The immorality of pacifism

  1. Barry Lyndon - 13th March 2010, 23:47
    Most people's criticism of pacifism is that it is laudable in theory, but impossible to implement in practice(same argument used against Marxism as well, interestingly enough).
    I actually go much farther then that, and think that pacifism is highly immoral even in theory, and can often be so in practice. Not intentionally, but in it's actual outcomes.
    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.
    These are the better arguments against pacifism, any better ones from the comrades here?
    Hasta la victoria siempre!
  2. grok
    grok - 25th July 2011, 22:07
    In fact, the petit-bourgeois argument for "Pacifism" -- or "Peace" or "Love" or what have you -- is in fact an Idealist formulation, utterly void of any real, concrete, material meaning, in its complete abstraction and generality (whatever 'practical' considerations demanded of any particular pacifist movement in a given political-economic context).

    Marxists and even hegelians of any sort should well-understand the futility of fixating on abstract Ideals in any political movement (or anywhere else), rather than instead developing an informed materialist and dialectical understanding of the concrete context in which a mass-struggle actually finds itself in -- one which will invariably develop itself over time and space into new forms and content.
  3. Flying Trotsky
    Flying Trotsky - 26th July 2011, 00:36
    I guess it all comes down to how you define "Peace".

    The ruling class, conservatives, "liberals", etc. all define peace as being a level of social order. I think the true nature of peace was best described by MLK who quipped "Peace is not the absence of violence but the presence of justice". Yet this teaching is constantly glazed over by the standing social system because of the massive threat that this understanding poses.
  4. grok
    grok - 26th July 2011, 19:53
    I guess it all comes down to how you define "Peace".
    Well, we should 'absolutely' -- i.e. politically -- reject the bourgeois-Idealist definition, if we are anti-capitalist revolutionaries, eh? (And understand the normal, developmental place of such bourgeois thinking in the historical-materialist context -- i.e. in a 'non-absolutist' sense.)

    The ruling class, conservatives, "liberals", etc. all define peace as being a level of social order. I think the true nature of peace was best described by MLK who quipped "Peace is not the absence of violence but the presence of justice". Yet this teaching is constantly glazed over by the standing social system because of the massive threat that this understanding poses.
    This is still petit-bourgeois thinking -- and the revolutionary Left should distance itself from it, explicitly and implicitly. We can't develop a revolutionary strategy based on the Idealist bourgeois notion of Reality.
  5. Flying Trotsky
    Flying Trotsky - 27th July 2011, 05:52
    Truth is always truth. Just because a Bourgeois scientist claims that the earth revolves around the sun doesn't mean we as Marxists must assume that he's wrong.
  6. grok
    grok - 27th July 2011, 06:04
    Truth is always truth. Just because a Bourgeois scientist claims that the earth revolves around the sun doesn't mean we as Marxists must assume that he's wrong.
    This is not a dialectical-materialist formulation, komrad. "Truth" is generally a relative thing -- and develops over time and depends on context, etc. You should know that. Bourgeois scientists, whatever their achievements, tend invariably to fixate on objects, rather than see Nature in terms of developing, evolving processes (tho' they are being forced by their developing understanding of objective Reality to change this vulgar empiricist way of thinking) and also tend, still, to reify even processes and relations, etc., if they're not conscious enuff about these matters. Which in many cases they're not.
  7. Flying Trotsky
    Flying Trotsky - 28th July 2011, 16:41
    I'll grant you that, but we do have to accept that there are certain things in the universe which, even with the development and flux of the universe, serve as constants. Gravity, time, the laws of physics.