Anarchist & Radical Book Club discussion

This new year we'll be reading, discussing, and debating How Nonviolence Protects the State by Peter Gelderloos. I've often heard this compared to Ward Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America as a more approachable takedown of liberal and reformist ideas of struggle. It'll be interesting to see how different people understand how thesis and how we agree or disagree with it!

The complete text as a plain text website plus pdfs and other downloads are online for free.

Have at it.

pacifism is problematic for several reasons. the only sense in which it is coherent at all is, 'if everyone did as i do, we would succeed'. which is true, in the sense that 'if everyone were a communist, we would have a communist government'. but everyone is NOT a communist, and that where things become difficult.

I wholly agree with Gelderloos, and with Ward Churchill too. Thanks to this list, I also recently finished reading Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War IIand consider it one of the most important books I've ever read. Centuries of nonviolent actions appear to have only increased US levels of racism, slavery, and genocide.

As February wraps up, I'm wondering if anyone else is reading this and has any comments or questions?

I've started it but haven't finished yet.

there's a link above for a free pdf version

I did finally make it through the Gelderloos book, a few months after the group read has ended. It raises a lot of important issues about the possibility of bringing about meaningful change through a diversity of tactics, including the use of violence, a term which doesn’t get enough analysis by Gelderloos, surprisingly, even though it’s central to the book’s message. His whole goal, of course, is to argue that violence isn’t necessarily objectionable but he could cover much of this ground by contesting the definition of violence which is forced on activists and includes any harm to property or objects. That’s one point I want to take issue with in this book because I think there’s much to be said for why harm to inanimate property just isn’t violence and isn’t as objectionable as harm to people or other living things. He doesn’t take this issue on, though, and I’m not sure why. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

I agree with his general point though that force or the threat of force is sometimes needed for effective action. The historical examples he cites, including especially the American civil rights movement - where I thought he could have given even more credit to the riots of 1960s - really do illustrate how power gets taken seriously and how purely pacifist, or moral persuasion often does not, e.g. the anti-Iraq war protests of the last 10 years.

Its a good anecdote to pacifism, but otherwise it's overly simplistic. Political minorities aren't going to outdo the state in terms of violence and some pacifists have done good work around the ploughshares movement, I think particularly Catholic Worker.

This is worth a read, for an alternative take on the violence issue
http://zabalazabooks.files.wordpress....

Thanks for the suggestion. I also notice this text on libcom.org. The good point there, and Gelderloos seems not to pay attention to it, is that the use of destructive force creates authoritarian relationships which, for an anarchist or anti-authoritarian at least, would be a huge problem.

Yeah, thats right. Reminds me of Malatesta

"When a community has needs and its members do not know how to organize spontaneously to provide them, someone comes forward, an authority who satisfies those needs by utilizing the services of all and directing them to their liking. If the roads are unsafe and the people do not know what measures to take, a police force emerges which in return for whatever services it renders expects to be supported and paid, as well as imposing itself and throwing its weight around; if some article is needed, and the community does not know how to arrange with the distant producers to supply it in exchange for goods produced locally, the merchant will appear who will profit by dealing with the needs of one section to sell and of the other to buy, and impose his/her own prices both on the producer and the consumer. This is what has happened in our midst; the less organized we have been, the more prone are we to be imposed on by a few individuals. And this is understandable. So much so that organization, far from creating authority, is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each one of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in the collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders."

Years since I read this book, but I often go back to it as a reference and would be good to discuss it here even though comments are sporadic.

@Kevin, the book does actually pay attention to the argument (I think he comes back to it several times), or more specifically whether 'violence begets more violence'. On both points Gelderloos comes to the opposite conclusion: NOT defending yourself creates the very authoritarian relationship or structural violence that fighting back might break