“Guerrilla warfare is history.” Hugo Chávez

“America is weak,” the Russian military officer boldly shouted at us, a group of closely-shaved raw recruits in our second week of basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was a cold February morning, and we had marched to a training site for classes, ironically, on patriotism. Herded into a small barn-like structure, the air was close and our drill sergeants stood, uniformly menacing, at the foot of the stage.

“You are weak, too,” the man fired at us in his Eastern European accented English. These were the waning days of the Cold War. Boris Yeltsin had come to power in what was left of the Soviet Union after quashing a coup of Soviet Army officers loyal to the “hardline” wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

George H. W. Bush had turned US imperialist sights on Iraq in the first Persian Gulf War for oil. We all knew the purely aggressive economic aims of the war, but most of us enlisted anyway for glory, God, and country. Also, few of us had real alternatives to the military.

The Russian's words drew hostile responses from the increasingly agitated crowd of would be soldiers. Anti-Communist and anti-Russian oaths and shouts arose from our ranks. After several minutes of taunts and rhetorical abuse, we were in a frenzy, ready to rush the stage. Only our drill sergeants who seemed unaffected by the anti-American abuse poured out by the Russian held us back.

Later, while using the restroom before assembling to march back to our barracks, I bumped into the sergeant who ran the “patriotism school.” I had been suspicious of the Russian officer's true identity – why would a Russian be hanging out at Ft. Benning – and pointedly asked the sergeant if the whole thing wasn't just a set up to test our “patriotism” and our willingness to attack another human. “What do you think?,” he coyly responded.

It wasn't the last time our military trainers linked patriotism to violent xenophobia and other prejudices. In bayonet training, we frequently chanted racist slogans against Arab people while slaying crude human mock-ups with our thrusting knives. It was all part of a process, our drill sergeants would later admit, of breaking down our individual psyches and reshaping us into obedient, mostly unthinking units within a military machine aimed at preserving and reproducing the violent and coercive system that created the need for the military in the first place. Indeed, we ate, slept and breathed violence. Our individual abilities to retain a sense of humanity were also broken down. Brutal fights, homophobia, sexism and rape fantasies (and acts), racist in-fighting, and, in overseas postings, bitter hatred of foreign nationals, were all more than commonplace; these had become part of our normal identities.

There was a logic to this deconstruction of the human psyche. Building a successful military unit depends on how fully the humanity of the individual soldier can be stripped and replaced with an identity geared toward obedience, violence, and the ability to reduce to mere targets for destruction those whom the commanders determine to be the “enemy.” In challenging notions of the validity of violence and armed struggle as a tactic in a political movement, raising the example of the US military – the most violent and transparent tool of US imperialism – will obviously be regarded as the exception rather than the rule when it comes to of morally acceptable forms of violence. Because it is no force for justice or liberation, how could it be considered in the same light? But on this specific issue, the extreme proves the rule.

Critics of the following arguments may raise historical examples of people's armies and guerrilla operations that reflect more positive democratic values and social justice oriented goals than the US military has for most of its existence. Who would denounce the actions of the armed sections of the African National Congress, other than supporters of apartheid who labeled them communists and terrorists? Who would not praise the Algerian or the Vietnamese patriots who shook off French colonial rule? Who would insist that Castro's and Guevara's liberation of Cuba was anything other than just? Reaching further back, who would claim that the abolitionist John Brown, modeling his own violent actions on those of his predecessor Nat Turner, wielded anything other than the Lord's terrible, swift sword? And the list goes on.

But, then again, who could miss the revolutionary actions, aims and successes of the men and women who knelt on the Edmund Pettis bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965? Their triumph in helping to bring down racial apartheid in the South ranks alongside the Boston Tea Party or the Salt March led by Ghandi in India in 1930. Or who could ignore the impact of the millions who have marched non-violently to end the war in Iraq, to expose the truth about the Bush administration's lies, In order to bring to an end 30 years of ultra-right-wing rule in America?

Behind most justifications of historically specific acts of armed struggle lies the general philosophical and moral stance that says, “the ends justifies the means.” In other words, because they sought liberation, the men and women who took on a violent system of domination with violent tactics were justified. German Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin contends in his 1921 essay “Critique of Violence,” that people who support armed struggle as something that is acceptable (despite its harm) might offer the following justification: “The proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious,” wrote Benjamin, “if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life.”

In other words, the “sacredness” of life under any circumstance – slavery, colonialism, exploitation – is not, Benjamin insisted, in itself an acceptable or defensible value. He added, however, a small but important qualification: “[I]f existence ... means the total, irreducible condition that is 'man,'“ or if the destruction of human life is viewed as something more terrible than the “not-yet attained condition of the just man,” then, for Benjamin, the moral calculus of the end justifying the means may need to change.

What does Benjamin mean by the “just human,” and what precisely is the exception he is proposing? His position appears to be that violence in pursuit of justice is acceptable, unless the destruction of human life itself becomes a factor which undermines the justice that is being pursued. If the aim of the political movement, on at least one level, is a higher, more developed humanity, the destruction of humanity to achieve that end cannot succeed, and cannot be morally justified.

From another angle, an argument put forward by philosopher and activist Angela Y. Davis is worth consideration here. In her short book advocating the abolition of prisons, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis argues that a system of violence, coercion and control (prison), designed to house and restrain the “social detritus of global capitalism,” cannot simply be replaced by other forms of violence, coercion and control (a reformed prison system). If so, the coercive system itself is perpetuated, even if it deploys different reformed methods; its purpose, impact on society, and reason for being remain intact.

Davis argues, in fact, that an alternative vision has to be adopted in order to break with the dominant system that requires mass imprisonment. In Davis' view, such a new strategic objective could only be a society without prisons or violent coercion. It would only be achievable through the tactical rearrangement of all social relationships in favor of equal access to social goods and formation of a more “just human,” to paraphrase Benjamin. Davis advocates abolition of incarceration in favor of comprehensive reforms that could make prisons obsolete: universal education, health care, and access to jobs; social equality across gender, race, sexuality and nationality; and abolition of poverty, homelessness and insecurity. Revolutionary tactics for a revolutionary strategic goal.

Davis is not simply repackaging the moral notion that the ends do not justify the means. She is advocating political struggle aimed at promoting a new strategic vision: political goals that perpetuate the system through the very methods that legitimize the system should be replaced by those that completely subvert the logic and aspirations of the existing order by adopting new practices of living, acting and struggling. Simply put, using repressive measures as the means of arriving at a free and liberating society is a flawed concept.

This argument may be applied generally to a view of choosing the tactics to be used in political struggle, and by extension to our view of violence and armed struggle. If the communist idea is the struggle to break with capitalism, the logic of capitalism and the tactics its ruling blocs use to hold power have to be discarded in that break. Simply put, a violent means is fundamentally at odds with a non-violent end.

Is this merely a utopian idea without basis in reality? The non-violent philosophy of the civil rights movement suggests that it is not. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asserted the validity of this point in a 1966 article for Ebony magazine titled “Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom.” For him the inescapable, mathematical outcome of the use of violence in America to achieve social ends would be disproportionate violence against African Americans. The police and the National Guard, King argued, would get to perform the task they were brought into existence to perform when a riot occurred. “Violence as a strategy for social change in America is nonexistent,” he wrote. “[B]old talk produces no action and signifies nothing,” he said. King equated ends and means.

King's tactical calculation of the unevenness of the balance of forces in the struggle was not his only consideration. For him, the morality of non-violence elevated the political question of tactics to the level of a strategic aim, a theoretical generalization. Citing the US government's willingness to kill millions in Vietnam without remorse, King asserted the arithmetical inevitability of the failure of violent resistance. To even the equation, King called for a “strategy for change, a tactical program” for reforming US social institutions and relationships as rapidly as possible. Nonviolent, militant committed action, wrote King, saves lives and produces tangible changes, while even the smallest act of violence elicits a tremendous reaction from the rulers, which becomes the very thingthat legitimizes the police, the prisons, the racist system, class inequality, and the need to stifle political dissent.

For King, nonviolent action meant short-term suffering for the nonviolent protester facing the state, in order to achieve long-term political gain and an overall improvement in the lives of human beings. Self-defense, as a rationale for violent acts inflicted on individual oppressors, he argued, was an individualistic myth that produced neither a vision of a serious systemic alternative nor a framework for unified collective action. For King, nonviolent political action called into question the actions of the coercive representatives of the state, and the political and moral authority under which those coercive agents operate. This makes the nonviolent act a social and political act which transcends mere individual self-defense, which cannot, by its nature, be a political tactic in a united social movement for change.

Some have argued that it is only through a radical, violent break that such political change ultimately come about. King's critics insisted that without such a break political demonstrations were little more than a way of blowing off steam. But when mass action takes place on this level, King asked, how is it possible to claim that life is just going on as usual?

Throughout his career, King sought moral authority through political action aimed at building the widest possible coalition of forces to end the institution of Jim Crow in the South and racial segregation and ghettoization in the North. King envisioned a united movement comprised of the faith community, the labor movement, students, and the peace movement, joining together to win civil rights. But nonviolent demonstration is also part of a larger and longer process “to dramatize evil, to mobilize the forces of good will, and to generate pressure and power for change.” In addition to demonstrations, King advocated boycotts, rent strikes, labor strikes, voting and electoral action, organizing, and educating. People old enough to remember the civil rights movements, or who have studied it, know that it was more than simply a movement of passive victims of brutal police violence or KKK terrorism. Non-violent resisters directly challenged Jim Crow and confronted, exposed and defeated the murderous system that oppressed them. This is what King calls “a dangerous unselfishness,” one that promotes unity, subverts the oppressor, and effects political transformation.

This nonviolent tradition of political and social change, which aligns King, Davis, and Benjamin, is at odds in key ways with some strands of the Marxist tradition. It is a grievous error to reduce the entire Marxist tradition to violent social revolution. Marx and Lenin, and the broader Marxist tradition, favor – and insist upon – the mobilization of broad social forces with shared aims to change society through a variety of militant, and preferably peaceful actions, including strikes and elections, but only when deemed absolutely necessary through armed struggle.

The Marxist concept of historical materialism, however, which argues that human history is the struggle for hegemony by social classes and blocs of social forces, also provided many people, who interpreted Marx's general theory of history dogmatically, with an ethical basis for the use of violence as a supposedly legitimate political tactic. In fact, it has been argued that Marx himself viewed violent social revolution, though brutal and inhumane, as a necessary historical process. This particular argument, as the late Palestinian American cultural critic Edward Said noted in his landmark book Orientalism, derived from Marx's immersion in the 19th century German romantic philosophical tradition. And it undermined Marx's intense personal humanism by replacing it with theoretically abstract legitimations for the destruction of people and cultures. This view, however, was tempered and countered by Marx himself in some of his writings on colonialism, but more importantly by other Marxist thinkers such as Lenin, Ho, Castro, and others who viewed the class and national-based struggles of peoples against imperialism and capitalism as a creative force.

Marx's apparent philosophical indifference to violence, however, remains influential. As Marxist philosopher Howard Selsam suggests in his book Socialism and Ethics, Marx's ethics are “so solidly rooted in the historical and social processes of [humanity] that they refuse to take the standpoint of the dominant classes as final.” While, for Selsam, this view applies to a range of social and ethical questions, e.g. marriage, sexuality, religion, etc., it also applies to the question of violence. Making a decision about an ethical issue, such as whether or not to use violence, can only be done from the point of view of whether it “will or will not advance the cause of the oppressed masses.” Thus, Selsam returns us to the initial argument: do the ends justify the means? However, he has not satisfactorily answered the question of whether violent struggle allows us to achieve, as Benjamin hinted, a fulfillment of humanity or, as Davis and King suggest, in ultimately winning the strategic aim of transformation.

While the position presented here does not completely examine all the sides and levels of the question at hand, it is a step toward the argument that a more advanced concept of struggle would accept Dr. King's moral and mathematical calculations about nonviolence being the best political tactic for producing social change without compromising the kind of society for which we aim, one that allows the fullest possible moral, political, social and philosophical development of all people on their own terms. Or, as Davis suggested, our alternatives, our tactics in struggle, cannot mirror, perpetuate or legitimize the violence and brutality of the interlocking systems of institutional racism, global capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia. Indeed, this is the source and focus of the revolutionary break we seek with capitalism and other oppressive systems. Ultimately, the tactics we use in our struggle, rather than tearing us apart individually and collectively (whether literally or psychologically), must coincide with our strategic aim, which is a more peaceful, just and socialist world.

--Joel Wendland is editor of Political Affairs.