In 2001 I traveled to the University of Colorado to engage in a public debate with activist and professor Ward Churchill, on the subject of his book The Pathology of Pacifism. I began the debate with a series of points on which we agreed, before going on to challenge him. We had a stimulating time of it, and I offered to meet him in other venues for continued debate.

Because I find I can often learn a lot from our critics, I picked up this book by Peter Gelderloos with anticipation. I certainly found things to agree with. Along with Gelderloos I find that there are people who glibly regard nonviolent action as a kind of magic that overcomes all odds. I agree with him that people's interest in nonviolent action doesn't eliminate their blinkers of racial bias, or classism, or the other oppressions. I also agree with him that robust strategizing can be hard to find among groups that use nonviolent action.

Gelderloos' main concern is that an activist might hold back from doing or supporting the most effective means of combating oppression. This 'holdback' might come from a belief that nonviolence is the most effective means of change -- a mistaken belief, in his view. Or the holdback might come from a moral scruple. The holdback might come from a failure to identify with the oppressed because of classist or racist or another kind of privilege, with the activist using fastidiousness about violence as an excuse. It might come from the wish to confine a social movement's goals to reform or minor policy change, and the fear that introducing violence into the struggle will escalate the stakes and result in a power shift -- a revolution, possibly even liberation.

Because activists advocating nonviolent struggle are so full of holdbacks, Gelderloos argues, "nonviolence" has gradually become a rallying cry that stifles progressive change. It's become a "lowest common denominator" that unites -- on a tactical level -- a range of voices that otherwise have differences with each other (radicals and liberals and conservatives who oppose, for example, the Iraq war, or human rights violations). This cry of "nonviolence" is so pervasive, uttered by such a range of political actors, that the cry crowds out those pragmatic and passionate militants who believe in a diversity of tactics including violence.

And, for Gelderloos, diversity of tactics is the heart of the matter.

Diversity of Tactics

Gelderloos argues that "nonviolence" is ineffective, racist, statist, patriarchal, and tactically and strategically inferior to a diversity of tactics.

His could be a grand attack, but Gelderloos weakens it fatally by making completely amorphous what he's attacking: "nonviolence." That leaves him free to cherry-pick from all the annoying and incorrect things we've ever run into that might have anything to do with "nonviolence," and to explain how annoying and incorrect they are. Meanwhile, the question of how "diversity of tactics" works among the activists who embrace this approach is one worthy of close consideration (

Under the banner of "nonviolence" Gelderloos lumps together all pacifists (both radical and reformist), plus all non-pacifist advocates of strategic nonviolent struggle, plus all occasional users of nonviolent tactics who basically believe that when push comes to shove, violence is necessary. Gelderloos' argument lumps together Martin Luther King and the NAACP, whereas in fact they rarely got along. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founder John Lewis and the white owners of record labels that sell hip-hop are, in his view, somehow bunched together. Members of the War Resisters League will be surprised to learn that they (as pacifists) found acceptable the massive bombings of Dresden and Tokyo during World War II, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The bewildering references go on and on. Where, in reality, are Gelderloos's unnamed "nonviolence adherents" who today claim victory in the struggle against nuclear weapons? And who are the nonviolent advocates of revolution/liberation whose strategy, according to Gelderloos, relies on converting the privileged elites -- "the authorities" -- to their point of view? I try without success to imagine Barbara Deming or Dave Dellinger or Gandhi recognizing themselves among the nonviolent revolutionaries who, according to Gelderloos, believe that lobbying is the way to bring about fundamental social change!

Because Gelderloos' object of address is so amorphous, his effort sprays all over the place and it's hard to see how he advances a valuable debate. Even some of his best points are weakened by vagueness and omission. He says that anarchist militants are marginalized by advocates of nonviolent struggle -- an important point; he explains that those who marginalize anarchists are sexist, capitalist, statist reformers who play it safe. Yet nowhere in his book could I even find mention of Starhawk, a widely respected feminist anarchist anti-capitalist who has steadfastly reached out to the Black Bloc and other militants while leading protesters into dangerous, tear-gas-filled streets in anti-globalization confrontations! Don't her decades of leadership, her edgy and coherent writing, her risk-taking, and her following earn her the respect of fellow anarchist Gelderloos? Or does Starhawk go unrecognized (even in his chapter about patriarchy) because he can't discount her when she advocates nonviolent struggle?

By contradicting himself, Gelderloos gets more chances to take potshots at his diffuse opponent, but he misses the chance to explore carefully the underlying and really important question: what's the more effective way, under what conditions, to defend against repressive violence -- answering violence, or explicit and strategic nonviolent struggle?

The uses of polemics

I do like the passion that electrifies the prose and enlivens the character of this book. In fifty years of life in social movements I've generally appreciated the polemics that come with the territory -- I find that argumentation stimulates me and pushes my thinking. That's the upside of polemical discourse.

The downside emerges when the topic is: how to strategize about mass movements and popular struggles.

Polemics work best when the questions are about purity: "True anarchism is…" "The heart of pacifism is…" "The fundamental principles of feminism prove that…" etc. Polemical discourse thrives among small groups of the faithful. The trouble with strategizing in mass movements and popular struggles is that the focus of strategy is not on purity, but rather on effectiveness. It's not that radicals when strategizing need to throw out their principles, but rather that their goal needs to be to bring principles to the historical moment with all its contradictions. Principled radicals can also be grounded in complex reality. On a good day, that enables us to communicate with the mass of people who don't come to the struggle in order to implement ideological principles of any sort but instead come to the struggle to win.

That means that all of us -- anarchists in the labor movement, gay liberationists in the LGBT rights movement, pacifists in the anti-war movement -- are not operating (if we're effective) in our "core," but instead we're on our edge, faced with the tremendous and wonderful complexities of the reality that non-radicals actually experience.

A fine example of writing about revolutionary strategy that takes up questions of violence and nonviolent struggle is activist sociologist Martin Oppenheimer's The Urban Guerrilla. Oppenheimer presents his best case for one violent strategy in the US, then he deconstructs it in terms of probable results. He turns next to making his best case for an alternative violent strategy, and carefully analyzes that one in terms of probable outcome. Finally, he turns to a nonviolent strategy -- a last resort. Oppenheimer's non-pacifist pragmatism helps the reader to become very thoughtful about options for mass revolutionary strategy. I recommend his book highly, although it won't necessarily get the emotional juices flowing that a polemical approach does.

The puzzle is: how to combine polemical writing, full of rants and delicious simplifications, with strategy questions that face us in popular struggle, necessarily on our edges and therefore complex? I believe it can be done, and hope we can learn to do it.

What's his strategy?

On one level this might be an unfair question. Gelderloos is mainly trying to persuade the reader to adopt a "diversity of tactics" that includes violence. The question of strategy hovers on every page, however, because even if the reader decides to add more tools to the toolbox, I still need a way of deciding: which tools do I use when?

I got hopeful when Gelderloos addressed the limitations of the recent series of nonviolent campaigns that have toppled dictators in Serbia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. In my 1973 book Strategy for a Living Revolution I described similar limitations in the nonviolent campaigns that overthrew dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala in 1944, and went on to describe in detail how the lessons learned from those can be folded into a more radical (and anarchist-friendly) theory of revolution. Unfortunately, Gelderloos is so dismissive of these current cases that he learns nothing positive from them about strategy.

This may be part of the reason why, for all the knowledge Gelderloos has about revolutionary struggles, his chapter on "The Alternative" is so empty. He describes traditional anarchist concerns about organization and leadership, reminds us that he values diversity of tactics, and that's about it!

There's got to be more -- from both sides. And because I so much appreciate clarification and debate on these issues, I hope Peter Gelderloos will in the future give up on scattered complaints and focus his critique on a single, clear subject. My personal favorite would be strategy for revolution; it's a big topic, but a clear one. If he'd like, I'd be willing to volunteer to engage him on it. Let the debate begin!

For George Lakey's critique of violence as a tactic in high-stakes struggles for justice, see "Diversity of Tactics and Democracy," Clamor Magazine, March/April 2002 and "Strategizing for a Living Revolution" in Globalize Liberation (David Solnit, ed.; City Lights, 2004)