TW: rape culture, racism, death, police violence, misogyny

Facebook page ‘Anarchist Memes’ recently posted this image which reads ‘I think it’s time we abandon dogmatic adherence to nonviolence’.

One response I saw ran along the lines of ‘we shouldn’t be using violence in comparatively democratic and nonviolent European regimes’ so I thought I’d write a series of blog posts outlining why European regimes are anything but nonviolent and exploring the legitimacy and efficacy of a diversity of tactics versus dogmatic non-violence codes. This series will draw heavily on Peter Gelderloos’ ‘How Nonviolence Protects the State’ and will explore the harmful role of pacifism in the activist left. The first post explains 8 ways that violence pervades liberal societies.

In order to experience Western society as generally non-violent you have to be in a very specific structural position. In simple terms, in order to buy this shit you really have to be a cisgender, heterosexual, middle class, white, male citizen of a Western country.

Note: I’ve decided to focus on Europe rather than the USA in this piece because many liberals will accept the all-too-obvious violence of US society – from Ferguson, MO and post-Katrina New Orleans to the US-Mexico border and the US Empire – but will profess that European social democracies are nicer, more humane, free of such deviations from true liberal democracy (strange that the heart of capitalist liberalism is the most unequal, impoverished, racist and violent of Western nations, almost as if this violence is not an aberration at all but is in fact integral to liberalism).

1. ‘Fortress Europe’

A nation-state implies exclusion of certain individuals from the national community, through violence if necessary. ‘Fortress Europe’ refers to the fact that, though for Europeans the EU has dissolved borders within the liberal zone the outer borders of Europe are heavily policed. According to ‘United For Intercultural Action’ 17,306 deaths can be attributed to European border security policies in the period 1993-2013. Jimmy Mubenga was murdered by private security firm G4s in 2010, and in January of this year Greek coastguard deliberately drowned a boatload of migrants. This is structural violence. I’ve been to Harmondsworth Immigration Detention centre, it was totally grim and lifeless – we should make no mistake, the policy in this country is to imprison migrants in inhumane and abusive conditions.

2. Imperialism

Everyone knows about the great European empires which, while priding themselves on their ‘civilisation’, committed genocides and kick-started their industrial developments on the back of a brutal slave trade. Less commonly understood is that things haven’t changed all that much since the heyday of Empire. Today, following a 2011 bombing campaign by Britain and France, Libya has disintegrated into civil war and is plagued by ascendant Islamist extremism. European nations collaborated in the US conquest and plundering of Iraq which brought about over a hundred thousand deaths, mostly civilian. A litany of similar ‘interventions’ counted on the military support of European nations. Quite simply Europe is a willing collaborator in the violent mayhem brought by the US Empire. This is violence conceived and perpetuated in the liberal West and enacted on the Global South for the benefit of capitalist accumulation. So much for the ‘zone of liberal peace’ that democratic peace theorists harp on about.

3. Climate Change

Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to the wellbeing and continued survival of humanity today. Climate change is likely to have the most severe and deadly impacts in the Global South, where poorer nations have less ability to respond and less resilient infrastructure. For example, when droughts cause food production to fall the poorest are the first to die. The fossil fuel economy, both at the stage of extraction and the resulting climate change, disproportionately impacts the poor, people of colour, and those in the Global South. Just like in New Orleans after Katrina, people will die, lose their homes and be displaced by escalating and ever more frequent natural disasters – this is a violent system in which the consumption and profits of the richest kill and dispossess the poorest. As Deidre Smith eloquently points out in a piece at 350.org which seeks to make links between resistance to militarised police and racism in Ferguson and the movement for climate justice: “Communities of color and poor communities are hit hardest by fossil fuel extraction, as well as neglected by the state in the wake of crisis. People of color also disproportionately live in climate-vulnerable areas.” We must resist the ideological push to naturalise disasters that are a direct result the capitalist mode of production and whose differential effects are determined by imperialism and white supremacy – there are few truly ‘natural’ disasters distinct from social (power) relations. If we see that deaths due to (un)’natural’ disasters are the result of social relations then it also becomes clear acts such as fracking are violent actions.

4. Fascist/Racist Violence

The Greek fascist party Golden Dawn’s rise to prominence and attacks on migrants and people of colour is the most clear example of the violent racist organisations that exist on the fringes of political culture in European countries. In recent years the far-right attained greater traction across Europe, from Hungary’s Jobbik to the French ‘Front Nationale‘. This brings with it racist attacks on people of colour and political violence against the left (for example against Greek antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and French antifascist activist Clement Meric – both murdered by fascists). These movements may appear marginal yet there are also thousands of racist hate crimes each year across European societies. These movements must be fought by militant action, to refuse defensive violence against them is to put pacifism above the safety of oppressed communities.

One reason that Britain has not seen the level of fascist violence as other European nations is the successful tradition of militant – i.e. physical force – antifascism, as documented in Sean Birchall’s ‘Beating the Fascists’. From the 1936 Battle of Cable Street which saw off Moseley’s Nazi-sympathising ‘British Union of Fascists’ to the pitched street battles between Anti-Fascist Action and the Nazi ‘National Front’, British leftists have seen that fascists are physically beaten off the streets.

5. Police violence

On the 4th August 2011, police marksmen extra-judicially executed Mark Duggan, a young black man, in Tottenham. A stream of lies poured from the Met’s PR machine – that Mark had shot and wounded a police officer, that his bullet was lodged in the police radio, that he was one of the most dangerous gangsters in Europe. The press took up these lies and playing on racial stereotypes of black as criminal they smeared him. This murder sparked a nationwide uprising which the police brutally crushed, handing looters of items worth pennies months in prison, magistrates’ courts working round the clock. Years on there is still no justice. An inquest full of contradictions, police perjury and a miraculously moving gun came to the absurd conclusion that the killing was lawful. Stop-and-search is a violent practice, involving daily harassment, humiliation and physical violence against people of colour. Deaths in police custody are all too common. Just the other day police raided well known gathering points for the homeless in London to continue their campaign of harassment and criminalisation of poverty (a product of the economic order which they themselves uphold).

Similar police violence is widespread across Europe – for example the Swedish cops who recently ran down anti-fascist protesters on horses. The violence of police and prisons is at the heart of maintaining an intensely violent and, on a humanitarian level, dysfunctional liberal order.

6. Patriarchy

The patriarchy is a system of power of men over women enforced by violence and by restrictive social norms. Rape is an epidemic in all societies, including ‘civilised’ Western ones, for example one in five British women have been subjected to a sexual offence. Recent revelations about the attitudes of police and social services to rape victims in Rotherham shows the extent of violent rape culture. The question of rape also intersects heavily with state violence – as in the recent ‘spycops’ case in which female activists had long term sexual relationships with undercover male activists leaving the women to feel, as on put it, as if they had been ‘raped by the state’. Women are subject to pervasive instances of catcalling and street harassment. Further, the boundaries of acceptable gender expression and identity are police by everyday acts of violence – trans women especially experience harassment, assault and murder for simply existing in public and a 2013 European Union study found that half of LGBT Europeans sometimes avoided public places to avoid harassment.

Non-binary gender identity is erased and goes unrecognised even by supposedly progressive institutions – the NHS, for example, will only provide gender reassignment surgery if a person expresses, to their satisfaction, a gender identity opposite to the one they were assigned at birth. For example, I was recently told the story of an afab (assigned female at birth) trans man being criticised by his doctors for wearing pink shoes during his transition. Given the psychological impacts and stresses of gender dysphoria, this refusal of state institutions to recognise the reality of diverse and fluid genders is an act of violence intended to bring people in line with the patriarchal, binary conception of gender.

7. Work and Poverty

Perhaps a controversial thing to call violent, but the wage labour system is violent in many ways that are just as real, though less apparent then the other examples here. For starters, in a society which has the material means to provide for everyone’s needs, where there are warehouses filled with food, much of which is then wasted, and homes lie empty and rotting, the wage system denies access to these goods to those who don’t submit to the authority and exploitation of an outside force. Austerity kills and poverty kills, largely because we if we are denied access to the labour force then we are denied access to the necessities of life – as with the 10,000 people who died after being wrongly declared ‘fit to work’ by ATOs. This is a system that will starve you through artificial scarcity to impose work discipline. This system can only exist because of the implicit and explicit violence of the state in upholding private property and suppressing anti-capitalist resistance. Wage labour is also a theft of human life and potential, it causes stress, alienation, and thousands of accidents and deaths a year. The dull monotony of life in a call centre or office is a fate imposed by violence not the natural necessities of producion for human need.

8. Corporate terrorism

As I write this there is a copy of the ‘Daily Telegraph’ next to me on the kitchen table, the front page emblazoned with the dramatic headline ‘BRITAIN GEARS UP FOR WAR ON ISIL’. ISIS/ISIL/IS/whatever-they’re-calling-themselves-now are a particularly nasty Islamist organisation that has carried out various beheadings, massacres and other atrocities. But we must be more than a little sceptical when the press dubs them ‘barbarians’ and Joe Biden hyperbolically threatens to follow them ‘to the gates of hell’. The dominant narrative draws on their ‘mediaeval’ methods of warfare to separate their violence – scary, Oriental, barbarous, conducted in the name of a foreign god with knives and rifles – with our violence – precision, surgical strikes on ‘terrorists’ with highly advanced computer technology, civilised, proportionate. Yet we must ask ourselves, is it any worse for ISIS to behead a journalist than for British companies like BAE Systems to supply arms to Indonesia or Israel to carry out their genocidal actions in East Timor and Gaza with fighter bombers and cluster bombs? Supplying weapons to repressive regimes and for genocidal wars is terrorism.

Western companies also carry out economic exploitation in the Global South, their demand for cheap products leads to death and suffering – whether it is Coca-Cola killing union organisers, Primark sourcing clothes from unsafe garment factories leading to atrocities like the Rana Plaza collapse or Apple’s Foxconn plant where nets had to be installed to stem the tide of suicidal workers jumping from the factory roof.

N.b. I do not profess to be an expert on all of these topics – given the diversity of issues covered in this post there are sure to be errors. Regarding oppressed identities I lack the relevant lived experience. Please call me out if I have inadvertently made any factual errors or used outdated, oppressive or problematic terminology.