On Violence as a Political Strategy by David O.

Violence as an approach to resistance against political authority is an inevitability in a society which relies upon violence to maintain and reinforce its status quo. The effectiveness of this tactic as a manner of effectuating political change is relative to the political goals of the violent actor, the ability of a political force to engage in violence successfully and with impunity and public perception of the political violence engaged in. It is evident that we live in a society where violence of many sorts it a status quo political reality. Certainly even those who engage in peaceful disruption are often met with violence in response. Moreover, the violence of the status quo has historically been met with violent resistance in many cases to different effects at different times. As regard's the question of whether or not violence is an effective political strategy, the only honest answer is that, while "You can't blow up a social relationship," it may be an effective strategy for effectuating some limited goals. This is evident when one approaches such common realities as the nature of state power itself. Certainly Max Weber hit the nail on the head when he defined the state as the entity which held a "monopoly on the legitimate use of violence" within society. The very primary roles of the state emanate directly from the capacity of the state to inflict violence upon less powerful elements around and within its territory. The role of the state as martial functionary, operating in the defense of the public & private interests of those who live within the geographical territory over which it stands, is only the most clear manifestation of this power. Certainly the vast military industrial complex which props up this power in the American context and the millions of people around the globe which it has left dead or wounded stand as testament to one measure of the effectiveness of violence as a strategy in the acquisition of certain political goals. Moreover, the policing impulse, whereby millions have been removed from their homes and forcibly held against their will to serve a sentence of public retribution for what have often been crimes without external victim or against material property stands as a testament to the internal machinations of a similar scheme. The existence of this prison industrial complex says nothing to the thousands killed needlessly in the act of policing the domestic population, whether crushed under the weight of falling police officers or burnt alive under incendiary bombs which burn down entire residential blocks. Peaceful resistance to authority has had mixed results. While the peaceful resistance of the freedom riders and many other participants in the civil rights movement achieved some gains on their own, it was not without the race riots which swept the country in the early to mid '60s that legislation like the Civil Rights Act was pushed forward. While the peaceful non-cooperation of Gandhi was instrumental in demonstrating a will on the part of many an Indian toward the independence of India from the British colonial Raj, it was not without the violent resistance of resistors like Baghat Singh, The Sepoy mutiny 90 years previous or most poignantly the financial damage inflicted upon Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War that Britain finally capitulated to the realization that the maintenance of the Raj in India was (literally) more costly than it was worth. More damningly, the passive reaction to Nazi violence on the part of many Jews in the ghettos and camps of the holocaust gained them absolutely no ostensible ground. Taken even to the point of Jewish prison Kapos policing their own people on behalf of their would be executioners and actively cooperating in so ghastly an activity as the disposal of Jewish bodies, this passivity verged upon acquiescence to extermination itself. While violent resistance on the part of Jewish partisans and most famously, in the uprising within the Warsaw Ghetto, did little to impede the German Wehrmacht overall, it certainly cannot be said to have helped them in any ostensible way, limited gains in local PR aside. The above three cases stand as poignant examples of another aspect to the use of violence as a political strategy, however. Violent disruption is always met with a greater violent reaction at the hands of the state. Certainly in the case of black militants in the United states, from the government reaction against Robert Williams when he attempted to arm South Carolina Blacks to defend themselves from attack at the hands of a politically entrenched KKK to the later murder of Fred Hampton by the Illinois

State Attorney's Office and Chicago PD, those who espoused violence or even the threat of potential violence have been terminated with extreme prejudice. In the case of Baghat Singh, his execution by the British speaks for itself. In the case of the Violent resistance of Jewish militants against their Nazi captors across the continent of Europe, the efforts of the Wehrmacht to hunt down and exterminate every pocket of Jewish militancy was nearly complete with only a handful of exceptions. Is violence an effective political strategy? In the end, it depends on who you are. If you have the capacity to present a significant threat to the militant power of the state, then yes. This has been the case in the past. In Russia, toward the tail end of the First World War, in China following the Second World War and in Cuba in the late 1950s, violence was effected upon the powers of the state in such a way as to effectively change the place holders of the seats of power. Certainly, according to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the three necessary conditions for these turns of events were as follows: There was a need for determined leaders, Who knew exactly what they want, who knew that they had everything to gain and that they had everything to lose. There was a need for disciplined followers, Who would accept orders and wouldn't think for themselves. ("This is inconsistent with the revolutionary tendency. People who participate in revolutions tend to want to think for them selves. That can't be allowed.") There was a need for the other side to be weak ("all revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door"). What Galbraith and many another observer seems to miss in these revolutions was that in each of these, a significant force of the previously trained and entrenched military force were in some way swayed to concede power to the would-be revolutionary force and in being so took away from the power of the state to defend itself from counter-state influence. More importantly, to what degree this change in the place holders of the seats of power effectively did anything to change the dynamics of the political spectrum within these countries is questionable at best. The scores left dead in the wake of these revolutions and the lack of any discernible conclusion to the social struggles which sparked them lends weight to questions of whether or not violent revolution can do anything to change the habitual institutions which constitute a social relationship.

Works Cited Age of Uncertainty. By John K. Galbraith. Perf. John Kenneth Galbraith. BBC, CBS, KCET, OECA, 1977. Internet. Churchill, Ward, and Mike Ryan. Pacifism as Pathology. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK, 2007. Print. Levi, Primo, S. J. Woolf, and Philip Roth. Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi Assault on Humanity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print. Weber, Max. Politics as a Vocation. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1965. Print. Wicker, Tom. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Bantam, 1968. Print. Williams, Robert F. Negroes with Guns. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. Print. "You Can't Blow up a Social Relationship - the Anarchist Case against Terrorism." Libcom.org. Libertarian Socialist Organization, 1979. <http://libcom.org/library/you-cant-blow-up-socialrelationship>.