The Aporia of Pacifism

With everything going on these days - The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict echoing the Gerard Stanley aquittal for murdering Colten Boushie, the fallout of the Trump presidency, and the increasing possibility (likelihood, I think) of war with China - I keep turning back to the question of pacifism. I don’t talk about pacifism much on this blog - I think I only wrote about it once on the old platform - but pacifism has long been a core aspect of my worldview, and poses real problems for my politics. Pacifism is something that really troubles all my political thinking; it constitutes an aporia - an intractable knot - in my approach to things. I think this is, in the main, a good thing, as it prevents me from sliding too easily into certain positions. Pacifism is always there as a limit.

While I am emotionally and intuitively committed to pacifism, this aporia is, I think, defined by the fact that I find it very hard to support intellectually. The more I think about it, the more the knot tightens and tangles. In a world of violence, what alternatives are there? How do we make positive change in the world - especially given the time-pressures of climate change - how do we even resist the violence done by others, or protect other people from the violence of others, if we take violence off the table at the outset?

But this raises the important question of why we should take violence off the table? Perhaps it isn’t something to be eschewed - if not something to be embraced - but at the very least considered as a tool. This make violence, in principle, a more focused and pragmatic instrument than George Sorel’s (and anarchism more general) propaganda of the deed. However, this way of conceiving of violence is the way contemporary imperial and colonial regimes, the UN, and Nato, present violence. So it is hard to trust that such a “principled” use of violence is anything more than a cover for more bloodshed and cruelty.

I also don’t subscribe to the platitude offered by so many prime-time TV shows as an easy bromide, the idea that the use violence makes us “just like” our enemies. That’s a cheap and pointless conclusion, a vulgar oversimplification.

I think the problem of violence was posed most clearly by Tolstoy, in a famous letter to Tarak Nath Das in 1908 (often referred to as “Letter to a Hindu”). This letter was hugely influential on Gandhi’s own non-violence. Tolstoy had already explored pacifism in his 1894 book, The Kingdom of God is Within You, looking explicitly at Jesus’ injunction of “non-resistance to evil”.

In two letters to Tolstoy, Das had argued that India had fallen to English colonialism because Indians had not resisted strongly enough, had not met force with force. In what reads too much like victim-blaming to modern ears, Tolstoy argues in the letter to Das that the idea of resisting force with force only showed that force was the highest power, and anyone who conceives of force as the higher power will always be subject to and participate in violence. The only way to break a cycle of violence is to cleave to a higher argument, a higher rule, a higher power than violence. Put another way, to participate in violence - even through violent resistance to attack - means implicitly or explicitly avowing that violence is the final, highest power in social relations. The ramifications of that avowal are horrific: civilization is nothing but organized violence, and humanity can never escape violence as the organizing principle of all our social relations.

Over humanity’s history, alternative ordering principles have been developed as a means to displace violence from its privileged position. For Jews, it was and is the law; for Jesus (if not for many Christians), it was and is love; for the Enlightenment it was Reason; for Tolstoy and Gandhi, it was a transcendental judge; for today’s politicians it is the “rule of law” (constantly discredited, most recently in the RCMP occupation of Wet’suwet’en territory (to support the creation of an oil pipeline, of all things).

In periods when human violence becomes dominant (I will not say it arises, because human violence is always with us; but neither will I say that some periods are not more peaceful than others), all of these alternative ordering principles appear (are?) discredited. At least, this is so for someone like me, who is not religious, and who doesn’t see in the Enlightenment anything but the organization of knowledge and social relations for European capital. So the aporia of pacifism consists in the fact that I deeply - but emotionally or intuitively - deny that violence should be the highest ordering power in human life, but I can’t find an alternative ordering principle that is intellectually compelling.

So there is an insoluble problem at the heart of my political thinking (and not only my political thinking) that limits what I think political action can do, since all roads lead either to violent repression or violent resistance to violence. In a way, it’s like the prospect of war with China on climate change: if such a war is fought with conventional weapons and materiel, the resulting carbon burn will push past the point of no return; but there is something perverse about the idea of fighting a global war with clean, environmentally-friendly weapons.

Tolstoy’s solution - and in The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You - he talks a lot about the Quakers in this respect - is mass civil disobedience in every area which can even lead to violence. In North America our taxes pay for the military, so we should withhold our taxes as a form of civil disobedience. But in Tolstoy’s day, society was either self-sufficient (like the peasantry) or lived feudally on peasant labour. In our post-welfare state world, we have handed over self-sufficiency to state support (and this too was a move of capitalism). So withholding taxes hurts us just as much as it hurts the military. One of the drawbacks of the idea that “socialism equals a big state” is that we have become much more dependent on the state and its support than Tolstoy or Gandhi and their followers were, a state which is a tool and purveyor of capital, colonialism, and imperial oppression.

We can set up dual power and mutual aid networks, but if we continue to pay taxes, then we are contributing to violence as an ordering force in the world. And as various critical theories have shown, even if I as an individual stopped paying taxes to fund the military, I would continue to benefit from the military (or white supremacy, or anti-Indigenous violence), and therefore benefit from violence as the highest form of order. Where is the way out? Tolstoy could avoid paying taxes, remain self-sufficient on the labour of peasants, and soothe his conscious by individual withdrawal. Individual withdrawal and conscience-soothing is not possible in our world; and collective action has to engage with the issue of violence.

This blog post got away from me a bit, indicating the open, twisting nature of the questions the aporia raises. There are no answers, only more questions and lines of enquiry. It’s fitting then to end this blog post abruptly and arbitrarily.