Before the horrors of the First World War and the violence unleashed by the new, post-war German republic against the revolution of 1919-20, the anarchist-syndicalist Fritz Oerter made an impassioned defence of what he called “non-violent socialism”.
If for some on the “left”, including anarchists, this is a “disastrous theory”, Oerter’s 1920 pamphlet Violence or Non-violence? merits far greater consideration than such scorn implies.
Distinguishing between “violence” and “power”, Oerter argues that the former is not only incompatible with socialism – for it is the fundamental instrument of political and economic oppression under capitalism –, it also creates and shapes subjectivities that quickly resort to violence in any situation of frustrated desires, both politically and beyond.
For Oerter, violence is a poison that threatens to permeate any society, at all levels, if it becomes habitual. And for Oerter, it had become a habit. Indeed, it was so much so that the working classes themselves and their supposed political representatives could only imagine freedom from exploitation as resulting from the violent appropriation of state power from the capitalists. But at the same time, this very same habit engendered a culture of violence which rendered the working classes susceptible to political manipulation from above. Violence comes to be perceived as politically and socially cleansing. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see how such a culture would feed German fascism.
If socialism is meaningful as a political project, it is because it identifies justice and equality and peace as one. These cannot be served with the instruments of injustice and inequality, of which violence is an intrinsic part.
In opposition to political “violence”, Oerter espouses economic “power”, that is, it is the task of the working classes to withdraw or retreat from capitalist labour, to refuse to contribute to the reproduction of capitalist social relations, creating alternative economic-social relations. What Oerter understands by power is the potentiality to live autonomously, in freedom and equality. “Power”, in this sense, is not domination, but the capacity to create social life collectively. And for Oerter, this would only be possible in a generalised culture of non-violent solidarity.
Oerter recognised that his destituent socialism – the expression is not his – would provoke a violent response from the ruling classes. He believed however that such violence would only create further conditions for the spread of socialism. And this, some would say, perhaps even many, is naive.
But then Oerter’s naivety is that of someone who believed that justice was possible, but that it depended on a passion, an enthusiasm for justice, born by a story of universal emancipation that he called “non-violent socialism”.
The cynical “left” of our time seems to have fallen back on “national” solutions, with patinas of social-democracy, or even more radical forms of autarky, imagining a freedom of splendid isolation. Both are illusory. Against nationalist and centralising sovereignty, Oerter opposed federalism and against political oppression, he opposed economic solidarity, what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon imagined under the concept of mutualism and what Peter Kropotkin called mutual aid. If we take the concepts of the economy and the working class as broadly as possible, then we are given a picture of socialism in which everyone jointly cares for our common home.
If we may criticise Oerter for anything, it is perhaps in his belief, however implicit, in moral progress. He could not fathom a paralyzing pessimism and even in the darkest of moments, some kind of hope remains.
He wrote, in this regard, that when “an epoch allows itself to wallow in violent and bloody practices, a moment of saturation, an aversion, a sudden disruption of the spirit, occurs, turning it in another direction, sometimes the opposite. We have the right to hope that this disruption will also occur in our epoch.” We can excuse the use of the expression here of “the right to hope” and endeavour to consider the meaning of these words a little further.
In the brilliant documentary film The Faces of War, dedicated to the effort of two visual artists Edik Boghosian and Areg Balayan to register and condemn the violence of war – in this case, among Armenians who were wounded in the recent, multiple military confrontations between Armenia and Azerbaijan –, two testimonials perhaps allow us to understand Oerter’s “hope”.
This war awakened me. As a human being, you have no value there. You’re not recognised as a specialist, as Areg, the father of a family. In other words, all the attributes that characterise you gradually start disappearing. And this continues until you are completely empty, just like when you were born. You become nothing. If it hadn’t happened, I mean, if you hadn’t become nothing, you wouldn’t even understand that …, that too much nothing is everything. I am grateful that I experienced that nothingness and I touched it with the tip of my nose, which had the highest price.
Based on my own experience, I keep saying that war is a bit better than peace. Wherever I say this, it disturbs people. But when I explain what I mean, that say: That’s true. … I see it this way: Doesn’t war bring out the best in people? You wouldn’t give a glass of water to a dying person in times of peace. Because you’re suspicious of others, you don’t want the stranger to harm you. You pretend to be blind and walk ahead. You share your piece of bread with a stranger in war time. So, what now? Is war worse than peace?
Perhaps Oerter’s hope lies in this, that in the darkest moments of human experience, we discover that we are nothing, that all of us are nothing, like newborn children, and that in this shared fragility, we turn to each other as equals.
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Chile: From Uprising to Plebiscite: Street Victories, Electoral Defeats
From the CrimethInc. collective (20/09/2022), sharing voices from chile …
From Uprising to Plebiscite: Street Victories, Electoral Defeats – Perspectives from Chile on the Constitutional Plebiscite
In October 2019, an uprising exploded throughout Chile. For a while, the police and armed forces lost control. Seeking to placate the rebels, the government announced a plebiscite about whether to replace the constitution, a relic of the far-right dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A majority of the parties in congress drew up a roadmap for this process, calling it the “Agreement for Social Peace.” In May 2021, elections to determine who would participate in the constitutional process were hailed as a victory for “independent” politics—though we expressed concern that this process would chiefly serve to pacify social movements, pointing out that today, it is much easier to rally opposition to a government than it is to make change via state institutions. As it turned out, in the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, a majority of Chileans voted to reject the proposed constitution—shocking many Chilean leftists, who had not expected such a resounding defeat.
Hoping to gain insight into these events, we sent a series of questions to several thoughtful participants in autonomous social movements. Some of them suspended their rejection of state politics to participate in the constitutional process, while others remained outside the process, taking note of the ways that it shaped the possibilities in Chilean society at large.
Looking on from a distance, the events in Chile strike us as part of a familiar pattern. The institutions of capitalism and the state impoverish and oppress people, precipitating revolt; the defenders of those institutions scramble to channel anger and desire for change back into reforming the prevailing institutions; as they shift their attention to reform and electoral politics, the rebels lose leverage on those who hold power, and the cycle repeats itself.
In fact, electoral politics has served to subdue revolutionary movements since the emergence of modern democracy. In France, immediately after the revolutions of 1848 and 1870, elections served to return reactionaries to power; at the apex of the May 1968 uprising, president Charles de Gaulle regained control by calling a new election for June 23. Transformative social change takes place at a different pace than the establishment of majorities. Seeking to legitimize proposals by majority vote—rather than opening up space for experimentation by decentralizing the processes that distribute agency and legitimacy—will always reduce political possibility to the lowest common denominator.
The same repressive process can play out even via direct democracy, especially when it becomes separated from the force of revolt that offered it leverage in the first place. Movements that wait to reach consensus before taking action tie their hands from the start, as we can see by comparing different encampments during the Occupy movement. In Bosnia in 2014, an uprising that began with the burning of government buildings ended with a whimper when the plenums that had crafted a proposal for social change discovered that the reconstituted government no longer had any need for reform once the threat from the streets had abated. It seems to us that the transformative process of revolt itself is the important thing to self-organize, not formal processes to achieve social change through the institutions of the state. Anything that distracts us from this priority can only weaken our movements.
We still remember how, at the high point of the 2019 revolt, for about a month, Santiago and many other parts of Chile were self-organized via a decentralized network of neighborhood assemblies employing a wide array of decision-making structures. Each one was shaped by the participants, focusing on the matters that concerned them and discussing what could be done immediately with the resources at their disposal. This remains the high-water mark of popular power in Chile.
After the constitution was approved, the cabildos (town hall meetings) began in many of the same spaces. They appeared to mimic the neighborhood assembly format, but focused on discussing the constitutional process. The immediate power that people had experienced in their neighborhood assemblies gave way to a sense that power came from the state—or at least through the state—and that their desires would eventually be fulfilled at the end of a long, orderly, democratic process. (“And you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”)
Comparing the events in Chile with the grim end results of other left electoral victories in Brazil, Greece, and Spain—which admittedly did not go so far as to propose to establish a new constitutional basis for government—it seems to us that anything that draws us back into trying to reform the institutions of power can only sidetrack us and obscure our real proposals by associating them with the inevitable failures of the state. From our perspective, the failure of the constitutional process in Chile is a cautionary tale. At the same time, if we want to foster movements that can reject such compromises and continue building strength through changing circumstances, we will have to innovate ways to make them sustainable.
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