The Nonviolence Industry And The Rules-Based Order

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This is not an argument for violence. That’s absurd. This is an argument for honesty about resistance as a historical experience.

Resistance has always involved a range of actions — some of them legal, some of them illegal, some of them confrontational, some of them dangerous. The people who hid fugitives from the Fugitive Slave Act were breaking the law of the land. The labor movement did not win through moral suasion. The dynamics that actually produced change included the credible threat that the cost of maintaining an unjust system would become unbearable for the people maintaining it.

That threat took many forms. Pretending it didn't exist, or that it was incidental to the outcome, is not scholarship. It's dogma.

The nonviolence framework, as currently marketed, defines the ceiling of permissible action for the people challenging power and never for the people wielding it. The state's violence is governance. Your violence is the thing that has to be debated. That asymmetry is baked into the theory, and it serves a specific function: it keeps resistance within bounds that the existing order can absorb. If the existing order were capable of self-correction, that might be enough. It isn't. And the people insisting on that framework know it isn't, because their own data tells them so.

The question is what kind of resistance people are being allowed to imagine. And right now, the answer is: only the kind that doesn't threaten the structures that have already failed.

@@tad.stoermer