On strategy & tactics: Neither pacifism nor violence fetishism

I don’t particularly give a damn about bourgeois or corporate property. I will shed no tear over a smashed window of a multi-billion dollar corporation. Nor will I feel bad for the owner of a police car destroyed by any group of protesters.

However, there is a difference between one’s abstract ideological sympathies, on the one hand, and the strategic application of concrete tactics in struggle, on the other. The tendency by some would-be ‘ultra-leftists’ to fetishize violence and property damage in all circumstances, is highly dogmatic, counterproductive, and ultimately undemocratic in the extreme.

In this way, the proponents of ‘propaganda of the deed’ who fetishize violence and provocative confrontation as the ’end-all, be-all’, are merely expressing the inverse of the irrational, undemocratic dogmatism of those pacifists who ceaselessly preach ‘non-violence’ in even the most revolutionary of circumstances.

I am a firm believer in the importance of mass, democratic struggle. At an early stage of the development of a struggle, this may mean nothing more than a peaceful, mass march. At another stage (for instance, see Egypt’s revolution or the 1992 L.A. Rebellion), this may mean physically attacking police, reactionary businesses, or political party offices.

The question in the end is simply one of accurately assessing the current mood and desires of the mass base of the movement and figuring out what tactic at a given juncture is best suited to both express the mood of the majority, while also seeking to push things forward as far as that majority is willing to go at that moment.

It does no good if you as an individual are ready to set up barricades in the streets and commence with a revolutionary struggle for power, if the mass of people are not. In fact, it actually tends to have a counterproductive effect, inviting mass repression by the police while also arresting or even retarding the process whereby masses of people are drawn into closer contact with and affinity for the more revolutionary-minded among their ranks.

Militancy itself is neither a talisman nor a curse to the beholder. When applied at the proper moment, it can at most be a midwife to social revolution; but when applied prematurely or in the wrong place, it can often lead to a miscarriage of the struggle.

Notes on the state, anarchism, and marxism

Anarchism vs. Marxism
Marx and Engels on Anarchism
Anarchism: A Marxist Criticism | Molyneux
Anarchism | Paul D'Amato
Marxism & Anarchism | Blackledge
Another side of anarchism | Birchall
The relevance of anarchism | Arblaster
Contemporary Anarchism | Kerl
The Makhno Myth | Yanowitz
EMMA GOLDMAN: A life of controversy | Selfa
In defense of Leon Trotsky | Gasper
ANARCHY IN THE UK? | Stack
Trotsky | Hallas
Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War | Bailey
Proudhon: Father of anarchism | Hal Draper
Anarchist Libertarianism? | IS Canada
Bakunin's antisemitism and his 'invisible dictatorship'
Bakunin vs. Marx | Diemer
Marx vs. Bakunin | Woods
The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict | Robertson

Trotsky & Lenin on Anarchism
--Trotsky--
My First Exile, My Life
Why Marxists oppose Individual Terrorism, 1909
The July Days, History of the Russian Revolution
The Makhno Movement, 1919
Makhno’s Coming Over to the Side of the Soviets, 1920
How Is Makhno’s Troop Organised?, 1920
Contradictions Between the Economic Successes of the Ussr and the Bureaucratization of the Regime, 1932
--Lenin--
Anarchism and Socialism, 1901
Guerilla Warfare, 1906
Socialism and War, 1914
State & Revolution. Controversy with the Anarchists, 1917

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* Alienation, dislocation, precariousness, uncertainty; politics of middle-class alienation; the uncertainty principle; politics of powerlessness; exaggerated/obverse pacifism (fear of violence vs. fear of organized violence, i.e., the state); social groups/class bereft of power/agency

* Anarchists view the state in the same way that pacifists view violence -- as something which inherently corrupts all who use it, and is incapable of being used in any sort of emancipatory way.

* Anarchist/pacifist taboos on the self-created sacrosanct fetishes of power/violence are like the superstitious (and ultimately harmful) fears of the ancient Hebrews regarding blood and female menstruation -- it is a natural phenomenon which is not understood and thus feared; a thing to be shunned and hidden along with the unfortunate woman who has thereby been 'sullied' by its presence.

* Mystical fear of a social phenomenon that is not understood -- it is a cursed object (like prehistoric human burned by fire, sees the devil in it, doesn't understand its origins, purpose, transmutations, how to control, etc)

* Thus far, the state has exclusively been used by ruling classes comprised of a minority of society -- anarchists draw the conclusion that states necessarily produce a minority-bureaucracy ruling over majority

* They assume the state first arose by someone/group creating a state out of thin air, subjecting rest of society to state authority, and only then accruing economic powers/privileges by force of arms

* They believe the state was used by its original wielders to create previously-nonexistent capitalist relations of inequality and exploitation; rather than seeing the state as a creation of the rulers of an already-obtaining economic system of capitalist relations, which itself evolved into being out of the contradictions inherent in the feudal system of economy.

* In other words, the fallacious notion that the state produces inequality, rather than itself being a product of inequality -- i.e., the state is an institution brought into being for the purposes of consolidating, defending, and extending, the already-won socio-economic supremacy of a ruling clique in society.

* First state emerges only after a class of people economically freed from productive labor & supported by the development of a social surplus emerges to carry on social functions (irrigation, trade, religion, etc) -- took centuries for this class to gel into a self-conscious clique and impose its laws & authority upon society 'from above' (i.e., constitute a state).

* State is not universally repressive -- to wit, it is not repressive, viz., the class that wields it -- in fact, it is quite responsive to that class's needs and interests (i.e., the monarchy, viz, the landed nobility; the bourg republic, viz, the capitalists) -- to them, the state is merely an organ to express and enforce their will on the rest of society, which it does quite well. To all other classes in society, the state confronts them only as a repressive, non-representative, corrupted tool, which anarchists identify as universal features of all states, regardless of place, time, content