While the literature on political violence is bulging at the seams, the theoretical literature on the use of violence in class conflict is far less developed. Since the urban rebellions and uprisings of the 1960s, almost no work has been done to understand when working-class insurgents resort to violence. The little that does exist suffers from the theoretical paralysis of the burgeoning cottage industry of anti-terrorism, plagued by flawed theories of violence as theological, ideological, or moralistically driven. Fueled by countless amounts of funding from governments and inter-governmental organisations in the perpetual war on terrorism, the field is far too vast to be explored here.

The anodyne days of thinking about violence in working-class struggle occurred between the first Russian Revolution of 1905 and the twilight of global colonialism. Spurred by the literary dramatisation of anarchism and the Russian Revolution in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Jack London’s The Assassination Bureau, Ltd, a debate raged in the decades between V.I. Lenin and Frantz Fanon that is mostly forgotten today, relegated to the margins of anarchism and armed insurgent groups. The role of violence as a political tactic of the working class suffered from the ideological remnants of Lenin’s unsophisticated labelling of violence as ‘terrorism’ in sectarian tirades against the Bolshevik’s tenuous social revolutionary allies. In 1905, Lenin distanced himself from terrorism as a tactic wielded by a vanguard elite, only to later advocate for its use against the Bolshevik’s class enemies during the 1917 revolution. He advocated that tactical terrorism was not apart from the mass movement, but grew organically from it. ‘Its strength was the strength of the revolutionary movement of the people … That terrorism was due, not to disappointment in the strength of the mass movement, but, on the contrary, to unshakable faith in its strength…’ Violence was not a tactic apart from the movement but, rather, ‘fused’ to it. Lenin’s point was that the use of tactical violence could not be a substitute for the strength of working class, but his analysis was opportunistic. Since the 1905 revolution was defeated, Lenin could effectively denounce the use of terrorism by other revolutionary groups when the working class was weak as premature, and later as ‘infantile.’ (Lenin, 1920)

Lenin’s analysis of tactical violence is slim but remains influential, if hypocritical. After October 1917, he began to advocate its use in light of the Bolshevik’s relatively small size and limited mass support – exactly the conditions he had denounced his adversaries on the left for doing so twelve years earlier. While Lenin is credited as a key theorist of revolutionary terrorism, he really had little to say about it. His polemical commentaries lack a clear articulation of its tactical and strategic deployment. There is no subtlety of its use at certain moments when the balance of power shifts, whether it is to disrupt and destabilise or to advance and seize space. If violence grew out of the mass movement, Lenin seemed incapable of understanding how and why violence was deployed. Calling political violence ‘terrorism’ also muddied the waters and illustrated a lack of understanding of how tactical violence can be tied to specific class strategies and objectives. Though a self-described ‘communist’, Lenin’s theory of violence hints at but offers no class analysis. Rather, Lenin’s reputation as a theorist of revolutionary terrorism has been exaggerated far beyond its scope because the Bolsheviks were one of the first to deploy it in order to actually seize state power and control of the economy.

The lasting impact of the Russian Revolution made armed struggle a legitimate strategy for contesting and seizing power. The Bolshevik use of armed struggle was increasingly emulated globally by independence movements, nationalists, anti-colonialists, and the left in the networks of European colonies and home countries across the globe. The next half century was perhaps the longest sustained period of global revolutionary activity in two millennia of human history. As anti-colonial movements escalated along the trajectory of political conflict by deploying armed struggle and terrorism, colonial militaries staggered to meet the challenge of a shift from a war of attrition to a war of manoeuvre against non-state actors, in what today are called ‘small wars.’

Though the scope of one important debate is far beyond the focus of this book, and was lacking a class analysis, the posthumous debate between Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt addressed key themes of the role of political violence used by insurgents. After Fanon had died, Arendt took issue with the psychological basis of his theory of the role of political violence by insurgents. For Fanon, ‘violence is a cleansing force’ that frees the colonised (he called them ‘natives’) from the violence and resulting inferiority, fear, inaction, and despair of colonialism. (Fanon 1963, pp. 94) In this way, Fanon saw violence as psychologically cleansing, wiping away blockages that impeded the revolutionary consciousness of the colonised. Because colonialism ‘is violence in its natural state and will only yield when confronted with greater violence,’ Fanon observed that violence would be necessary to unhinge the power and violence of the colonist and end colonialism. All efforts by the colonised middle class for redress of grievances demonstrated the truth in the National Liberation Front’s (Front de Libération Nationale) assertion that France ‘will only yield when there is a knife at its throat.’ The colonised, seeing all ways to peaceful resolution of their suffering blocked and repressed, will respond by escalating their tactics using violence in proportion to the violence deployed by the coloniser, resulting in a spiral of conflict towards ‘a point of no return.’ (Fanon 1963, pp. 88-9)

Fanon’s presumption that violence becomes a tactic of the oppressed when all other avenues were closed proved a sound one. It is no accident that his works and the film The Battle of Algiers, which is based on his theory, have been used by the U.S. military as training materials. Fanon viewed the role of violence as one tactic among many, and warned that it is more likely to be used when the insurgent is dehumanised and denied access to existing political spaces in order to fight for political power according to the normative rules of politics. In this way, Fanon peered into Lenin’s mass to uncover the conditions of the insurgency when violence is deployed. But, like Lenin, Fanon added further confusion by hinging the use of violence as a tactic deployed based on the psychological predisposition of the insurgent, rather than the composition of class forces.

If Fanon attributed the use of violence to the psychology of the oppressed, Herbert Marcuse, when writing about the revolts of the 1960s, disconnected tactics from the balance of power entirely. Portraying it as a desperate act of last resort, Marcuse wrote that ‘as long as the opposition does not have the social force of a new general interest, the problem of violence is primarily a problem of tactics’. (Marcuse 1967) Mistaking the lack of mass support as a rationale for resorting to the tactics of violence was to prove a tragic strategic blunder, as many left wing armed insurgencies formed out of the mass movements of the time to speed up the revolutionary conditions. Not only did these armed groups mistake strategy for tactics, they also cut themselves off from the mass movements that birthed them, and helped to undermine them, by substituting a clandestine tactic for the recomposition of working-class power.[1]

What few realise is that Fanon’s influence on armed insurgencies such as the Black Panthers was parallel to his influence on social scientists conscripted into theorising a new strategy for urban counter-insurgency. Over the next decade, several federal commissions, congressional investigations, and private foundations delved into the causes of political violence in the aftermath of Malcolm X, waves of urban revolts and riots between 1963–8, and the rise of armed struggle groups. What emerged from these exhaustive investigations has dominated the thinking of social scientists and anti-terrorism to this day. So-called ‘relative deprivation’ theory covertly drew on Fanon’s ideas to argue that political violence is a tool deployed by the urban masses (read: people of colour in poor neighbourhoods) in response to frustrated attempts to share in the promises of affluent capitalist America. The theory of political violence has not progressed very far since Le Bon’s ‘psychology of the crowd’ in which the faceless mass of automatons are swept up in a contagion of fury and violence. (Le Bon 1896, pp. 1-35.)

Relative deprivation theory argued that individuals and groups will revolt when they perceive that they have been denied their share of society’s affluence and are locked out from access to the polity, generating emotional turmoil that leads them to commit irrational violence.[2] The theory gained prominence in its explanation of the urban insurgencies of the mid-1960s that transformed into armed struggle groups such as the Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Brown Berets, Young Lords, White Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Liberation Army. While relative deprivation theory has lost its explanatory power and has withdrawn from the academic spotlight, its undue influence over counter-insurgency theory in the age of an endless war on terrorism continues under the guise of ‘winning hearts and minds’, and in deploying democratisation and NGO-led development as a weapon. Few disputed this social science consensus that eventually informed the decades-long legislative, police, and military counter-insurgency that underlies what Alexander today calls the New Jim Crow.

Arendt not only equated the counter-punctual violence of states and insurgents, but inextricably linked violence to the struggle over state power. For Arendt, states that lose authority, legitimacy, and obedience increasingly resort to the use of violence or terror. States resort to terror because they lack the numbers and, thus, the power. But this dynamic feeds on itself as the lack of power continues to require the resort to terror, which further erodes power and ultimately erupts into a revolutionary situation:

Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use; and the question of this obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion, and, of course, by the number of those who share it. Everything depends on the power behind the violence. The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience to laws, to rulers, to institutions – is but the outward manifestation of support and consent. (Arendt 1971, pp 48-49)

Arendt put the tactical violence of insurgents in counter-point to the violence of state power while remaining doubtful about existing theories of revolutionary violence. ‘Textbook instructions on “how to make a revolution” in a step-by- step progression from dissent to conspiracy, from resistance to armed uprising, are all based on the mistaken notion that revolutions are “made.”’ (Arendt 1971, p. 48) She simultaneously refuted both Fanon and relative deprivation theory for essentialising violence. ‘Violence is neither beastly nor irrational,’ Arendt posited.

Under such conditions [concentration camps], not rage and violence, but their conspicuous absence is the clearest sign of dehumanization. Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such; no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. (Arendt 1971, p. 63)

Rather, Arendt agreed with Fanon’s notion that violence is a tactic to be deployed when reform is impossible. Insurgents that deploy violence must be sensitive to the legitimacy of their grievances and the terror arrayed against them preventing their redress. Arendt acknowledged the tactic of violence while dismissing its objective as incompatible with state power and governance: ‘violence can be justifiable, but it will never be legitimate.’ (Arendt 1971, p. 52) Violence is justifiable when the political system is closed to insurgents’ pursuit of peaceful redress. ‘Violence does not promote causes, neither history nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction; but it can serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention’. (Arendt 1971, p. 79) In this way, Arendt argued that violence cannot be the end goal or objective, transforming the irrationality of violence into the rational, a means through which to achieve a short-term goal. (Arendt 1971, pp. 66 and 80) As D’Arcy similarly argues, the use of militancy, including violence, can be a legitimate tactic if it serves the objectives of democracy and social justice by bringing attention to unmet grievances. (D’Arcy 2013)

While much has been written about political violence as a weapon in anti-colonial struggle between the Russian Revolution and the 1970s, it remained primarily framed as an ideological rather than tactical premise: whether or not to use it, rather than when, how, and by whom. What Lenin, Fanon, and Marcuse all missed is that political violence can be explained by social conditions, not individual consciousness. Since we still live in a capitalist class society, it is necessary to look at the struggle of class relations to find the source of violence. According to Tilly and Tilly, ’The formulation tells us where to look for explanations and their confirmation: not in the abstractly conceived interest or motivation of an average individual workers, but in the social relations and culture laid down by previous interactions of work and contention.’ (Tilly and Tilly 1998, p. 237)

In contrast, military counter-insurgency theory has made great strides in addressing the question of violence as a tactic. As Lawrence Freedman documents in his exhaustive book Strategy, after the Russian Revolution and during the anti-colonial movement, military strategists shifted their focus so as to understand when insurgents resort to violence as a tactic in order to learn how to counter it. (Freedman 2013)

John Boyd was one of the foremost military strategists articulating a ‘conceptual spiral’ in which insurgents deploy guerrilla warfare to ‘disintegrate existing regime’s ability to govern.’ (Boyd 1986, 1987) The aim of a ‘war of manoeuvre,’ according to Boyd, was to apply the strategy to the military in order to ‘generate many non-cooperative centres of gravity, as well as disorient, disrupt, or overload those that adversary depends upon, in order to magnify friction, shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about his collapse’. (Boyd 1986, 1987) In his wide-ranging historical overviews of evolving strategies of armed violence by the military and insurgents alike, Boyd’s theoretical work illustrates how the military has come closer to conceptualising the tactical and strategic role of violence by insurgents than anything by Lenin, Fanon, and other theorists of revolutionary armed struggle during the bulk of the twentieth century.

Contention theory: steps in the spiral staircase

What is widely missing from both the anti-colonial and military theories of political violence is a nuanced conceptualisation of how, when, why, and by whom violence is used to achieve a political objective. Their approaches are roundly ahistorical, attempting to construct a grand unifying theory without providing the theoretical tools to examine the political conditions under which violence is ultimately deployed as one tactic among others.

Existing theories of political violence suffer from what I call the ‘origination fallacy.’ In other words, without an analysis of the conditions in which violence is deployed by insurgents, the appearance of violence is perceived to be the starting point of the insurgency. In reality, violence often appears as a tactic in later stages of a mature insurgency after it has already churned through a repertoire of other tactics of escalating intensity. By perceiving insurgents to have launched their campaigns with violence, methodically understanding when and why they choose to use violence becomes moot, if not impossible. As a result, violence becomes conflated as ideologically, rather than tactically driven — and studying when and why violence is used becomes further conflated, seeking to justify its existence rather than explaining it.

Avoiding the origination fallacy makes it necessary to analyse the political conditions in which violence is used. For this we can turn to sociologist Tilly’s ‘theory of contention,’ which guided his study of French peasant uprisings and the French Revolution. (Tilly 1977, 1978, 1989, 2003, and Tilly and Tilly 1998) Tilly examined the political conditions and changing mode of production under which insurgents operate in order to surmise the appropriate time to deploy violence as a tactic from a ‘repertoire of contention.’ He insightfully explored how insurgents will study the conditions in which they struggle, their level of mass support, and the balance of power between ‘contenders’ to decide on which tactic to deploy.

The period from 1877 to 1921 was an exceptionally tumultuous and bloody time in American history, not merely because capital resorted to political violence in an attempt to assert its dominance, but because its power was being contested while the balance of power shifted dramatically. Workers had found vulnerable links in the industrial production process, distribution, and the movement of capital and goods. They were willing to use all available means to disrupt individual companies, entire industries, and even the entire country during wartime as leverage to have their demands met. Emerging from immigrant and indigenous mutual aid and cultural organisation, the working class was able to parlay its new power into new forms of organisation to expand mass support and new tactics to assert their power. These tactics spanned a continuum from constitutionally protected rights to assemble, speak and petition to coordinated military assaults by worker armies. In a spiralling of action and reaction between workers and capital, an escalation of tactics from force to threats and ultimately political violence took place in an environment in which legal political action was blocked, repressed, or co-opted. In order to defeat the insurgencies and diffuse their potential to launch new insurgencies in the future, capital itself underwent a reorganisation and introduced new forms of social control both inside and outside of the workplace.

As insurgents present demands for redress of grievances, they must take into consideration the factors of support, threats, and opportunities to achieve gains. When the political system is closed as elites manoeuvre, so as to block insurgent access to the available political space, the latter must escalate their tactics in order to pursue their objectives. The question is: what kind of tactics will they use to carry on their struggle? What causes political violence to take so many different forms? These questions present what Tilly describes as the ‘problem of explaining variation in the character and social organization of violence.’ (Tilly 2003, p. 13) What occurs, and when, can only be answered by addressing the great variation in political conditions, balance of power, and the sometimes rapid shifts from one form of political violence to another.

The point is not to establish general laws for all sorts of violence but rather to identify crucial causal processes: those that operate similarly in the short run across a wide range of circumstances yet produce dramatically different forms of collective violence depending on their settings, combinations, and sequences. (Tilly 2003, p. 23)

Identifying the complex causal factors that produce violence is the objective of this book. The trajectory theory of violence is based on a careful examination of tactics and strategy in the context of the available political space, balance of class power, and class composition. Each step along the trajectory is the tactic, and movement to a higher intensity tactic is determined by the strategy to achieve the objective. The relationship between tactics and strategy is elusive, especially on the left, even while it has been conceptually mastered by the theoreticians of war. The legendary British intelligence agent Thomas E. Lawrence, i.e. ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ succinctly linked tactics to strategy while working with the Arab guerrillas who harassed and blunted the superior Turkish Army during WWI. He wrote:

The task was to analyze the process, both from the point of view of strategy, aim in war, the synoptic regard which sees everything by the standard of the whole, and from the point of view called tactics, the means toward the strategic end, the steps in the staircase. (Lawrence 1929)

Gene Sharp, the pre-eminent theorist of tactics and strategies of non-violent struggle, fills in the crucial elements of tactics and strategy missing in Tilly. He explains that ‘tactics describe how particular methods of action are applied, or how particular groups of resisters shall act in a specific situation’. (Sharp 2005, p. 459) In contrast, strategy is

the conception of how best to achieve objectives in a conflict (violent or nonviolent). Strategy is concerned with whether, when, or how to fight, and how to achieve maximum effectiveness in order to gain certain ends. Strategy is the plan for the practical distribution, adaptation, and application of the available means to attain certain objectives. (Sharp, 2003, p. 21)

By understanding the interplay between tactics and strategy, trajectory theory can also be understood as a strategy of tension because each new tactic is chosen with the intent of gradually ratcheting up the tension that provides leverage to achieve one’s objectives. In this way, as the intensity of tactics rises and falls in relation to strategy, political conditions, opportunity and costs, Lawrence’s staircase could be better described as a spiral staircase.

The categories of tactics along the trajectory allow us to distinguish between types of tactical violence, the conditions under which they are likely to be used, and whether elites or insurgents use them (although our focus here is on the latter). Tilly explains that they

result from an interaction between challengers and other groups. In the terms we have been using here, they result from the interplay of interests, organization, and mobilization, on one side, and of repression/facilitation, power, and opportunity/threat, on the other. (Tilly 1978, p. 138)

This interplay of contestation to counter-contestation to response to counter-contestation can spiral about one another infinitely in a danse macabre until one contender is defeated, disbands, disarms, de-escalates or both sides disarm, de-escalate, and negotiate. Each preparation for the deployment of tactical escalation signals movement along the tactical trajectory of violence.

The use of Tilly’s calculus of contestation for elites and insurgents to move along the trajectory of political violence also raises issues of splits, pairing, or switching. Insurgents may not exclusively deploy a single tactic but put several into the terrain of struggle at the same time. Facing a rising threat of repression and costs, insurgents may open negotiations to pursue de-escalation and disarming while also holding the level of tactical escalation, or even increasing its intensity. In this way, insurgents may simultaneously deploy tactics at different points along the trajectory. Doing so offers them the leverage of ramping up the intensity of tactics if they are perceived to be weak at the negotiating table, or if their offer to negotiate is spurned entirely. Insurgents will sometimes be willing to unilaterally de-escalate to negotiate if elites also exhibit the willingness to do so according to an absolute gains strategy.

When the threat of repression and costs are extremely high, and offers of negotiation need to be tested, insurgents may replicate a parallel ‘above ground’ organisation while continuing ‘underground’ tactical escalation. In such cases the amoebic split off is subordinate to the underground challengers. This pairing of de-escalation and escalation may also create a split in the insurgency as the above ground group gains recognition, authority, concessions, and is integrated into the elite coalition, while the underground group continues to mobilise and escalate.

If insurgents demobilise and de-escalate in order to obtain concessions, reforms, compromises, and access to the polity, they risk abandoning the disruptive tactics that made it effective in the first place. For this reason insurgents face the Sisyphean task of attempting to move an insurgency forward as tempting concessions appear from behind and storm clouds of repression mass on the horizon.

Cycles of struggle

Unfortunately Tilly only gets us part of the way, as, like the anti-colonial and military theorists, he lacked a class analysis. Although his theory of contention operates in the context in the relations of production, he did not provide a class analysis of the struggle between capital and workers.

To understand how the composition of class forces shapes the decisions about which tactic to deploy from the workers’ repertoire of contention, we must draw upon autonomist Marxists Alquati, Bologna, Cleaver, Glaberman, Holloway, and Tronti. Cleaver identified the necessity of a ‘strategic deciphering … which helps to clarify and develop working class struggle’ from the perspective of the working class.(Cleaver 1979, p. 10) Workers study what the autonomist Marxists call the class composition to decide what tactics to deploy, which shapes the outcomes of their struggle. By fusing Tilly’s theory of contention to autonomist Marxist theory of class composition, my trajectory theory illuminates why class conflict between 1877 and 1921 was frequently characterised by violent armed struggle, as well as the conditions, factors, and balance of power that can confidently assess not only its use but also the potential responses to it.

Trajectory theory tells us that the use of tactical violence was neither a start nor an end point during these four decades of class struggle. Rather, as Arendt asserts, violence was used tactically as a means to overcome blockages, to counter threats of diffusion and co-optation, to exploit the weakness of elite power, and to achieve short-term goals. Faced with a closed political system dominated by elites, judicial, police and military repression, and efforts to deflect, divert, and co-opt their struggles, workers escalated their tactics to deploy violence to achieve their objectives. This book offers an alternative perspective to historians who found the use of political violence by workers who had not articulated an explicit class consciousness or theory of revolution or socialism to be pursuing economistic and conservative objectives. Self-organised workers whose efforts to unionise had faced violent repression leapfrogged over these impediments to attempt to disrupt capital accumulation in order to achieve their objectives. When they were successful in doing so, it was because they had successfully managed to recompose their class power providing them with the necessary leverage to extract concessions. In cases where they were defeated, it was because the new composition of capital had tilted the balance of class forces against them.

[1] D’Arcy also observes that clandestine armed struggle, in contrast to a peoples’ militia for self-defence, presents itself as a ‘self-appointed counter-elite’ that usurps authority over a mass movement replicates the same dynamics of power the movement seeks to struggle against. See D’Arcy 2014, pp. 179-81.

[2] While ‘polity’ ordinarily implies the institutions of politics including governmental and extra-governmental institutions, Tilly’s use of the term can be understood more broadly as the political processes in which contending forces, including workers and capital, struggle for power.

Robert Ovetz, Ph.D. is a contingent lecturer in political science at a university in California in the US. He is the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (Brill 2018, Haymarket 2019) and the forthcoming tentatively titled Workers’ Inquiry: Strategies, Tactics and Objectives of the Global Working Class (Pluto Press). Read his writings on the refusal of work at: https://sjsu.academia.edu/RobertOvetzPhD and follow him at @OvetzRobert