When they poured across the border

I was cautioned to surrender,

this I could not do;

I took my gun and vanished.

[...]

“Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,

through the graves the wind is blowing,

freedom soon will come;

then we’ll come from the shadows.

-Leonard Cohen, “The Partisan”

Introduction: Nonviolence has lost the debate

Nonviolence has lost the debate. Over the last 20 years, more and more social movements and rebellions against oppression and exploitation have broken out across the world, and within these movements people have learned all over again that nonviolence does not work. They are learning that the histories of purported nonviolent victories have been falsified, that specific actions or methods that could be described as nonviolent work best when they are complemented by other actions or methods that are illegal and combative. They are learning that exclusive, dogmatic nonviolence does not stand a chance at achieving a revolutionary change in society, at getting to the roots of oppression and exploitation and bringing down those who are in power.

At best, nonviolence can oblige power to change its masks, to put a new political party on the throne and possibly expand the social sectors that are represented in the elite, without changing the fundamental fact that there is an elite that rules and benefits from the exploitation of everybody else. And if we look at all the major rebellions of the last two decades, since the end of the Cold War, it seems that nonviolence can only effect this cosmetic change if it has the support of a broad part of the elite—usually the media, the wealthy, and at least a part of the military, because nonviolent resistance has never been able to resist the full force of the State. When dissidents do not have this elite support, strict nonviolence seems like the surest way to kill a movement, as when pure nonviolence led to the total collapse of the anti-war movement in 2003 , or an enforced nonviolence led to the collapse of the student movement in Spain in 2009 .

In dozens of new social movements around the world, people have gone into the streets for the first time thinking that nonviolence is the way, because contrary to the claims of many pacifists, our society teaches us that while violence may be acceptable for governments, people on the bottom who wish to change things must always be nonviolent. This is why from the Occupy Movement in the US to the plaza occupation movement in Spain to the student movement in the UK, tens of thousands of people who were participating in a struggle for the first time in their lives, who only knew about revolution and resistance from television or from public schools (which is to say, from the media or from the government) overwhelmingly believed in nonviolence. And around the world, experience taught many of these people that they were wrong, that the pacifists, together with the media and the government had lied to them, and in order to change anything, they had to fight back.

This has been a collective learning process that has taken place around the globe, and the direction of that process has overwhelmingly gone from nonviolence to a diversity of tactics—the idea that we cannot impose a limitation of tactics or one method of struggle on an entire movement, that we need to be able to choose from a wide range of tactics, that struggles are more robust when such a variety of tactics are present, and that everybody needs to decide for themselves how to struggle (peaceful tactics, therefore, are included within a diversity of tactics, where nonviolence excludes all other tactics and methods).

Eight years ago, there were frequent debates between proponents of nonviolence and proponents of a diversity of tactics. In the fall of 2004, I wrote How Nonviolence Protects the State, one of several similar polemics to appear at the time (the arguments I make in that book, as well as criticisms of it, are outlined in the appendix). In the climate of the antiglobalization movement, which was heavily skewed towards nonviolence thanks to the disappearance or institutionalization of the social movements that came before us, and thanks to the heavy ngo participation, the debate felt like an uphill battle, although most of us were aided and inspired by the discovery or republication of texts from earlier generations of struggle, like Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology or Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

At that time, proponents of nonviolence frequently emerged from their ivory towers to debate with proponents of a diversity of tactics. But in the intervening years, something has changed. Insurrections have occurred around the world, while nonviolent movements have proven themselves stillborn or morally bankrupt (see Chapter 3). Even within the confines of the antiglobalization movement, the most powerful and communicative protests were those that openly organized on the basis of a diversity of tactics, while the rebellions in the Global South that kept the movement alive were nothing close to pacifist.

Many of the proponents of nonviolence were drawing on a rich if somewhat flawed history of peaceful movements for change, like the Latin American solidarity movement in the US or the anti-militarist and antinuclear movements in Europe. But many of these older, principled pacifists have disappeared, while those who have remained active were scarcely present in the emergence of the new nonviolent mass movements. In the face of its defeats, nonviolence nourished itself not in the experience of social movements, which repeatedly counseled against it, but rather anchored itself with the support of the mass media, the universities, wealthy benefactors, and governments themselves (see Chapter 8). Nonviolence has become increasingly external to social movements, and imposed upon them.

As this has happened, direct debate between the idea of nonviolence and that of a diversity of tactics has become increasingly rare. The criticisms of nonviolence that were published in those years made a number of arguments that would have to be either rebutted or acknowledged for any honest debate to continue. These include:

the accusation that proponents of nonviolence, in conjunction with the State, have falsified the history of the movement against the war in Vietnam, the struggles for civil rights in the US, and the independence movement in India to portray movements that used a diversity of tactics as nonviolent, and to make a partial or limited victory seem like a full victory;

the argument that the State was able to prevent the movement from attaining full victory, both in the case of civil rights and Indian independence, thanks to the role of pacifists in dialoguing with the government and attacking others in the movement who used more combative tactics;

the fact that proponents of nonviolence, particularly those who are white and middle-class, have heavily edited the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi to cut out those figures’ own learning processes and their radicalization in later years, and to silence their criticisms of white progressive allies or their support for non-pacifist movements including urban rioters and armed liberation movements;

documentation of government, police, and media encouragement of nonviolence within social movements, including government strategy papers that show that the State prefers to go up against a peaceful movement rather than a combative movement;

evidence of paternalism and racism by nonviolent organizations towards the struggles of poor people and people of color

the argument that government and business institutions are structurally immune to a “change of heart” and that historically a strictly nonviolent resistance has never provoked massive mutiny from the military, police, or other institutions, as has combative or diverse resistance;

a long list of gains won by movements that used a diversity of tactics;

the argument that “violence” is an intrinsically ambiguous category that enables more analytical manipulation than precision;

the argument that most of the alleged problems with revolutionary violence are in fact problems that can be attributed to authoritarian movements that use violence and not to anti-authoritarian movements that use violence.

Yet proponents of nonviolence in recent years have not acknowledged these criticisms, neither to rebut them nor to revise their own positions. They continue repeating the clichés, the misinformation, the broad statements, and the name-dropping of Gandhi and King that sparked the criticisms in the first place. But more often still, they avoid any direct communication altogether. In social movements across the world, they have begun spreading the claim that the Black Bloc in particular, or masked rioters in general, are police provocateurs and government agents. Never mind that in every single one of the many countries where this cheap accusation has been made, there are comrades in the social movements who argue in favor of self-defense against the police, of taking over the streets, and of smashing banks; never mind that they have already published explanations of their actions and that they would also be willing to sit down with those of another opinion to debate these things; and never mind that many of them have dedicated their lives to social movements for years—not just to the task of attacking banks but also to solidarity in all its forms, as well as many kinds of creation and self-organization.

With increasing frequency, unscrupulous supporters of nonviolence have spread the accusation, often without any evidence, that other members of a social movement are police provocateurs, and they have done this precisely because they are afraid to debate. They have to rob their opponents of any legitimacy and prevent bystanders to the debate from realizing that there is indeed any debate going on, that the social movements contain conflicting beliefs and practices. And by spreading false rumors of infiltration and dividing the movement, they expose those they accuse to violence, whether that is the violence of arrest or the violence of fellow protesters. On a number of occasions, police have tracked down and arrested those “bad protesters” who are accused of being infiltrators in order to clear their names. Supporters of nonviolence have often aided police in identifying the “bad protesters”. And after organizing or participating in debates on nonviolence over a hundred times in Europe, and North and South America, I am convinced that those who have most often physically attacked fellow protesters have been supporters of nonviolence. This is certainly confirmed by what I have seen with my own eyes. The episode has played out so many times that it has lost all its humorous irony: proponents of nonviolence attacking those they disagree with for not using peaceful tactics.

There was a time when the only people dishonest enough to toss around the accusation that the Black Bloc or other masked protesters are police infiltrators were Stalinists. Now, this has become a stock argument, not only by conspiracy nuts but also by pacifists who claim the mantle of Gandhi and King. Lies and manipulations are a resort of those who have lost an argument but don’t have the decency to admit it.

In the plaza occupation movement in Spain, self-appointed leaders imposed strict adherence to nonviolence, even prohibiting the blocking of streets or the painting of banks, and they boycotted any debate on the subject. In Barcelona, they even made the paperwork disappear when anarchists tried to reserve the sound system to organize such a debate. And during Occupy, a number of mainstream journalists posing as friends of the movement published denunciations filled with manipulations and misinformation in a bald-faced attempt to criminalize a part of the movement.

When one of these journalists, The New York Times’ Chris Hedges, sat down to debate a member of Crimethinc, he repeatedly contradicted himself, denied some of the arguments he made in his infamous article, and proved incapable of understanding that violence is a social construct that is applied to some forms of harm but not to others, often depending on whether such harm is considered normal within our society. When some nonviolence proponents broke the principles of unity and denounced fellow protesters after the demonstrations against the Vancouver Olympics, one of them subsequently debated Harsha Walia from “No One is Illegal”, and got soundly thrashed.

Most proponents of nonviolence have been smarter, and they have avoided any level playing field. They have not chosen the terrain of the movement itself, because collective experiences repeatedly prove them wrong. Instead they have turned towards the elite and gotten support from the system itself. Mainstream, for-profit publishing companies print out their books by the millions, in a stream of titles that increases as combative social movements gain more ground. Mainstream, for-profit media give nonviolent activists interviews while they demonize the so-called violent ones. University professors and ngo employees living off of grants from the government or wealthy donors (and living lush, compared to those of us who make our living working in restaurants and bars, shoplifting, teaching in public schools, driving taxis, doing temp work or sex work, or volunteering for medical experiments), also tend to weigh in on the side of nonviolence, bringing a hefty array of institutional resources along with them.

All of these resources overwhelm the small counterinformation websites, the pirate radio stations, and the all-volunteer independent presses of the movement. For every book we print out, often cutting and binding by hand, they can print a thousand books. The proponents of nonviolence, yet again, have chosen to unscrupulously work with and for the system in a Faustian pact, availing themselves of resources, economic security, safety from repression, and even fame, but make no mistake: they have revealed themselves as morally corrupt. The closer one gets to the do-it-yourself, the self-organized, and the crowd-funded structures of our movements for revolution, and the more one is immersed in the streets, in the struggles of those who are fighting for their own lives, the more likely you are to find support for a diversity of tactics. And the closer you get to the ngos, to the corporate publishing houses, to the mainstream media or the richly funded “alternatives”, to the elite universities, to the media-conscious careerists, and to the halls of wealth and privilege, the more likely you are to find strict support for exclusive nonviolence.

Nonviolence has failed on a global level. It has proven to be a great friend to governments, political parties, police departments, and ngos, and a traitor to our struggles for freedom, dignity, and well-being. The vast majority of its proponents have jumped ship to cozy up to the media, the State, or wealthy benefactors, using any cheap trick, manipulation, or form of violence (like attacking fellow protesters or helping the cops carry out arrests) that comes in handy to win the contest, even if it means the division and death of the movement. Many have proven themselves to be opportunists, politicians, or careerists. And a principled minority who actually have remained true to their historical movements still have not answered for past failings or current weaknesses.

In response to How Nonviolence Protects the State, there were a few principled supporters of nonviolence (writing in Fifth Estate or on Richmond Indymedia, for example) who criticized the tone of the book but accepted many of the criticisms, and called on other pacifists to read it in order to come to terms with certain mistakes.

In this book also, I argue in favor of a diversity of tactics. At its most basic, the concept of a diversity of tactics is nothing more than the recognition that different methods of struggle exist side by side. My goal is not to make other people think like I do or support the exact same tactics and methods that I do. To me, not only is it inconceivable that a movement contain a homogeneity of methods, it is also undesirable. It is nothing but authoritarianism to censor a movement for social change so that everyone else uses the same method as we do. This is why I believe that nonviolence—meaning an attempt to force nonviolent methods across an entire movement —is authoritarian and belongs to the State. For the same reason, I do not want to impose my methods on others. And even if this could be done through the pure force of reason, simply convincing everybody (and it couldn’t, for no human group ever thinks with the same mind, and thank the heavens for that), it would be a grave mistake. We can never know whether our analysis and our methods are wrong, except sometimes with hindsight. Our movements are stronger when they employ diverse methods and analyses and these different positions criticize one another.

Those of us who have tried to create a more conflictive struggle have often been wrong, and sometimes we have been aided by the criticism of those who are more drawn to healing and reconciliation than to conflict. But that kind of mutual criticism and support is only possible if those who today separate themselves as pacifists decide unequivocally to stand always with those who struggle, and always against the powers that oppress.

My aim with this book is not to convert or delegitimize every person who prefers nonviolence. Within a struggle that uses a diversity of tactics, there is room for those who prefer peaceful methods as long as they do not try to write the rules for the entire movement, as long as they do not collaborate with the police and the other structures of power, and as long as they accept that other people in the struggle are going to use other methods, according to their situation and their preferences. It would also help if they acknowledged the historical failings of nonviolence, but that is only their concern if they wish to develop effective nonviolent methods that must actually be taken seriously, as contrasted with the hollow, comfortable forms of nonviolence that have predominated in the last decades.

And while any struggle not attempting to enforce homogeneity must accept the existence of a diversity of tactics, I do not wish to give anyone the impression that we, collectively, have been doing a good job of building this struggle, or that the diversity of tactics framework is adequate to our needs. We need much stronger social struggles if we are to overcome the State, capitalism, patriarchy—all the forces that oppress and exploit us—to create a world on the basis of mutual aid, solidarity, free association, and a healthy relationship with the earth and one another. To that end, I will conclude by talking about struggles that have revealed promising new directions, and about how we can move past a diversity of tactics so that different methods of struggle can complement one another critically and respectfully.

Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist

Perhaps the most important argument against nonviolence is that 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.

In the last ten years, I have organized or participated in dozens of workshops on the topic of nonviolence. Whenever I can, I ask people to define “violence”. The curious thing is that no group of people, whether they number five or a hundred, has ever agreed on the definition. And we're not talking about a random sample of the population, but relatively homogeneous groups who participate in social movements, who live in the same town and often know each other, or in a few cases a neighborhood association or study group. Excepting the occasional university class, we're talking about a self-selecting group of people who come out to a talk critical of or in support of nonviolence. And even in that narrow sample, there is no consensus about what violence actually means.

Sometimes I would try teasing it out by asking folks to stand or raise their hand if they thought a specific action or situation was violent. Then I named cases like, “a protestor punching a cop who is trying to arrest someone,” “breaking the windows of a bank that evicts people from their houses,” “buying and eating factory-farmed meat,” “buying and eating factory-farmed soy,” “a person killing someone trying to rape them,” “carrying a gun in public,” “paying your taxes,” “driving a car,” “the police evicting someone from their house,” “making a cop feel good about their job,” “a predator killing and eating prey,” “a lightning bolt killing someone,” “imprisonment” and so on.

After doing this exercise dozens of times, I noticed a few clear patterns. First, as I have already mentioned: there was no agreement. But even more interesting was what happened if I asked people to close their eyes while answering. If they could not see how their peers were responding, there was an even greater divergence. If people had their eyes open, most questions had a clear majority describing the case as “violent” or “not violent”. If their eyes were closed, many more cases were divided clearly down the middle (this divergence was even more evident if I asked people to position themselves on a spectrum rather than giving a simple yes or no). In other words, “violence” is not necessarily a category that is reasonably defined, so much as one that is defined by the reactions of our peers. What is considered normal or acceptable is much less likely to be defined as violent, no matter how much harm it may cause.

Something that critics of nonviolence have long said is that 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, 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. And this is why the police, in turn, try to urge protesters and protest organizations to be nonviolent, to publish nonviolent codes of conduct, and to expel or help arrest any “bad protester” who doesn't follow the law.

Only people who are involved in radical causes, or who have experienced it first hand, tend to see structural harm as violence. People in a typical college class do not identify paying taxes or buying clothes made in a sweatshop as violent. People who have been foreclosed, or participants in a group that fights foreclosures, will identify an eviction as violent. Animal rights activists will identify eating meat as violent. Small farmer advocates or rainforest advocates will identify soy as violent. Almost no one will identify driving a car as violent, even though in objective terms it is the item on the list that has caused and will cause the most deaths, without a doubt.

What about natural violence? What about the harm caused by weather, by predators, by lack of predators, by the simple fact so many people still have not come to terms with, which is that everybody dies? How much does the concept of a “right to life” owe to Christian morality, founded in the idea that our lives belong to God and not to us? What is the relationship between this fear of violence and a fear of the naturalness and inevitability of harm and death? Categorically separating harm that is inevitable in nature and harm caused by humans is inextricable from a separation of humans from their environment, both philosophically and materially. How much suffering is caused by this separation?

Does violence mean causing harm? If we participate in a non-voluntary structure (like the State or the capitalist market) that tortures, kills, or malnourishes millions of people, are we off the hook, just because we would face negative consequences for refusal (to pay taxes, to engage in any market exchange because, let's face it, even if you buy green, all economic activity fuels overall economic activity)? This would make a joke of nonviolence, if those who fight back against structures of oppression are considered worse than those who accept them passively. And if complicity with violent structures is also to be defined as violent, then how much resistance is required of us so as not to be violent? If we participate in a protest once a year, that after over thirty years has still not succeeded in closing one military school, can we now be considered nonviolent? What if we get arrested for civil disobedience, even if we know that our arrest will probably change nothing?

These questions are impossible to answer. We are all forced to participate in a society that is held together by structural violence, and rewarded for our participation with various privileges, though these privileges are spread unevenly across society. Given that those who use some form of visible, antisocial violence are often the least likely to enjoy the privileges of structural violence, there is no feasible way to determine who is violent and who is not. And if we define passive complicity as support for violence, there is no way to judge which methods of struggle are more or less violent, since a peaceful method may be more complicit with structural violence. Given that we do not yet know for sure which methods will be most effective at finally abolishing the structures that are oppressing us and destroying the planet, no one can make a solid claim to having a truly peaceful method, unless we understand “peaceful” as “non-conflictive” and perhaps also as “at peace with existing structures of violence”.

Therefore, nonviolence is not an absence, avoidance, or transformation of violence. That would be impossible to certify. Nonviolence is an attempt to resolve, transform, or suppress those things in our society and in our social movements that appear to its practitioners to be violent. Because violence cannot be understood objectively, nonviolent groups will tend to focus on eliminating or discouraging the forms of violence that are more obvious, and in their reach; the kinds of violence that are not normal, but that go against normality; the kinds of violence that are not invisible, but spectacular. This means nonviolence will prioritize resistance against open war (a “hot” war between states), against dictatorships, against military rule, while downplaying or even cozying up to the less visible violence of democratic government, capitalism, and structural warfare. This also means pacifying those who are fighting against power, because the act of rebellion will always appear to be the most violent act in our society. For this reason, many proponents of nonviolence denounce any combative form of rebellion while normalizing and even justifying the repressive response of the State. This is not by any means true of all practitioners of nonviolence, but it is the logical outcome of the contradictions in the idea of nonviolence, and therefore it is the path that many or most practitioners will take.

It is no surprise, then, that one of the largest nonviolent movements of recent years, the “indignados” of Spain, declared any illegal actions including blocking streets or even guerrilla gardening—turning the grassy lawn of a public plaza into a garden—to be violent. In contrast, many self-described pacifists I have met have decided that self-defense or even assassinating dictators would not be violent because they were aggressors and such an action would avert a much greater harm. Violence is a very flexible term that people can bend and twist however they want to morally justify or condemn the actions they have already decided are acceptable or unacceptable.

Violence is so vague, so hard to define, it is useless as a strategic category. It would be silly to abolish it as a word, because it can succinctly describe a certain emotional reality. But to use it analytically, to use it as a guiding criterion for our strategies of struggle, is an invitation to confusion.

It can take hours of debating and only sometimes will a group of people agree to a common definition of violence. But they have accomplished nothing, because some of them will still not be convinced whether “nonviolent” lines up with “good” and “violent” with “bad” as they are intended to. In other words, they still will not have learned anything about the proper methods for struggle. And more importantly, nearly everyone else in the world will still be using another definition,

How was the category of “violence” introduced in our strategic debates? I would argue that it was introduced by the very institution that serves as the gatekeeper to people's perception of violence: the media. It is the media who constantly discipline social movements to adopt these categories and defend themselves from the ever-ready accusation of being “violent”. As soon as dissidents try to defend themselves by arguing that they are not violent, they have fallen into the trap, taking up the values of the State and adopting its preferred category. There are also histories that suggest the media's role in introducing this category in earlier struggles. Even Gandhi, who saw how the liberation struggles before his time were maligned by the powerful, and who went to study at an elite university in England, his country's colonizer, would have been highly sensitive to how rebels and revolutionaries were characterized in the discourses and the media of the ruling class. He certainly would have gotten such a perspective when he voluntarily rallied his fellow Indians in South Africa to support two different British wars, winning a War Medal for his efforts.

Discussing the history of popular movements and elite responses in the city of Barcelona, Chris Ealham reveals the media's use of “moral panics” to unify the city bourgeoisie against the threat of revolution from below. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the major newspapers were primarily a tool of communication among the bourgeoisie—the class of rulers and owners. Because there was no single effective conspiracy uniting all the elite, especially in Barcelona, where the elite were divided between Spaniards and Catalans, merchants and landed gentry, Catholics and progressives, much of the conversation about how to rule had to take place in the open. But in the face of general strikes, worker rebellions, and a growing anarchist movement, the factory owners, politicians, aristocrats, and church officials could not communicate openly about their need to keep the lower classes down. Doing so in a newspaper would only hasten their loss of control over the hearts and minds of their subjects, and it would also contradict with their own self-image and the philanthropic discourses they used to justify why they got to sit on top of the social pyramid. So they turned to moralistic euphemisms.

The elite, as has been the case at most times in history, did not have a single set of interests, but conflicting interests and differing strategies regarding how to maintain and amplify their power. Different sectors of the elite generally had their own newspapers, and these featured competing discourses. However, when popular movements were particularly strong, such that they presented a threat to the social pyramid, it was crucial for the elites to get over their differences and join their forces to trample down those on the bottom. Therefore, the newspapers began to deploy some of the key euphemisms they were already circulating to signal a moral panic, an ungodly threat to the ruling order that required the whole ruling class to unite.

Aside from uncleanliness or hygiene, the principal term used to unleash a moral panic and mobilize elite action was “violence”. Among the elite, then as now, in Barcelona as in the English- speaking world, “violence” was a euphemism for a threat to the ruling order and its illusion of social peace, with which the class struggle, the brutality of patriarchy, and the murderousness of colonialism are hidden. The newspapers did not talk about violence when cops killed strikers, when landlords evicted families, or when poor people died of hunger. They talked about violence when workers went on strike, when tenants stopped paying rent, when street vendors refused to surrender their wares to the cops (who would harass them at the behest of the store owners), and when anarchists carried out sabotage or held unpermitted marches.

One of the advantages of moralizing elite discourses, and of democratic government as well, is that they train the oppressed to adopt the mentality and the language of the oppressor. Over time, people fighting to better their situation came to care about their image in the eyes of the media, which is to say in the eyes of the elite. They wanted to appear respectable. In some cases, they were opportunists who formed political parties and cashed in their popular support at the first opportunity to obtain a seat at the table of power. In other cases, they were people who took these elite discourses seriously, bit down on the bait, and tried to prove that they were not violent or unhygienic. They debated with the hollow hypocrisy of the elite in an attempt to show that they were not monsters deserving repression. If the justification for repression could be removed, wouldn't the repression also disappear? As the Spectacle grew in strength, many people became so detached from the reality in the streets that their own self-image and moral compass were largely crafted by the media.

As soon as social movements began to listen to the media, the elite could determine which forms of resistance were acceptable, and which were unacceptable. Every day of the week, the media—which are owned by the same people who profit off the current state of affairs—are telling us what is violent and what is normal. The category of violence belongs to them. By using the same category as our moral compass, we are allowing those in power to guide our struggle. One justification for clinging to the category of violence is that violence is oppressive, therefore we need to highlight it and avoid it.

This would only have a chance of being true if we controlled the definition of violence, rather than the powerful. If we choose other criteria for evaluating our resistance, for example whether or not a tactic or method is liberating, whether it makes us more free and opens up space for new social relations, we can avoid the forms of authoritarianism or self-harm the pacifists wish to avoid, without giving the advantage to the media. The media do not talk 24 hours a day about what is liberating, because they do not want us to think about it, and because we have the advantage in that debate. More often than their occasional use of “freedom” as the justification for some war, the government and media have to explain why we need limits on freedom. But when it comes to violence, in a ten-second sound bite they have the upper hand if they want to describe a conflictive social movement as violent, or an austerity measure or capitalist development project seem like a mundane fact of life. Even in a fair debate, and the debate is far from fair, most people will be persuaded that the thing that triggers a release of adrenaline, that has a sense of danger—a riot, a shooting, smashing things, shouting and running around, crime—is violent, whereas the thing that is abstract, bureaucratic, or invisible—a million slow deaths on another continent, the price of medicine, a prison sentence—is not violent.

Freedom as a concept sides with those who are struggling for theirs, whereas nonviolence as a concept sides with the enforcers of normality and the rulers of the status quo.

By criticizing nonviolence, I am not advocating violence. Many of us believe that the phrase “advocating violence” has no inherent meaning, it is just a form of demagoguery and fear-mongering. Nonviolence requires a strategic usage of the concept of “violence”, which is moralistic, imprecise, incoherent, and tends towards hypocrisy. We reject nonviolence because it is pacifying, and because it is incoherent. The category of violence is a tool of the State. In using it uncritically, nonviolent activists also become tools.

I do not want to waste any more time by talking about violence. I will try to talk concretely about the actions we need in our struggles. If I have to refer to a body of methods or tactics that are usually excluded by nonviolence, I will talk about “illegal”, “combative”, “conflictive”, or “forceful” actions, as the case may be. But I will try to do so with my eyes set on the necessity for a diversity of tactics.

But “diversity of tactics” should not simply be a replacement term for “violence.” I think the criticism has sometimes been warranted that practitioners of a diversity of tactics have done whatever they wanted without thinking about the consequences for anyone else. But also, some of the most effective protests in North America in the last few years—effective in terms of disruption to the summits of the powerful, in terms of spreading awareness, surviving repression, and also allowing a diverse range of protest methods to inhabit the same space in a spirit of respect and solidarity (excepting that method which tries to dictate how everyone else may or may not participate)—used a diversity of tactics. These include the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, the Republican National Convention protests in St. Paul in 2008, the Pittsburgh G8 protests in 2009, and the protests against the 2010 Vancouver Olympics; and one might also add the 2005 protests against the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, or the 2007 protests against the G8 in Heiligendamm, Germany. And in the aftermath, there were inevitably some proponents of nonviolence who broke the principles of unity agreed on beforehand and denounced the “bad protesters” in the media.

While the debate around a diversity of tactics most often surfaces in major protests that bring together people with very different methods, it also applies to other moments and other kinds of struggle. Likewise, the most effective social uprisings since the end of the Cold War can be characterized as using a diversity of methods, whereas the exclusively peaceful movements have resulted in disappointment. (Chapter 3 is dedicated entirely to this point).

There are other criticisms that have come from the so-called bad protesters, the violent ones, themselves. While many still hold to the ideal of a diversity of tactics, and many believe that combative methods such as sabotage, riots, Black Blocs, or even armed struggle, are necessary, few are content with our methods to date. Participants of certain struggles, at certain moments, have criticized a fetishization of violence in their struggle, or the lack of a next step once police have been defeated in the street (see, for example, “And After Having Burnt Everything? Strasbourg, Black Bloc, and the Question of Strategy” or “Another Critique of Insurrectionalism” ). Generalizing these criticisms to all “violent protesters” would be dishonest and it would also miss the very valuable and nuanced points they bring up.

In my experience, the unfair and often manipulative generalizations made by supporters of nonviolence make it much harder for conflictive anarchists to make these self-criticisms openly. Ironically, nonviolence advocates have created the exact sort of polemicized environment that “nonviolent communication” tries to avoid, in which two sides close ranks and face off. I could decry this as yet another example of nonviolent hypocrisy, but then pacifists who don't deserve that criticism, along with those who do, would be more likely to block their ears and reload for the counterattack. So, I'll just leave the criticism in the open and reiterate the point that those who support a diversity of tactics are not generally satisfied with our struggle, many are self-critical, and many want to be more inclusive.

A diversity of methods is necessary in our struggle because none of us have the answer regarding the one true strategy for revolution; because there is no one size that fits all and each of us must develop a unique form of struggle for our respective situations; and because in fact our movements are harder to repress when we replace a party-line unity with a broad solidarity, when we attack as a swarm and not as an opposing army. Whether that army is pacifist or combative, the discipline required to coerce or intimidate everyone into following one set of pre-approved tactics, and to exclude those who fall out of line, is authoritarian. In such a contest, whichever army won—the army of the government or the army of the movement—the State would triumph.

A lack of unity does not mean a lack of communication. We learn from difference, and we are stronger when we communicate across this difference, criticizing one another but also helping one another, and all the while respecting our fundamental divergence. There are many totally erroneous or backstabbing forms of struggle, and these should be criticized vehemently, not protected behind a polite relativism. But the goal of our criticism should be solidarity, not homogeneity. There are a thousand different roles to play within this struggle, if we can learn to support one another in our differences. There is a place for healers, for fighters, for story-tellers, for those who resolve conflicts and those who seek conflicts. All of us can do a better job at seeking this more robust struggle.

Chapter 2. Recuperation is How We Lose

The reason I am talking about methods of struggle is because struggle is a vital part of the lives of many people around the world. Sometimes we meet in the streets—in protests, occupations, demonstrations, festivals, talks, and debates—and sometimes we are separated by a wide gulf in our practices. What we have in common is that we want to fight against the current state of things, but we don't even agree on how to phrase this. Some would say we want to liberate ourselves from colonialism, others that we want to abolish oppression, and others that we want to change the world. One person might say we are working for social justice, and others, myself for instance, would counter that justice is a concept of the ruling system.

I am an anarchist, but I fight alongside many people who do not define themselves the same way. We may all say that we want revolution, but we mean different things by this. Many people believe in political revolution, which would be the overthrow of the existing political structure and the installation of a new, presumably better political structure. The revolutions in the American colonies, France, Russia, China, Cuba, and Algeria were political revolutions. Anarchists generally believe in a social revolution, which means the destruction of the existing political structure and all coercive hierarchies, without the imposition of a new political structure, therefore allowing everyone to organize themselves freely. But again, those are my terms; others would describe it differently.

Some people understand revolution as the abolition of classes, while others see it as the proletariat achieving political dominance. Some focus on the abolition of the patriarchy, and others on ending white supremacy and imperialism. The idea of revolution can apply to all aspects of life. If I do not talk exclusively about my own vision of revolution, it is because my goal in this text is not to convince others of that vision, but to deal with a problem that has arisen in spaces where people with very different ideas of revolution try to work together.

Even though revolution is a term with many definitions, it is informed by experiences of the struggle we often share. This vague commonality, the fact that we are on some level struggling together even though our reasons and concepts differ, is why we can criticize one another's concept of revolution without necessarily agreeing on what revolution means: because concepts inform practices, and practices meet with different results when they are put to use in the streets. When these results are counterproductive, sometimes we refuse to see our own failings and need to hear criticism from a different perspective. This, in my mind, is the complicated, suspended nature of reality, often lacking any objective coordinates but still full of pressing needs and imminent truths. An academic approach demands that we establish objective definitions and shared criteria for evaluation. This method has its uses but it is not always realistic in a situation of struggle. The criteria we choose might be incorrect, or the definitions misleading, and we will not know until we put them into practice. We each know why we are fighting, but perhaps we cannot articulate it, much less agree about it with others. Perhaps the demands for a philosophical unity are themselves antithetical to the project of liberation, since we ourselves are so obviously neither identical nor unified.

Despite lacking a common definition of revolution, we can criticize the nonviolent vision of revolution for betraying that nameless refusal, that urge for freedom we all have inside of us. Through collective debate, we can dismantle visions of revolution that do not live up to their pretenses of being either liberating or realistic. The end result of this debate is not a single definition of revolution nor a common, correct practice, since we do not represent a homogenous humanity with the same needs and experiences. The result is a multiplicity of practices that are more intelligent and more effective, and that either complement one another or clearly evince the unbridgeable chasm between themselves.

The present criticism of nonviolence, therefore, does not seek to convert its adherents, but to disprove their pretenses, suggest new directions for those interested in a revolution against all forms of domination, and let them make up their own minds.

The primary flaw in a majority of nonviolent discourses is to view revolution as a morality play. According to their morality play, revolutions lose because they open the Pandora's Box of violence, are corrupted, and end up reproducing what they intended to abolish. But not only the so-called violent revolutions have suffered this fate. The government of India continued to mete out humiliation, exploitation, beatings and killings after the victory of the supposedly nonviolent independence movement. In the United States, the desegregated South continued to preserve white supremacy northern style, through gentrification, judicial lynchings, structural discrimination, and other measures. And in recent years, where the “Color Revolutions” have forced out the ruling political parties in Serbia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere, we still find government corruption, police brutality, the forcible exclusion of common people, and widespread apathy.

Government violence is not the result of violent revolutions, but the product of government itself. Any movement that leaves the State intact will fail in ending the oppressions we are fighting against. A nonviolent movement that replaces one government with another—and this is the greatest victory a nonviolent movement has ever achieved in the history of the world—ends up betraying itself, allowing Power to change its masks without addressing the fundamental problems of society. Nonviolence as an analytical tool has no means of understanding this kind of defeat—the kind that looks like victory.

When evaluating the possibility for a revolutionary social change, it is necessary to set our sights on a complete transformation that does away with coercive hierarchies of any kind, including governments, capitalism, and patriarchy. Governments are by their nature aggressive and dominating. No society is safe if its neighbor is a state. Capitalism, for its part, is based on the endless accumulation of value, which requires exploitation, alienation, the enclosure of any commons, and the destruction of the environment. Capitalism has proven to be the strongest engine yet for state power, which is why every state in modern history, even those that call themselves socialist, link themselves to the accumulative processes of capitalism. And patriarchy is perhaps the most insidious, longest lasting form of oppression on the planet, constituting itself as a plague in our own families and communities as much as an external force to be combated.

An anarchist revolution opens the door to many different forms of self-organization, but it must do away with all these hierarchical systems. Being critical of nonviolence is not essential to being anarchist, as there are many anarchist pacifists, and participating in social movements does not at all require having an anarchist vision.

Although some folks participate in social struggles simply to recover lost privileges (especially in these times of austerity measures), a deeper unhappiness with exploitation, oppression, and the destruction of the planet drive many more people to the streets. Most of these folks understand their problems within the dominant discourses of the day, which tend to be democratic or religious. In other words, they reject the problems caused by the system, but they adopt the language, the philosophy, and the range of solutions given to them by that same system. As such, they often set themselves the goal of getting the right leaders in power. But all social ills flow from the fact that we are robbed of power to make the decisions and solve the problems that directly affect us. No one knows what's best for us more than we ourselves do. Once we are turned into spectators of our own lives, any manner of abuses can be heaped on us with ease.

This book is not only for anarchists, but it is written from an anarchist perspective, based on the belief that no matter how people understand their problems, rising up to solve them will necessitate conflict with the State, and those problems will not be solved until the State is destroyed.

Many readers may not agree with this contention, but if they continue struggling for their own vision of freedom, the debate will come up again and again, because their struggle will bring them into conflict with the State, and if they should ever win, and have the opportunity to build a better state supposedly compatible with their liberation, they will be sorely disappointed, and all their dreams will be corrupted, as has happened so many times in the past. In the meantime, we can agree to disagree, and focus on the fact that struggling for a better world means conflict with the current system. If we are going to challenge that system, it will help to familiarize ourselves with how governments themselves understand resistance. The specific strategies vary greatly, but for the last half century, governments across the world have used the paradigm of counterinsurgency for defeating rebellious movements. The idea of counterinsurgency comes from the State itself, based on experiences in Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam, and urban ghettos in the United States and Europe. Its basis is the hypothesis that conflict is the inherent condition of society under the State. The goal of government, therefore, is not to eliminate conflict, but to manage it permanently, and make sure it remains at lower, less threatening levels, which according to the military authors of this idea, includes nonviolence.

Insurrectionary anarchists often divide counterinsurgency into repression and recuperation. Together, these two motions constitute a carrot and a stick that can discipline social movements into adopting behaviors that do not threaten the fundamental basis of the current system. Nonviolent activists very rarely talk about recuperation, and some would say this is because they tend to play the role of recuperators.

Recuperation is the process by which those who rebel and break away from current power structures are induced to rejuvenate those power structures or create more effective ones. They either turn their rebellion into the mere symbol of rebellion, as a way to exorcise whatever anger or discontentment led them to rebel, or they direct it against only a small part of the system, creating a change that allows the State to function more effectively overall. Recuperation is when countercultural movements like punk or the hippies become just new ways of buying and selling, new product lines, a new niche within the diversity of capitalist democracy. Recuperation is when workers' movements around the world form political parties that enter into government and sell out their base, or when labor unions come to convince workers of the needs of bosses, for example accepting voluntary pay cuts for the good of the company. Liberation movements in India, South Africa, and many other countries were recuperated when they decided to seek common ground with their colonizers and fight for a new government that would carry out all the same economic projects of the old government, reserving themselves the special role of local managers for international finance.

NGOs profit constantly off the State's need to recuperate popular rage. Rich donors and government agencies give away huge amounts of money to pay dissidents to feel like they're making a real change in the world by running services that constitute a bandage on the gaping wounds of poverty and structural violence, while training those in need to passively accept aid rather than fighting to change their circumstances. Thanks to charity, the powerful can throw some crumbs to those who wait obediently, allowing them to more effectively crush those who rise up to create change directly.

Struggles in democratic societies are defeated by recuperation more often than by repression. Though a democratic state is perfectly capable of shooting down protesters in the street or torturing rebels in prison—and every democratic state does this with more regularity than many of its citizens suspect—democracy's greatest strength is in winning the consent and participation of the exploited. To do this, a democratic government has to pretend it is open to criticism. Democracy requires social peace, the illusion that, in a society based on exploitation and domination, everyone can get along and nobody's fundamental well-being is under threat. If a democratic government cannot successfully project the idea that its use of the bullet and the baton is exceptional, the social peace is disrupted, investors grow cautious, and state subjects stop participating.

To preserve the social peace, businesses and politicians constantly deploy measures to convince those who rise up to make demands, to enter into dialogue, reform the system, play politics, or turn their critiques and anxieties into something that can make money. We can't overcome the destruction of our communities, but we can have a thousand friends on Facebook. We can't keep the forest we played in as children from getting cut down, but we can start a recycling program. Indigenous people cannot have their land back, but one or two of them might get elected to Congress. Poor neighborhoods of color can't get rid of the police who occupy their streets, harass them, and occasionally shoot them down, but they might get the city to pay some NGO to give the cops cultural sensitivity trainings.

For recuperation to work, those who participate in social struggles must play along in some way. Enough people need to agree to play by the new set of rules being imposed from above. They need to accept the new police training requirements or recycling program as a victory, they need to vote for the new candidate or support the new worker-friendly business. They will do this only if they do not see the system as a whole as their enemy; they will accept domination at the hands of the police as long as it happens in more subtle ways; they will be content with the destruction of the planet as long as it happens a little more slowly.

For this reason, nonviolence tends to be a necessary component for recuperation. Nonviolent resistance is less likely to help people develop an antagonistic consciousness of the State. It gives the guardians of law and order more opportunities to put on a friendly face. And it also prevents the disruption of the social peace during the necessary period of institutional pressure and dialogue in which radical movements allow themselves to be recuperated.

The Civil Rights movement in the US was recuperated when it was convinced to fight for voter registration instead of any material equality or meaningful freedom. The independence movements in India and South Africa were recuperated when they set their goal on new capitalist states that played by the same rules that had enriched investors during the colonial or apartheid regimes. Popular outrage in Ukraine, Serbia, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, and other countries that experienced the “Color Revolutions” was recuperated when they identified their enemy as one specific political party, and declared victory when a new political party came into office, even though none of the structures that caused their poverty and powerlessness had changed. Nonviolence played a key role in all of these processes of recuperation by enabling dialogue between powerholders and movement leaders, by preventing people from taking power into their own hands, giving them instead an ideology of glorified powerlessness, and by ensuring peacefulness and stability in critical moments of transition from one form of oppression to another.

Anyone who believes in revolution needs to have an analysis of recuperation and a strategy for how to keep their rebellion from being twisted to suit the needs of the State. Not only does nonviolence lack this analysis, it frequently serves as a vehicle for recuperation.

Chapter 3. The Revolutions of Today

After demonstrating that the historical victories of nonviolence have not been victories from a revolutionary standpoint, that they did not bring an end to oppression and exploitation, they did not fundamentally change social relations, much less create a classless, horizontal society, one often hears the rebuttal, But violence has never worked!

Moving past the moralistic simplemindedness contained in the belief that “violence” is a method, this statement conceals an important fact. Unlike the proponents of nonviolence, we (and here I only mean to speak for anarchists who believe in revolution, though many other anti-authoritarian anticapitalists as well as indigenous people fighting for their freedom from colonialism may identify) have never claimed victory. We have pointed to specific battles won, ground gained, or small steps ahead as sources of inspiration and learning, but we are not trying to offer easy solutions, cheap hopes, or false promises to anyone. If we liberate ourselves in one area, all we gain will be lost again unless the State is defeated on a worldwide scale.

The State does not brook any independence or externality to its rule, and that is why it has brutally colonized the entire globe. The tendency of nonviolence to claim superficial, false victories reveals its inclination to seek accommodation with ruling structures by identifying oppression with the spectacular violence of “bad government”, thereby covering up the deeper mechanisms that “good governments” use to accomplish the same ends. Supporters of nonviolence claim Indian independence as a victory for their method, whereas anarchists who support combative methods do not claim the Russian Revolution as a victory. Why should they? Although they participated, along with other currents of struggle, the world they talked about did not come about, and in fact they were slaughtered as other elements took over the revolution. Things clearly changed in Russia, but it was not an anarchist change.

However, these exact same criteria apply to the nonviolent movement in India. They were but one of multiple currents, their leaders were killed off, and the peaceful, just society they spoke about never came into being. Nonetheless, proponents of nonviolence jump at the chance to declare victory, no matter how many embarrassing details they have to ignore. This is not simple opportunism, but an outgrowth of the functional complicity between nonviolence and the structural violence of the State. The very philosophy of nonviolence leads to a misleading distinction between good and bad government, based on whether a government must make use of shocking, visible forms of violence or whether it can control society through other, invisible means.

By chalking up the failure of the revolutions in Russia, Spain, China, Cuba, and elsewhere to one simple factor, the revolutionaries' use of this thing called “violence,” they save themselves the need for any nuanced, thorough historical analysis. Nonviolence, in sum, encourages superficiality, false expectations, dishonesty, and sloppy thinking. Even more troublesome, it conforms with the narratives of those in power, who would also have us believe that a nonviolent Gandhi carried the day in India, and that the workers in Russia opened a Pandora's Box by rising up.

Anti-authoritarians who support a diversity of tactics do not claim a victory in the revolutions in Russia, Spain, Haiti, and elsewhere. They are forced, therefore, to analyze how people empowered themselves to defeat the government and begin to self-organize society, what went wrong, and what was the interplay between different revolutionary currents. To make sense of their defeat, they have to investigate whether people achieved a meaningful freedom in the Maroon villages, the Russian soviets, or the collectives of Aragón ; and whether these liberated zones were effective or ineffective at defending themselves. This has led to years of research and debate to hack out nuanced answers to organizational questions regarding movement unity and coordination, volunteer militias, guerrilla forces, clandestine cells, and labor unions; socioeconomic questions like the role of the struggle against patriarchy within these revolutions, the possibility of alliance between wage slaves and unwaged slaves, whether the productive logic of the factory can ever be liberated, whether intensifying attacks on capitalism and efforts to collectivize a society's resources strengthen or weaken the attempt to defeat fascist or interventionist militaries, and a long et cetera. In moments of social peace, this can seem like an obsessive escapism into the distant battles of history, but when social movements reemerge in times of renewed conflict, the people who have participated in these debates have been able to apply historical lessons to ongoing struggles and avoid the repetition of old errors.

Social scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan are the authors of a study that is among the only statistical analyses of the effectiveness of nonviolence. Like many social scientists before them, they use statistics to obscure more complex truths. They claim to have compiled a list of 323 major nonviolent campaigns or violent conflicts from 1900 to 2006, and then superficially rate these as “successful”, “partially successful”, or “failed”. They do not use revolutionary criteria for success, and in their mind the “Color Revolutions” and many other reformist, dead-end, or self-betraying movements were successful. Although they rate campaigns as objectively violent or nonviolent, they do not define violence, and they also uncritically use loaded terms like “the international community”. They credit nonviolence with victory in cases where international peacekeeping forces, i.e. armies, had to be called in to protect peaceful protesters, as in East Timor, and they define victory simply as the achievement of a movement's goals, as though movements ever had a consensus on their goals.

They do not publish the list of campaigns and conflicts with their original study, and after extensive searching I was unable to find it. They explain that the list of major nonviolent campaigns was provided to them by “experts in nonviolent conflict”, in other words, people who are almost exclusively proponents of nonviolence. Given widespread manipulation by such “experts,” who frequently describe heterogeneous struggles as “nonviolent,” such as the independence movements in South Africa and India, the Civil Rights movement, or the uprisings of the Arab Spring, we can only assume that many of successful nonviolent campaigns on the list included armed and combative elements. The violent conflicts that they include in their study come from a completely different source: lists of armed conflicts with over 1,000 combatant deaths. In other words, wars. They are comparing apples and oranges, lining social movements up against wars, as though these different kinds of conflicts arose in the same circumstances and were merely a product of the choices of their participants.

One methodological weakness they do admit to, in a footnote, is that by focusing on “major” nonviolent campaigns, they weed out the many ineffective nonviolent campaigns that never assumed large proportions. But none of the measures they took, ostensibly to correct that bias, could possibly have any effect. Circulating “the data among leading authorities on nonviolent movements to make sure we accounted for failed movements” is useless since there is no objective distinction between major and minor campaigns, and the biggest failures never become major campaigns. Running “multiple tests both across nonviolent and violent cases and within nonviolent cases alone to ensure robustness on all results” is worthless if the study sample is stacked from the start.

Their entire method is superficial to the point of being useless. They are using statistics to obscure complex realities. But even in this flawed endeavor, they have to manipulate the statistics in order to affirm their preconceived conclusions. Most of their paper centers on a detailed explanation of their hypotheses, and pseudo-logical arguments for why their hypotheses must be correct. For example, they cite psychological studies on individual decision-making, with the unspoken assumption that complex social conflicts between institutions and heterogeneous populations will follow the same patterns. They provide no evidence for key arguments like “the public is more likely to support a nonviolent campaign” (p. 13) nor do they interrogate the figure of “the public”. They also make convenient use of non sequiturs, as in the following paragraph:

Second, when violent insurgents threaten the lives of regime members and security forces, they greatly reduce the possibility of loyalty shifts. Abrahms finds that terrorist groups targeting civilians lose public support compared with groups that limit their targets to the military or police.[footnote removed] Surrendering or defecting to a violent movement […] [p. 13]

All the subsequent arguments in the paragraph, which are rhetorical arguments lacking any documentation or data, refer to the topic sentence of the paragraph. All of them are intended to convince readers that so-called violent movements are less effective at provoking defection or “loyalty shifts” among state forces. The only sentence that makes any reference to evidence is the second one, quoted above. But notice how the study cited actually has nothing to do with the topic sentence, no bearing on the question of defection nor the variable violence/nonviolence (Abrahms' study only addresses violent groups, distinguishing between those that do and do not target civilians).

Elsewhere in the study, the authors ambiguously admit that the statistics do not reveal more defections in the face of nonviolent movements, but they structure the entire article to hide that inconvenience and advance their preconceived arguments.

Such operational successes occur among violent campaigns occasionally, but nonviolent campaigns are more likely to produce loyalty shifts. Although in the quantitative study these findings are qualified by data constraints, our case studies reveal that three violent campaigns were unable to produce meaningful loyalty shifts among opponent elites, whereas such shifts did occur as a result of nonviolent action in the Philippines and East Timor. [p. 42]

To put it more plainly, these “data constraints” are a lack of data supporting their argument, or “insignificant effects” as they admit on page 20. The three case studies they call in to save the day are three examples cherry-picked to prove the point they are trying to make. We can do better: the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, partisan resistance during World War II in Yugoslavia and in Italy, and the anarchist resistance in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. Five examples of armed movements provoking major defections among the armies sent to crush them, all of them more definitive and on a higher scale than the “loyalty shifts” provoked in the Philippines and East Timor.

In one paragraph summing up her research, Chenoweth acknowledges that the impact of a “violent wing” on the success rates of a movement is “not statistically significant” and then in the next paragraph say that “the most troubling possibility is that the armed wing will reduce the movement’s chances of success.” Later, she commits the most basic error in statistics, confusing correlation with causation, to say that “an armed wing can reduce popular participation [her emphasis]” even though her own data do not support this assertion.

It is significant that mention of this study made the rounds on a number of nonviolent websites. From what I saw, the nonviolence advocates who used the statistics to prove the superiority of their method never linked directly to the study. They probably never even read it.

In order to evaluate the successes and failures of the major uprisings of the last twenty-odd years since the end of the Cold War, we need a fair and sensible set of criteria. We can set aside the superficial question of “who won?”, given that nobody has won, except for those who continue to rule us.

We should also avoid the criterion of whether or not a movement leads to increased repression. I can remember countless arguments in which supporters of nonviolence have tried to paint a struggle as a failure on the grounds that it was heavily repressed. The semi-effective nonviolent movements of the past all provoked an increase in government repression whenever they could encourage widespread disobedience. The belief of modern pacifists, which was not shared by King or Gandhi, that peaceful struggle can avoid brutal consequences at the hands of police and military, has been effectively used as a selling point to flood the ranks of nonviolent movements with opportunists, weekenders, fair-weather friends, cowards, careerists, and naïve citizens who think that changing the world can be easy and hassle-free. Repression is inevitable in any struggle against authority. It is important to be able to survive this repression, but in the worst case, a struggle that is completely crushed by repression is still more effective—because it can inspire us today—than a struggle that allows itself to be recuperated for fear of repression, as happens with many nonviolent movements. Therefore, because the long-term effects of repression still remain to be seen, we will not include this as a criterion, but we will note if a particular rebellion was successfully defeated by repression or recuperation, so that readers will notice a pattern if the combative movements truly are unable to cope with repression, as their critics claim, or if nonviolent movements are frequently recuperated, as we claim.

One criterion of the utmost importance is whether a movement succeeds in seizing space in which new relations can be put in practice. New relations mean: do people share communally and enjoy direct access to their means of survival, or is the social wealth alienated; are people able to organize their own lives, activity, and surroundings, or is decision-making authority monopolized by government structures; do women, trans, and queer people enjoy means of self-defense and self-determination, or are they fully exposed to the violence of patriarchy; do people of color and indigenous people have means of self-defense and autonomy, or are they at the mercy of colonial structures like the market and the police? While the forms are different, the social relations are fundamentally the same between one capitalist state and another, whereas there is a marked difference in the social relations in a stateless commune or an independent indigenous territory. Even though autonomous space will usually be reconquered by the State, we take the experiences of self-organization away with us. The more of these experiences we win, the more powerful our struggles become, the greater our capacity for self-organization on a higher level, and the more people there are who know that obedience to the existing system is not the only option.

This suggests a second criterion: to what extent a movement spreads awareness of its ideas. And this, in turn, needs to be evaluated in terms of whether those ideas are spread as passive information, or whether they are communicated as ideas worth fighting for (or in the case of the nonviolent, taking action and making sacrifices for).

Because of the importance of recuperation in defeating social movements, one important criterion is whether a movement has elite support. If a part of the elite supports a movement, it is much more likely that the movement appears to achieve a victory, when in fact the victory is insubstantial and allows the elite to improve their own situation. This criterion can also show if the pacifists are right when they say the government wants us to be violent, or if the opposite is true, that the elite want us to be nonviolent.

Finally, did a movement achieve any concrete gains that improve people's lives, restore their dignity, or demonstrate that struggle is worth it and that the government is not omnipotent? From this criterion, we must exclude strictly formalistic gains, like pro-democracy movements that achieve free and fair elections, because this is a redundant victory that can only matter to those who have allowed themselves to believe that democratic government is somehow analogous to freedom or a better life. When the Soviet Bloc countries transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, citizens' freedom of action did not at all increase, whereas their quality of life suffered dramatically. In other words, the achievement of democracy is solely a question of how power organizes itself, and not one that necessarily impacts how normal people live. If, however, successful resistance to a dictatorship means that people can take to the streets without fear of being arrested and tortured, then we can clearly count this as a concrete gain. Hopefully, the critical difference is obvious.

In sum, the four basic criteria are:

whether a movement seized space for new social relations; whether it spread an awareness of new ideas (and secondarily if this awareness was passive or whether it inspired others to fight); whether it had elite support; whether it achieved any concrete gains in improving people's lives.

Because all of us are still at the mercy of an oppressive system, our focus must be on the strengthening of our struggles for freedom, dignity, and well-being. The above criteria measure the health of our struggles, and whether different methods avail us of what we need to have any chance of creating a new world.

The Oka Crisis

In 1990, Mohawk warriors took up arms to prevent a development project on their lands. According to Warrior Publications:

The Oka Crisis of 1990 involved the Mohawk territories of Kanehsatake/Oka & Kahnawake, both located near Montreal, Quebec. The standoff began with an armed police assault on a blockade at Kanehsatake on July 11, 1990, which saw one police officer shot dead in a brief exchange of gunfire. Following this, 2,000 police were mobilized, later replaced by 4,500 soldiers with tanks & APC’s, along with naval & air support… The armed warriors at both Kanehsatake & Kahnawake inspired widespread support & solidarity from Indigenous people throughout the country. Protests, occupations, blockades, & sabotage actions were carried out, an indication of the great potential for rebellion amongst Indigenous peoples. This manifestation of unity & solidarity served to limit the use of lethal force by the government in ending the standoff. Overall, Oka had a profound effect on Indigenous peoples and was the single most important factor in re-inspiring our warrior spirit. The 77-day standoff also served as an example of Indigenous sovereignty, and the necessity of armed force to defend territory & people against violent aggression by external forces.

The Oka Crisis was an armed conflict.

It succeeded in seizing space. It spread ideas of indigenous sovereignty and inspired many others in North America to fight back. It did not have elite support. The golf course expansion on their lands was defeated, and the conflict came to a dignified conclusion for the Mohawk.

The Zapatistas

In 1994, the Zapatistas, an indigenous army based in Chiapas, Mexico, rose up against the North American Free Trade Agreement and neoliberalism in general. They are an armed movement, though they have also carried out a large number of peaceful actions. In other words, they have employed a diversity of tactics. Although critiques exist of hierarchical organization, nationalism, and other problems among the Zapatistas, for the time being they seem to have distinguished themselves considerably from other guerrilla movements that proved to be authoritarian.

The Zapatistas have seized space for new relations, liberating a number of villages, and holding assemblies and encuentros for over a decade. The Zapatistas did more than most any other group in the '90s in spreading critical awareness of neoliberalism, and inspiring people to take action. The Zapatistas do not have any significant elite support in Mexico. They do receive support from academics and far-left political parties, but in recent communiqués they seem to have rejected this support for its paternalism or authoritarianism. Although blockades and punitive actions by the Mexican government have made life difficult for Zapatistas, they have been able to protect themselves from paramilitaries, self-organize to meet basic needs, and by many indications reclaim their dignity.

The Pro-Democracy Movement in Indonesia

In May 1998, thousands of people in Indonesia protested and rioted against the Suharto regime and economic conditions. Soldiers cracked down, and more than a thousand people were killed. The military negotiated with a protest leader to cancel a major rally. When the pro-democracy political groups demonstrated they had control over the movement by successfully canceling the rally, Suharto stepped down. In sum, the movement was not peaceful, but its leadership tended towards nonviolence.

The movement seized the streets, and student protesters held assemblies in the universities. However, much of the rioting had an internecine character, including attacks on women and ethnic minorities. Although the movement succeeded in ousting Suharto, it was not linked to any social critiques that spread beyond Indonesia. Suharto stepped down after receiving a call from the US Secretary of State, and pro-democracy groups received government support in pushing for a democratic transition. It was also alleged that elements of the military redirected crowd violence away from government buildings and against ethnic minorities. In sum, pro-democracy elements of the movement did have elite support. The movement did succeed in getting rid of a particularly brutal dictatorship. However it did not succeed in changing the underlying economic conditions that was the main grievance of many participants.

The Second Intifada

In September 2000, Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation and apartheid system, immediately in response to a visit by then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon (the highest official responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982) to the site of the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest place in Islam, annexed by Israel in 1980. In the first five days of fighting, Israeli security forces killed 47 Palestinians, while Palestinian rioters killed five Israelis. The uprising, or intifada, spread across the country and lasted some five years. Palestinians used mass protests, general strikes, slingshots, suicide bombings, and homemade rockets, while the Israelis tried to crush the uprising with tanks, infantry, helicopter gunships, snipers, missiles, starvation, and mass imprisonment. Over 3,000 Palestinians and around 1,000 Israelis lost their lives. The intifada ended in an impasse.

Because of the nature of the conflict, it is extremely hard to evaluate the results of the intifada in liberatory terms. Most of the losses suffered by the Palestinians, both to their quality of life and in terms of the degree of oppression and dispossession they suffer, can only be attributed to the viciousness of Israeli repression. Some proponents of nonviolence would blame the repressive conditions on the violence of the Palestinian struggle but this hides the fact that the idea of Zionism has always been predicated on the obliteration of whatever people happened to already be living in the “promised land”, and that in moments when Palestinian resistance has been relatively peaceful, the Israeli government has only been more aggressive in stealing Palestinian lands. I would argue that thanks only to combative Palestinian resistance and international solidarity, is there still a Palestinian people left to speak of. But because we are dealing with historical hypotheticals, this argument cannot be proven.

It is not without meaning, though, that the intifada was a popular and spontaneous struggle that had the overwhelming support of Palestinians. People who live in other situations and are not fighting for their own survival—both individual and collective—cannot make the argument without a great deal of arrogance and paternalism about whether or not the struggle was worth it. As outsiders, if we respect their cause the best thing we can do is respect the choices they make for how to struggle.

From a distance, I cannot venture to say whether the struggle opened up more liberatory spaces than the reaction closed down. We can state with certainty that a greater part of the global elite opposed the intifada, though it did have the support of a few governments such as Iran, and that domestically, the much more powerful Israeli elite uniformly opposed the uprising while one wing of the Palestinian elite (Fatah) tried to moderate the uprising and the other wing (Hamas) supported it. As for the spreading of ideas, the Second Intifada is probably directly responsible for bringing the plight of the Palestinians back to the attention of people around the world, generalizing critiques of Israeli apartheid, and spreading theories and debates about neocolonialism, statehood, urban combat, and social control.

It would be extremely difficult to talk about concrete gains in such a bloody struggle, but a few things can be pointed out with clarity. Israel was unable to decisively crush the uprising, despite enjoying what may be the most competent military/security apparatus in the world, in terms of being able to project force on a domestic and localized level. Not only that, it proved unable to guarantee the security of its privileged citizens, to rescue hostages, or to protect its own economy. According to the Israeli Chamber of Commerce, in 2002 the intifada caused as much as $45 billion in damage, mostly in tourism losses. This constitutes a whopping one-third of the total GDP.

Because the Palestinian resistance raised the costs of occupation, the Israeli government cannot avoid the consequences. The costly impasse in the Second Intifada cannot be separated from Israel's subsequent failures in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon and its 2009 invasion of Gaza, nor from its decision not to invade Gaza in 2012, nor from its budget crisis in 2013.

In the near invasion of Gaza in 2012, many media analysts declared the conflict a victory for Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that was able to stare down the Israeli military. One mainstream journalist, Chris Hayes, went further to say that the conflict was a victory for violent tactics. In his analysis, Hamas had policy victories to show for their use of rocket attacks. Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who for years have been counseling non-militant, non-conflictive forms of resistance, along with the nonviolent protesters trying to stop the construction of the Apartheid Wall, have nothing to show. Their nonviolence has failed. Hayes goes on to advise US policy makers to reward nonviolent action so that the violent currents of the Palestinian resistance do not continue winning support. In Hayes' analysis, Palestinians are still the terrorists, the ones who have to prove they are not violent, while Israel is let off the hook. Hayes' advocacy for nonviolent Palestinian resistance is clearly predicated on a view that privileges Israeli power and that sees violent action as the greater threat to existing hierarchies. Because Hayes is not an ideologue of nonviolence, he can be honest about its total ineffectiveness. What he argues for is the modification of the current political system to create the illusion that nonviolence is effective, a philosophy of power that rewards nonviolent action and encourages a practice of dialogue in which the needs of those in power will always be honored first and foremost, but a greater number of well placed crumbs are allowed to fall to the floor, into the hands of those at the bottom of the social pyramid who protest in the ways the powerful dictate they should protest. The lesson is clear: nonviolence is ineffective, which is why those in power want us to use it.

Although applying such straightforward criteria to such a complex situation is necessarily reductionist, we can assert in broad strokes that:

The intifada seized and defended spaces. It globally spread a critique of Israeli apartheid, militarization, and urbanization, therefore linking to global histories of occupation and resistance; it inspired solidarity movements and was also a major inspiration for the later revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. The intifada received support from the Palestinian elite as well as minority sectors of a global elite, although this support was largely directed towards the brokering of a peace settlement. The intifada established a limiting factor in Israeli military actions over the next several years.

The Black Spring in Kabylie

Kabylie, a Berber territory occupied by the state of Algeria, was the site of a major uprising in 2001. The police murder of Guermah Massinissa, a Kabyle youth, provoked months of intense rioting that police and military were unable to suppress. In fact, rioting Berbers pushed government forces out of their territory, which remained largely autonomous years later. Around 100 youth were killed while fighting with government forces, and 5,000 injured.

In the space of the uprising, people brought back the Arouch, a traditional assembly-based form of direct, communal self-organization, and they also reversed much of the erosion of Berber culture by the Algerian government. The initial riots, conducted by a small number of people, quickly spread until hundreds of thousands of people were participating, including tens of thousands of Berbers in Algiers. The uprising brought Berber demands for autonomy in Kabylie to the world's attention, and their practice of communal assemblies even influenced social movements in Europe and elsewhere. The uprising did not have elite support, not even within Kabylie. In fact, the uprising permanently changed the politics of the Kabylie liberation movement, leading to the grassroots creation of the Arouch movement and completely undermining the existing Kabyle political parties. The uprising won a large measure of autonomy for Kabylie, led to the withdrawal of the gendarmerie, and to the official recognition of Tamazight, the Berber language.

The Corralito in Argentina

In December 2001, the Argentine government froze all bank accounts and floated its currency in response to a mounting debt crisis. As a result, many people lost their savings while private businesses were able to decrease their debts and buy up suddenly cheap properties. A massive social uprising followed on the heels of the corralito, forcing out one government after another in a few short weeks. Many participants have noted that the rioting, in which tens of thousands of people took to the streets, smashed banks, looted supermarkets, and fought with the police, finally shattered the terror that the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, which murdered around 30,000 dissidents, had left in its wake: only by rising up were people able to conquer their fear, and since then Argentine politics have not been the same. Whereas previously, the country had remained in the military's shadow, with the government controlled by the rightwing and the neoliberals, since 2003 Argentina has had a leftwing government that has supported the prosecution of figures from the dictatorship and opposed the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and other free trade agreements with the US.

In the streets, many things also changed. Neighborhoods in all the major cities formed assemblies to facilitate their self-organization on economic, cultural, and political levels, upgrading neighborhood infrastructure, organizing soup kitchens, food and clothing banks, libraries, and theaters, and coordinating protests. Workers took over factories and other workplaces that had been paralyzed by debt, often linking these occupied factories in a productive network, and defending them from police with the help of neighbors.

The uprising had diverse roots that predated the corralito by many years. One root was the struggle of people from poor suburbs who seized unused land and built their own communities, or blockaded highways to win their demands. These were the people who made up the bulk of the revolt, until it was taken over by middle-class families who generally only got involved once their bank accounts were frozen.

Another root was the association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers whose children had been disappeared by the military dictatorship, who began gathering weekly in the Plaza de Mayo in central Buenos Aires in 1977, demanding to know what had happened to their children. The Mothers are largely credited with drawing attention to the atrocities of the dictatorship and creating pressure for the transition to democracy. Pacifists seize on this as an example of the force of nonviolence, but they leave out the bigger picture. Many of the people disappeared by the dictatorship, whose disappearance the Mothers were protesting, were members of armed leftwing organizations that made up a larger anticapitalist movement. The resistance of the Mothers only makes sense in the context of their struggle and sacrifice. Furthermore, the Mothers were not able to put an end to the dictatorship. The democracy that followed continued the exact same political project that the military had pursued with an iron fist during the Dirty War. Many of the exact same people stayed in power and the dominance of the military remained unquestioned. It was not until people fought the police in the streets and toppled one government after another in 2001, that the military's immunity was finally revoked. The Mothers played an important part in this process, but in all fairness it was a process that used a diversity of tactics, from blockades to riots to peaceful vigils.

By rioting, taking the streets, occupying land or factories, and defending their gains against police, people in Argentina were able to seize space in which self-organized communities, neighborhood assemblies, and self-managed workplaces could flourish. This movement, anything but pacifist, constituted a major experiment in self-organization and self-management. Many people, including myself, have argued that autonomous factories producing for a capitalist economy reproduce the same alienated social relations as a traditionally managed factory. Nonetheless, the workplace occupations in Argentina constitute an experiment in new social relations, even if they provide a negative example, one proving that the new social relations lead back to the old ones; because negative examples such as this one help illuminate the way for future struggles. And this criticism is not to mute the insistence of many participants of these workplace occupations that theirs has indeed been a liberatory experience. There can be no doubt that the uprising in Argentina spread an awareness of new ideas and inspired other people to fight. The experiences in neighborhood assemblies and the self-management of workplaces were transmitted directly to similar experiments in other countries. The uprising in general strengthened the antiglobalization movement and helped spread critiques of neoliberal capitalism across the globe. Until the popular movement was co-opted by Nestor Kirchner, representing the leftwing of the Peronist party, and conducted into supporting the charity programs of a populist government and accepting a chauvinistic, South American capitalism (in rejection of the dominant, North American model of capitalism), it did not have significant elite support, although the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo enjoyed important support from NGOs and international legal organizations. The revolt probably led to the defeat of the FTAA in South America, which is definitely a concrete gain, although it would be hard to argue that Kirchner's Mercosur is any better for people or the planet in the long run. More immediately, it shattered the psychological residues of the dictatorship, and allowed poor people to organize their own form of emergency economic relief, through the looting of supermarkets.

The Day the World Said No to War

That is how many proponents of nonviolence refer to the multitudinous—and almost exclusively peaceful—global protests on February 15, 2003, against the then-upcoming invasion of Iraq. “Our movement changed history,” writes progressive journalist Phyllis Bennis for the Institute for Policy Studies on the ten-year anniversary of the protests. She notes that the protests made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for their unprecedented size. But what the protests did not accomplish was to stop the war. The peaceful protesters demonstrated that “millions were now willing to show their opposition by marching in the streets”, but the dozens of governments preparing the war shortly proved that people marching in the streets did not matter.

Did members of the anti-war movement take that as a lesson to change their tactics? Not at all. Protest leaders and proponents of nonviolence declared “victory” while continuing to exclude non-pacifists and to silence the debate about tactics. The vast majority of participants would quickly disappear, unmotivated to continue protesting in the face of its apparent uselessness, although ten years later nonviolent activists would refer to the day as “inspiring”.

In the US, relatively small numbers of anarchists would carry out acts of sabotage against military recruiting centers and infrastructure used in the war mobilization, while also participating in open protests and counter-recruiting drives, sometimes together with war veterans. Proponents of a diversity of tactics worked together with proponents of nonviolence to blockade the ports of Olympia and San Francisco, stopping military shipments. However, on the whole the latter excluded the former from broader movement spaces, denied them support, and left them to fend for themselves when they were targeted by repression. Practically the only case of a broad movement using a diversity of tactics was the San Francisco port blockade, though in a typical betrayal nonviolent organizers later described the action as a victory for peaceful methods.

The movement failed to stop the war. The people in Iraq had to resist the invasion and occupation as best as they could, and the methods they chose overwhelmingly involved the use of arms. Some of these groups were fundamentalist and authoritarian in ideology, many were leftist, and a few were anti-authoritarian. Nonetheless, pacifists and proponents of nonviolence who were ostensibly opposed to the war never spoke of Iraqi resistance. For them, Iraqis only gained mention when they became victims. It is noteworthy that public opinion in the US did not turn against the war and occupation—eventually becoming a major election issue that helped Obama win on a platform of troop withdrawal—until US casualties started piling up thanks to the effective armed resistance of the Iraqis. This should not be a surprise, as the same thing happened in the Vietnam War.

The armed resistance of the Iraqis and the global protest against the war were separated by a broad gulf. Focusing on the protest movement, we have to admit that it was overwhelmingly nonviolent.

On the whole, this was exclusively a movement of protest, and did not propose or practice the development of new social relations. What the movement communicated was a simple word, “No”, which can hardly constitute an idea in a world in which colonization, domination, and mass murder can be carried out with many means aside from military invasion, means which were already being used against Iraq. And given the fact that the movement vanished almost overnight, this peaceful “No” cannot be considered inspiring, not even to the bulk of the movement's partic