How Nonviolence Protects the State, Part 3

This is a continuation of my review of Peter Gelderloos' 2007 book, How Nonviolence Protects the State (see Part 1 and Part 2). I have chosen to devote considerable space to a critical review of this work not because it represents a formidable challenge to nonviolence in itself, but because it appears to collect under one title many of the grievances and frustrations of militant activists toward those who advocate nonviolent tactics. To the extent that Gelderloos captures these concerns and articulates their rationale, this review aims to clarify misunderstandings, and show a way forward that avoids the pitfalls Gelderloos mistakenly ascribes to nonviolence as a whole.

Here I will examine the claims of his third chapter, "Nonviolence Is Statist." Gelderloos begins with the obvious: "Put quite plainly, nonviolence ensures a state monopoly on violence." He concludes, therefore, that "Pacifists do the state's work by pacifying the opposition in advance."

Not for the first time, Gelderloos has willfully conflated nonviolence with pacification and passivity, both words strongly associated with submission-to-authority. There is nothing submissive, pacificatory, or passive about revolutionary nonviolence (the only kind worth talking about, in my opinion). It's absolutely true that a position of nonviolence concedes all violence to the state, of course. But revolutionary nonviolence embraces and enables strategies of resistance, noncooperation, and diversion of resources that systematically weaken not only state power itself, but violence in general.