Nonviolence is Pacification
Structural Violence and the Fiction of a Peaceful Capitalism
Morning Comrades.
Back to a regular schedule after a short break and we find ourselves, once again, in spectacular interesting times. The Madleen Gaza Flotilla has, as of the time of writing, been intercepted by the IDF in an act of piracy whilst the genocide continues and L.A. has erupted in a righteous clash with the states forces in response to their fascist bullshit.
Right on cue, the usual suspects, ranging from the pigs to your favourite influencer and right down to the self-proclaimed “left-wing” organisations are calling for non-violence and some are going as far as denouncing this more than necessary reaction to the siege laid upon the city by an undemocratic minority rule. I’ll dedicate Wednesday’s dispatch on why even Communist and Anarchist organisations are not only missing but denouncing the only appropriate response but for the time being a timely reminder that any and all calls for non-violence are to be disregarded and at best, those that call for it, viewed with suspicion.
If you protest seriously, if your actions even hint at disrupting business as usual you will be called “violent,” no matter what. Doesn’t matter if you’re blocking a road, smashing a window, occupying a building, or just yelling loudly near a police line. The label comes swiftly, and it sticks. It’s not because you’ve harmed someone and usually you haven’t, but because you’ve violated something sacred to this system: the order of things, the sanctity of property, and the illusion that this society runs on peace.
In their sharp and necessary book Let This Radicalize You, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba open up this terrain in the chapter “They Will Call You Violent.” What they capture is the sickening familiarity of being blamed for resisting. The deeper point, however, though present implicitly is that this labelling relies entirely on the moral code of the ruling class. It is bourgeois morality that defines “violence” not by harm caused, but by threat posed to capital and the institutions that defend it.
Bourgeois morality is not morality in the universal sense. It is the codified values of a particular class, the capitalist class, raised to the level of moral common sense. These values prioritise property over people, order over justice, and legality over legitimacy. It is this morality that allows an entire society to ignore the slow violence of eviction, hunger, or environmental collapse while clutching its pearls when a bank window is broken.
Violence as Defined by Bourgeois Morality: The Ideological Ruse
In “They Will Call You Violent,” Hayes and Kaba describe how power routinely condemns even modest disruptions, like protests or occupations as violent acts. The key to understanding this reaction is to recognize that what is labeled “violence” in the public discourse is not a neutral or objective category, it is a class-coded moral judgment. Bourgeois morality, shaped by the capitalist class’s need to protect its property and legitimacy, equates violence not with actual harm, but with challenges to capitalist order.
Louis Althusser noted that ideology works by embedding the ruling class’s interests into everyday assumptions.¹ In this light, the charge of “violence” becomes an ideological weapon deployed by institutions, police, media, courts to reproduce capitalist dominance. A peaceful die-in blocking a corporate lobby is called violent. A riot in response to police murder is called lawless and criminal. Meanwhile, capitalist violence, layoffs, redlining, poisoned water, rent hikes goes unremarked.
This moral double standard serves a clear function: it delegitimises resistance that does not play by the rules of the ruling class. The bourgeoisie, after all, must present its domination as natural and peaceful. When revolutionaries reveal the brutality behind this peace, bourgeois morality kicks in to reassert control. It does so not with argument, but with accusation: You are violent. Hayes and Kaba expose this tactic as preemptive repression, it is meant to isolate militants and discourage others from following their lead.
Structural Violence and the Fiction of a Peaceful Capitalism
One of the most insidious effects of bourgeois morality is its refusal to recognize structural violence. Structural violence, defined by Johan Galtung as the harm caused by unequal social arrangements² is not counted as “real” violence because it is administered legally, bureaucratically, and impersonally. Capitalism’s everyday harms, poverty, eviction, police harassment, environmental destruction are treated as unfortunate byproducts, not moral outrages.
This selective moral recognition allows the bourgeoisie to present itself as the guardian of peace, even as it perpetuates a system of death and exploitation. As Hayes and Kaba make clear, protests that disrupt this status quo are considered dangerous not because they cause harm, but because they expose the harm that already exists.³
Rodrigo Nunes' stresses that debates around violence are not moral debates, but political ones.⁴ What is deemed legitimate or illegitimate is determined by who has the power to define the moral field. Bourgeois morality paints police as peacekeepers, even when they are armed enforcers of racialized property law. It portrays striking workers as disruptive, even as it ignores the slow violence of labour exploitation.
This moral logic is not just hypocritical, it’s functional. It keeps the working class confused about where real violence resides. By focusing outrage on the actions of protesters instead of the structure they resist, bourgeois morality protects the capitalist system from scrutiny and rebellion.
The Myth of Moral Superiority
One of the major takeaways from Let This Radicalize You is that the call for nonviolence is not neutral; it is often used to pacify movements before they become powerful. Hayes and Kaba detail how appeals to civility and “strategic nonviolence” often come from within movements themselves, warning against the loss of public sympathy or funding. But these appeals are rooted not just in strategy, they are rooted in bourgeois moral frameworks that reject any politics that defy polite liberal norms.
Revolutionary history suggests that nonviolence, when held as an absolute moral principle, becomes a tool of containment. Even Martin Luther King Jr., who is often sanitized as a saint of nonviolence, acknowledged that riots are “the language of the unheard.”⁵ The bourgeois morality that today claims King as a moral paragon does so only by erasing his critiques of capitalism and U.S. militarism.
Marx understood revolution not as a moral choice but as a material necessity. In Capital, he writes that “force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.”⁶ That is, revolutionary violence arises not from hatred or chaos, but from the contradictions of a system that refuses to yield. Bourgeois morality, however, casts such force as inherently illegitimate, precisely because it threatens the ruling class’s grip on reproduction and order.
This false moralism also appears in the nonprofit-industrial complex, which often pressures activists to remain within state-sanctioned forms of protest. As Hayes and Kaba show, this limits the political horizon of movements and protects the illusion that systemic change can occur through institutional channels alone.
So what are revolutionaries to do with this moral landscape so thoroughly dominated by capitalist interests? Hayes and Kaba call for solidarity across tactics, and for resisting the pressure to distance oneself from “violent” actors simply to maintain respectability.⁷ This is a crucial step, but we must go further: we must build an ethics rooted not in bourgeois morality, but in the material conditions of the oppressed.
Such an ethics would reject property as sacred, accept self-defense as necessary, and understand disruption not as a moral failing but as a strategic tool. Silvia Federici has called attention to the “everyday violence of capitalism” that is gendered, racialized, and normalized.⁸ To resist such violence effectively requires not moral purity, but militant clarity.
This clarity is echoed in revolutionary Marxist traditions that emphasize collective discipline, not pacifist martyrdom. Groups like The Red Nation frame ecological and Indigenous resistance not in terms of nonviolence, but in terms of responsibility to life and land.⁹ In this sense, revolutionary ethics prioritise human need and planetary survival over capitalist civility.
The rejection of bourgeois morality is not a descent into nihilism, it is the beginning of political maturity. As Aimé Césaire put it, “No one colonizes innocently.”¹⁰ Likewise, no one resists effectively while clinging to the moral codes of their oppressors.
The morality of the capitalist class cannot be our guide.
Bourgeois morality exists to protect bourgeois power. It names violence only when it serves that end. If we are to build a world where justice, care, and freedom flourish, we must abandon the moral rules that tell us to be silent, civil, and safe in the face of oppression. The truth is simple: they call us violent because they fear what would happen if we stopped caring about their rules.
With that, you know what to do.
Yours, warmly,
V.
Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–191.
Hayes, Kelly, and Mariame Kaba. Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023.
Nunes, Rodrigo. Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization. New York: Verso, 2021.
King Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In Why We Can’t Wait, 77–100. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Hayes and Kaba, Let This Radicalize You.
Federici, Silvia. Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press, 2018.
The Red Nation. The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth. New York: Common Notions Press, 2021.
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Excellent post, thank you for addressing this topic. As Audre Lorde wrote “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”