we have seen
the results.And while we’re at it:
Privileged white people were instrumental in appointing activists such
as Gandhi and King to positions of leadership on a national scale. Among
white activists and, not coincidentally, the white-supremacist ruling
class, the civil rights-era March on Washington is associated first and
foremost with Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech. Mostly
absent from the white consciousness, but at least as influential to
black people, was Malcolm X’s perspective, as articulated in his speech criticizing the march’s leadership:“It was the grassroots out there in the street. It scared the white man
to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, DC, to death; I
was there. When they found out this black steamroller was going to come
down on the capital, they called in…these national Negro leaders that
you respect and told them, “Call it off.” Kennedy said, “Look, you all
are letting this thing go too far.” And Old Tom said, “Boss, I can’t
stop it because I didn’t start it.” I’m telling you what they said. They
said, “I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it.” They said,
“These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of
us.” And that old shrewd fox, he said, “If you all aren’t in it, I’ll
put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll
welcome it….This is what they did at the march on Washington. They joined
it…became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost
its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to
be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a
picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all….No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover….They controlled it so tight,
they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs
to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what
speech they couldn’t make, and then told them to get out of town by
sundown.”The end result of the march was to invest significant movement
resources, at a critical time, in an ultimately pacifying event. Demonstrators received premade protest signs with government-approved
slogans; the speeches of several protest leaders, including SNCC
chairman John Lewis, were censored to take out threats of armed struggle
and criticisms of the government’s civil rights bill; and, just as
Malcolm X described, at the end, the whole crowd was told to leave as
soon as possible.And finally:
Even Gandhi and King agreed it was necessary to support armed liberation
movements where there was no nonviolent alternative,
prioritizing goals over particular tactics. But the mostly white
pacifists of today erase this part of the history and re-create
nonviolence to fit their comfort level.King’s more disturbing (to white people) criticism of racism is avoided and his clichéd prescriptions for feel-good, nonviolent activism are
repeated ad nauseum, allowing white pacifists to cash in on an
authoritative cultural resource to confirm their nonviolent activism.Further reading: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state
So in short, assuming I understand correctly, peaceful protesting can only succeed when fighting for the same cause as a militant group and only do so because the provide the state an option to pacify the masses with a smaller change than what is demanded.
The state will find it better reach out to the pacifists as they, knowing they posses little power over the state, are more eager to settle for a solution less drastic than the militants will. And with there being an agreement, a small improvement, some of the militants will no longer see enough left to gain to make up for the costs of remaining militant – thus leaving the movement without enough steam to continue, and without having reached more than a few of its goals
YES.
Often respectable non-violent activist groups who speak to power in a
civilized manner get nowhere for decades because the system doesn’t
need to listen to them, because it loses nothing from ignoring them.But
then a radical activist group shows up who are prepared to just burn
the system down. And then suddenly listening to that reasonable
non-violent group becomes very attractive to those in power.And the non-violent group will always claim that their non-violence was
what changed the system, but it was the fear of something worse that
made the system change.When the change becomes history, the system will loudly claim that it was the non-violent group that created the change, it will paint that group to be even more absolutely pacifist than they ever were and will provide funding to foundations that train young activists in this fundamentally ineffective non-violent method so that this process can repeat itself.
tldr: Non-violent activism doesn’t create change, it is utilized by those in power to manage and limit change.
Am Indian, we extensively learn about the freedom struggle in history in schools, and-
“The pacifist history of India’s struggle”-
Lel.
The struggle was not pacifist. Civil disobedience, in practise, was not pacifist. During the civil disobedience movement, there were riots across India. People set fire to places, there were mobs, hundreds were arrested.
And even if one works within the purest definition of civil disobedience- it’s not exactly peaceful. Civil disobedience literally implies, well, disobeying the law. Strikes are civil disobedience. Protests blocking traffic, or protests without police permission, are civil disobedience. Resisting the police is civil disobedience. A crowd of people walking kilometres to draw attention to an unjust salt law is civil disobedience.
Just amused every time someone brings up Gandhi and the civil disobedience movement as an example of pacifism.
Also, uh. Mutiny among Indian soldiers drafted to fight for the British was, uh, alkso a pretty big part of India’s struggle. See also: Mangal Pandey, Rebellion of 1857
– Blue
This history lesson is super important and good, but I just want to point out what happened in the original post and the reply:
OP talks about “riots, smashed windows, burned trashcans…” and skye-is-blu replies with “Really? You’re advocating violence?”
This tactic of equating destruction of property with violence (which most people understand as harming human beings or animals) is so common you don’t even fucking notice it anymore. People think things are as important as living creatures! That breaking a window is as bad as breaking someone’s nose! It’s not! Stop equating the two! The world is a hellscape when you phrase it like that! X_x
If you have to break every window in the whole world to stop cops from killing just one more person, it is justified! A person’s life is worth more than all the windows in the world!
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.[..]
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.
More from The Failure of Nonviolence which is really a fantastic book.
We also shouldn’t fall for the temptation to emphasize the ‘property damage vs people damage’ thing so much that we start to make a distinction of our own between ‘good riots’ where only property is damages and ‘bad riots’ where people are harmed.
Nazis, cops, millionairs, people purposely standing between us and a life worth living, these people need to be fought. We should feel no guilt when they are hurt, as they have hurt us a billion times over and define their existence through their intention to hurt us.
QueerAnarchism 