The left and non-violence - a reply to the Guardian

Submitted by AWL on 20 August, 2016 - 11:58 Author: Dan Katz

The Guardian (19 August) is horrified by a discussion which took place inside Momentum’s steering committee. Momentum’s aims had been discussed in the meeting, and it was proposed by some to remove a commitment to only non-violent methods. The text was amended and the promise of non-violence at all times removed.

The paper quotes AWL supporter Jill Mountford: “I raised a point that if we stuck with the suggested wording, and our members were arrested for defending themselves on a protest, then we would have to consider expelling them from Momentum.

“As people who are organising and protesting, we have to have a right to defend ourselves. I cited the fight against fascists in Cable Street, the right of self-defence during the miners’ strike, the suffragettes. Those struggles showed us that while the right might accuse the left of violence, we should defend the right to defend ourselves.”

We think Jill’s statement should be uncontroversial. Violence is an ever-present reality in our world.

Twentieth century genocides took place in Rwanda in 1994 and against the Armenians, by the Turkish state, in World War 1. Hitler’s Holocaust claimed six million Jews. Enormous wars killed and maimed tens of millions. The US bombed Vietnam and the USSR bombed Afghanistan.

Today Islamic State attacks Kurds, Shia and others in Syria and Iraq, and plants bombs and shoots down civilians in Baghdad, Aleppo and Europe. Assad and the Syrian regime have put down a peaceful reform movement using torture and mass killings, barrel bombs and gas attacks.

And, on a different level, violence is sadly a mundane fact of life in the UK, now. Men hit women, adults hit kids, people fight outside pubs.

The police, who are charged with preventing the violence are – minimally – ineffective. Clear-up rates are low. Domestic violence is ignored. Perpetrators go free. It is even legal to hit children.

The police, who often appear in front of working class communities as a bureaucratic mechanism imposed from above, and outside, are mistrusted.

That mistrust is well placed. The police are often part of the problem, harassing Black youth and others. In the past, in the late 70s and early 1980s, Black and Asian youth organisations emerged to protect their communities from both fascist violence and either the complicity or active involvement of police in racist attacks. The slogan of the Asian youth in Bradford and Newham was, ‘Self Defence is No Offence’.

The police have also been used in great numbers to repress working class protests. During the 1970s and 80s, in response to tremendous working-class strike movements the police were an ever-present threat, arresting and beating militants, attempting to break our resistance. Thatcher won and she used the police to help her do so.

You might find it difficult to get the police to come round and solve a burglary, but there are always several thousand available to police a radical demonstration.

So firstly it is not a matter of being in favour of violence, just facing the fact that violence is an unavoidable feature of everyday life, and – in particular – of political life. It is an issue for the left to face, and to answer. Either we agree to be pacifists – ruling out, in advance, all violence (from the right of a woman to forcibly stop a sexual assault, to the right of an oppressed group to stop their persecution through their own activity) – or we accept the possibility of using violence.

Would any reasonable person deny the right of the Kurds to self-defence? In other words, deny the right of the Kurdish people to resist – violently resist, with arms – IS attacks? Or deny the right of a woman to fight off a rapist?

We think there are few such people. The logic would be to accept the worst, most violent oppression, for ever.

So let us, the left, attempt to have a careful discussion about when our violence might be acceptable – or, at least, unavoidable. Let us not be battered down by the Guardian’s publishers and others – who, after all, are only acting on behalf of Owen Smith – into editing down what we can say to what they find acceptable.

That is what the Guardian’s shock-horror story is attempting to do. This is another scandal on behalf of Owen Smith.

But do we have an answer to their argument? The middle-class journalists are demanding of us that the only force in the modern world that is expected to renounce the use of violence is the left and the working class. We should leave the state and their agencies – the police and army – with a monopoly, and accept our place.

And if a woman has the right to fight off a rapist, and the Kurds have the right to defend themselves, why should workers and oppressed groups in the UK, now, not have that right, too?

A serious right-winger, or Guardian editor, might argue: a woman fighting off an attacker shouldn’t have to wait for the state; and the Kurds have no option but to fight. But in the UK, now, there is a democratic authority (government and its agencies) which workers and others must submit to. That would be more reasonable if the state really was accountable to us all, an honest player, even-handed, above the conflict between bosses and workers.

But, in fact, we face a class state, a bosses’ state, hostile to workers and our struggles.

In Indonesia in 1965-6 the state turned on the left and ethnic Chinese and killed, perhaps, a million people. A democratically elected, mildly left wing government was overthrown in Chile, in 1973. The French state murdered tens of thousands to put down the Paris Commune in 1871. A dozen foreign armies invaded workers’ Russia to try to stamp out the 1917 revolution.

There are scores of such major events. And many thousands of smaller actions against us and our class.

When Jill Mountford mentions the Suffragettes we might remember their campaign of setting fire to mail in post boxes. Or their training workshops on self-defence from police attacks. Or attacks on gallery art. Each individual action might be subjected to tactical criticism (was this the right thing to do, at the right time, to further the struggle for votes for women?) But would anyone – except the most crusty old reactionary – object to their right to set fire to the post, or to smash windows? After all these are relatively small matters set against the much greater injustice of denying women the vote.

The Suffragettes were right to take matters into their own hands, to fight for their rights, to not wait.

And what about Orgreave? Remember what happened: thousands of miners in shorts and trainers assembled at the coking plant during the great miners’ strike of 1984-5. They were met by horses, dogs and riot police - and a police riot. The police were not keeping the peace, they were breaking it. Miners were beaten and some railroaded to jail by compliant courts and with the support of the jeering press. The police even broke their own laws to keep Britain safe for Thatcher, the Tories and the capitalists.

So what are we saying here? We should accept the right of the police to do this? We should put our faith in capitalist justice and wait for more than thirty years for the possibility that the state might accept some bad apples in the police force might be to blame?

Or Cable Street, where the police helped the Mosleyite fascists to march into the Jewish East End. Should the workers’ organisations have folded their arms and allowed Black Shirt and police thugs to attack their community?

One of the shocking things about many of these events is the unpreparedness of some working class organisations and activists for the violence of the state. And that is why we need to have this conversation, and we need to remember our own history.

Yes, the miners had the right to self-defence. Yes, the Suffragettes had the right to use direct action. Yes, the united workers of London’s East End were right to break the law, in order to confront the fascists and their police helpers, and defend their community and organisations.

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