The text below appeared in the journal of the Organisation Communiste Libertaire (OCL) of France, Courant Alternatif. Whilst specific French instances are referred to, we feel that this is a useful general article on the question of “non-violence.”
For ages, the debate between non-violence and violence has permeated social movements. Violence is not only physical, but also institutional, symbolic, psychological, and so on. This opposition is largely fuelled by the state. It criminalises our mobilisations by accusing them of being violent, even going so far as to accuse them of terrorism or of glorifying it. It is imperative to move beyond this opposition and try to act by taking into account and articulating the multiple forms, actions, and initiatives that social movements take.
The primary function of the state is to maintain social order: capitalist society. It is founded on exploitation, the maintenance of a social hierarchy, patriarchy, and the division of the dominated among themselves, through racialisation, the subjugation of certain genders, criminalisation, and the creation of artificial competition. All of this generates daily violent conflict. Faced with challenges to these various aspects, the state has no choice but to respond violently. In this context, the debate between non-violence and violence is sterile. It only serves to perpetuate divisions within social movements.
This violence takes many forms. The first, and most visible, is physical violence, for which only the state is deemed legitimate. This requires police forces, and even military personnel if necessary. The judicial system is one of the tools of this violence. The goal is to crush by force any form of social protest and to imprison anyone who does not submit to this social order.
Politically, the bourgeoisie can turn to the most authoritarian governments when it deems the situation too perilous. Thus, in the 1930s, some capitalists declared, “Better Hitler than the Popular Front” (for example, de Wendel, a steelworks owner and member of the Comité des Forges). To analyse the interwar period, the focus is primarily on the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe, the most well-known being fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany.
From February 1917 until 1939, a revolutionary wave swept across much of the globe. It began with the Russian Revolution in 1917, followed by the German Revolution in 1918. This process spread to Italy with the creation of workers’ and peasants’ councils and to Central Europe. From 1936 to 1939, Spain experienced the most significant revolutionary upheaval that challenged capitalist society. The United States was also affected by this social unrest: numerous factories were occupied by proletarians who could no longer bear the consequences of the 1929 crisis. This inspired workers in France during the Popular Front, who also occupied their workplaces. This greatly worried the capitalists. In France, after initially condemning the Popular Front, they appealed to Léon Blum, the Prime Minister, to resolve the conflict so that the workers could “liberate” the factories and return to work.
Governing through fear
Currently in France, entire segments of the population are subjected to this physical violence. Residents of working-class neighbourhoods are subjected to it daily. This results in numerous injuries and deaths. Special police units are assigned to maintain order in these areas. The State, through the justice system, the administration, and the mainstream media, attempts to conceal this violence, either by minimising it or by discrediting the victims and those who express their solidarity. Legal proceedings can be initiated when individuals, political groups, or artistic groups declare that the police are killing people. The State must absolutely normalise this police violence to maintain fear in these neighbourhoods, keeping residents silent about their increasingly degraded living conditions. It is a veritable government by fear that is being established. When some residents revolt, the repression is extremely violent.
This form of government by fear has been used for several years to repress social movements (the movement against the El Khomri law, the Yellow Vests, the pension reforms, etc.). The mobilisations can be large (involving several million people), but the state responds only with violence, seeking to crush them by force. It refuses any questioning of its political choices. Macron clearly demonstrates the purpose of the state. He governs to satisfy the wealthiest few percentages of the population and large corporations, primarily multinationals. The rest of the population must endure the deterioration of public services (education, healthcare, etc.) and pay for an increasingly unequal budget. Similarly, the distribution of wealth is becoming increasingly unequal.
Under these conditions, the state must equip itself to be even more repressive. Given the deterioration of living and working conditions, he cannot rule out the possibility that people will organise to oppose these societal choices, leading to the impoverishment of increasingly large segments of the population.
But since the state alone holds the legitimacy of physical violence, any form of popular physical and violent opposition is condemned. Social movements are delegitimised in order to depoliticise them. They are often labelled as terrorists. Thus, new categories are invented, such as ecoterrorism, and more recently, movements denouncing the massacre of the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli state are denounced as antisemitic and as glorifying terrorism.
It’s only a matter of time before any protest or mobilisation becomes an act of terrorism! Neoliberalism must prevail at all costs. Thatcher declared there was no other choice. Clearly, she has descendants! Challenging this form of capitalism is synonymous with “lèse-bourgeoisie” (a crime against the bourgeoisie). All means are justified to maintain the hegemony of the bourgeois class, even if it means killing people, massacring populations, refusing to eradicate genocidal processes, even if it means destroying the planet by refusing to question productivism and thus the creation of ever-increasing profits…
This unconditional support for the apartheid and colonisation policies of the Zionist state serves to criminalise all Muslims, and by extension, immigrants of Arab origin. They are portrayed as backward, wanting to impose Sharia law and challenge “democracy,” “equality between men and women,” and even, for some, to “replace” whites with Arabs, etc. But do we live in a truly democratic country? Are elections a democratic guarantee? Can we truly take control of our own affairs within the current institutional framework? Can we collectively determine what we produce, how, with what means, and for what purposes? Can we reclaim these questions (currently answered exclusively by capitalists according to their own interests) to prioritise socially useful work? Has patriarchy disappeared? Has racism vanished?
Social, institutional, symbolic, psychological violence…
The state and those in power exert other forms of violence. Who hasn’t experienced institutional violence from administrative services, for example? These services often receive us with suspicion. An unemployed person is frequently perceived as a fraudster who must be subjected to increasingly strict controls. A person of foreign origin often faces racism, contempt, and, again, suspicion. It is becoming increasingly difficult to assert one’s rights, even though these rights are regularly curtailed by laws.
Providing answers is very difficult due to the isolation of individuals, while the person they are speaking to relies on the institution for which they work. In fact, we are confronted with our own solitude in the face of these state machines. At times, revolts are expressed individually or collectively. Here again, we are met with authoritarian responses (police, justice system).
Psychological violence can also be perpetrated, for example, in the workplace. Employers generally receive state support when employees oppose them by occupying the company. The police, acting on the prefect’s orders, usually violently remove them, even though they are fighting, for instance, for their dignity.
Increasingly degraded working conditions are also experienced as violence against workers. Concretely opposing them can also lead to repression, often violent. And what about evictions? Finding oneself suddenly on the street can only be an act of extreme violence. Being locked up in a detention centre, then forcibly put on a plane while tied up to be “deported” to a country from which it was deemed vital to distance oneself, is an act of extreme violence.
We could continue this list of examples of everyday experiences.
This shows how difficult it is to separate all these forms of violence. Some mutilate bodies, others cause psychological pain. Some inflict physical blows, others leave no trace on the body. But all are expressions of a desire to dominate us, to impose the capitalist social order on us, to humiliate us, to remind us of our status as commoners.
A sterile opposition
We cannot accept the division imposed by the State. On one side, physical violence, for which only the State has the legitimacy; on the other, symbolic, institutional, psychological, and other forms of violence that can be exercised by many, as long as, in certain situations or thanks to a social status (like a boss, for example, or a zealous civil servant with a high opinion of their position, etc.), a person is in a dominant position.
Faced with violent situations, it is difficult to distinguish between violent and non-violent responses. Faced with violence, all responses are violent. Whatever responses we give to thugs or directly to oppressors, they will always be experienced as violent. Whether we go on strike peacefully (railway workers on strike: that’s a hostage situation!) or hold a boss hostage to obtain a pay raise; Whether we prevent the deportation of an undocumented immigrant through a sit-in or by forcing our way through a police barricade, it will always be perceived as violence on our part.
Rejecting the violence/non-violence dichotomy means rejecting the categories into which the State seeks to confine us; it means rejecting the separation between so-called responsible citizens (that is, those who ultimately accept state violence or violence supported by the state) and supposed terrorists, to use the vocabulary currently in vogue within the corridors of power. This allows us to move beyond this sterile debate, which ultimately only those in political power hold a monopoly on. The act of mobilising inevitably provokes aggression against those against whom we mobilise, regardless of the form of mobilisation. The struggle against exploitation and domination is always violent! The construction of power relations (doesn’t this common expression contain a form of violence?) requires diverse and complementary modes of action to impose our demands, but also to envision imaginaries both in everyday life and to build futures that break with capitalism: creative utopias.
J Christophe
Comment from OCL:
We wish to reiterate that, beyond what the author states, the capitalist state, whatever its form, is not the only vector of oppression. In capitalist society, and with Macron’s neoliberal policies, which normalise the state of exception (Article 49.3, state of emergency, etc.), class violence is experienced daily. It is structural violence, theorised by Johan Galtung, that produces oppression and inequalities in access to common goods (healthcare, education, resources, etc.). This can manifest as joblessness or being trapped in low-paying jobs that deprive workers of a portion of production for the benefit of the wealthy. It is also the domination and suffering of the most vulnerable that the productivist world of work engenders, as developed by Michel Foucault. It is worth recalling that one of the characteristics of this structural violence is that it renders the lives of the proletariat “uncertain” at the intersection of social reproduction, patriarchy, downward mobility, racism, and class-based racism. In the current context of radicalised anti-social policies and repression, we are publishing this perspective on state violence because, in our view, it reflects questions raised in demonstrations and shared feelings of both isolation and hope for finding the strength to act. Ultimately, this text addresses, in its own words, the fact that the state has succeeded in imposing the “collective belief” of Max Weber’s “monopoly on legitimate physical violence”, but also the symbolic violence so dear to Pierre Bourdieu. This text also questions the notion of non-violence and moves towards the notion of counter-violence, which liberates, as opposed to the oppressive, dominating violence of Herbert Marcuse . Questioning these concepts seems to us a necessary step to re-establish more solidarity, which in our view can only be revolutionary.