The good people at the Open Anthropology Collective (OAC) have produced a new volume of essays titled Emancipatory Politics: A Critique (available here with a Creative Commons license: Emancipatory Politics), edited by LSE anthropologists Stephan Feuchtwang and Alpa Shah.

Here is a comment by Keith Hart summarizing the for sake of which:

The editors identify three inter-related themes. 1. The tension between mass organization and the party in charge of the armed force. Democratic centralism may lead to an inflexible inability to accommodate local conditions. 2. This raises the question of the relationship between democracy and emancipatory politics. The party sometimes becomes unaccountable to the people it claims to serve. 3. Analysis of the classes, issues and alliances involved in the struggle for emancipation is essential. The answers chosen often turn out to be wrong, but the cases presented here also provide many interesting solutions.

Within these key themes, perhaps the most important, and perennial, point is (again in a comment by Keith Hart):

The priority for any revolutionary, emancipatory transformation must be a burgeoning political and social movement, but then how should it defend itself and how should it seize state power (in order to transform it) without becoming commandist?

My own experience and reflection takes me back to endless discussions in left-political contexts pitting efficacy against ideals:

“It takes an army to fight an army.”

“If you take on the mode and method of the enemy, you become the enemy.”

“Refusal of armed struggle is complicity with state violence.”

“Once you take up arms, you can never really put them down again.”

All of those are faux quotes, but they capture the essence of things I heard stated and argued over and over again during my years doing anti-imperialist, left and related politics in the United States. As a veteran of the United States armed forces, presumably already compromised (infected? stigmatized?) by violence, I was often asked to comment.

This made me profoundly uncomfortable. My insights into the matter always felt cursory and unworthy, but such as they were (and are) they go like this:

The question can’t be answered in the abstract. State violence, so far as I can see, is almost never justified, but revolutionary (“emancipatory”) violence cannot so easily be set aside. Refusal of revolutionary violence, under conditions where state violence is endemic, effectively displaces both perpetration and victimization onto others. Yet no matter the justification, violent acts are never good for the perpetrator—much less the victim. David Graeber makes the point in one of the comments on this volume:

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a classic terrorist strategy (the use of violence against non-combatants to create terror by a formally non state actor) being pursued by organization that was internally democratic.”

The type, degree and context of violence matters. Stone throwing, even Molotov cocktails, do not equal bullets or bombs—or I would add prolonged incarceration and/or torture. The latter can never be compatible, in my view, with a movement of emancipation—which of course is not to say that no movement aimed at emancipation can ever engage in such tactics: human beings contradict themselves, even at the level of fundamental values, all the time.

The hinge around the argument, however, is not only the degree of violence employed. It is also the degree to which substitutionary logics become extended. That is, to what extent are people of certain ascriptive categories, as determined by the users of violence, considered interchangeable? War logics allow the widest possible extension, such that, say, a hospital run by an international NGO that happens to be “in the wrong place” might become collateral damage in a bombing campaign. Those who are unintentional casualties of such violence point up the plenitude of violence available to the perpetrator, but such “messaging” is nearly beside the point. In the end, it’s just easier to bomb indiscriminately—and what bombing is really discriminating?—than otherwise.

So where do I come down on the inevitability of violent means leading to a soul-deadening, hierarchically obnoxious organizational culture? I come down thinking armed struggle is a dreadful, awful, terrible idea that is, at times, very slightly less dreadful than the alternative—allowing the undefended, unarmed, and otherwise unprepared to become unacknowledged collateral damage. I come down with the notion that social substitution—the logic of war—should be avoided to the extent possible. You might shoot back at people shooting at you; you don’t shoot at their brothers, sisters, spouses, or children or bomb the cities in which they happen to live. It’s a higher standard than the perpetrators of state violence hold themselves to—but no lower standard is compatible with democratic (in the broadest sense) action.