Anarchism and Violence - Anarcho-pacifism

Anarcho-pacifism  (also pacifist anarchism or anarchist pacifism)
is a tendency within the anarchist movement which rejects the use of violence in the struggle for social change.^[1][2] The main early influences were the thought of Henry David Thoreau^[2] and Leo Tolstoy while later the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi gained importance.^[1][2] It developed "mostly in Holland (sic), Britain, and the United States, before and during the Second World War".^[3]

Thought

 

For An Anarchist FAQ "the attraction of pacifism to anarchists is clear. Violence is authoritarian and coercive, and so its use does contradict anarchist principles." "(Errico) Malatesta is even more explicit when he wrote that the "main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations".^[16]

Anarcho-pacifism tend to see the state as 'organised violence' and so they see that "it would therefore seem logical that anarchists should reject all violence"^[2].. Anarcho-pacifism criticizes the separation between means and ends. "Means,...must not merely be consistent with ends; this principle, though preferable to 'the end justifies the means', is based on a misleading dichotomy. Means are ends, never merely instrumental but also always expressive of values; means are end-creating or ends-in-the making".^[2]

An anarcho-pacifist critique of capitalism was provided by Bart de Ligt in his The conquest of Violence. An Anarchist FAQ reports how "all anarchists would agree with de Ligt on, to use the name of one of his book's chapters, "the absurdity of bourgeois pacifism." For de Ligt, and all anarchists, violence is inherent in the capitalist system and any attempt to make capitalism pacifistic is doomed to failure. This is because, on the one hand, war is often just economic competition carried out by other means. Nations often go to war when they face an economic crisis, what they cannot gain in economic struggle they attempt to get by conflict. On the other hand, "violence is indispensable in modern society. . . [because] without it the ruling class would be completely unable to maintain its privileged position with regard to the exploited masses in each country. The army is used first and foremost to hold down the workers. . . when they become discontented." [Bart de Ligt, Op. Cit., p. 62] As long as the state and capitalism exist, violence is inevitable and so, for anarcho-pacifists, the consistent pacifist must be an anarchist just as the consistent anarchist must be a pacifist".^[16]

A main component of anarcho-pacifist strategy is civil disobedience as advocated by the early anarchist thinker Henry David Thoreau in the essay of the same name from 1849.^[2] 

Leo Tolstoy was influenced by it and he saw that a "great weapon for undermining (rather than overthrowing) the state was the refusal by individuals to cooperate with it and obey its immoral demands".^[2] Also the concepts of passive and active resistance have relevance as they were developed later by Mohandas Gandhi.^[2]
For anarchist historian George Woodcock "the modern pacifist anarchists,...have tended to concentrate their attention largely on the creation of libertarian communities -- particularly farming communities -- within present society, as a kind of peaceful version of the propaganda by deed. They divide, however, over the question of action.".^[1] Anarcho-pacifists can even accept "the principle of resistance and even revolutionary action (Nonviolent revolution), provided it does not incur violence, which they see as a form of power and therefore nonanarchist in nature. This change in attitude has led the pacifist anarchists to veer toward the anarchosyndicalists, since the latter's concept of the general strike as the great revolutionary weapon made an appeal to those pacifists who accepted the need for fundamental social change but did not wish to compromise their ideal by the use of negative (i.e., violent) means."