“Nonviolence” can be the heart of an uncompromising movement as typified by Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence or the core method through which those who refuse to hear are forced to see, as typified by Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

Yet this article is not intended to critique nonviolence or to reveal it’s limitations, but to argue against nonviolence altogether.

Why is this? It is because the central feature of the movements mentioned above, the reason why they were effective, was not their nonviolence, but their violence. Their assaults against the status quo, and its violence, could not be ignored within their historical contexts.

A refusal to recognize nonviolence as a specific strategy of organized violence is to fall into a mainstream-created trap. This trap simultaneously makes space for “legitimate” protest (long since neutralized), while severely punishing anything that can be portrayed otherwise. Nonviolence therefore becomes a codeword for “waste-of-time.”

This needn’t change the dictum that our ends and means are one, that we must live the world we wish to create; but it does mean that any effort to do so is thoroughly removed from the current status quo… and liberals.

Since the 1960s, when the supposedly beneficent government of the USSR was exposed as a bureaucratic nightmare, communities of all types have worked towards realizing in earnest what is promised but impossible within the current world order.

Growing out of the civil rights movement in the US, identity groups of all sorts sought to reclaim their humanity and shatter the primacy of the capitalist and the white-maled norm. At the same time, other groups around the world sought to realize direct democracy, group autonomy, sustainable living, to mention a few. An example of this is Europe’s Autonomen, but epitomized by the ongoing practice of the Zapatistas in Chiapas.

This is an ongoing struggle, local and global, as demonstrated by recent events in Oaxaca and the decision by the Minneapolis Janitors (SEIU) to strike if their core demands are not met today.

What we see in current movements at their best is a recognition that there is no one way towards the world we wish to create; that oppression must be opposed in all its forms. Moving towards a qualitatively better world therefore requires organizing so that no group is allowed to consolidate sufficient wealth or power to take control over any others. It is this type of organizing that is antithetical to the dominating structures of the State.

It is here, in these struggles for liberation where violence returns and destroys, where the violence of political liberalism and State politics reemerges — not to mention the terrorific economic system which drives and supports violence. And it is because of this violence that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. organized their own violence against the powers they opposed.

Perhaps it is time for us to again organize our violence, or better, join others that are doing so. It is in this context that we may realize “freedom as the practice of freedom”.

Welcome! to the seven part series entitled Stop Being a Stupid Liberal. I hope you enjoy it, after all, I wouldn’t be writing it without you. Unhappily not a zealot, I am pleased that most of you find politics dispiriting. It means you know shit when you see it and still have hatred for being forced to act like what we say when applying for jobs, or college.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what we enforce as appropriate, normal, even moral, when we refuse to have a position.

As such, I am writing these articles, and holding discussion hours [not on the blog but wow, you can comment]. For these discussions I am listing contextual reading, though I would of course prefer talking to you than to myself.

This week’s discussion will be on...The Damage Done by Sophie Smith, found in last semester’s zine (available in the Infoshop) and the first chapter of Wendy Brown’s new book on tolerance, which can be found at: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8306.html.

Next week’s topic: Against Nonprofits.