I am refering to the old school non-violence by the way, not the modern non-resistance crap. What are your toughts?
What do you have in mind when you state "old school non-violence"?
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Stuff like tree sitting, chaining oneself to pipelines or just good ol strikes.
Sun Tzu:
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.
...
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk [disrupt, stymie, stifle] the enemy's plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.
...
Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: (1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. (2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. (3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. (5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
To give at least some credit to Clausewitz:
War is the continuation of politics by other means.
Non violence is an aim, an ideal, a category of strategies.
Not the whole of strategy.
The overall situation is what dictates the means at hand, the potentially viable strategies.
Unnecessary violence is always sub-optimal.
... It will be up to you, as a strategist, to determine what constitutes unnecessary, in what overall situation.
Violence is monopolized by heirarchical power structures. Decentralize violence.
You mean decentralize the capability of violence right?
Non violence till it become necessary to be violent
Violence, for a political aim should be cold and calculated, not emotional. It should also play second fiddle to non violence and communication.
The Irish troubles are a good example. The IRA forced the British government to listen to the politicians. The non violent protests and marches gave popular backing to the political process.
In a sane world, politicians know that violence is an option, and pay heed to the non violent methods before it escalates. This is what has happened in a number of non violent political movements. The option of escalation cannot be taken off the table however. It provides the silent bite to back up the bark.
The biggest thing to avoid is emotional violence. Smashing up shops in a riot might feel good but achieves very little. It burns the good will of the public. Instead it needs to be focused on a target, with minimal collateral damage. Particularly collateral deaths/injuries to the general public.
Ironically, the recent burning of a warehouse is a good example. Little to no collateral damage, but significant damage to its target, with a strong, stated reason.
One thing to note. Disparaging non violent protests is a definite bad move. Those protests provide both cover to organise, and a weathervane on public feeling.
When it comes to political action my American public school system education always held up these examples against each-other as if to say: "Here are two different ways people responded to the civil rights movement: Pacifist heroes like Rosa Parks compared to domestic terrorist Black Panthers." Their message was always that it is morally correct to respond to injustice with passivity.
This half-truth is so sinister that it leads us down this road of not even considering violence as an option at all and just throwing our hands up and wondering why everything is getting worse despite how hard we post on the internet about it. It took me a while to de-program myself, but once you see the actions and the protests as a necessary dichotomy a lot of things seem possible.
Colonists used to teach their victims to "turn the other cheek" in the face of injustice.
Here's your friendly reminder that nonviolence still allows for self protection. If someone is performing violence on you or someone you love, being nonviolent doesn't mean you just sit there and go "it'd be wrong for me to use violence to protect myself/my loved ones". Fighting back is acceptable.
“it’d be wrong for me to use violence to protect myself/my loved ones”
Some privileged people actually think this
State says violence bad when they have no problem enforcing it and codifying it into law 24/7/365.
But I'd rather not hurt ppl personally...
The state is the biggest hypocrite
That is correct.
In France violence is legally defined as harming people. Burning a Tesla shop is technically not violence, so it's perfectly fine 🔥
Non-violence at best accomplishes one thing: make injustice public, force society to talk about it and position itself on a topic. It won't be enough to convice, unless you are a victim of publicized harsh violence (think blood is spellt, people get into a coma, or worse). Like all strategies revolutionaries will have, none should be discarded and they are all complementary. What matters is that everyone acts collectively and pushes in the same direction
To quote flippanarchy,
Inaction is violence
I'm a hard-line pacifist. Not because I feel compelled by any authority, but because every time in my life that I've done violence to someone, no matter how well deserved, I felt like a total piece of shit afterward. It has driven me to find new philosophies, new ways of living, to understand why I feel this way and how I can avoid hurting people. Even if it means I have to eat shit sometimes.
I'd like to think there's a way for good people to live free without violence, but I don't think the reality of the situation will permit it. I may not be cut out for violence, and I'd rather not see it come to that, but I also won't stand in the way if other victims of the oppressive system we live under rise up in violent revolt. It would only be the natural consequences of what the elites have done, and it'd be their problem to handle.
the only thing that gets hurt is your ego
An interesting take. Tell me more about your mother.
not an insult
Doesn't matter, it's wrong and misses the whole point.
I also won’t stand in the way if other victims of the oppressive system we live under rise up in violent revolt
Hmm, doesn't this make you non-pacifist? I think if you condone violence by others you might not be a pacifist, even if you refuse to take part in violence, yourself. I guess it depends on the definition...
Only reason I say this is because I feel the same way personally about violence -- I never use it as a tactic, and would like the right to refuse to use it personally -- but believe that members of a movement shouldn't restrict the range of tactics its members use against a violent system. So I feel like I feel the same as you, but came to the opposite conclusion (I'm not a pacifist)
I can only make such moral decision for myself, not for others. I can enforce my values on myself and demand I do better, but other people have to walk that road for themselves.
You can't enforce any moral values on others? Or just this one?
Somebody else here, I think an issue might be that it's people being under (presumably) immoral oppression lashing out with immoral means, so to try to stop them might itself be siding with the also immoral oppression. There's something here about the goal and the means.
The way I see it, the people lashing out are doing so because they were effectively forced to, which puts their behavior outside the bounds of moral judgement. Such judgement should be reserved for the ones who left those people with no other choice.
If you're making someone do something by force then what they do can't be defined as moral. It would be compliance with someone else's wishes, not obedience to an internal directive. Therefore moral matters are for one's own consideration and not something to beat other people into submission with.
I think violence is way more effective in people's imaginations than it is in reality. Even where it is effective, the ends resemble the means in unintended ways. It inherently promotes hierarchy and control, because it's a way of solving problems that more than any other does not require listening to or understanding the people you are dealing with.
All of that doesn't mean violence can never be a good decision, but it's very strongly biased towards being a bad decision, and people are much too fixated on it and sabotage their own efforts by appraising its utility too highly, especially if their goals are opposed to authoritarian dominance.
I used to because pacifist. This fucking regime ended that.
Depends on what or who the violence is applied to. I'm generally okay with violence towards things and generally not okay with (big amounts of) violence towards people. I believe the state and the capital depends on physical things to function and so we can attack them without attacking people, but i get why it's probably more efficient to target people.
As a old saying se have here where i live "violence isn't the answer, violence is the question, the answer is 'yes' "
Counterinsurgency: Start a definitional debate about violence to disperse your enemy.
Seen this first hand what damage this can have, but I get why it is a thing (you don't want politics turn into gang violence).
Hot take: Shouting no violence, while standing next to a brick-holding comrade is tactically compatible.
What COIN specialists promote is not nonviolence, its non-resistance. Non-violence is stuff like occupying buildings or shutting off pipelines. Non-resistance is harmless things like petitions and A to B marches.
I'd argue they also disseminate discouragement of resistant non-violence by calling non-violent resistance to repression violence, but more importantly they stall consensus by invoking the violence debate in critical situations.
I tend to agree with Peter Gelderloos opinion that non violence protects the state
It's the same thing as "turn the other cheek"
Also
I'm not violence neutral, I'm anti-violence. Defensive violence is 10000% necessary as long as military of any kind exist. As long as there are military, there is the capacity to create the world we are living in now through a combination of aggression and survival. When there can't be military because there would be no point of forming one, only then would non-violence make sense to me.
Violence is fundamentally how the far-right thinks, that brings to prevarication and competitiveness. I think anarchy (as opposite on the spectrum) is essentially pacifism, one of the best way you can in fact divide the left cultures is using violence and how much violence you think is enough for the purpose.
I personally think that non-violence can only work small scale
I say the State only speaks one language
Non-violence works collectively. The problem is people are wet blankets.
Non-violence is very effective when violence is visibly on the sidelines looking for an excuse to step in.