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Pacifism is a controversial term in anarchist circles. We all have our reasons to be in favour of it or against. Yet the discussion always seems to be black and white in the eyes of many. Anarchism and revolution would be inherently violent, and thus, anarchism and pacifism can’t be mixed and to think otherwise would be naive.
Arguments for pacifism generally come from a moral point of view. This is a valid point of view. Violence is a horrible thing after all. However, whilst the moral argument is very strong, I would argue there’s a big philosophical and practical argument to be made for pacifism as well.
First of all, we’ll have to define what anarchism and pacifism are. Anarchism is the destruction of the state, hierarchy and capitalism, to be replaced with a decentralised and directly democratic society. But what is pacifism? To define pacifism, one has to first find out what violence is.
Violence exists in a number of distinct ways, which generally intersect. I will, for the rest of this essay, categorise violence into four categories. The first is physical, the simplest to understand. They’re outbursts of physical harm inflicted on a person or object, such as a punch to the cheek of a certain R. Spencer.
The second kind is psychological violence, thus things that harm one mentally or emotionally. This is harder to find out than physical violence, it doesn’t quite hit you in the face to make it easier for you to notice. Examples of this would include emotional abuse and insults, but also the use of slurs.
The third, and most important one relating to anarchism is structural violence. The usage of the state and hierarchy to keep people down from being truly free and happy, but also things such as a society that looks down upon LGBTQIA+ people, people of colour, neuro- and physiodivergent people and generally anyone who deviates from the norm.
The last kind of violence of self-defense. This is the usage of violence to defend oneself from the other three kinds of violence and end the threat of those. Sadly, this is one of the most controversial kinds of violence and one very central to any question of pacifism.
The main goal of anarchism is the destruction of the state and all hierarchy that the state enforces. Yet, how does the state enforce these hierarchies? Via violence, especially structural and psychological and at occasion physical. Thus, the abolishing of those hierarchies is the abolishing of the state and thus the destruction of the violence it entails; a strictly pacifist goal. Indeed, one cannot have anarchism without pacifism, and no pacifism without anarchism. They’re interlinked in that way.
But what I see in the anarchist communities of today is a dangerous and counterproductive attitude towards violence: the usage of violence for our own ends. This is, initially, a very easy position to take. We have to stop the reactionaries from crushing the revolution after all. Yet, I consider that counterproductive. This is in essence not a destruction of the state, but the replacement of it with all the issues it entails. This is no better than what the Marxist-Leninist states of old have done. The result there was not the destruction of hierarchy but the creation of a new one.
Violence itself builds hierarchy, as it’s putting someone or something else down and making them in some way weaker than the perpetrator. Someone down on the floor after a couple of punches is in all ways subservient to the one punching down at him, and one who reads propaganda is the thought-slave of the writer and in essence, loses freedom of thought.
But pacifism can indeed be a weapon against the state, indeed, it’s a more effective one than usually thought. Instead of using violence to destroy it, we should use the very minimum needed to overthrow hierarchy, an act of self-defense, and then push towards a pacifist society. Doing this, we can hopefully avoid the trap of violence which, due to it’s nature, rebuilds hierarchy.
Radical rehabilitation is thus what we should strive for. Our aim should be to rehabilitate everyone we can rehabilitate and make strives to do so in accordance with anarchist principles. We should show them that anarchism is indeed a better alternative to capitalism by building a great society, we should educate them, we should work with them and most of all, we should respect them. Violence is not the answer.
This, however, is not a call for passivism and to put down those who fight oppressive structures of class, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, the state and all others. These have to be fought and overthrown. I support anyone who fights these and will fight alongside them. What this is a call to all anarchists to consider a different route after the revolution and of abolishing those systems. One which is unexplored beyond morality yet offers so much for our movement.
Love, Ina.
