Transcription of Violence and Protest
I do not believe in intellectual property
VIOLENCE & PROTEST
Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing! That wrath which hurled to Hades’ gloomy reign, the souls of heroes too untimely slain. Declare, oh Muse in what ill-fated hour sprung that fierce strife, from what offended power…
In 2016, 4000 environmentalists in Germany shut down a coal mine. Germany has a lot of coal mines. In fact, they account for seven of the ten biggest CO2 emitters in Europe. So activists from the Ende Gelände movement blockaded the Garzweiler mine and the power station next door to it, which is called Schwarze Pumpe. They broke down a few fences and sprayed some graffiti, but mainly they just stood in the way of the machinery and shut the plant down for two days. They attracted a lot of criticism. The CEO of Vattenfall, the company who owned the mine at the time, described it as “Massiven kriminellen Gewalttaten!” (Massive criminal violence). And it’s interesting that he used the word “violence” because the activists didn’t hurt anybody, they were unarmed, they didn’t even damage the machinery, despite being attacked and then arrested by police and despite being attacked by members of the far right party Alternative Fur Deutschland, whose only problem with German coal is that its brown. So, this is the context in which I would like us to consider today’s topic.
The Iliad is one of humanity's oldest stories. I studied it in high school. It tells the story of the invincible warrior Achilles and his friends trying to rescue the Lady Helen from Lord Freeza. And then some androids show up with a bug man and there’s a sequel where they go into space. But the French philosopher Simone Weil says the true protagonist of the Iliad isn’t Achilles or Goku. It’s actually violence itself. It’s almost omnipresent throughout the poem, both glorified and described quite bitterly, almost as if Homer couldn’t make up his mind about it. A lot of people seem to be in two minds about violence, especially political violence. The ecologist Andreas Malm was one of the people involved in the action against Schwarze Pumpe. He’s been an environmentalist since the early 90’s, literally longer than I’ve been alive. In that time, millions of people have gone on marches, millions of children have taken part in school strikes for climate, there've been letter writing campaigns and the Extinction Rebellion… And with the exception of Ted Kaczynski and a few others, all of that’s been completely non-violent. Malm and others say that’s pretty remarkable.
“It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathes by almost everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London , a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say 50 people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: 6000 thrashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets, so why don’t these things happen?” - John Lancaster, Warmer, Warmer, in The London Review of books
Malm also says that this inspiring tradition of non-violence has failed. In my lifetime CO2 emissions have accelerated and there is now more money being invested in fossil fuel infrastructure. If civilization as we know it is to survive, those investments need to be written off. That means there needs to be no more fossil fuel infrastructure commissioned, and some of what we’ve already got needs to be dismantled. Malm says the free market ain’t going to do that because investors expect profit and governments have so far been reluctant to make the first move, so Malm - and here I must stress that the views of Dr. Malm are not necessarily the views of Ali Alonzo! Free speech, free speech, academic cancel culture, turn around, touch the ground, skinchies! - Malm explicitly recommends sabotage. Massiven kriminellen gewalttaten! As Ende Gelände put it: “We are the investment risk”.
“At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?”
Andreas Malm, How To Blow Up A Pipeline
Greta Thunberg showing up at COP27 like “right motherfuckers”. To be clear, Malm doesn’t want violence against people. He advocates targeted sabotage of fossil fuel emitting devices like SUVs and power plants as part of a mass movement that remains overwhelmingly non-violent. So, he doesn’t want guillotines, but he does want people to consider going from protest to direct action. Given that the vast majority of environmental action is non-violent, a lot of people find that idea a little bit too spicy. It’s one thing to express yourself on a march. It’s another way to actually do something about it. Some environmental movements, including Extinction Rebellion and Ende Gelände in 2016, explicitly rule out the kind of thing Malm thinks is necessary. He and others say that this ruling out of direct action often ignores the history of it working. People remember MLK, they ignore the Black Panthers. They remember Gandhi, they ignore the Indian mutiny. They remember the suffragettes, but they ignore the suffragettes. Who planted bombs and threw rock at Winston Churchill! Can you imagine the reaction you would get throwing rocks, even at the statue of Winston Churchill now? We wouldn't need nuclear energy. We could power the whole country on the fury of Telegraph columnists! And I include myself here. The stonewall riots were one of the catalysts for LGBTQ-rights in the English speaking world, and it wasn’t peaceful. Police turned up at the Stonewall Inn in New York and started systematically rounding up and sexually assaulting gay and trans people, so they defended themselves. They threw loose change and the bricks at the police, I’m glad they did that. My life is almost certainly better as a result. And yet I have political goals now, things that would make my life better again, and I’m not using those tactics to pursue them. Now you might say “Ali, that’s because you’re a hypocrite and a coward, and you’d rather lie around in a hammock eating french cheese, than getting off your arse and actually do something!”. And I’d say “Well, I don’t think that’s entirely fair, it’s not a hammock, it’s a divan”. But this is a bullshit essay, we know that the interesting intellectual and emotional stuff comes out when people try to defend the tensions in what they think. So why do so many people have this discomfort, almost hypocrisy around violence? Maybe what we need is a clear cut case to sharpen our critical skills, so let’s take it to its extreme. Let’s talk about guillotines.
Vive La France
France in the 19th century was an absolute monarchy. That is a political system in which the monarch is not bound by any written law, so they have the right to do anything you can’t stop them from doing. They had a lot of debt and poor people paid more taxes than rich people because rich people wrote all the laws and rich people had so captured the state that meaningful reform just wasn’t happening. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose! The people of France decided they’d had enough, so they wrote strongly worded letters and held peaceful protests until the people in power felt so bad, they changed their ways. No, they cut the goddamn king’s head off. And almost immediately, several European politicians and philosophers shit their fucking pants. But one man could always be relied on to keep his pants firmly unshitted, and that was prussian philosopher Imannuel Kant. Kant wrote a lot of famous books, like “Critique of Pure Reason”, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” and “Harry Potter and the Metaphysics of Justice” all of which philosophy students will know. But today I want to look at some of his lesser known albums. His later stuff, his B-sides, because Kant actually lived through the french revolution.
I said lived through, he never actually lived in France, but he read about it on 19th century Twitter. And he had some thoughts that have puzzled philosophers since because even Kant had some seemingly contradictory ideas about political violence. On the one hand, Kant was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary cause. So much that he required the nickname the Old Jacobin. The Jacobins were the more radical wing of the revolution. When things first got going, it looked like France might become a constitutional monarchy like Britain, where you keep the monarch, but they have to follow some laws. And the Jacobins were like, “Ah oue, une monarchie constitutionnelle. Mais que diriez-vous à la place, la guillotine.” And eventually they won. Kant thought republicanism was great, the most radical form of government. On the other hand, he condemned killing the king and any kind of violence and even breaking the law. He was very explicit about that.
“All resistance against the supreme legislative power, allm incitement of the subject to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth for it destroys its very foundations. This prohibition is absolute. And even if the power of the state or its agent, the head of state, has violated the original contract by authorizing the government to act tyrannically, and has thereby, in the eyes of the subject, forfeited the right to legislate, the subject is still not entitled to offer counter resistance.”
Immanuel Kant, “On the common saying: This may be true in theory but does not apply in practice”
And philosophers since Kant have tried to figure out how he squared these two apparently contradictory ideas, liking the french revolution, but opposing the french revolution. Kant was quite into what philosophers call social contract theory. It was really big in the enlightenment. There’s lots of different versions, but the basic idea is - imagine a time before society called the state of nature, where there are no laws. It’s not a real time like the Dark Ages or Roman Empire. It’s a rhetorical figure, like the age of heroes or the time of Gods and monsters. In the state of nature everyone has authority over themselves. So in that sense they have a certain freedom, but because people’s interests conflict everybody’s fighting all the time. So they come together and they transfer all their individual authority to a government so they can decide what to do when people’s interests conflict. That way we replace violence with politics. In return, the government might promise to do some stuff like follow the law. It depends on which version of the theory we're talking about.
“The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is, given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.”
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
And this is why Kant thought that citizens have no right to rise up against their governments or even question them. Suppose the people of a country felt that their government was too harsh so they started rebelling. The government could turn around and say “The only reason we’re being harsh is to squash the rebellion,” and who’s to decide who’s in the right? You can’t have another government above the government to decide who’s right when the government and the people disagree. The whole point of having a government is that they decide what happens when people disagree. Now at this point it might be tempting to say that Kant is not only licking boot, but he’s wrapping the boot in paté and baking it in pastry, a kind of Wellington boot, if you will.
But the key here is, he's not saying challenging the government would necessarily result in disaster, just that it would be intellectually inconsistent. You want to have a social contract, but you also don't want to give up your individual authority? Sorry, but that doesn't make sense. You can't have both. This is a classic Kantian move, to insist that the thing you want must not be contradictory. If you can grasp what he's doing here then a lot of the rest of his stuff will start Generations of philosophy students have felt that same frustration you might be feeling, where it's like, come on Kant, what are you, a fucking Vulcan? People aren't 100% rational all the time. We're not consistent. And he'd say, "Yeah, I know, but you should try. If you're going to use brain, you gotta use all brain." And it might not be quite as weird as it appears at first. This idea is actually reflected in international law. We might not like that other countries don't have democracy but you're not supposed to invade and make them have democracy. You can't want a system of sovereign nations and also want to tell other people what to do. That's a contradiction. Although it does still happen. So given all this, why did Kant support the French Revolution, an uprising that quite clearly breaks his rules? Kant thought that by watching a revolution and cheering it on, but not taking part in the violence, we create a community of onlookers.The revolutionary goes beyond morality, deliberately breaks the rules of the game. And obviously morality can't ever tell you that it's acceptable to do that. But the spectators stay in the moral zone and engage with the questions that the revolution throws up. By doing so, they develop morally and intellectually and so humanity progresses. Kant thought that by watching the revolution people would be inspired to recognise the virtues of republicanism, and so out of evil cometh good. Again, it might be tempting to just say that Kant is being a coward. What, you'd sit on your arse and watch while other people try and build a better world? But he was hundreds of miles away and an old man. He wasn't going to be storming the Bastille. And the same is sometimes true today. Not everyone has the opportunity or the ability to blockade a power plant. Engaging with the questions that political violence throws up is not necessarily cowardice. It's kind of the premise of political philosophy. So let's get engaged.
Sticks & Stones
I was not personally involved in the Ende Gelände occupation of Schwarze Pumpe, and statistically, you probably weren't either. And even if you were, you weren't. We were spectators, this time. We have allegedly witnessed some Massiven Kriminellen Gewalttaten and we can engage with the questions that it throws up, one of which might be - when the police attacked the activists, that wasn't generally called violent. Why not? The philosopher Walter Benjamin had a lot of thoughts on the police. He was living in Weimar Germany in 1921 when he wrote his famous essay, "Critique of Violence." 'Critique' here means investigation rather than criticism. And he certainly had a lot to investigate. Germany had just lost WW1, so the rest of Europe was sending them Venmo requests for reparations. They had a lot of debt. They had food shortages. They had a political deadlock. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose! The year before, 1920, German police murdered 42 left-wing protesters outside the Reichstag, the German parliament. There was a right wing coup called the Kapp Putsch, which was overthrown after a few days by a general strike. The striking workers decided hey, we quite like being in charge of our own lives, so they took over an area of Germany called the Ruhr, before being absolutely brutally put down by the government they had just saved working with some of the right wing forces that launched the coup. So if the social contract was supposed to be replacing violence with politics, it didn't seem like it was working. A lot of people were starting to suspect that actually the government was fine with violence, as long as it's against communists. And as the old poem goes, "First they came for the communists..."
Benjamin distinguishes between a few different types of violence. The first is law-preserving violence, like when the police tackle somebody and arrest them. In an ideal world we could talk to people and persuade them not to hurt each other, but philosophers and normal people have pointed out that sometimes words aren't enough. So the government and their agents, the police, maintain a monopoly on violence so people can live in peace, even when they might prefer not to. However, that might be a little bit too simple. I don't know about you, but whenever I see people talk about the police, what they do is rarely described as violent. It would be one thing if they said, "Oh, the police used violence on the Ende Gelände activists, but it was justified." But through things like using the passive voice in headlines and only describing what the activists did as gewalttaten, it seems like what the police do doesn't even count as violence. Benjamin has an explanation for this. He says the police don't do law-preserving violence, at least not exclusively. Their real job is to use what he calls law-making or mythic violence, which is itself illegal, but is the foundation of a new legal order. For example, the French Revolution. He says cops regularly do things for "security reasons" that are completely illegal and in so doing, they create law on the spot in the interest of the state without democratic oversight. Benjamin really did not like cops! Kind of understandable given what he'd seen them do. Mythic violence is a bit of a departure from the old social contract idea where people get together and form a government that represents the general will to limit violence. Rather, Benjamin says that creating a legal order is itself a violent act. When a government is formed, it gathers all the violence into itself and says "Right, this violence is acceptable and this violence isn't." And the way it decides isn't a rational decision-making process so much as vibes. For example, blockading a coal mine? Bad vibes. Police beating the unarmed people doing the occupying? Well that passes the vibe check. Batman commits violence against criminals. The Gotham police also commit violence against criminals, and probably a lot of people who aren't criminals. But Benjamin says they chase Batman because his violence isn't officially sanctioned. It's a threat to the system not because it is violent, but because it's the wrong vibes. If you wanted to commit illegal violence against people who haven't been proven to do anything wrong, you should have joined the police! Oh God, it's finally happened. I've been reduced to making philosophical analysis of pop culture. You either die a proud pseudo-intellectual, or you live long enough to see yourself become Jordan Peterson. Mythic violence is often mythologised, even romanticised, by associating it with symbols like uniforms and flags. If you adopt those symbols you can give people the impression your violence is sanctioned, even though officially it might not be, and you may even get away with it! Exactly what violence is and isn't sanctioned is deliberately not written down in the law. It's meant to be vague because then they have a right to do anything you can't stop them from doing. We really are a long way from seeing society as a social contract between rational individuals aimed at limiting violence. Rather, Benjamin sees society as founded in and maintained by violence.
He has another kind up his sleeve though, divine violence. The exact meaning of this has been hotly debated, but he says that divine violence doesn't establish a new legal order. Rather, it destroys legal order and achieves justice. He's thinking about that general strike that defeated the Kapp Putsch. Maybe he would say that the Ende Gelände action was divine violence too? There are lots of fictional stories about heroes going beyond the law to dish out divine violence. There's Batman and James Bond. But a lot of people have wondered whether divine violence is possible in the real world. Can it be done or will you just end up sparking a cycle of revenge? Will you just end up establishing a new system with its own injustices in which case, what you've actually done is mythic violence, like the French Revolution. One of the big differences between Benjamin and Kant is that whereas Kant sees violence as almost always prohibited, Benjamin's like "Oh, well... you know, sometimes it's based." You've got to look at who's doing it and why, and that leads us on to something even more interesting.
Words will never hurt me?
Another question that we could engage with when spectating the Ende Gelände action is - was that actually violence? It was massiven, and it was kriminellen, but was it gewalttaten? A lot of legal texts define violence as involving some kind of physical force or damage, but then threatening somebody This is potentially a very important issue because the meaning of 'violence' affects how we use other words like threat, protection, security, vulnerable populations, terrorism, intimidating protest. These words can affect our lives in a major way. Think about the difference between describing a group of people as a crowd versus describing them as a mob. One of those words paints them as potentially violent, and these words can be used to enact political control. It's really worth taking this in, the idea that calling something violent is itself a kind of metaphorical weapon. Violent people are not usually thought of as having the right to self-defence. If somebody attacks you and you fight back and they kill you, they can't claim self-defence because they started it. So by calling someone violent, you imply that they don't have the right to resist. Politicians and journalists will sell you policies making that move on everything from policing to workers' rights, to the interpretation of your own country's history. Benjamin said that mythic violence can be used to establish a legal system and philosophers since him have added that it can also be used to set the boundaries of what even gets to be thought of as violent. And that doesn't mean that we should just throw up our hands and go "Oh, well, I guess it's all relative then!" Just that whatever definition of violence we employ, should consider how it's going to be used.
"We cannot simply start with a definition of violence and then proceed to debate under what conditions violence is justified or not, for we have first to settle the question of which framework is naming violence, through what erasures, and for what purpose? We cannot simply assume a definition of violence and then begin our moral debates about justification without first critically examining how violence has been circumscribed and which version is presumed in the debate in question. A critical procedure would ask as well about the very justificatory scheme at work in such a debate, its historical origins, its presuppositions and foreclosures."
Judith Butler, The force of Non-violence
Simone Weil, the French philosopher who wrote that essay about the Iliad we started with, makes an interesting suggestion. She says that violence or force is the thing that takes away human choice. She wasn't the first person to say this. The 13th century philosopher Thomas Aquinas said that the violent is the opposite of the voluntary. If somebody loses their agency, their autonomy, their ability to affect the world, then violence is the thing that takes that away.
"To define force, it is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense, it makes a corpse out of him. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same. It turns a man into a stone. From the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power in its way more extraordinary. The power to make a human being into a thing
while he is still alive. He is alive, he has a soul, and yet he is a thing. Strange, a thing with a soul. Strange for the soul! It wasn't made to inhabit a thing. When it is forced to, there is not a single part of it that is not subjected to violence."
Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the poem of force
Weil's definition might prompt some interesting reflections. If she's right, then violence is very common. Raising a child involves denying them choices, so that would be a kind of violence. Compulsory public health measures like mask mandates or vaccine requirements would be kind of violent as would denying somebody healthcare. The French Revolution, obviously, but also the regime that preceded it. This means that it would be difficult to divide actions into violent and nonviolent, which is annoying because it would be really useful if we could do that. it would be very helpful if there were some particles of violence that we could detect and say "Ah, this thing is definitely 20% more violent than this thing!"
But sadly, it doesn't seem to work that way. Violence is a relationship between the action and the context in which it takes place. We could consider the Schwarze Pumpe
to be violent. Malm does.If you sabotage something, then you deny somebody the choice to use it, and that is a kind of indirect violence.But of course, Malm would invite us to consider the context; the much greater, though slower, violence of building and maintaining a coal fired power plant. And he's not the first person to point this out either.
It's been a persistent feature of struggles for racial justice for decades.
"There is a daily pervasive state violence that is never spoken of, much less acknowledged.
For Palestinians living under a brutal military occupation, for marginalised, disenfranchised young people in British cities or French suburbs, for African-Americans disproportionately impoverished, disadvantaged and preyed upon by US police, surviving generation upon generation of institutionalised and violent racism, for the global south diminished and drained by neoliberal policies imposed upon it by the IMF and the WTO.
If it were ever in doubt, the protests in Baltimore have shown us once again that only some types of violence are visible or really matter."
Rachel Shabi, Baltimore and the Media Tyranny of Nonviolence
The trouble of course is that you can't focus on both the action and the context at the same time. Hence the weird almost hypocrisy that we started with. To the Jacobins the violence of the French Revolution was justified in the context of what came before. But understandably that came as a little comfort to Louis the 16th who still ended up contextually fucking dead. The million dollar question is, how do we separate the violence that we care about from the violence that we are willing to accept or believe to be inevitable? And that's kind of what politics is for. When the German police took back Garzweiler mine, most of the people involved escaped. A few hundred were arrested and then had to be released because they refused to speak to the cops and just clogged up the bureaucracy. There were some charges made, but as far as I can find, nobody was ever convicted of anything. The mine was owned at the time by a company called Vattenfall, who were themselves owned by the Swedish government who were Social Democrats and Greens, so a clever choice of target. Kind of hard for them to ignore that context. Sadly, rather than shut it down, they sold it to a collection of fossil capitalists from the Czech Republic and it is still in operation, at time of writing.Step forward, we hear that you are a good man. You cannot be bought, but the lightningwhich strikes the house also cannot be bought. You hold to what you said, but what did you say?You are honest, you say your opinion. Which opinion? You are brave. Against whom? You are wise. For whom? You do not consider your personal advantages. Whose advantages do you consider then? You are a good friend. Are you also a good friend of the good people? Hear us then, we know you are our enemy. This is why we shall now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration of your merits and good qualities, we shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you with a good bullet from a good gun and bury you with a good shovel in the good earth.