Autonomies

… nonviolence, in its current manifestations, is based on falsified histories of struggle. It has implicit and explicit connections to white people’s manipulations of the struggles of people of color. Its methods are wrapped in authoritarian dynamics, and its results are harnessed to meet government objectives over popular objectives. It masks and even encourages patriarchal assumptions and power dynamics. Its strategic options invariably lead to dead ends. And its practitioners delude themselves …

…

We must realistically accept that revolution is a social war, not because we like war, but because we recognize that the status quo is a low-intensity war and challenging the state results in an intensification of that warfare. We must also accept that revolution necessitates interpersonal conflict because certain classes of people are employed to defend the centralizing institutions we must destroy. People who continue to dehumanize themselves as agents of law and order must be defeated by whatever means necessary until they can no longer prevent people’s autonomous realization of their needs.

Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State

In what could be described as a sort of “coda” to our last two “film” posts on “violent” anarchist political action, we share a rightfully celebrated and significant essay by Peter Gelderloos on violence and non-violence.

In sum, to confine discussions of tactics and strategy to debates about violence and non-violence is to condemn the former to impotence, because the latter is a false debate, and a dangerously false debate, masquerading as moral rectitude. The issue is one of tactics and strategy, and if these are difficult enough to think through and act upon, they are paralysed by false controversies to which there is no answer, thereby contributing to the perpetuation of what already exists.

If we have disagreements with Gelderloos, they in fact are over the substantive question of tactics and strategy; but as he himself defends, there is no one path of anarchy.