Political Violence, Crisis, and Polarization
On the day this is being written MAGA leader, Trump confidant, and founder of conservative organization Turning Point USA was killed by a shooter during a public Q and A. Political violence in the United States is on the rise with this not being the only political assassination this year and with current president Donald Trump being the target of an assassination attempt on the campaign trail. Conservatives and liberals will likely blame each other for the uptick in violence, but it represents a failure of the liberal democratic paradigm in the United States. The point of liberal democracy is to keep ideological disputes from erupting into all out political violence by allowing for a negotiated compromise through peaceful maneuvers of political position within social institutions by adherents of different ideologies.
The post-cold war era despite being heralded as the final victory for liberal democratic ideology around the world has in fact been an era of democratic backsliding and the increasing influence of illiberal ideological movements. What liberal democrats themselves on both the liberal conservative and centrist liberal sides won't admit is that liberal democracy is not in fact characterized by an absence of political violence, but rather by a specific form of its management. Liberal democracy creates space for a broad ideological consensus in which technocratic policy debates replace open social struggle between ideological blocs. However, that technocratic consensus is backed up by a violent and uncompromising reduction of ideological struggles to debates among experts and constituencies about how best to integrate everyone into the capitalist nation-state's bureaucratic superstructure. The purpose of that superstructure is to doll out some concessions to the lower strata of society via social safety nets, union negotiations, and civil rights.
This ensures that the lowest strata of society (the working class, gender and sexuality minorities, racial minorities, the mentally ill and disabled, ect.) are disincentivized from taking collective action to dislodge the political-economic structure which concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the entrepreneurial property owning (capitalist) class. If any social actors take action against the legal, ideological, and political consensus they will be violently crushed, that's what the police, military, courts, and prisons are there for. Recall FDR, perhaps the American president best known for constructing the welfare state, sending in the national guard on striking workers, or more recently former President Joe Biden's administration carrying out a crackdown on campus protests in support of Palestine, or similarly the UK's banning of support for the organization Palestine Action and subsequent mass arrest of protesters showing solidarity with the prescribed group.
Liberal democracy was spread around the world by a geoculturally dominant alliance of liberal conservatives and centrist liberals as a mechanism for integrating populations into the technocratic structure of the capitalist world-system and thus expanding the world-system's dominance. The democratic backsliding of recent years in the form of MAGA and the two-trump administrations as well as illiberal right-wing parties and administrations in Europe is the result of the structural crisis of world-capitalism where population, labor cost, geographic, and resource limits have drastically reduced investment prospects for capitalists and thus come to mortally threaten the world-system. These limits produced a decline in real production from the 70s onward which undercut the ability for states and capitalists to pay for social spending, union power, and civil rights. The initial response by the technocratic liberal conservative-centrist liberal alliance was the introduction of "neoliberalism" where state power was used to crush unions, implement austerity, and increase the free movement of capital across borders.
Neoliberalism increased finance in proportion to production of actual goods and services, a process that is normal in periods of economic decline and naturally produces speculative baubles which are bound at some point to pop. The biggest pop that resulted was the 2008 financial crisis in which states around the world had to marshal billions in state spending to prop up failing financial institutions. Neoliberalism, which prescribes cutting down national debt and state spending along with increasing free trade, had to be replaced with a war-like political economy based on deficit spending and protectionism alongside austerity. In the long run this form of political economy will facilitate deglobalization where supply chains are dismantled and links in the global division of labor are deconstructed. These conditions of crisis produce increasing social destabilization which in turn means increasing polarization and the breakdown of the technocratic consensus.
These are conditions in which the democratic state has to increasingly become a repressive mechanism to keep a lid on social tensions. Correspondingly the political right is freed from the liberal democratic consensus and is increasingly incentivized to pursue an illiberal agenda involving the use of the democratic state to repress minorities and political enemies. So when liberals and supposed 'socialists' lament the breakdown of the liberal democratic consensus or moralize about violence they ignore that 1; the liberal democratic consensus relies on the management of violence, rather than its absence and 2; this is all the result of the natural breakdown of that consensus as the world-system which undergirds it falls apart.
Those on the illiberal right moralizing about violence ignore the part that Kirk played in the instrumental violence of the illiberal right itself. Kirk was a mobilizing force for a movement that is currently using state power to suppress minorities and political opponents. Kirk himself tried to participate in the MAGA riot on January 6th at the capitol building designed give Trump a second term by force in 2024. He pled the fifth when questioned by investigators. Right before he was killed, he was agreeing with a fan that transgender people are to blame for mass shootings.
Anarchists have a unique political perspective on violence. We think the problem with modern society is precisely that it is too violent. The capitalist world is organized through coercive concentrations of power that dispossess everyone, but a globally small entrepreneurial propertied class. As a result, most people have to go to work for this class in order to earn the money that will allow them to buy the means of life (food, shelter, whatever comforts they can afford). The bureaucratic and coercive structure of the state staffed by law makers, courts, police, and military with prisons at its behest exists to ensure that these private property rights and the resulting class structure are not disobeyed. If a community decides that since its workers produce the social wealth that sustain the community that these workers are simply going to take control of their places of work, the tools of work, and what they produce to directly meet the needs of the community, rather than produce a mass of commodities which are to then be sold on the market by the companies they work for, those companies will call the police who may even send in the military in order to enforce the property rights of the former. The workers and members of the community that abetted them may even be handed down sentences and serve prison time, all for taking control of the product of their own social labor and the social wealth which they consume to produce that product by their own productive activity.
So the entire capitalist order along with the mainstream political ideologies which engineer consent to it are premised on political violence which inhibits free cooperation among human beings to meet their needs. In order to achieve a world which allows for the social control of social wealth by freely associated producers Anarchists call for a self-organized movement of workers and oppressed people to replace the state with a global confederation of free and equal humanity and expropriate the capitalist class replacing private property and the market with common ownership of productive resources and the product of social labor organized through a decentralized and participatory rational plan to meet the needs of humanity. Sometimes Anarchists have employed a terroristic strategy to inspire the masses to revolt. Anarchists in the 19th century carried out high level assassinations of elites with the goal of inspiring social revolution. This strategy largely served to isolate the Anarchists from the working masses whom they hoped to inspire.
As a result, the Anarchist movement largely reversed course at the end of the century. In doing so it developed the strategy of Anarcho-Syndicalism in which labor unions open to all workers and inspired by a core of revolutionary Anarchist/socialist militants engage in struggles with employers and the state while organizing mutual aid and cultural activities for the working masses. Strategically this strategy builds a revolutionary mass movement that trains the working masses to run society themselves by having them run the class struggle themselves. Once the movement builds critical mass it can rest control of society and production from capital and the state. Anarcho-Syndicalism has been the main strategic stay of the Anarchist movement since the outset of the 20th century.
Since Anarchists want a society of peaceful cooperation the Anarchist social revolution will aim to minimize any violence which takes place, but at the same time, Anarchists are prepared to follow in the footsteps of the Anarcho-Syndicalist CNT-FAI in the Spanish Civil War when the union organized their own voluntary brigades to fight right wing and Fascist forces as the movement seized control of land and factories for the workers and peasants. They did this because Anarchists, while seeking to minimize violence, know that it would be unjust not to use force if it is required to defend the emancipation of the masses. In the words of famous Anarchist activist and theorist Errico Malatesta:
"Anarchists recognize violence only as a means of legitimate defense; and if today they are in favor of violence, it is because they maintain that slaves are always in a state of legitimate defense. But the anarchist ideal is for a society in which the factor of violence has been eliminated, and their ideal serves to restrain, correct and destroy the spirit of revenge which revolution, as a physical act, would tend to develop.
In any case, the remedy would never be the organization and consolidation of violence in the hands of a government or dictatorship, which cannot be founded on anything but brute force and recognition of the authority of police—and military—forces.
… An error, the opposite of the one which the terrorists make, threatens the anarchist movement. Partly as a reaction to the abuse of violence during recent years, partly as a result of the survival of Christian ideas, and above all, as a result of the mystical preaching of Tolstoy, which owe their popularity and prestige to the genius and high moral qualities of their author, anarchists are beginning to pay serious attention to the party of passive resistance, whose basic principle is that the individual must allow himself and others to be persecuted and despised rather than harm the aggressor. It is what has been called passive anarchy.
Since there are some, upset by my aversion to useless and harmful violence, who have been suggesting that I displayed tolstoyanist tendencies, I take the opportunity to declare that, in my opinion, this doctrine however sublimely altruistic it may appear to be, is, in fact the negation of instinct and social duties. A man may, if he is a very good … Christian, suffer every kind of provocation without defending himself with every weapon at his disposal, and still remain a moral man. But would he not, in practice, even unconsciously, be a supreme egoist were he to allow others to be persecuted without making any effort to defend them? If, for instance, he was to prefer that a class should be reduced to abject misery, that a people should be downtrodden by an invader, that a man’s life or liberty should be abused, rather than bruise the flesh of the oppressor?"
Anarcho-Syndicalists thus oppose lone wolf acts of political assassination such as that carried out against Kirk, not on the grounds that political violence is unacceptable, but the grounds that it will achieve nothing in terms of the liberation of the working masses and will thus amount to a waste of life. Anarchists wish to avoid a years of lead, style situation in which right and left are engaged in mutual acts of recrimination. Anarcho-Syndicalists like me, thus wish to draw the attention of those of us wanting to confront the illiberal right with an emancipatory alternative to the dying capitalist world-system to building a self-organized movement of the working masses. Against moralism, against terrorism, for the self-emancipation of the working class!
Sources
World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Wallerstein
Politics: The Basics, Tansey and Jackson
Anarchism: Key Concepts, Honeywell
Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, Rocker
Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century, Damier
Anarchism and Violence, Malatesta
Anarchy and Violence, Malatesta
https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-conservative-activist-shot-546165a8151104e0938a5e085be1e8bd
https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-shooting-utah-university-republicans-8357c3d102de09e3320fde761258131a
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/illiberal-democracy-and-the-struggle-on-the-right/
Does Capitalism Have a Future? Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian, Calhoun
Anarchy in the World-System, Demirel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjS6uDu0qxQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrbHdzlURc0
The Democrats: A Critical History, Selfa
