The Competitive Masculinity of Revolutionary Violence

What do we do with a system so toxic and oppressive that we cannot survive under it? When we cannot change it, we have been told, we must destroy it.

“Star Wars: Andor” is rich in the cultural zietgiest. As we grapple with the growth of fascism, it captures a clear picture of how fascism operates and an inspiring message of resistence. In this moment, it is impossible to miss one of the most popular quotes on the Internet.

The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try. ―Karis Nemik, in Andor

20 years ago, as I write this, “V for Vendetta” introduced the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol for rebellion that itself persists. Another 6 years earlier The Matrix and Fight Club both represented rebellion (though the later being an often missed critique). All of these represented a type of resistance to authoritarianism, the building of a resistance movement, acts of militant or violent resistance. Even the original 1977 Star Wars trilogy that Andor leads into (via “Rogue One”) presents a similar archetype of rebellion.

Heading into the 2000’s, Che Guevara shirts became a popular item at the “subculture” mall retail chain Hot Topic. Rage Against the Machine, themselves providing the song that played out the end of the first Matrix movie, repeatedly referenced Che Guevara and used his image extensively in their merchandise and include Guerilla Warfare on their recommended reading list.

All of these invoke the image of the armed revolutionary, rising up to fight against the system they oppose. The quote Che Guevara quote, “it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees,” is still inspiring for those facing what feels like overwhelming odds. While the words still ring true, the man behind the image doesn’t hold up. The very archetype of the hero, especially the hero with a gun, is less a rejection of the cult than an mirror image of it: the details are reversed, but the shape remains the same.

The Cuban Revolution had both liberatory and oppressive elements, including repression violent suppression of homosexuality. The Matrix offered the standard resistance narrative of action movies (with cutting-edge special effects, and a cool twist): gunfire and explosions. Even more complex cultural critiques such as “They Live” only offer the same “shoot the bad guys” simplified image of resistance.

Andor is especially interesting today because it presents a detailed and nuanced picture of the development of a revolutionary movement, including escalation and counter escalation. It pulled from real revolutions, was modeled on real history, to create something that presents a real picture of how these movements develop and win. The only problem is that none of the referenced movements produced liberatory results and some of them produced the most brutal and oppressive regimes in history. We are lead to believe that Andor is a good model because we know that Star Wars always ends with the Empire being defeated.

We are so thirsty for hope that we will drink it up, even when that hope comes from a fiction and the truth behind the hope is poison. In Andor, we see the worst elements sacrifice themselves for some of the best. The revolution goes through a process of purification, the complicated elements weeding themselves out to make room for the simplified good, as the rebellion unifies. In reality, this tends to be the opposite how things actually work.

Revolutions do not become more clear, more ideologically pure, more true to their objectives. They do not become more liberatory. They compromise. They become afraid. They fold under the trauma of revolutionary reality, and their results are an amalgam of the worst elements and worst decisions. Authoritarian vanguardism will infiltrate and destroy liberatory popular movements, as they undermine and destroy the state they resist. Even compassionate and optimistic revolutionaries will eventually yield to their anger, committing atrocities in revenge, torturing or executing prisoners of war.

Trauma changes people, and revolutions are made of people. This is not to say that revolutionary change is hopeless, but rather that we should not build our hopes on a foundation of fantasy. We should not believe that we can follow a path that has lead, time and time again, to authoritarian failure and hope for it to produce liberation.

In order to do this, we must confront the thing that shapes these hero stories. We must understand what hides the truth from us and leads us to follow, again and again, the same path of failure.

There is a cultural blindness to the equivalent exchange inherent in violence. Every scar you inflict leaves one behind. A warrior takes on a burden. It’s not just about risking one’s life: it’s about dealing with the scars of survival. Dead warriors are the ones who got out easy. And those scars are not just on the warrior. They come back to the community. Trauma is not a static wound, but a living contagion. Every bit of violence we express, even for our own liberation, inflicts wounds on ourselves that we need to heal or it risk its spread.

All violence, even in self-defense, incurs a debt. That debt is not represented in popular media, it is invisible within the current paradigm, because it is paid back with feminized labor. In the Star Wars universe, the traumatized simply die for the revolution. The duality of the Jedi and the Sith are simply two aspects of the masculine hero (even when embodied by feminine characters). The feminized labor of healing, community building, movement building, and logistics are not represented (except where they happen to intersect with subterfuge or combat).

All this is not to say that violence should not be part of a revolutionary movement, as liberals tend to assert. Liberalism sometimes recognizes this paradox and resolves it by pushing for their image of “non-violent” resistance. Violence can’t solve problems, they assert, there is only protest. Revolutionary change always produces “bad” results (they tend to lack any analysis as to why other than “violence bad”), therefore incremental change is preferable. The thing that liberals don’t understand, perhaps they refuse to understand, is that there is necessarily a continuum from protest to insurrection.

Any protest that is unwilling to continue to escalate along that continuum can simply be ignored or crushed, if authorities are willing to escalate far enough. The thing that insurrectionary partisans tend to not understand is that the capacity for escalation is not the same as actual escalation. Not only are these not equivalent, but escalation that precedes capacity building impairs existing insurrectionary capacity. Escalation, who escalates and on what grounds, is actually a critical element of how the revolutionary conversation unfolds. (This dialog where Andor’s revolutionary representation and historical accuracy excels.)

I’m not going to spend too much time on this, because I don’t think it’s worth my time. Other people have long since made this point, well before I was born.

In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. -Kwame Ture

You can’t ever reach a man if you don’t speak his language.

If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can’t come to him with peace. Why, good night! He’ll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. If a man speaks French, you can’t speak to him in German. If he speaks Swahili, you can’t communicate with him in Chinese. You have to find out what this man speaks. And once you know his language, learn how to speak his language, and he’ll get the point. There’ll be some dialogue.

You know the language the Klan speaks. -Malcolm X

Speaking the language of violence is, as I’ve already said, not free. It comes at a cost. It is always the worst option. It is, however, the only universal human language, and this can occasionally make it the only option. But since context matters, the context of these critiques are different. We are not discussing the relative values of mutually exclusive concepts, violence vs non-violence, but the relative emphasis on what must be complementary elements. A movement with no capacity for violence can be ignored by those who lack a conscience. Let’s move back to discussing the complement.

Popular media focuses on violence at the expense of representing (femninized) capacity building. It centers the armed revolutionary, and violent revolutionary struggle by extension, because it aligns with the patriarchal and individualist narrative that (usually male) heros use violence to change the world. However, this narrative replicates the patriarchal norm of decentering the (often feminized) work of community building.

For example, while Galleani is central to insurrectionary anarchist theory, research into the Galleanisti themselves revealed a complex social network, built on top of multiple communities. Underlying the visible revolutionary action was a massive social structure that made those actions, and the journal that promoted them, possible. Even Che Guevara himself, while recognizing and talking about the centrality of the revolutionary program and support infrastructure in Guerilla Warfare, died because he prioritized violent action over infrastructure.

We can follow this path of missing elements through fact and fiction.

As psychedelics first made their way into Europe and colonizer societies, these societies began to rupture. In early 1960’s Germany, high profile Nazis were being put on trial. German students came face-to-face with the atrocities that their parents participated in and high profile business and government officials had committed. Meanwhile, anti-colonialism was spreading through European colonies. A wave of resistance to oppression swept the globe, from the civil rights movement in the US to the Guerilla warfare against empires.

Inspired by the successful use of guerilla warfare by colonized people, colonizers largely appropriated the term and ignored the entire theory these successes were based on, thereby inventing the Urban Guerilla movement. The strategy of guerilla warfare, as most famously outlined in Che Guevara’s thus titled work, avoided urban areas. Instead it focused on building support in rural areas, surrounding cities, then using the advantage of rural terrain to attack the logistics of the enemy within the cities. The majority of the urban guerilla movement took the strategy of kidnaping, robbing banks, killing people, and then just kind of hoping that will lead to a revolution somehow because… uh… wanna smoke some dope and shoot cops?

Basically everyone in these movements was arrested or killed, including some extra judicial killings carried out by states. The Right leveraged the massive unpopularity of these movements into a backlash against the Left in general, leading quite directly to the rise and dominance of Neoliberalism as we see it today.

It’s difficult to imagine how these insurrectionary movements that are occasionally viewed as a model by the radical left could possibly have been less successful. A dedicated reactionary plot would likely have been less effective at annihilating the left for an entire generation. Yet they remain an image for anti-authoritarian resistance.

Why did these movements fail? Some cases need little analysis. The Symbionese Liberation Army, for example, was wildly incompetent. It had no connection to the people it was trying to liberate, and seemingly no connection to reality at all. They started by murdering the first black superintendent (Marcus Foster) of a major school system, robbed banks to fund their own operation, alienated the communities they operated within, and were ultimately astoundingly incompetent.

These were not political radicals, Blackburn said of the SLA. They were uniquely mediocre and stunningly off-base. The people in the SLA had no grounding in history. They swung from the world of being thumb-in-the-mouth cheerleaders to self-described revolutionaries with nothing but rhetoric to support them. -quote pulled from the SLA wikipedia page (Robert Blackburn, acting superintendent of Oakland schools who was also wounded during Foster’s assassination)

But some organizations were far more rigorous. The Weather Underground, for example, was perhaps one of the most successful organizations. By choosing to target infrastructure instead of people and warning people before setting off bombs, they set themselves apart. They had a clear political foundation, and they were careful to make sure their actions aligned with those politics. This is why they were able to operate for about 8 years as opposed to the 2 years of the SLA (though the majority of SLA were killed in a shootout with police not even a year after formation).

While it’s easy to understand why revolutionaries believed they were on the brink of revolution, industrial nations were stable. Governments largely retained their legitimacy. Capitalism worked, in that it supplied a sufficient number of people with a sufficient amount of their needs, and in that it could maintain the illusion (and for some the reality) of upward mobility. The Civil Rights Movement had appeared to work, at least enough to split moderates from radicals, and the peace movement had managed to end the Vietnam War.

While revolutionaries were correct in identifying additional problems, they were not able to bring others along with them. We should all recognize this counterinsurgency strategy of splitting the insurgency from it’s base. It is generally achieved with a combination of compromise with moderates, and extreme retribution against radicals.

A guerilla movement must grow to survive. It must demonstrate it’s ability to take and hold territory. It must put forward a revolutionary program to build it’s base. The insurrectionary left of the industrial world in later half of the 20th century did none of these things. Rather, it drew resources to carry out attacks without giving anything back. It created no liberated spaces and only occasionally returned liberated resources to the community. When the state met moderate demands, they could easily isolate radicals. Isolated radicals radicalized more, going to war with the society itself rather than remaining focused on isolating and destroying the state apparatus of oppression.

All of these movements centered militant revolution. In doing so, they omitted or cut themselves off from the logistic support needed to sustain such revolutionary activity. The trauma of carrying out violence further isolated and radicalized them. Lacking infrastructure for trauma healing, their decay escalated and became unrecoverable. Ultimately, their revolutionary movements both emulated and reinforced the status quo they were trying to resist.

There emerges a strange historical parallel that is difficult to see from within the dominant paradigm. The competitive politics of electoralism derives from heroic competition, where people (typically men) compete (often violently) for control over a territory or people. Thus the insurrectionary enters into the very same competition as a challenger, not against the system of domination but for control over it. The success of the revolution, then, does not abolish the system of violent domination but changes rather replaces its management.

Many modern anarchists will be quick to point out the disconnect between ends and means. While authoritarian projects often assert that “the ends justify the means,” and Andor implies the same, anti-authoritarian projects assert the ends and the means are not only united but are, in fact, the same.

The shape of the resulting society will always be informed by the shape of the movement that lead to the revolution. Prefigurative politics recognizes this truth and informs us that the process of revolution begins by building the system we want to see at the end. If there is a militant revolutionary phase, it must be an extension of the system we build, a defensive element of something else, not the objective itself.

Propaganda of the deed can only be so effective as it can be sustainable, and to be sustainable it must be built on top of a community. Community is the mycelium from which the fruit of insurrection can grow.

There is another way to think about this as well. An insurrectionary movement that succeeds in overthrowing a government is one that succeeds in fulfilling the purpose it was designed to do. A system built to destroy another system is not a system built to replace the system it’s destroying. This means that any successful insurrectionary movement necessarily leaves a vacuum or must rapidly re-tool itself towards maintaining revolutionary changes. During the transition, the revolution is vulnerable.

A prefigurative system begins by building the post-revolutionary structures. After the success of the revolution, any insurrectionary elements that came from this revolutionary movement can simply be dismantled and re-integrated into the prefigured system. The transition leaves no vacuum because the future society already existed before conflict.

But there’s one more reason why prefiguration, why building the new system first, is so important. There is no one to shoot, nothing to bomb, no place to attack and destroy, that could free us. An insurrectionary movement can only attack the effects of the system, it can only target the symptoms. The system itself is not physical. It is in our minds. We cannot attack this with physical weapons. The best way we can attack this system is by showing that a better world is possible. The best way to show that a better world is possible, is to build that world now. As the IWW put it, we must “build the new world in the shell of the old.”