Guest post: A validation of violence as a form of political expression
Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Does the left hate women?
Considering we’re talking radical left, I think a lot of it has to do with Antifa, or the philosophy behind Antifa.
Antifa is fundamentally, as an idea, a validation of violence as a form of political expression, as a tactic in political debate.
Now this strain of thought predates Antifa as a formalized idea on the radical left, but it was with Antifa that it formed enough coherency to be properly identified.
So when Islamists launch terror attacks in Western nations – think the Charlie Hebdo massacre for example – that is seen as not just a political statement, but a valid one. The conversation is always shifted to historic “context” with an emphasis on demonizing the victims. There is always the excuse of justified grievances.
In less radical spheres, in civil discussion we tend to consider violence an invalidating factor. If you punch somebody because they disagree with you, you’ve ceded the argument, because my ability to thump you doesn’t translate into me being right.
But with this ideology where violence is considered a legitimate means of making a point, those who are more willing to use violence are afforded greater credibility than those who are not. If we allow violence as a response to non-violence, we descend into rule by thuggery.
LGB and women are generally less willing to use violence than the trans community. I think the problem with saying LGBTQ will always lose, is T are prized over the rest of the alphabet soup, because lets face it a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire isn’t a lesbian symbol.
Atheists and women tend to land at the bottom of the list, women because physiology means that women are at a disadvantage in a fight. The same reasons for the sex divide in sports, means that women trying to defend that divide are at a physical disadvantage. Atheists because of the meme about how religious militants kill, atheist militants write books.
I think a part of this is the psychology that comes from phrasing radical leftwing identity politics as “allyship”. I think the concept of “allies” is fundamentally toxic – men who identify as “feminist allies” aren’t feminists. By definition they are men who see feminism as something that can be exploited to further their own political goals, that is the nature of an alliance.
You don’t have to agree with an ally, you just need to see them as a useful tool.
So who is more useful as an ally if you accept the idea that violence is an appropriate means of arguing political points? A 60-year-old woman, or a 30-year-old male pervert in a dress? Women who are simply stating biological fact, or men who will spend the better part of a decade smearing and sending death threats to a much beloved female author because she said something they didn’t like?
Of course, one needs to bear in mind that the only really successful movement in the left since the rise of Antifa, has been atheists. We’re so wildly successful that when a religious conservative doesn’t like an idea, they proclaim that idea to be a “religion”. Even the people who are pro-religion, phrase being a religion as a problem.
An increased willingness to use violence might help you with the radical left, but I’m not sure it would help you with literally anyone else.
Indeed so. The idea on the radical left that violence is a valid tactic goes back at least to Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts** or Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
[**People might quibble about whether they were “left”, but those movements considered themselves to be socialists and their economic policies were socialist.]
It’s hardly a “quibble” to say that Oswald Mosley was in no way on the left. Nazi=national socialist, too; not on the left.
@Opelia:
That depends on how one defines “left” vs “right”. In terms solely of economic policies both Mosley’s Blackshirts and the manifesto on which the NSDAP stood for election were “left”. Other policies could be described as “right”. Many commentators have suggested that they had a mixture of left and right attributes.
Oswald Moseley’s great pal, Adolf Hitler, is mostly remembered for the slaughter of Jews, but before the Jews, it was the socialists and communists bashed, imprisoned, and murdered.
“The Battle of Cable Street” was a blockade of Mosely’s fascists’ attempt to march through London’s East End. The blockade was comprised of Trade Unionists, Socialists, and Communists, among others.
Moseley was a political gadfly, having been at various times a Fabian, a Conservative MP, and a Labour MP, but when he formed his British Union of Fascists he was anti-communist, and an authoritarian nationalist.
@Rev David Brindley:
True, in the sense that the national socialists were opposed to the internationalist outlook of the communists. The NSDAP were socialist (wanting a state that provided for its citizens), but only for ethnic Germans (with no care for others), in contrast to the internationalist socialism-for-all of the communists.
Coel
I’m not entirely sure that one can claim that left vs right economic outlooks amount to capitalism vs socialism.
In my own country, the far right Apartheid government, well a big chunk of that was government telling you who you could hire for what job and what you were allowed to pay them. One should also note that our current government, for all it is in an alliance with the South African Communist Party, has trended towards privatization rather than nationalization. Sure, BEE is a thing, but it is nothing on the level of control that the Nationalist Party exerted.
If you look at the modern right for example, Donald Trump’s whole “America first” trade war approach is basically market protectionism. The Democratic Party is generally more in favor of free trade.
Whether the right or left favor a more or less free market approach appears to me to be purely opportunistic – it is whichever one they feel better suits their broader social goals.
@Bruce:
It really does come down to how one defines “left” versus “right”, and there is no general agreement on that. (Judith Butler regards Hamas as a left-wing liberation movement, but if you swapped them from being brown Muslims to white Christians, leaving everything else the same, they’d instantly be labelled “far right”.)
One popular “political compass” has an economic axis and an orthogonal social axis. The NSDAP policies (e.g. their 25-point manifesto) — as regards their in-group ethnic Germans — would put them on the left on economic policy. They also, of course, score highly authoritarian on the “social” axis.
Coel:
I was about to mention the need for *at least* 2 dimensions to map political views.
Calling political positions “left” or “right” is useless for any sort of rational discussion of policies.
Political views are all too often tribal markers with no rational connection between views that are considered eg: “left” or “right”.
See the lumping of T with LG&B.