The Question of Comparative Violence

This entry about political violence might be rather boring and long-winded.  Although I've tried to keep its tone more meditative than academic, the latter often supersedes the former (can't help it - I'm an academic!).  The reason I've posted this, however, is because of a debate in the comments of The Anti-Anti-Imperialism of Assayas' Carlos which I felt was getting out of hand, though going down an interesting avenue of debate that was somewhat connected with my critique of the film.  I promised a future post on that subject (though I'm not sure if the commenters will find it interesting anymore or my long-winded writing enjoyable to read!), so here it is.

One of my academic areas of so-called "expertise" is political violence.  Since my dissertation focused on philosophical questions raised by anti-colonial theory, it was necessary for me to engage with the issue of anti-colonial and revolutionary violence and its structural opposition to the larger context of colonial violence.  All of the great anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist thinkers were concerned with the social fact of violence: there was a reason that Frantz Fanon began his masterful The Wretched of the Earth with a philosophical meditation on violence - and it is a mistake to simplistically dismiss this meditation as nothing more than an endorsement of violent behaviour by simply wrenching a few phrases out of context (i.e. the "cleansing" force of violence) and utterly ignoring the point he was trying to make.

Fanon, like so many other revolutionaries, was interested in investigating the great and terrible violence of the everyday, how it tragically caused the necessity for violent response, and why this lamentable necessity must be taken seriously.  It also becomes necessary to ask the question of comparative violence and the impermissibility/permissibility of violent acts in this society.  The question of comparative violence is the following: why is the violence of everyday capitalism-imperialism conjured away, relegated to peripheral spaces, and accepted as normative and not-violent; and, conversely, why is the violence of those who act violently against and because of the violence of this system understood as the only thing that can be properly called violent.  Other connected questions follow from the question of comparative violence: why do some deaths count more than others, why do so many of us on the left go out of our way to condemn the violent acts of the victims of a violent system, why do we want to keep our revolutionary colours but play the game of peacenik reformism?  Also, on the opposite side, does the necessity of revolutionary violence cause us to wrongly treat violence, like the foot-soldiers of imperialism and the movies celebrating their actions, as heroic and glorious?

I want to structure this loose and semi-academic discussion on political violence with two quotes from Alain Badiou that, in my mind, explain the question of comparative violence:

[T]he communist hypothesis is [perceived as] a criminal utopia that must give way to a culture of 'human rights', which combines the cult of freedom (including, of course, freedom of enterprise, the freedom to own property and to grow rich that is the material guarantee of other freedoms) and a representation in which Good is a victim.  Good is never anything more than the struggle against Evil, which is tantamount to saying that we must care only for those who present themselves, or who are exhibited, as the victims of Evil.  As for Evil, it is everything that the free West designates as such. (Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 2)

Lumping together Stalin and Hitler was already a sign of extreme intellectual poverty: the norm by which any collective undertaking has to be judged is, it was argued, the number of deaths it causes.  If that were really the case, the huge colonial genocides and massacres, the millions of deaths in the civil and world wars through which our West forged its might, should be enough to discredit, even in the eyes of 'philosophers' who extol their morality, the parliamentary regimes of Europe and America.  What would be left for those who scribble about Rights?  How could they go on singing the praises of bourgeois democracy as the only form of relative Good and making pompous predictions about totalitarianism when they are standing on top of heaps of victims? (Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 3-4)

 In these quotes the inequality of violence and death - what the common sense morality considers Good and Evil - is problematized.  The everyday violence necessary for the "freedom" of private property and the market, that lurks behind the founding of the central imperialist nations and must be maintained through military might and the export of capital, is sublimated in a discourse of human rights where this everyday reality is Good.  Thus, anything that acts against this Good must ultimately be Evil and the only thing that should count as violence.  (On a side note, I discussed this issue in a different context in my analysis of Pascal Laugier's brilliant film Martyrs.)

It is in this normative context that we are conditioned to treat acts of violence that defy this context as reprehensible.  The battered wife who shoots her rapist husband is called "hysterical."  The suicide bomber who murders himself out of a desperate hatred of his colonizer is "beyond reason."  Those who flew the planes into the Twin Towers in 9/11 were "cowardly" and "evil" and how could they do this to us?  The reality of the initial context of violence, everything that the so-called West codes as Good, is ignored and we are often taught to see violence as anything that threatens the business-as-usual structure of the free world.  These violent actors, whose small violence will never be measured by the same standard as the massive violence behind capitalism, are "declared insensible to ethics […] represent[ing] not only the absence of values, but the negation of values." (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 41)

Revolutionary thinkers have always understood the violent response to oppression as a necessity.  If, as Fanon rightly claims, the oppression "only loosens its hold when the knife is held to its throat" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 61), then revolutionary violence is the only response.  The terrible violence of capitalism, the so-called free and Good, will not disappear simply because we vote it away.  The ruling classes will not be convinced by a scientific "socialism or barbarism" argument (though I believe these are necessary to make) that they should not continue exploiting.  There are stakes involved, and capitalism and imperialism works hard to maintain its violent way of life: anything that threatens this life is Evil, and now we are cynically told that the previous challenges - that every challenge - to the capitalist "end of history" can be nothing more than totalitarian, violations of human rights.  (Another side point: the human needs versus human rights distinction is important to grasp in this context: pursuing our needs as a species is treated as irrational, whereas abiding by the "rights" discourse of liberal capitalism is treated as somehow "natural.")

Before Fanon, Mao Zedong understood the problem of violence - Mao's logic, in fact, lurks behind The Wretched of the Earth.  Mao understood that the people needed to be armed and mobilized in order to defeat the fascists and Chiang Kaishek's reactionary regime.  His famous statement that "revolution is not a dinner party" but a "violent uprising in which one class replaces another" was meant to explain why revolutionary violence was a forced option.  Although it is popular these days, in reactionary and liberal circles, to ahistorically treat Mao as some sort of subhuman monster who was only interested in murdering his people, we have to understand this insight about violence as an understanding about the necessity of political violence in response to the far greater and world-destructive violence of capitalism and imperialism.  When Mao spoke of political power coming from the barrel of a gun, he was not championing some macho gunslinger aesthetic.  The insight was simply meant to indicate that seizing political power could only happen through armed revolt and that maintaining this power (here he follows Lenin's insights from The State and Revolution) requires a certain measure of violence: the exploiters will try to return and restore capitalism (and he was right - they did return in Russia and China), the capitalist world will try to invade and destroy that which challenges its global supremacy.  This is why Mao also said: "we are for peace, but are not afraid of war; we are ready for both."

I think, however, we also need to understand the epistemological dimension of political violence, especially in its clash with the normative everyday violence.  It is one thing to agree that, pragmatically speaking, this violence is necessary.  It is quite another to celebrate its existence in the way Hollywood celebrates its soldiers and maverick cops.  The key to understanding revolutionary violence and its necessity is to understand that - and here I'm gleaning this insight from Lewis Gordon's analysis of Fanon - this type of violence is a tragic necessity.  A violence generated by the overall violence of capitalist-imperialist life, either sporadic or organized, is not essentially liberating.  It is the tragic tool forced upon revolutionaries in their long march for liberation, but it is not something that should be celebrated in isolation from its context.

There is a beautiful passage by Lewis Gordon that not only explains this tragic dimension of revolutionary violence but connects it directly with what I call the question of comparative violence:

For Fanon the oppressed confront the oppressor on multiple levels.  On the situational level, an oppressed individual confronts the oppressor as an objective limitation of humanity.  It is irrelevant what the colonized or oppressed individual may think of himself in relation to members of the colonizing or oppressing group.  Everyday he confronts the objective reality of his life's inequality to theirs.  His death will never rip through the overdetermined anonymity of nature-like existence.  He looks around him at the slaughterhouse that constitutes, say, colored life in the modern and contemporary ages and he finds it difficult to distinguish colored life from that of the array of other animals that sink each day into the belly of consumption, death, and irrelevance.  At times of trouble, it is the whites who are scurried off to safety; in the midst of thousands of colored deaths, it is the loss of an occasional white life that rips into the consciousness of the world - the world, in this case, usually coded as "free" or "civilized," which means, ultimately, European, Western, white.  In the prisons, the colonized see colored captives, especially in cases where the colonizers are victims of violent crimes, but rarely see colonizers, and nearly never colonizers in cases where the colonized, which often means people of color, are victims of colonizers' violent crimes.  Eventually, it becomes important to equalize matters.  If the colonized cannot make a colonized or colored life as good as that of a colonizer or white one, they can at least make a white one no more valuable than a colonized or colored one; they can, that is, bring the white god down to humanity. […] Here we see the stages of a tragic story.  For in its symbolic form, violence always takes the path of someone's being dragged "downward."  In revolution or violence the human being tragically emerges out of a violent situation of "gods" and the "damned." (Lewis Gordon, "Fanon's Tragic Revolutionary Violence", 303, emphasis added)

Here we have the necessity of revolutionary violence that issues from a context of unequal violence - where the existence and violence of the oppressor are treated as normative and not-violent, and where the existence and violence of the oppressed is seen as an abnormal violent response.  The deaths of the oppressor, Gordon notes, are anonymous because their annihilation is often not worthy to be considered. The oppressors killed by violent responses of the oppressed, however, "rip into the consciousness of the world."  And when the oppressed, and those fighting with the oppressed, act in violent ways (i.e. the Algerian terrorism, both in Algeria and France, during the FLN's fight for national independence) we react with more horror than we did to the violent existence that structured these actions.  The revolutionary violence becomes spectacle; the normative violence of capitalism-imperialism vanishes.  Even many leftists, especially those in positions of oppressor privilege, want to command the actions of the oppressed: you're going too far, you're making a mockery of our sober politics, you should go about things in the way we say you should go about things.

This is not to say, however, that the organization and operation of revolutionary violence should not ever be criticized.  As Gordon points out, we need to recognize the tragic dimension of this violence.  We can correctly answer the question of comparative violence without celebrating and glorifying the tragedy, and this is important to discuss.  For if some of us reject and belittle these acts of revolutionary violence, some of us also cheer and endorse these acts in the way that Hollywood patriots laugh and clap their way through reactionary action films.

At a conference I attended a year ago, in the question and answer section of one panel, an old Marxist academic stood up and delivered a speech about arming the world proletariat and the need for a "violent and bloody revolution."  Although I agree, for reasons stated above, that the world situation of capitalism generates violent revolution, this specific speech was an abstract glorification of revolutionary violence coming from a man, a comfortable academic, who was disconnected from the tragic stakes of this violence.  Like a general of the US military, he could babble about the oppressed taking up arms while he, comfortable in the ivory tower (like myself and so many others), could command from afar and tell them who to kill and why.  This is the danger, I believe, of mistaking the tragic necessity of revolutionary violence as something that, divorced from its aims and reasons, is moral in and of itself.

There is a long history of the debates of violence within revolutionary movements.  Every successful revolution has had to confront the contradiction between the tragedy of violence imposed by the violence of oppression, and the need to pursue a liberatory society that exists beyond violence.  Under Stalin, because of the logical fear that the bourgeois would return, there was a paranoia that the enemy of socialism was everywhere, in every home: this led to mass political liquidation, the history of which is well known.  Recognizing the problem of the Soviet Union, Mao and his allies tried to deal with the question of violence in a different way: forced with peasants who were suddenly free to harass their landlords, the CCP of the Mao period was always fighting amongst itself on how to properly curb violent excess.  Here they were faced with the tragic violence of the formerly oppressed who, now justified in a revolutionary society, wanted revenge on their former oppressors.  As for the return of the bourgeoisie, Mao's line was always re-education over liquidation: he recognized that "cutting heads changes nothing" and that it was more important to change the ideas in the heads.  In any case, failure of the Chinese Revolution notwithstanding, the Maoist position (which is being taken seriously again in places like Nepal) was an attempt to take the fact of tragic revolutionary violence seriously.  Mao understood the necessity of revolutionary violence but, because he understood its tragic dimension, he was not like that academic man who spoke at the conference last year about bloodshed and violence.

My point, here, is that those engaged in revolutionary violence - those who have fought against the overdetermining violence of the system - have been forced to deal with the questions of tragedy.  There is a history of understanding the tragic dimension, of trying to work through the contradiction, and we should not ignore this fact by celebrating necessity as freedom.  Necessity and freedom are dialectically connected, as Engels following Hegel has pointed out, but because they are dialectically connected they are also opposites.

Still, the question of comparative violence is very important when it comes to how we condone or condemn the acts of those who violently respond to the violence of global oppression.  Lewis Gordon, in his discussion of tragic revolutionary violence, highlighted a passage in C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins where, after describing in gory detail the spectacular and terrible violence of the revolting slaves (where the standard of the revolution was a white baby on a spear), James writes "[a]nd yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or ever would be to them."  Gordon notes that, in a later edition of The Black Jacobins, James adds a footnote to this claim that reads: "[t]his statement has been criticized. I stand by it."  And Gordon comments: "[o]ne wonders who these critics were in terms of the audience they signified." (Gordon, "Fanon's Tragic Revolutionary Violence," 307)

So what audience do we choose to represent when we condemn or celebrate revolutionary violence?  What lives do we consider possess more meaning, and what actions do we accord the meaning of Good and Evil?  For those who have sacrificed their lives pursuing tragic violence, in all the failed attempts to bring the capitalist god down, often die forgotten or maligned - or are awaiting death in prisons and ghettoes the world over.  While we should recognize the tragic dimension of their decisions, we should not silence them and dismiss them for their attempts, however frail and failed, to attack the violence of global oppression.  The ruling ideology of capitalism condemns them already - in films, books, and common sense political discourse - and to allow this ideology to speak for them is to possibly collaborate with this ideology by accepting its interpretation of violence and the Good, abandoning those who fought for a better world.

Now, if I haven't bored the reader by now with this overly-ponderous and decidedly unwhimsical entry, and those commenting in the Assayas film review post are still interested, have fun attacking me in the comment section.  But please abide by the comments policy, especially point six.