When ruling elites call for peace, they are demanding docility. When they cynically cite decontextualized Martin Luther King Jr quotes and invoke the rights of “peaceful protesters” while denouncing actually existing protests, they announce that no effective protest will ever be peaceful enough to meet their approval. Ruling elites, pundits, and police use the rhetoric of nonviolence to discipline protesters and shift responsibility for state violence onto its victims.
We shouldn’t fall into their trap. There’s nothing peaceful about nonviolence if you’re doing it right.
Nonviolence is not about playing by the rules, working within existing institutions, or keeping protests unthreatening. Nonviolent direct action is direct action. It’s not saintly self-sacrifice or high-minded moralizing but a theory of power and a repertoire of tactics for using it. Effective nonviolence is about wielding collective action to disrupt the normal workings of society.
Martin Luther King Jr knew this better than most. While the pundits are right that King regularly rejected rioting as a tactic, he defended rioters themselves as expressing justified anger against a racist, capitalist order that had left inner-city black residents brutalized, exploited, and abandoned. To him, rioting was anger burning hot; the kind of radical reconstruction of American society he envisioned required it to burn long.
It’s true that King thought nonviolent direct action, militantly pursued, was morally superior to rioting — but more important, he thought it represented a more promising path to directly confronting the American state. Nonviolence, as he came to conceptualize it by the end of his life, was a means of channeling popular rage into a fighting force that could pose a more direct threat to the Johnson administration.
