We, the working class, are the immense majority and we don't need violence unless it is necessary to defend ourselves from people who are using violence themselves. This stance throws the responsibility for violence back onto the people who have no alternative except to use violence or see their power fall apart. In these circumstances, observers are more likely to fall in behind us and less likely to be swayed by the propaganda of the capitalist class.
The only place violence comes into the revolutionary process is to defend the new revolutionary system from attack by the ancien regime. Similarly, the political content of a given struggle against capital does not rely on whether the working class has taken up arms against the State. Rather, the political content needs to be judged according to the social relationships forged in the struggle. The only violence in which we should engage is that which is reasonably necessary in self defence
Although we always have the right to use reasonable force in self defence, it is sometimes the wiser course not to exercise that right. Sometimes it's better to take the hit and make our enemy pay by exposing them publicly. This can be especially effective when the perpetrator has a reputation to uphold. And sometimes the best response to violence is not counter-violence.
One argument in favour of minimising the resort to violence by our movement is that we take damage every time we use it. Even when the use of force is justified, we take damage - it's just that, in those circumstances, we take less damage by using force than by not using it. We take damage because the use of force encourages the authoritarian idea that might makes right. It disorients people on our side and entrenches our opponents in their positions. The more force we have to use in the course of the Revolution to prevail, the more difficult will be our problems afterwards.
If we must use force in self defence, then let us do it without hesitation and with all vigour necessary to prevail in the concrete situation. But let us not use force to substitute for having insufficient numbers on our side, because that is a confession of political weakness.
Our view is that the power of dictatorships ultimately comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern. All hierarchical systems require the cooperation of people at every level, from the lowliest workers to the highest bureaucrats. Despots depend on the population’s cooperation and submissiveness - and if the people effectively withhold their consent, even the strongest of regimes can collapse. Without the consent of the working class - either their active support or their passive acquiescence the ruling class would have little power and little basis for rule.
If protesters don’t have a clear objective, then they are likely to be sadly disappointed. Protest alone accomplishes very little. If you don’t have that basic understanding of what you’re doing, then you’re not going to win anything. One struggle doesn’t always do the job; sometimes you have to have two or three or four or five struggles in succession. Class war is in fact very much like war, a series of class-struggle battles with both victories and defeats. Cutting off our enemy's sources of sustenance, its power, is the ultimate goal. But it won’t happen easily, or quickly, or always. Non-violence is not passive, nor is it a way of avoiding conflict. Any non-violent movement that takes on a well-entrenched dictatorship. Those who start such a movement must be prepared for a long struggle, with setbacks and numerous casualties. After all, only one side is committed to non-violence. Nor is there any guarantee of success, even in the long run. However th other option, entails even larger casualties and has even poorer prospects of success.
Violence is not all that effective in a revolution. People have long thought that power grows out of the barrel of a gun.and it's taken a number of historical events to prove that is not true. When non-violence fails, the method is condemned. But when violence fails, strategy or tactics are blamed—not violence as a method. And partial success is seen as total failure.
Non-violent means will increase our chances of the military refusing to obey orders. But if you go over to violence, the soldiers will not mutiny. They will be loyal to the dictatorship and the dictatorship will have a good chance to survive. An armed response from the revolutionaries will not succeed, as the regime is invariably stronger on the military front. As soon as you choose to fight with violence you're choosing to fight against opponents in possession of the best weapons. The state's police and army are better trained in using those weapons. And they control the infrastructure that allows them to deploy them. To fight dictators with violence is to cede to them the choice of battleground and tactics. Using violence against experts in it is the quickest way to have a movement crushed. That is why governments frequently infiltrate opposition groups with agents provocateurs—to sidetrack the movement into violent acts that the police and security agencies can deal with. Non-violence is an aspect of resistance that the normal forces of coercion are ill-prepared for. When the ruling class choose to use their superior force against nonviolent activists, they sometimes find that it does not bring about the desired results. First, all sanctions must be carried out by the ruler's agents (police or military personnel) who may or may not obey or may reluctantly make a show of obeying to commit brutal acts against people who are clearly presenting no physical threat. It could have the effect of converting them to our point of view by winning over their hearts and minds. Even if a non-violent campaign is unable to change our adversary's way of thinking, it can still wield power and influence the course of events who may decide it is too costly to continue the fight or forced to make concessions because its power-base has been dissolved.
People turn violent because they feel there is little alternative but to resort to violence. Socialists organizations will develop the substitutes to militarising the class struggle and then people will have a choice of psychological weapons, social weapons, economic weapons and political weapons which can be applied and are ultimately more powerful against tyranny. Once enough people and organizations within a society (trade unions, community groups) are engaging in civil disobedience and withholding their cooperation from a regime, the capitalists' power will gradually wither from political starvation.
The success or failure of any peaceful revolt largely depends on the campaign’s ability to undermine the regimes supporters and weaken the allegiance of its civil servants, police and soldiers to the regime; to persuade those neutrals sitting on the fence to join the opposition. The worse the regime suppresses protests, the more steadfast ought the opposition be in its commitment to non-violence and the more the people resists, the more we will realize our own power and discover the means of re-shaping our destiny.
Non-violent popular civil-disobedience has an important role in moving forward from limited political democracy to full social democracy, which is what we mean by socialism. Not as a substitute for electoral and constitutional action, but as an additional guarantee that the socialist majority will achieve its goal under any conceivable circumstances. Socialists are not pacifists on principle but purely as a practical tactic. We acknowledge that there might be instances in which violence is a legitimate means to use.
It has become a commonplace to declare that "one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter." Many leaders of movements for "national liberation" (the so-called terrorists) have subsequently become part of the ruling class they once fought. Most who killed and were killed did so in the belief that they were creating a better and more just society than the one they lived in. But violence has failed to deliver a better life to those who indulged in it and suffered from it.
Socialists have always opposed both violent struggles for "national liberation" and the "legitimate" wars fought between nation states. We see that causing more of it cannot lead to an end to the suffering in the world. If you sincerely believe in the efficacy of violence to solve your own and the world’s problems then you simply deny the evidence of history. It is interesting how often politicians and journalists who steadfastly support violence when it comes from what they think is “their own” side, nevertheless quickly explode with anger when it comes from someone else. Every side, in any of the disputes raging round the world at the moment, claim that their own violence is only made necessary because of the violence coming from their opponents. The truth of the matter is that capitalism inevitably produces violence.
Violence will not make people into socialists. What many groups can’t stand about the Socialist Party is that we do not advocate violence and therefore cannot offer a practical programme of activity based on it. We are labelled ‘theoretical’ (as if this being a term of abuse!). No violence, no death or injury, will bring socialism any closer. Socialism will be brought about when the great majority of the world’s people want it to be brought about. We want to change people’s ideas. Violence will not make people into Socialists. Cudgeling someone’s head is not going to alter the ideas inside that head, at least in any worthwhile way. Rational discussion will finally make socialists. We believe that by considered argument we can show how co-operation and mutual assistance will achieve what we all want to achieve – a peaceful, harmonious, and contented existence. But Socialist Party members are not Quakers or pacifists, and do not rule out the need for violence under all circumstances. We simply argue that it is quite possible, and highly desirable, for a large majority to establish socialism without bloodshed. The more violence is involved, the more likely the revolution is to fail outright, or be blown sideways into a new minority dictatorship.
Violence we leave to others.
In the bourgeois revolutionary struggles of 19thCentury armed insurrection for the bourgeoisie and their working class allies was, in the absence of a wide suffrage, the only form of struggle available and, what is most important, the weapons and fighting methods then in use, made victory for the insurgents, under favourable conditions, possible.With the introduction of the general franchise an entirely new method of the proletarian struggle came into being .The bourgeoisie had more to feared from the legal than the illegal action of the workers' party, more to fear from the successes of the workers in elections than those of their armed rebellion.
What many can’t stand about the SPGB is that we do not advocate violence and therefore cannot offer a practical programme of activity based on it. We are thus labelled as sterile or ‘theoretical’ (this being a term of abuse, naturally). Not that the master class will hesitate at bloodshed if they deem it necessary to the maintenance of capitalist privilege. They have not hesitated to incur bloodshed and murder to maintain their full pound of flesh. But we are not Quakers, and do not rule out the need for violence under these circumstances. We simply argue that it is quite possible, and highly desirable, for a large majority to establish socialism without spilling blood. The more violence is involved, the more likely the revolution is to fail outright, or be blown sideways into a new minority dictatorship. We are not pacifists, but we always make it clear that we think that socialists should only contemplate resorting to violence reluctantly and as a last resort should an anti-socialist minority attempt to prevent by violent means the implementation of the democratically-expressed will of a majority for socialism. So you will find no glorification of violence.
The attitude of fetishism which the some anarchists and Trotskyists show towards "violence" their advocacy of street warfare against overwhelming odds, and their efforts to build up a party on mere desperation and unintelligent discontent only serves to make more difficult the Socialist education and organisation of the workers. Ill-timed revolts, the propaganda of sound-bite slogans in place of knowledge, and the strutting of impotent and empty-headed leaders. All this helps to impede the understanding of socialism and, along with disappointment at the failure of to get them anywhere, drove masses of workers to despair and to indifference to the genuine socialist message. Capitalism is the real enemy, not its managers, nor its police . If scapegoats there must be, we are all deserving. The creation of the human ‘enemy’ in revolutionary politics is the point of departure from the the Socialist Party’s case for change, and the foundation and wellspring of all appeals to violence. In short, any solution which necessitates violence against individuals is probably wrong, not because of some pacifist moral imperative, but because it doesn’t get rid of the problem.
The criterion for judging whether someone is a revolutionary or not is whether they want a rapid and decisive change in the basis of society, not the means they advocate to bring this about.Such a social revolution doesn't have to involve violence, insurrection, civil war, street battles, and executions as in the mistaken, popular conception of "revolution".
But what happens when such a small minority does succeed in winning and holding on to power? Because the "unconscious masses" don't want or understand socialism a key condition for its establishment is missing, so whatever happens socialism can't be the outcome. Not being able to establish socialism the new rulers find themselves obliged to govern what is inevitably still essentially a capitalist economy based on wage-labour, money-commodity relations and trading. The enlightened minority may try to do this more or less "benevolently" but this doesn't make much difference as what can be done, and what happens, is determined not by political will but by economic conditions. The minority may want to improve the living standards of the "unconscious masses" but are severely limited as to what they could do by world market conditions.
Our strategy is that the socialist-minded working class majority should try to bring this about with a minimum of social disruption and violence, by sending a majority of socialist delegates – socialist errand boys and girls – to parliament and take over political control, so depriving the capitalist class of the possibility of using the armed forces to protect themselves. If a minority of recalcitrant pro-capitalists were to seek to resort to violence to defy the politically-expressed will of the majority for socialism, obviously they would have to be dealt with. But, frankly, faced with a socialist majority legitimately in control of political power, even the top brass of the armed forces, let alone the rank and file (who will also be influenced by socialist ideas) would throw in their lot with a doomed hypothetical revolt by a recalcitrant pro-capitalists minority.
AJJ
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