Who's Afraid of "Violence"?

The battle over protest language

— written by Yaa Mensah-King

The following essay is featured in Daughter’s lates print issue, ANARCHIST.

The first book I read this year was Andreas Malm’s How To Blow Up a Pipeline, which details the merits and shortfalls of strategic violence and pacifism within the climate movement. I had initially learnt about the book when trying to read up on the FBI and other law enforcement’s warnings¹ about the 2021 film it inspired. I had also just read an interview² with Malm in which the interviewer blurted out a question that any sensible person would ask when confronted with the climate crisis, “Could you give me a reason to live?” I figured that maybe Malm’s writing might give me that. While I wouldn’t say it gave me a reason to live per se, it reinvigorated my activism and expanded my conceptions of what can be done. One of the arguments Malm decries for strategic pacifism is the notion that “the state loves a fight of arms [because] it knows it will win.” Malm argues that the state has an advantage not just in the domain of violence but in “virtually all” others like coordination, tangible resources, legitimacy and, most importantly for the purposes of writing this essay, the media. Any time the question of 'violence or nonviolence' arises—whether it be by the feminist, civil rights, climate movements and so forth—it is almost always accompanied by another question: What is violence?

One of the most important tools within the arsenal of activism is the protest. In most countries that call themselves democratic, all citizens have the right to protest. However, this right often comes with some stipulations, the most important one being that the protest remains peaceful. For this reason, protesting is probably the most eminent form of nonviolent action. Instead of literally blowing up pipelines, for example, we take to the streets and use our voices. One would think that surely, that is peaceful enough a course of action. Unfortunately, there’s no such luck thanks to the weakly-formed definition of violence. Any protest can suddenly cross the line into “violent” territory even in the absence of any changes in strategy. What can be lauded as a peaceful protest today, can be considered violent barbarism tomorrow. On the flip side, what was violent barbarism in the past can be celebrated as legitimate protest today. The Suffragettes, who were dismissed and decried at every turn, are now celebrated for their heroic acts by the same apparatus that antagonised them in the past. Very importantly, however, it is to be noted that the suffragettes' more violent acts of protest have systematically been erased from pop history. From this example we can see that in the present day, the word ”protest” has undergone two linguistic processes: narrowing and pejoration. The narrowing can be seen through the loss of a wide variety of protests.

The average person sees the word “protest” and can usually only think of people with signs marching through the streets because that is all the press refers to as “protest” these days. The second process is pejoration which is when a word develops a negative connotation. By constantly interrogating whether protests are violent or not and over-reporting on friction during protests, the idea of it becomes a tricky, risky and dangerous thing. This framing of protest acts as a deterrent for some people who would otherwise also be fighting for change. State apparatus, much like a playground bully, enjoys the act of name-calling. They call us violent, riotous and criminal but that doesn’t necessarily mean that is who we are. When the playground bully decides to give you a nickname like Stinky, you don’t go by that name for the rest of your school days. You have your own name and that’s what you’ll continue to go by. The bully might persist in calling you this nickname but if you ignore it and continue to assert your own name, they will give up. Similarly, if we, as an activist group, have decided to only utilise peaceful methods of protest where nobody gets hurt by our hands, and those are being labelled as violent; does that mean we must not continue our protest the next day? No, because once we stop, we are ceding to the state’s proposition that what we were doing is violent in some capacity. There might still be state violence that is threatened or enacted in response to our “violence” but if we are steadfast in who we are and what we stand for, history will absolve us.

It’s a very valuable exercise to identify and interrogate what this state apparatus is, who it serves, and why it serves them so effectively. The apparatus is, of course, what I like to refer to as the ‘mythical’ media. This form of media is often personified. It loves, it hates, it crucifies, it praises, it builds and it destroys people and the movements that they create. It’s an immense, almost fantastical, amount of power and influence for a faceless entity to wield. Although if you look close enough, you’ll find that there are faces at the end of the channels, websites and newspaper trails. You begin to realise that the majority of these publications are only as powerful as the pockets they are tied to, some being more recognisable than others. We all know about Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post because that was a more recent, highly publicised acquisition. But the average person is not thinking of Rupert Murdoch when they see Fox News, or the Newhouse family when they read the New Yorker, or even Vogue. This is not by accident. The illusion of the free press and unbiased journalism would be shattered almost immediately if we were consciously reminded of people like Marc Benioff and the Agnellis every time we picked up Time or The Economist. It would be too easy to notice a pattern of what these people have in common and how certain headlines service them. The current organisation of mass media and its relation to the general population effectively enable the billionaire class to become architects of a false reality that works solely for them. We look to the news in search of truth and we find a reality that is being fed to us. Many confound the two and never question it. It’s a matter of great urgency that we start, or continue questioning these sources because they play fast and loose with the truth in their false reality building then want to tell us that “democracy dies in darkness.” What they don’t say is that the same people saying that, are the same ones actively snuffing out the light.

Media coverage of right and left-wing protest action is almost always skewed. The standard that all forms of protest are held to is that they remain nonviolent but, oftentimes we find that some form of violence takes place at virtually every protest—Or at least that’s what the media would have you believe, as it sensationalises any skirmish, unrest or disruption. This sensationalization is not employed equally across movements from different ends of the political spectrum. Rather, in some cases, it seems as though the right-wing movements are awarded a level of grace that left-wing movements are not. This disparity also presents itself with regards to the use of state violence which is often positioned as a reactive, defensive kind of violence that is only unleashed on a populace that has done or threatened violence unto the state initially. Where the threshold of violence lies is unclear because there are many discrepancies. One example that comes to mind immediately is that of the Proud Boys in Portland. Notorious for rallying while heavily armed and resorting to violence against left-wing counter protesters, this group is often lauded³ for the extremely rare instances their protests did not end in some sort of melee or shootout. State actors like the police clearly felt as though the group posed no violent threat and thus seldom intervened. However, they do seem to have considered the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 a threat as there were multiple instances of authorities clashing with unarmed protesters; despite the fact that an overwhelming majority⁴ of these protests were, in fact, peaceful.

Clearly, the true framework of what “violence” is has been deliberately obfuscated from the public consciousness. The only actor truly powerful enough to concretise it is the state, which does and undoes this framework on a whim. How, then, do we as activists, aspiring or experienced, navigate this treacherous terrain of the enemy? There are three major actions that we must take:

1. We must abandon everything that the state has told us about violence and nonviolence.

2. We must acquaint ourselves with nonviolence as more than passive and reactive, but as a potential offensive measure within our arsenal.

3. We must reconcile strategic violence with active nonviolence, eradicating any notions of the false polarity we have been operating under.

The act of unlearning is one that most people have to go through at some point in their lives. Whether it is unlearning certain superstitions, like the fact that stepping on a crack won’t break your mother’s back, or entire ideologies, it’s always harder to dismiss what you learned first. Before, you were willing to accept that information as truth, and you internalized it, and that shapes your reality. To ask you to let go, is asking you to alter your reality drastically. Make no mistake, this is no easy feat. But it must be done, and it can be done, especially for our purposes as leftists, activists, changemakers or whatever we want to call ourselves.

To go about this, we must remind ourselves of a few things: The first being that the state is our biggest oppressor in that it not only exerts oppression unto the populace, it also enables the oppression by “private” individuals, which is to say, the billionaire class. The second thing to remember is that the state, in collaboration with the wealthy, has continually warped truth to create and maintain a false reality that severely limits the scope of collective imagination as to what the world could realistically look like. We’re conditioned to think that change is impossible and anyone fighting for it is completely ridiculous for having any such desire. Thirdly, the state will fight to defend this false reality with every tool in a seemingly ever-expanding arsenal including the media. It is also important to note that this false reality building/maintenance is reliant on what the state chooses to show and what it doesn’t as well. Some protests and strikes never get any coverage at all and those that do are covered with a lot of bias. Does this mean we completely disregard the largest press channels and stick to getting our news from zines made by our ideological peers? No. However, it does mean developing a more discerning eye and ear when engaging with mainstream media. We must always question why a certain story is being told and why it is being told in that way.

A question that sometimes arises among activist groups is how to avoid getting tagged by the violent labels, since they might repel others from our respective causes. The idealistic answer is to avoid violence. While that may seem like an easy solution, it is not. As the state dictates, any form of state opposition can be deemed as violent if it threatens the state enough. So surely, we adopt non-threatening forms of activism? NO! As soon as it stops being threatening, it’s not activism anymore. But herein lies the problem of nonviolence, or at least the concept of it: it’s perceived as non-threatening. If it’s non-threatening then it’s effectively useless. As much as it would be nice to change the world by dancing, singing and sharing cans of Pepsi in the street, that’s just not how the state operates. The theoretically “perfect” protest is one that has a valid permit, follows an exact route, and disrupts nobody. This ceases to be a protest because there’s no incentive to change if it’s business as usual. This doesn’t mean we resort to bombing buildings because once again, in a war of arms, our odds aren’t that great. We find ourselves needing to conceptualize a sort of nonviolence that is threatening to the state, and it does exist. One example that comes to mind is the German group Ende Gelände that I learnt about while reading Malm’s book. Members of the group occupy coal mines in droves, halting operations for days and forcing fossil fuel legislation to come back to the fore in Germany’s political sphere. From this example, one could believe that it is easy to use nonviolent tactics but even that form of nonviolence is met with state violence.

What can we possibly do, then, to avoid state violence? The answer is nothing. As long as the state exists, it will weaponise violence. You may get called a terrorist, a fanatic, or worse just for fighting for a better world. That doesn’t mean you stop. While there is nothing, aside from abolishing the state, that we can do to avoid state violence— we can avoid it crushing our causes and our spirits. The only way to do this is through the reconciliation of violence and nonviolence within our movements. For a long time, there has been a mutual reprehension from members of each camp. Proponents of violence as the ultimate political strategy think of nonviolence as weak and oftentimes futile while those of nonviolence consider their apparent ideological rivals as barbaric and off putting to the general populace. However, if we look into the history of certain movements, we see both achieving victories. Three examples that come to mind immediately are the Suffragettes mentioned before, the civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. What these movements have in common is that the afterlife that exists in the average person’s imagination is of a largely non-violent movement that had some “fringe” violent groups even though that was not truly the case. There has been an obvious effort to erase the impact of violence against the state. In all honesty, we can use both nonviolence and violence not necessarily simultaneously but successively. However, both can become futile if we are not strategic about it, and to do that, we need to block out the noise of media coverage. Let’s think about our goals, let’s think about our tools and let’s fight on.

1. Jana Winter, “Law-Enforcement Agencies Have Sent 35 Warnings About This Movie,” Rolling Stone, April 21, 2023.

2. David Marchese, “How This Climate Activist Justifies Political Violence,” The New York Times Magazine, January 16, 2024.

3. Cleve R. Wootson Jr., “The Proud Boys avoided violence in Portland, an attempt to make their group more palatable,” The Washington Post, September 27, 2020.

4. Roudabeh Kishi and Sam Jones, “Demonstrations and Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020”, ACLED, September 3, 2020.

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