Pacifism and the Police
I wrote a blog post once before about pacifism and how it poses a political problem for me, a problem I have not yet solved (and often feel like I am very far from solving). In a nutshell, the problem is this: as someone who subscribes to revolutionary communism, is it possible to make revolution while adhering to pacifism. Are revolution and pacifism mutually exclusive? This has always been an acute problem. One reason I think of myself as a communist instead of an anarchist is that I think anarchism often overlooks the problem of what you do with the enemies of a new, just society. Capitalists, bourgeoisie, and right-wingers don’t disappear the moment the revolution is declared. The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary because something has to be done with the enemies of the classless society. The bourgeoisie will not adopt anarchism on day 1 of the new society. As Rosa Luxemburg puts it in “Reform or Revolution?”, “it is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realised in one happy act”.
In recent years this problem has been brought into focus first by the “punching Nazis” discourse and now by the whole question of defunding and abolishing the police. As I wrote once before, while I’m not a huge fan of punching anybody, punching Nazis is very low on my list of things to object to; I don’t know that this is a violation of pacifism or not. When it comes to defunding and abolishing the police, things appear on the surface more clear cut: the police as the defensive, punishment, and carceral arm of bourgeois society is an unreformable evil and needs to be wiped out. But what does this mean for the revolution? How can you have a dictatorship of the proletariat without reproducing the police?
We can put this another way. It is a bourgeois article of faith that liberal-democratic society is “always already” non-violent. Violence always belongs to dangerous, ungovernable, and illiberal people: Marxists, anarchists, immigrants, poor people, people of colour, colonial “subjects”, Indigenous people, etc. We have seen how white terrorists in the US avoid being called terrorists, and are very often described as people of whom no one would suspect such violence was possible. Violence is considered an exception to liberal society.
But this can only be accomplished by a repression of real violence: the violence of poverty, the violence of patriarchy, the violence of white supremacy, the violence of incarceration. And I’m not speaking solely of arguably metaphorical violence that might be objected to by adherents of free speech, but of real, concrete, material violence. We already live in a violence society - it’s just that those who live in cloistered suburbs, hide from the pandemic on yachts, or feel themselves secure in their boardrooms are insulated from it.
So in many ways, violence is an unavoidable aspect of the revolution and the dictatorship of the revolution because it is an unavoidable (i.e. already present) aspect of bourgeois society. Capitalism is based on the violence of exploited wage labour; white supremacy and colonialism on the violence of dispossession, assimilation, and genocide; patriarchy on the domestic and institutional violence against women.
Graham Greene was a complicated Catholic; one of his main criticisms of the Catholic church was that it did not understand the realities (often ugly or messy) of the real human world. For example, Greene thought the church’s prohibition on contraception condemned millions of poor Catholics to raising children they could not afford. Nevertheless, Catholicism was, for Greene a matter of “faith” rather than of “belief” - belief was, for him, an intellectual attitude, something worked out in the cold light of logical deduction. Faith was an intuition, a feeling, and on his travels through Catholic countries like Mexico in the 1930s, he saw a reflection of this kind of non-intellectual faith that he preferred over the systems and theories of believers. And so he retained this faith even when he had no belief - and his doubt is what makes his writing so important.
Perhaps I’m in a similar position. Pacifism, for me, isn’t a belief, isn’t a worked-out intellectual position, but something more basic and intuitive than that. And in a world of violence, predicting a violent revolution to come, perhaps there is no reconciling the two. Perhaps the adherence to pacifism just has to muddle through in contradiction, facing up to the ugliness and pain of it, simply because there appears - in the all-too-human world - to be no real alternative to it.