Peter Gelderloos Quotes

The people most affected by a system of oppression should be at the forefront of the struggle against that particular oppression.

Free speech does not empower us, and it does not equal freedom. Free speech is a privilege that can be — and is — taken away by the government when it serves their interests.

Freedom as a concept sides with those who are struggling for theirs, whereas nonviolence as a concept sides with the enforcers of normality and the rulers of the status quo.

Losing fights can still be better than not fighting at all, because it empowers people, and teaches us that we can fight.

Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy.

The pacifist avoidance of self-criticism is functional, not just typical. When your strategy’s victory comes from “captur[ing] and maintain[ing] the moral high ground,” it is necessary to portray yourself as moral and your enemy as immoral.

After a revolution that destroys all the structures of capitalism - seizes all the factories, redistributes the land, burns all the money - people who are philosophically capitalist need not be purged or intimidated with irrational authority, because lacking a military apparatus to implement capitalism or a police apparatus to protect it, they as people are quite harmless, and will either one day learn to do something creative with their lives or they’ll starve to death without realizing that they can no longer pay someone to slave for them.

Modern governments, which have long studied methods of social control, no longer view peace as the default social condition, interrupted only by outside agitators. Now they understand that the natural condition of the world (the world they have created, I should editorialize) is conflict: rebellion to their rule is inevitable and continuous. Statecraft has become the art of managing conflict, permanently. As long as rebels continue to carry olive branches and a naive view of the struggle, the state knows that it is safe.

The imperative of nonviolence overrides the basic respect of trusting people to liberate themselves.

Capitalism is based on the endless accumulation of wealth, extracted from the environment and from our labor, and government is based on the accumulation of power and control directly stolen from all the rest of us. A marriage between these two systems, which has defined the social reality for at least five hundred years, means everyone gets fucked.

The goal of our criticism should be solidarity, not homogeneity.

Capitalists and their predecessors—slaveowners, moneylenders, merchant-investors—owe their very existence to the State. In early times, concentration of political and spiritual power precedes economic stratification in society.

We are all forced to participate in a society that is held together by structural violence, and rewarded for our participation with various privileges, though these privileges are spread unevenly across society. Given that those who use some form of visible, antisocial violence are often the least likely to enjoy the privileges of structural violence, there is no feasible way to determine who is violent and who is not.

“Violence” was a euphemism for a threat to the ruling order and its illusion of social peace, with which the class struggle, the brutality of patriarchy, and the murderousness of colonialism are hidden. The newspapers did not talk about violence when cops killed strikers, when landlords evicted families, or when poor people died of hunger. They talked about violence when workers went on strike, when tenants stopped paying rent, when street vendors refused to surrender their wares to the cops.

Democracy requires social peace, the illusion that, in a society based on exploitation and domination, everyone can get along and nobody's fundamental well-being is under threat.