Violence – did somebody mention violence?

The inter-relationship of violence, ethics, and revolution

Many of those committed to the human project, namely the total transformation of social relationships, tend to adopt an ‘end justifies the means’ approach. This position was attributed to Leon Trotsky, although on this rare occasion, one has to concede that the arch counter-revolutionary took a more nuanced approach when examining the relationship between means and end. This tolerance should, however, be balanced with reference to Trotsky’s injunction that the proletarian sailor insurgents of Kronstadt should be “shot like partridges”

Michael ‘Bommi’ Baumann a working-class German who was familiar with violence as a daily fact of his social existence, was a member of the movement that pre-dated and spawned the Red Army Faction. He ended up horrified by the clinical attitude to violence of the largely middle-class Baader-Meinhof tendency, and felt that their use of firearms was a literal means of distancing the activist from their target, and thus avoiding the human complexities of their acts. These problematics touch on the thorny issue of ethics, which many regard as being an infinitesimally small step away from ‘morals’, with all the associated whiff of incense, piety, and prayer books.

Others tend to elide the question, due to their unexamined liberal predilections, and assume that they will wake up one morning, smell the cordite issuing from the guns of their comrades, and set out about this transformation of society thingy.

The third and final attitude might be summed as ‘the psycho-gun for hire’. We have come across a tiny number of people in the UK non-pacifist, extra-parliamentary milieu, who [generally] have floated from the far right to the ultra-left, in search of the opportunity to commit violence on others, as an undifferentiated expression of their social rage. Arguably, there are echoes of this sociopathy in Eldridge Cleaver’s position that rape carried out by black men on white women is somehow ‘revolutionary’. One could say that such people act as a salutary reminder of the dangers associated with practice becoming divorced from theory. As Horace noted “force without wisdom falls by its own weight”.

Women are notable by their relative absence from the ‘physical force’ school, arguably not only because they are put off by knuckle-headed machismo or do not feel sufficiently conversant in the language of street violence. To somewhat trivially paraphrase the reductionist anthropological distinction, one could ascribe this to women’s role as ‘life-givers’ rather than ‘life-takers’. However, this demeans many women’s pragmatic scepticism regarding a particularly male propensity (a) to deal with ambiguity by ‘direct action’ and (b) to enforce self-identity via the negative self-definition inherent in group formation, ie, that which is not within the ‘camp’ is inherently suspect and therefore inimical.

And what of violence in the name of non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary action? In particular, this will cause much head-scratching in relation to nationalist struggles, which although ultimately serving the agendas of a putative indigenous ruling class in the making, are often enacted in good faith by the ‘foot soldiers’, guided by the understandable, but ultimately misguided, belief that the expulsion of an alien oppressor will be the panacea they seek.

What is violence? It is both the military bullet to the spine, state torture etc, and also starvation, malnutrition, shortened life expectancy, higher exposure to preventable disease, lack of freedom of movement and choice, and so on. Difficult as it may be for some of us to do, one cannot help but acknowledge the desire for vindication and even revenge by the powerless against the powerful when faced by these choices.

The skull beneath the skin of ‘civil’ society is of course police violence, enacted by a force whose membership is probably attracted to ‘the job’ in greater proportion than guns for hire are represented in extra-parliamentary politics, and who are protected by the State and an exonerating judiciary.

In the British middle-class segment of Britain, at least, the myth of the friendly bobby on the beat has obfuscated the habitual and historical use of arbitrary violence against the working class, and buttressed the formal [if undeclared] processes that protect the ‘law enforcers’. The agents of capital will not willingly relinquish the reins of power, although, subject to appropriate checks and balances, we should accept deserters into our ranks.

So where does this leave us? To paraphrase the Situationists, it appears to be a matter of ‘using chaos without loving it’. That is to say, force [action] without wisdom [theory] is a form of alienated fetishism. Equally, relying on others to do the ‘dirty work’ perpetuates a division of labour between ‘doers’ and ‘thinkers. Therefore the synthesis or transcendence [aufheben] of these polarities expressed as praxis remains an urgent priority. As Marx’s criticism of fetishised intellectualism [which in the current discussion, also implies its opposite, namely mindless activism] put it in his Theses on Feuerbach: “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.

Hasta la proxima, compañeras/os.