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| A depiction of American atrocities from the Korean War |
“Do you say you believe in nonviolence simply because you don't think violence is a useful tactic in situations you anticipate being in personally?” the author John Spritzler has written. “Please understand that this belief of yours, while perhaps quite true, does not make you a follower of the philosophy of nonviolence. There is a huge difference between thinking that violence is inappropriate in a particular situation versus thinking it is a moral failure to ever use violence even in self defense, as the philosophy of nonviolence does.” When you look at history-especially the history of how people have had to defend themselves from the violence of the U.S. empire-you see how the recognition of this distinction can make the difference between whether millions of people allow themselves to be killed by imperialist aggressors.
When the U.S. occupied the Philippines in 1898, the people of the islands didn’t have the option to resist nonviolently. They were facing an aggressor that quickly showed it was willing to use tactics like torching villages, using water torture, and indiscriminately killing civilians in order to put down the resistance. To demand for them to not use armed resistance and fight for their freedom “peacefully” would have been an endorsement of their immediate surrender to colonialism.
When the U.S. partnered with south Korea’s right-wing dictatorship to start a war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, armed struggle was the way the country’s people largely survived. North Korea lost a fourth of its population during the war amid an American campaign of genocide where every town in the country was burned down. Torture and the deliberate killing of Korean civilians, including children, were standard practice by the Americans. To demand that the people of socialist Korea have given up their arms at that point, or that they give up their military forces now, would be completely absurd and beyond offensive.
Yet even when we talk about extreme cases of oppressive violence like these ones, the question is always present in our discourse as to whether the oppressed are right to use violence in response to the oppressors. Even when the ruthlessness and brutality of the capitalist colonizers is so obvious, those who arm themselves out of self-defense are targeted with admonishments from Western first-worlders about violence “never being the answer.”
This situation exists partly because our discourse is deprived of discussions about how the West has violently oppressed indigenous people and how capitalism creates institutional violence against the poor. We’re not told about the Korean side of the war by a media that constantly seeks to demonize the DPRK. Pundits and politicians don’t talk about how America’s militarized police forces terrorize poor nonwhite communities, or about how these oppressed communities within America share a common anti-imperialist political interest with the people in countries like the DPRK.
American liberals, mired in notions about American exceptionalism and only willing to support solutions that involve “reforming” capitalism, don’t see the systemic realities that make it necessary for capitalism’s victims to use violence to defend themselves. When one believes that America’s marginalized people can improve their lives by voting for Democrats and trying to make capitalism work better, it makes sense to propose gun bans that would disproportionately disarm communities of color; according to the bourgeois worldview, there’s no reason why private citizens should own firearms, because the system will protect them.
This impulse to only see things through the perspective of sheltered whites in the First World is reinforced by the selective glimpses of anti-colonial struggle that our media does show us. The fetishization of nonviolence is usually related with the glorification of Mahatma Gandhi, who supposedly proved that freedom from an empire can be won without using any violence. But does the standard vision of India having gained independence through obstinately nonviolent demonstrations under Gandhi’s lead really hold up to historical scrutiny? Predictably, there were more moving parts in the rebellion than Gandhi and his pacifist actions.
These nuances to the story of India’s independence movement have been articulated by my fellow socialist revolutionary Raúl Fernández-Berriozábal: “The short and simplified narrative states that Gandhi was able to rally the masses with peaceful, non-violent tactics, and thus we in the modern world today should be able to do the same in order to create progressive political, economic, and social change. But a historical analysis quickly demolishes the idea that Gandhian non-violence was sufficient to drive the British out of India. While Gandhian non-violence was certainly instrumental in creating a unified independence movement, it was ultimately the threat of widespread violent insurrection that eventually toppled the British Raj.
“The other common example is South Africa,” Fernández-Berriozábal continues in his essay. “Western liberals insist on spreading the myth that the end of apartheid was obtained through non-violent means when in fact there was a bloody armed struggle in South Africa from 1960 to 1994. On one side of this struggle was the racist apartheid regime backed up by the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel and in the other South Africa's popular resistance and Mandela's ANC supported, armed and financed by Mu'ammar Al Qaddafi and South African and Cuban troops trained by Fidel Castro - yes, the end of the apartheid regime did not happen because Artists United Against Apartheid's goofy songs or through economical boycotts, it came through the weapons and training provided by Qaddafi and Castro and more importantly, by the blood of South African and AfroCuban martyrs.”
Having recognized these misleading arguments that the ruling class uses to make people reject all violence, how exactly should we approach the issue of violence as we try to overthrow capitalism in America? The answer, in essence, is to apply pragmatism and careful calculation to when we decide it’s necessary to use violence. This article of course isn’t meant to be a piece of encouragement for socialists to go out and commit random acts of violence. And when leftist groups decide to use violence prematurely rather than first make the nonviolent steps to take power-such as the Weather Underground did with their hasty uses of offensive violence-they end up sabotaging their own cause. If you start trying to bomb buildings (as the Weather Underground did at one point) before you’ve built large revolutionary organizations or organized mass civil disobedience events, you’re not going to win power.
The impulse to enter into a class struggle by committing expressionistic acts of terrorism comes from the fallacious political strain that we Marxists often refer to as ultra-leftism. Unlike Marxist-Leninists, who’ve backed the strategic and well-organized armed struggles in South Africa and used military force to defend communist countries, ultra-leftists tend to use violence in the times and places where it hurts them. What makes Marxist-Leninists effective is their class education and their coherent strategy for taking power.
Amid rising danger of white nationalist violence and police state crackdown, the American left is increasingly turning to organizations like the Socialist Rifle Association for guidance on how to arm itself for self-defense. This is good, but it needs to be coupled with an effort to get these armed and politically active people educated about how to overthrow capitalism. The Marxist Burkina Faso leader Thomas Sankara said that “A soldier without any political or ideological training is a potential criminal,” and this must be applied to how we approach building on the country’s existing presence of armed leftist forces.
We must make social democrats aware of the fact that capitalism can’t be reformed, and that the only path to liberation for the Western world and the victims of colonialism is global socialist revolution. We must counteract the anarchist claim that capitalism can be defeated without first building revolutionary states. We must defeat the imperialist propaganda that’s used to demonize decolonized socialist countries like Venezuela, China and the DPRK, which deserve the solidarity of global socialists as they resist imperialist aggression. These efforts at fighting bourgeois propaganda are crucial for building an anti-capitalist movement that’s unified, and that will act in an intelligent and strategic way.
This is because educating the proletariat about where their allegiances should lie is ultimately just as important as educating them about the need for defending themselves against the violence of the capitalist class. Any violence that the revolutionaries engage in must be done with tact and restraint, which are practices that the capitalist state seeks to steer its opponents away from. A recklessly violent revolutionary can be handily dealt with by the state’s security forces. But an organized group of ideologically equipped socialists who won’t use their arms until they need to is a serious threat to the power structure.
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