Passivism and the left.

[LETSFIGHTBACK]

I was talking to a Wobblie down here in phila, and we were talking about how the gains were going to be defended. He said through passivism. I said stood there dumbfounded. It was the same old arguement, you know, to lay there and get the shit beat/stomped out of you, or shot,and hope that simpathy/support will develop and the movement will grow.meanwhile the gains will have been lost. haven't the wobbs learned anything from their own movement?, from the movement of the workers in a whole? remember the ford massacre? the peasants in central america? the CIA and the contras? how do leftist passivists plan to keep power if and when the revolutions takes place. my opinion, a new red army. what say you!!!

[Tablo]

I don't want a Red Army, but a mass uprising of the working class sounds lovely.

[LETSFIGHTBACK]

I don't want a Red Army, but a mass uprising of the working class sounds lovely.


an unorganized uprising? who will plan it? organize it, there needs to be leadership. this is why it is called "class war". it will be a war.and when you have a war, there needs to be a strategist, it needs leadership. history has shown this to be true.

[x359594]

...how do leftist passivists plan to keep power if and when the revolutions takes place. my opinion, a new red army. what say you!!!

Personally, I've never met a passive leftist. I suppose the typing left comes closest to being passive. Even advocates of non-violence are pro-active and religious pacifists have a long history of civil disobedience and sabotage.

People such as Mohandas Gandhi, A.J. Muste and Martin Luther King Jr. devised and experimented the strategy of active non-violent confrontation, both non-violent resistance and aggressive non-violence. According to their formulation this is the only strategy that addresses all aspects of the situation. It challenges unconcern. It attacks institutions and confronts people as well. It personalizes the conflict so that habitual and mechanical responses are not easy. It diminishes strangeness. It opens possibilities for the narrow to grow and come across instead of shutting them out. Most important, they believe, it is the only realistic strategy because it leads to rather than prevents the achievement of a future community among the combatants. Everyone involved in the conflict will have to live together in some community or other. How? In what community? We really do not know, but non-violent conflict is the way to discover it and invent it.

Non-violence is aggressive. Since the injustices in society reside mainly in the institutional system even though the personal agents may be innocent or sympathetic, it is necessary to prevent the unjust institutions from grinding on as usual. It is necessary not to shun conflict but to seek it out. So Gandhi, Muste and King were continually inventing campaigns to foment apparent disorder where things had apparently been orderly.

One must not suppose that no one will be hurt in a non-violent action. Naturally, aggressive massive non-violence is not safe (hundreds perished in the Civil Rights struggle and Gandhi lost thousands.) If only mathematically, when there is a big crowd, some will be hurt There will always be hotheads ready to overturn some garbage cans and smash a few windows thus giving the police an excuse to move in. But it should be noted that attacks on property are not the moral equivalent of attacks on people. Non-violent resistance will produce fewer casualties because opponents can’t easily justify the use of violence against people who are not threatening them with deadly force. In sum, this is the argument for non-violence. You can take it or leave it, but it's important to know what non-violent resisters and pacifist actually believe and practice and not merely dismiss them as passive.

As to the "non-violence" of the IWW, no Wobbly I know imagines that the general strike will be accomplished without resistance from the bosses and their hired guns.

The entire question of armed struggle has to be addressed realistically taking into account time and place, the level of awareness of the people, their understanding of the political-economic system and many other variables. Sometimes active non-violent aggression is the best tactic, sometimes armed struggle, certainly both have their place in any future revolutionary action.

[Tablo]

an unorganized uprising? who will plan it? organize it, there needs to be leadership. this is why it is called "class war". it will be a war.and when you have a war, there needs to be a strategist, it needs leadership. history has shown this to be true.
Of course it will be organized. We aren't a bunch of primmies are we? There does not need to be leadership other than the people themselves. Typically it will occur after a great increase in tensions with the state and the capitalists. It isn't like the Russian Revolution originally had any vanguard. The workers destroyed the Monarchy, were easily ignoring the provisional government, and had set up soviets before the Bolsheviks really exerted any form of power.

[LETSFIGHTBACK]

when I'm confronted with the non violence tactic, I always say it is an oxymoron. non violence on your end, but not from the other. so as soon as violence comes from the other side, it ceases to be non violent. as malcom x said, self defence is only common sence.

[Tablo]

when I'm confronted with the non violence tactic, I always say it is an oxymoron. non violence on your end, but not from the other. so as soon as violence comes from the other side, it ceases to be non violent. as malcom x said, self defence is only common sence.
I agree with that. There will be violence. It isn't like the ruling class will willingly give up their power.

[Uppercut]

I guess I could be considered passivist, whether I like it or not. I don't acknowledge the philosophy, but when it comes down to my actions, I'm pretty quiet and non-violent. I guess that's the personality effects of long-term depression on a young mind. If I actually had some confidence, maybe I would go out and try to be a bit more open about my views, but no, I'm pretty ashamed to call my self a Communist or a Maoist, simply for the reason that Communism (or socialism, for that matter) is looked upon as an ideology for the lazy and uneducated that aren't smart enough to function on their own.

Some people that actually know me are aware that I'm Communist, but other than that, I keep it on the downlow. I already get enough shit from conservatives, libertarians, and teachers and I don't need anymore tension right now. My school is full of them.

[Jimmie Higgins]

If passivism means being non-violent on principle, then I am against it, but I am also against using violent means on principle too. All tactics should be considered in terms of if they are going to take you to the next step or not.

Among working-class oriented radicals, passivism is pretty rare in my experience. It is, however, very widespread in the general left and especially among liberals - in fact it is probably one of the main principles of liberal thought (for the domestic population, not the US military of course:rolleyes:). Liberals love it when oppressed people offer themselves up for slaughter no matter what the circumstances.

But anyway, back to the point about the one IWW member. Frankly at this point with low public support of unions and low confidence among the rank and file, a violent labor action would most likely result in destruction of the union and the imprisonment of strikers and even more demoralization in the labor movement.

At a time when most US rank and file workers are timid about taking any concerted action, I don't think we'd get very far by telling people to arm themselves for the next Ludlow massacre or something. Because of the conservativism of the business-unionism leadership along with a rank and file that is shell-shocked from a generation of labor losses, I think rebuilding worker militancy is going to have to be in some baby-steps for a while. In most strikes, the union and rank and file are scared of getting injunctions so they aren't even willing to break the law to physically hold the picket line. All of this will need to be challenged and overcome for the labor movement and working class militancy to be revived, but in order to get to that point, it's going to take a lot of work on our part in building networks of militants within the beurocratic unions as well as people like the IWW building radical unions that can show what can be accomplished with radical working class tactics.

[LETSFIGHTBACK]

If passivism means being non-violent on principle, then I am against it, but I am also against using violent means on principle too. All tactics should be considered in terms of if they are going to take you to the next step or not.

Among working-class oriented radicals, passivism is pretty rare in my experience. It is, however, very widespread in the general left and especially among liberals - in fact it is probably one of the main principles of liberal thought (for the domestic population, not the US military of course:rolleyes:). Liberals love it when oppressed people offer themselves up for slaughter no matter what the circumstances.

But anyway, back to the point about the one IWW member. Frankly at this point with low public support of unions and low confidence among the rank and file, a violent labor action would most likely result in destruction of the union and the imprisonment of strikers and even more demoralization in the labor movement.

At a time when most US rank and file workers are timid about taking any concerted action, I don't think we'd get very far by telling people to arm themselves for the next Ludlow massacre or something. Because of the conservativism of the business-unionism leadership along with a rank and file that is shell-shocked from a generation of labor losses, I think rebuilding worker militancy is going to have to be in some baby-steps for a while. In most strikes, the union and rank and file are scared of getting injunctions so they aren't even willing to break the law to physically hold the picket line. All of this will need to be challenged and overcome for the labor movement and working class militancy to be revived, but in order to get to that point, it's going to take a lot of work on our part in building networks of militants within the beurocratic unions as well as people like the IWW building radical unions that can show what can be accomplished with radical working class tactics.




I really don't know what is so hard for people to grasp. if you are met with violence then you use it to defend yourself. if you want to watch as scabs waltz on by and take your job, fine.there are plenty of stories of back during the depresssion where women went into town with shot guns in hand and took food from the stores because there children didn't eat for days. they told the store own, I won't hurt you, as long as you don't try and stop me from feeding my babies.the whole point of this response is, DON'T SAT YOU'LL NEVER USE IT, because you'll never, ever know untill your in that situation.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I haven't the wobbs learned anything from their own movement?


When we strike now, we strike with our hands in our pockets.

I'm not a pacifist, but violence isn't the most important aspect of class struggle, and in many cases can be counter-productive.

[comrade_cyanide444]

I hate when people use Gandhi as evidence that passivism works. In India, there were many activists for freedom. Most of them fought violently. In fact, one man by the name of Bhagat Singh used a series of police killings and bombings. Bose allied with the Japanese during WW2 and formed Free India in the Japanese Occupied territories (which were given to him). Indeed, Ghandi did create quite a stir in India's Independence Movement, but over 200 years, several acts of resistance told the British that occupation of India just wasn't worth it. After WW2, Britain was in terrible shape, so the British Empire crumbled, and in 1947 India gained independence.

Really civil disobedience alone won't work. We have to educate the average worker that Communists aren't bloodthirsty fascists like Stalin. Generally however, in many societies, the government will suppress socialist uprising, so something is required there.

[Barry Lyndon]

The anarchist and indigenous American activist/scholar Ward Churchill has written a brilliant polemic against pacifists titled 'Pacifism as Pathology' over 20 years ago, which remains relevant today. He makes the following basic arguments:
1) Pacifism has never succeeded in affecting major social change, much less revolution. Even movements that pacifists claim as their greatest successes, the black civil rights movements, the Indian independence struggle, and the movement against the Vietnam war, were only 'successful' because of concurrent violent struggles or the threat of violence if the pacifists demands were not met. The ruling class only listened to MLK because of the threat that the black ghettoes would burn with rage if civil rights reform were not enacted, which indeed they did after MLK was assassinated, in 100 cities. The British Empire gave up India in large part because it had been gutted economically and militarily by two major wars with Germany, and the Indian independence movement itself had many militant communist and nationalist elements that would have come to the fore had the British killed Gandhi. The American intervention in Vietnam was primarily ended by the tenacious and violent armed resistance of the Vietnamese themselves. Therin, pacifism is hypocritical, because it only works when you have militant radicals waiting in the wings. Any revolutionary understands that the capitalist state is inherently violent, and will never make serious concessions without violence, much less simply allow itself to be overthrown.
2) By abstractly condemning all violence as dehumanizing and wrong, pacifists equate oppressed and oppressors, since to them engaging in violence makes someone "as bad" as the people you are fighting. In this moral calculus, the Jews who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto rebllion were as bad as the Nazi SS, or the black slaves who rebelled in the 19th century were the same as the white masters who put them in chains.
3) Pacifism for the most part is an expression of racial and class privilege. What really lies beneath a lot of pacifist sentiment in American activist circles, Churchill argues, is the fear that if bourgeois white activists were to engage in militant armed action against the US government and/or corporations, or even militant civil disobedience, some of the violence that the US capitalist state routinely uses against poor blacks and Latinos in the inner city and against countless people(Vietnamese, Central Americans, Palestinians, Iraqis) abroad would be redirected against them. Although this would impede the machinery of Empire, such a course would be a renouncement of privilege. Therin, ineffectual but 'safe' symbolic protest is a better course in the bourgeois pacifists view.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I'm not really a big fan of Churchill, but I think that he makes some good points with that also.

[cska]

Gandhi and Martin Luther King really accomplished nothing with their non-violence. The capitalists just hold them up as role models to distract people from fighting for real change.

[MarxSchmarx]

Ward Churchill's critiques come up here and elsewhere a lot, but they often go unaddressed. Although he makes some interesting points, a lot of his core arguments do not stand up to closer scrutiny.


The anarchist and indigenous American activist/scholar Ward Churchill has written a brilliant polemic against pacifists titled 'Pacifism as Pathology' over 20 years ago, which remains relevant today. He makes the following basic arguments:


You give a reasonable summary. Although one can only summarize the gist of his arguments without duplicating the text itself, the arguments are ubiquitous.



1) Pacifism has never succeeded in affecting major social change, much less revolution. Even movements that pacifists claim as their greatest successes, the black civil rights movements, the Indian independence struggle, and the movement against the Vietnam war, were only 'successful' because of concurrent violent struggles or the threat of violence if the pacifists demands were not met. The ruling class only listened to MLK because of the threat that the black ghettoes would burn with rage if civil rights reform were not enacted, which indeed they did after MLK was assassinated, in 100 cities. The British Empire gave up India in large part because it had been gutted economically and militarily by two major wars with Germany, and the Indian independence movement itself had many militant communist and nationalist elements that would have come to the fore had the British killed Gandhi. The American intervention in Vietnam was primarily ended by the tenacious and violent armed resistance of the Vietnamese themselves. Therin, pacifism is hypocritical, because it only works when you have militant radicals waiting in the wings. Any revolutionary understands that the capitalist state is inherently violent, and will never make serious concessions without violence, much less simply allow itself to be overthrown.


Churchill merely posits that because these movements were not 100% non-violent, and in some estimation he considers them successful, they couldn't have been successful without the violent elements. This is just alternative history writing, and is basically on the same intellectual level as "what would have happened had the British not colonized North America?" or some such. Basically what churchill is asking us to do is imagine what the outcome of the movements would have been absent the violent elements. We will simply never know. There is only so much speculation Churchill should ask of us as to what would have happened if these movements were 100% non-violent.



2) By abstractly condemning all violence as dehumanizing and wrong, pacifists equate oppressed and oppressors, since to them engaging in violence makes someone "as bad" as the people you are fighting. In this moral calculus, the Jews who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto rebllion were as bad as the Nazi SS, or the black slaves who rebelled in the 19th century were the same as the white masters who put them in chains.


What Churchill fails to explain is that the critiques of the nazi or white slaveholders of pacifists goes much beyond the methods these people employed. There are several reasons why nazis and slaveholders are morally repugnant, quite apart from their violent activities. They are in the estimation of pacifists "more bad" than the people engaging in resistence. As such the criticism that pacifists, at least on the left, somehow equate the rebels to nazis etc... is absurd. This is like saying that someone who thinks drinking alcohol to be bad would consider their teetotaler sibling to be as bad as hitler.



3) Pacifism for the most part is an expression of racial and class privilege. What really lies beneath a lot of pacifist sentiment in American activist circles, Churchill argues, is the fear that if bourgeois white activists were to engage in militant armed action against the US government and/or corporations, or even militant civil disobedience, some of the violence that the US capitalist state routinely uses against poor blacks and Latinos in the inner city and against countless people(Vietnamese, Central Americans, Palestinians, Iraqis) abroad would be redirected against them. Although this would impede the machinery of Empire, such a course would be a renouncement of privilege. Therin, ineffectual but 'safe' symbolic protest is a better course in the bourgeois pacifists view.
This is an elaborate ad hominem attack which criticizes the people advocating pacifism rather than pacifism as an idea. While a credible sociological observation (although history suggests repression of non-violent activists can be just as brutal), it is still an elementary logical fallacy that has limited bearing on the correctness of pacifist practice.

[CChocobo]

I think resistance is very much needed. If you sit there and allow the pigs or government agents to harrass, intimidate, and beat you, then what are you doing? Pacifism doesn't do anything except uphold the status quo. As for a new red army? I disagree, we don't want another vanguard.. Look what happened last time.. But i think people can organize themselves as a group collectively rather than needing a couple of people on the front leading the fighting. Look at the Anarcho-Syndicalists during the Spanish Civil War. They didn't have generals, captains, etc. Yet they were highly organized as a group fighting against Franco's nationalists.

[Barry Lyndon]

Churchill merely posits that because these movements were not 100% non-violent, and in some estimation he considers them successful, they couldn't have been successful without the violent elements. This is just alternative history writing, and is basically on the same intellectual level as "what would have happened had the British not colonized North America?" or some such. Basically what churchill is asking us to do is imagine what the outcome of the movements would have been absent the violent elements. We will simply never know. There is only so much speculation Churchill should ask of us as to what would have happened if these movements were 100% non-violent.It is not 'alternative history' writing. Ward Churchill is countering the widespread myth that these movements were entirely or even mostly non-violent. All Churchill is saying is that these movements succeeded(and he defines success as in blacks can now vote in Mississippi with relative ease, India is now independent from British rule, and the US military withdrew from Vietnam), because of a combination of violent and non-violent tactics.

Churchill does not 'speculate' either. He uses the Holocaust as an example of an oppressed group(the Jews) who were, with the rarest of exceptions(such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) completely non-violent in their reaction to the violence of the Nazis. They were, in fact, repeatedly told by their religious and political leadership to remain non-violent in the face of increasing Nazi terror, on the grounds that violence would only bring down more repression on them. The result was the almost total annihilation of Jews in Europe. Even then, the Nazi death factories did stop working because of non-violence, but because of the violent destruction of the Third Reich by the Allied powers.


What Churchill fails to explain is that the critiques of the nazi or white slaveholders of pacifists goes much beyond the methods these people employed. There are several reasons why nazis and slaveholders are morally repugnant, quite apart from their violent activities. They are in the estimation of pacifists "more bad" than the people engaging in resistence. As such the criticism that pacifists, at least on the left, somehow equate the rebels to nazis etc... is absurd. This is like saying that someone who thinks drinking alcohol to be bad would consider their teetotaler sibling to be as bad as hitler.Churchill is well aware that pacifists would never make such comparisons because they are obviously ridiculous, but does provide several examples of pacifists making similar arguments, the most notable is his quoting of prominent white pacifists who, in the aftermath of the murder of Black Panther leaders such as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by police and FBI under the COINTELPRO program, lined up to condemn the Black Panther militancy, claiming that they brought the repression down on themselves, and had become 'as bad' as what they were fighting. As if armed self-defense from racist police was the same as centuries of slavery, lynchings, and brutal segregation.
I have personally heard moral equivalency arguments of the same sort, with people saying that the Palestinian violence and Israeli violence are just as bad, making no distinction between occupier and occupied, never mind the total imbalance in actual death and destruction.


This is an elaborate ad hominem attack which criticizes the people advocating pacifism rather than pacifism as an idea. While a credible sociological observation (although history suggests repression of non-violent activists can be just as brutal), it is still an elementary logical fallacy that has limited bearing on the correctness of pacifist practice.History does not 'suggest' that repression of non-violent protesters is just as brutal. Max Weber noted that the modern state is defined by the monopoly on the use of force. Purely non-violent protest does not threaten such a monopoly, it in fact reinforces it by boosting the state's image as a benign democratic entity that can be swayed by peaceful marching and petitioning. From the Palmer Raids to COINTELPRO to the Patriot Act, the US government has directed most of its actual muscle against militant and/or revolutionary groups that pose a real threat because they do not accept the legitimacy of the capitalist state's right to use violence unchallenged.

[MarxSchmarx]

It is not 'alternative history' writing. Ward Churchill is countering the widespread myth that these movements were entirely or even mostly non-violent. All Churchill is saying is that these movements succeeded(and he defines success as in blacks can now vote in Mississippi with relative ease, India is now independent from British rule, and the US military withdrew from Vietnam), because of a combination of violent and non-violent tactics.


Churchill's argument only works by arguing that these movements would not have had these "successes" absent their violent elements. The only way that argument works is if we imagine what would have happened in a counter-factual world. That is the definition of alternative history.

Even if I were to for the sake of shits and giggles go along with this supposition, it is still problematic.

Let us for a moment take these specific movements and see what Churchill does. Churchill starts out by pointing out that these movements had violent components that aren't widely recognized. Fair enough. And perhaps this serves the interest of those in power. Again, that may very well be. But Churchill's sleight of hand here is to argue that because they weren't exclusively non-violent, and because their successes are so widely touted, the people who believe in non-violence are wrong; and Churchill is insinuating that because the practitioners of non-violence were wrong about historical facts, they are likely wrong about non-violent practice more generally.

Of course, apart from Churchill's alternative history writing, Churchill's logic even if we were to let the above two points pass still does not hold muster. Let us presume speculative history is acceptable, and let us assume the people who attribute the success of the movements to non-violence are wrong. But then, who is to say the movements would have not been even more successful if they were even more non-violent - that these violent elements compromised the outcome? Ultimately, Churchill's claims have no more validity than this, and all he manages to do is to expose that some non-violent practitioners have a shallow historical understanding - hardly an earth shattering conclusion.



Churchill does not 'speculate' either. He uses the Holocaust as an example of an oppressed group(the Jews) who were, with the rarest of exceptions(such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) completely non-violent in their reaction to the violence of the Nazis. They were, in fact, repeatedly told by their religious and political leadership to remain non-violent in the face of increasing Nazi terror, on the grounds that violence would only bring down more repression on them. The result was the almost total annihilation of Jews in Europe. Even then, the Nazi death factories did stop working because of non-violence, but because of the violent destruction of the Third Reich by the Allied powers.


Churchill again misrepresents or at best confuses the situation. The criticism of Jewish leaders up to the holocaust was that they were largely passive and collaborated with Nazis until the Nazi's stopped caring about their support. Passivity is not the same as non-violence, and Churchill attempts to paint serious non-violent resistance (like smuggling Jews abroad) with the same brush as those that simply continued holding for the best.



Churchill is well aware that pacifists would never make such comparisons because they are obviously ridiculous, but does provide several examples of pacifists making similar arguments, the most notable is his quoting of prominent white pacifists who, in the aftermath of the murder of Black Panther leaders such as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by police and FBI under the COINTELPRO program, lined up to condemn the Black Panther militancy, claiming that they brought the repression down on themselves, and had become 'as bad' as what they were fighting. As if armed self-defense from racist police was the same as centuries of slavery, lynchings, and brutal segregation.
I have personally heard moral equivalency arguments of the same sort, with people saying that the Palestinian violence and Israeli violence are just as bad, making no distinction between occupier and occupied, never mind the total imbalance in actual death and destruction.


If you think pacifists have nutjobs and idiots in their ranks, wait to you hear what some of the opponents of pacifism have to say about all sorts of things.

Point is, every movement has its idiots.



Purely non-violent protest does not threaten such a monopoly, it in fact reinforces it by boosting the state's image as a benign democratic entity that can be swayed by peaceful marching and petitioning.

For all your reading of Churchill you seem to lack a sufficiently broad understanding of non-violent tactics; equating non-violence with "peaceful marching and petitioning" only sets up a strawman and does not help your, or Churchill's, case.


History does not 'suggest' that repression of non-violent protesters is just as brutal...
From the Palmer Raids to COINTELPRO to the Patriot Act, the US government has directed most of its actual muscle against militant and/or revolutionary groups that pose a real threat

Setting aside your exclusive and somewhat selective focus on the United States, in RE: the palmer raids and cointelpro, yes, this is basically what the government told its citizens. Thankfully, historians are not confined to simply government propaganda to work with. The people they've gone after have certainly not all, and arguably not even for the most part, been violent. This was certainly the case with the Palmer raids.