Revolutionary Violence: A Critique

In State and Revolution (the very title of which announces the space of violence), Lenin is typically unequivocal in his assessment of what needs to be done in Russia in 1917: "The replacement of the bourgeois by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution" (1969, 20). Lenin is well aware of the violence necessary to the maintenance of any state; he understands the difference between its subjective and objective elements, its abstract and concrete manifestations, its ideological and institutional formations. There is no written reform that permits a class structured in dominance to willingly submit to its own dissolution as a class, especially if, in the form of a state, it exercises a monopoly on violence (Weber 1997, 154). It is true, hegemonic formations have been shuffled aside by non-violent means, and our understanding of key figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. is driven by that realization. No one should doubt the power of belief in peaceful change to alter the contours of human history. Yet studying such history also reveals something axiomatic in Lenin's perception of revolutionary violence in 1917: socio-economic transformation at the level of class is by definition violent to its core. You cannot subtract violence from class domination peacefully if, as a class and for a class, you intend to sublate that domination. You may reform a class; you may advance proposals that make it a little less violent in its domination; you might even get it to share power a little more and redistribute a little more of its wealth. But you will never eradicate the logic of its hegemony and its characteristics as a class by reform or eminently reasonable negotiation. The history of class reform has moments of peaceful exchange and transition; the history of class transformation, however, has only been one of extreme and devastating violence. Such is Lenin's insight but also, precisely, a reason for his vilification.

Obviously, from the late eighteenth century through most of the twentieth century, outbreaks of revolutionary violence at the level of class (the focus of the discussion here) were intense moments of transformational possibility and the subject of theorization by a plethora of radical thinkers (Marx, Engels, Sorel, Trotsky, Lukacs, Benjamin, Fanon, Sartre, Mao, and Arendt, to name but a few). There is no space here to detail either the history or the philosophy of revolutionary violence, but I am interested in its symptoms, its axioms, in the arché of its logic of transformation, the better to come to terms with the absence or not of its present manifestations. For many today, the very idea of proletarian revolution structured and overdetermined by the violent overthrow of the bourgeois state and capitalism as its lived relation seems absurd and anachronistic, a banalized red nostalgia for what might have been but what cannot possibly be in a period where billionaires (Gates, Soros, Buffet, etc.) prove capitalism can keep its house in order and where they, by charity or derivative, by monopoly and acquisition, provide the incontrovertible truth that capitalist caesars can correctly handle any and all contradictions among the people across the planet. To pose revolutionary violence as even relevant when capitalist ubiquity is a sure sign of the success of its peaceful evolution would seem to be not only utopian but faintly psychotic, a compulsion resolutely detached from the social relations that compose the world system as such. Indeed, we might venture that to conceptualize revolutionary violence is already to commit the violence of hermetic abstraction, a fatal contradiction in thinking passionately, incapable of advancing the cause of our resolute species being. Lenin is dead. There is no proletarian agon. Like the aristocracies before them, capitalists have won. Get used to it.

In addition, and significantly, violence describes a somewhat thorny intellectual arena. In general, academics do not advocate violence. We describe it, we might foreground its most egregious manifestations, seen and unseen, in daily life, in structures of power, in processes of thought themselves, in, of course, language. We live in times and in institutions when and where any promulgation of violence constitutes a terrorist act (I...