Understanding Context and Contradiction in the Concept of Violence: Frantz Fanon,Stokely Carmichael and the Long 1960s

Introduction

If the problems of violence remain obscure, as George Sorel remarked, then that obscurity pertains as much to the conceptual as it does the normative. Since the 1960s, a dominant aim of the applied philosophy of violence has been ascertaining a correct definition of violence for underlaying work on its normative and empirical problems. Recently, both the theoretical and the political feasibility of this undertaking have been called into serious doubt. Such doubt pertains to the increasing recognition that ‘violence’, like most concepts for organizing and describing our political life, is inextricably entangled with the values forming the subject-matter of that political life; that the concept of violence is essentially contestable; that attaining a concept of violence which, in the Platonic fashion, is free of the exigencies which characterize politics is unconscionable.

Subsequently, recent theoretical work on violence has moved away from attempting to attain an apodictic definition of violence and towards a greater emphasis on the meaning of violence as constituted by the concrete setting in which that concept is used. Such work entails a variety of methodological approaches, but is broadly united by the assumption that there is, as Mahmood Mamdani (2009: 3–19) terms it, a politics to naming violence (see also: Bhatia, 2005). That is, for the concept of violence to remain responsive to its ‘real-world’ instances, we are obliged to trace the way in which it is shaped by political discourse and open to strategic appropriation by political actors, remaining mindful of the inequities that pertain to politics. The importance of being attentive to the politics of naming violence is because calling things ‘violence’ is entangled with and co-constitutive of attempts to prevent and mitigate violence (Thaler, 2018: 1).

This article introduces the idea of contextual shift for refining understanding of use and meaning of the concept of violence. Accounts of polemical disputes over violence frequently have context function as an account of the background norms which motivate strategic uses of the concept by political actors. Contextual shift augments this by demonstrating how context can be a mechanism for conceptual change as political actors negotiate contradictions generated by structural transformations (see Farr, 1989; Martin, 1997). The analytical value of contextual shift for understanding use and meaning is demonstrated through an account of strategic appropriations of ‘violence’ during the ‘Long Sixties’, the period between the early 1950s and the early 1970s when the effects of international, convergent, structural transformations opened up both new opportunities and new challenges to revolutionary left-wing politics. The normative value of contextual shift is briefly explored in the conclusion.

Work on the concept of violence is now an expansive field. The ‘Concepts of Violence’ section begins with a brief outline of that field before describing recent approaches and situating the contribution of this article. The ‘Violence and Revolution’ section details how anticolonial movements indebted to an outmoded Marxism used the concept of violence to resolve contradictions between thought and practice. Given extant and emerging affiliations it was not long before this reconceptualization of violence arrived in the United States. The ‘Capitalism, Racism, Imperialism’ section gives a brief account of its travel. For the New Left, especially the Black Panther Party (BPP), anticolonial theories of violence provided a critique of state violence, and they also permitted the transcendence of domestic limitations through international solidarity. However, solutions to limitations at one level generated contradictions at another. Resonantly pejorative, avowals of violence by the New Left garnered opprobrium. The ‘Rhetoric and Redescription’ section describes the rhetorical strategies used to challenge the norms underpinning the presumptive disapprobation entailed by the term ‘violence’ before paying particular attention to the multiple commitments which vitiated Stokely Carmichael’s attempts at redescription.

A clarification before beginning. This article does not seek to argue for or against a particular conception of violence. Rather, it traces the way that violence is disputed while contributing to frameworks for understanding those disputes. In this regard, it concurs with Nietzsche’s (1974: 121) assertion that ‘to realize what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are’. Through the transformative power of language, the way we speak about things becomes part of the very being of those things.

Concepts of Violence

What precisely is violence? Much philosophical work in recent decades has concerned itself with that question. Against the backdrop of civil disobedience, this work was inaugurated by the ‘first wave’ of applied philosophy between the late 1960s and the early 1970s (see Arendt, 1970; Garver, 1968; Gert, 1969; Gray, 1970; Harris, 1974; Konrad, 1974; Shaffer, 1971; Wade, 1971). The character of such work is exemplified by Hannah Arendt’s 1969 remark that, in spite of its ‘enormous role’ in history, violence had thereto ‘been singled out so seldom for special consideration’ (Arendt, 1970: 8). Her influential On Violence extricated the concept of ‘violence’ from other significant, but often conflated, concepts in political thought, such as ‘power’, ‘force’ and ‘authority’. Since then, work on the concept of violence has continued apace with different proposals falling along a spectrum ranging between ‘narrower’ and ‘wider’ accounts of violence, that is, between those which permit of more or fewer phenomena to the category of violence (Bufacchi, 2005). However, given the sheer variety and breadth encapsulated by that spectrum, it is useful to distinguish between three sets of conceptions: individualist, expansive and legitimist.

Individualist accounts typically take violence to be a direct, interpersonal act of force involving the infliction of physical injury and often attended by a degree of psychological harm (Coady, 1989: 4; see Audi, 2009; Bäck, 2004; Coady, 2007: 21–42; Holmes, 1973; Keane, 1996: 6; Miller, 1971; Pogge, 1991: 67; Steger, 2003: 12–13). Such conceptions draw their strength for being the ‘normal’ understanding of violence as found in ordinary language usage. Indeed, C. A. J. Coady (1989: 5), an influential proponent of this conception, draws on the authority of the Oxford English Dictionary as a basis for accepting this conception. He argues, moreover, that when there are modifications of the concept of violence to extend its parameters, proponents of such modifications are offering an extension to this ‘ordinary’ usage. This is evident in certain examples of ‘expansive’ conceptions. For instance, Robert Harris (1980) retains the importance of physical harm for the concept of violence while precluding the method by which such violence was inflicted as morally insignificant and thus conceptually unimportant. What is important to Harris, a utilitarian, is the existence of physical harm in human affairs, not how it was inflicted, and through this exclusion he can extend the category of violence to include violence by omission – that is, when a person did not act to prevent (foreseeable) harm coming to another (see also Salmi, 1993: 17, 2000: 2–5).

However, in cases the concept of violence is extended so far beyond the ‘ordinary’ usage, it is difficult not to conclude that certain expansive accounts represent an altogether different conception of violence. This is strikingly illustrated in conceptions which take violence as pertaining to a set of social conditions rather than interpersonal force or physical injury (Galtung, 1965, 1969; Galtung and Höivik, 1971; Harris, 1974; Winter, 2012; Žižek, 2009). Johan Galtung’s (1969) conception of structural violence, one which divests violence of agential criteria, has become perhaps the most influential challenge to ‘narrower’ conceptions of violence. ‘Violence is present’, writes Galtung (1969: 169), ‘when humans are being influenced so that their actual somatic realizations are below their potential realizations’. In this conception, violence shows up as unequal life chances, poverty and immiseration. Rather than extending the ordinary usage of violence, then, Galtung rejects it as altogether insufficient. He does so primarily by positioning violence in opposition to peace, defining peace as the ‘absence of violence’, and notes that if we were to eradicate ‘violence’ as conceived only by narrower definitions, we would still be left with a world that could in no sense be described as ‘peaceful’.

Finally, legitimist conceptions take violence to be the ‘illegitimate or unauthorized use of force’ (Wolff, 1969: 606; see also Wyckoff, 2013: 338–340). While a species of the narrower conception of violence, what is important in the legitimist conception is the normative, rather than descriptive, content of the act. Coercive acts undertaken by either de jure or de facto authorities are just ‘force’, and those which cannot claim such authority are ‘violence’. As Robert Paul Wolff (1969: 606) writes, under this view of violence, ‘murder is an act of violence, but capital punishment by a legitimate state is not . . .’. The legitimist conception has lost much of its salience in recent years due to the increasing predominance of Just War Theory in the applied ethics of violence and the preponderance it affords questions of justification over legitimacy (see 2007; Finlay, 2017, 2018). That is to say, the reasons for using violence towards some end (justification) are now taken to be more important than whether or not that violence originated from a ‘right’ source (legitimacy). However, the preserve of conservative political thought, this understanding was a central point of contention by the US New Left during the 1960s.

What unites these disparate approaches is their desire to establish a unifying, philosophically compelling definition of violence. The criteria for adjudicating between these competing definitions are, in the last instance, the extent to which they can be action-guiding. The importance of making clear ‘the difference between acts of violence and acts which are not acts of violence’, is that it is the sine qua non for an ethics of violence (Harris, 1980: 13). For this reason, proponents of the stricter account of violence mistrust expansive definitions of violence. There is something about the ‘harmful agency’ entailed by interpersonal acts of force, about the ‘forceful intrusion’ into our lives by those wishing to do us harm, argue proponents of the stricter account, which makes violence a special phenomenon requiring special justification in a way that unequal social conditions are not and do not (see especially Bufacchi, 2007; Coady, 1989; Finlay, 2017).

Violence and Revolution

During the 1950s–1970s, the concept and theory of revolution entered a period of profound reappraisal (see Goldstone, 1980: 426–434; Stone, 1966). The stage was set for these transformations by a crisis in the institutions through which working-class politics had previously expressed itself. Writing at the opening of the 1960s, C. Wright Mills (2008: 214) observed that ‘in our time there is nowhere any left establishment that is truly international, or in fact truly left and at the same time consequential’. The crisis had its local variations but more generally was a direct result of the establishment of the Soviet Union which, effectively ‘nationalizing’ the international left, rendered one of the foremost inspirations of revolutionary politics an instrument of that great power’s interests. The process of de-Stalinization had already produced a profound sense of dejection (Hobsbawm, 1978: 134–135), but of greater importance in fomenting this crisis was the Cold War détente, the easing of USA–USSR geopolitical tensions beginning in the late 1950s (Suri, 2003). Encumbered by a bloated nuclear arsenal out of all proportion to any conceivable political aim, and fearful of the mutual obliteration promised by conflict, the leaders of those two powers accepted the status quo and curtained their ambitions for global change. ‘We are living in a time when it is important to achieve progress together in international affairs’, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy in 1963 (Khrushchev quoted in Suri, 2003: 42). However, to left-wing dissidents and progressive movements, events like the Cuban Missile crisis only demonstrated the Soviet Union’s prioritization of stable relations with the United States over existing commitments to Havana or Beijing, convincing them of the need to find a new centre(s) of revolutionary politics.

In these circumstances, Marxism became a rhetoric for intra-ideological denunciation and political abuse in ways which upended it from its original referents. Witness the curious effects of the Sino-Soviet split, whereby China’s castigation of Soviet bureaucracy as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘revisionist’, all but evacuated the class content from these concepts and repositioned the idea of what it was to be a ‘revolutionary’. As Fredric Jameson explains:

There is then an inevitable terminological slippage and displacement: the new binary opposite to the term ‘bourgeois’ will no longer be ‘proletarian’ but rather ‘revolutionary’, and the new qualifications for political judgements of this kind are no longer made in terms of class or party affiliation but rather in terms of personal life . . . (Jameson, 1984: 189).

The curiosity of this ‘slippage’, that revolutionary action was no longer foremost related to the economic base, but a question of personal life, is for the way it dovetails with later calls to make the ‘personal political’ as a necessary prerequisite for wider social and political transformation (Hanisch, 1970: 76–77). Indeed, so much more important than terminological slippages for transformations in notions of revolutionary subjectivity is the way in which the institutional crisis of the ‘old left’ wrought a crisis in the classical conception of class typically associated with Marxism. Moving prominently into the space left by the virtual disappearance of that universal social-economic category were new subjectivities, new identities, new social and political categories considered ‘marginal’ – the réservoir in Lenin’s phrasing – to those institutions shaped by the Soviet experience: students, young people, women, ethnic minorities and the lumpen-proletariat (Katsiaficas, 1987: 3–86). By the end of the 1960s, a Black ‘proletariat’, influenced by the teachings of Malcom X and lead by the BPP, provided the vanguard for efforts ‘to usher in a new era of human relations and to add a thoroughly new conception of the meaning and form and content of social revolution’ (Cruse, 1968: 111, 139–55).

The loss of revolution’s traditional ‘constituency’, then, did not mean the obsolescence of the idea of revolution as received from Marx but, on the contrary, the theoretical extension of the possible bases of revolution (Marcuse, 1969b; Marcuse and Busch, 1967). However, while these transformations were important for the affinities later felt between domestic United States and worldwide liberation groups, alone they were not sufficient to foreground the idea of violence. After all, in the space for new ‘constituencies’ emerged nonviolent movements of international renown, such as the Southern Church Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; Boyd, 1998; Carson, 1995; West, 1984). Rather, the necessary relationship between violence and revolution was established in this context by the anticolonial and nationalist movements which had emerged during the post-WWII fracturing of empire. Into the lacuna left by ‘first-world Marxism’ entered a whole set of revelations from those who, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, newly had use of ‘the word’, and who, as Fanon put it, had suffered the privilege of seeing that the ‘class’ ruling over ‘one thousand five hundred million natives’ did in fact rely upon violence, on ‘rifle-butts and napalm’, for their power (Fanon, 2001; Sartre, 2001: 29). It was here, at the point of tension between a Marxist revolutionary tradition and an expanded revolutionary constituency, that ‘violence’ was subject to conceptual innovation.

It is true that, writing in the long shadow of 1789, Marx had assumed revolutions to be violent affairs. But crucially, the relationship of violence to revolution was an incidental one and he had admitted the possibility of revolution without violence, albeit in only Great Britain, the United States, and possibly Holland (Finlay, 2006; Marx, 1962; Schaff, 1973). For revolutionary theorists like Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, there were two interrelated reasons why no such possibility was admissible. First, the use of violence existed as a tactical precaution. The foquismo of the Cuban revolution, for instance, emphasized violence because of lessons from past failed insurrections across Latin America when ‘socialist methods’ of revolution – unionization, mass organization and land occupations – had resulted in massacre by the superior, North American-backed, forces of the state (Debray, 1967).

Second, the necessity of violence was engendered by the fact that the essence of the colonial experience was itself one of violence. Whereas Western Marxism took the power of the ruling class to rest on a combination of coercion and consent, for anticolonial movements tasked with reformulating Marxism, the colonial experience rested on, and was ordered by, violence. In this respect, Fanon (2001: 29–33) contrasted the ‘education system, the clergy, the inherited structure of moral reflexes, the moral teachers’, that, in capitalist countries, ‘separate the exploited from those in power’ and ‘serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably’ to the ‘violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world’, the ‘violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed’. It was not only that the colonial order must be resisted with violence, but also that it would arise as a spontaneous response to that order.

In theorizing this spontaneity, Fanon replaced the alienation of labour exploitation with the dehumanizing neurosis of racist violence. The colonial world he describes in The Wretched of the Earth is a Manichaean one that is ‘cut in two’ and ‘inhabited by two different species’, the colonized and the colonizer, with the latter ruling over the former with violence (Fanon, 2001: 30–35). In this world, the incessant, constant exposure to violence, along with the din of racist language, ‘dehumanizes the native’ and induces a psycho-somatic neurosis. Ultimately, there comes a point when this canalized violence must be released and, in the process, when this violence is turned back onto the colonizer, the colonized ‘realizes his humanity’. Under this conception, the violence of the colonized is ‘the veritable creation of new men’ for it transgresses the psychological bifurcation of the colonial world (Fanon, 2001: 28–33).

Fanon’s substitution of dehumanization for alienation illustrates the interplay of violence in translating Marxism into the colonial context (Forsythe, 1973). ‘Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem’, Fanon (2001: 31) wrote. However, recasting the revolutionary subject in this context required more than a little stretching and it was likewise violence which would be vitally important for the constitution of revolutionary agency. In the largely agrarian economies, where decolonization was taking place, in lieu of an urban proletariat, it fell to the destitute rural masses to guide the revolution. As Fanon wrote:

. . . it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are the revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays (Fanon, 2001: 47).

Pre-revolutionary China, for instance, was hamstrung between a tottering feudal monarchy, warlords and a Japanese occupier that had systematically de-industrialized much of coastal China, dispersing its already small, urban working class into the countryside. In these circumstances, the Red Army would recruit the rebellious energy of the rural masses, the only viable opposition in China (Bianco, 1971: 82–107; Deutscher, 1964).

But this rebellious energy of the peasantry had to be organized and given a revolutionary form. The agent of revolutionary change envisaged by Marx, the urban proletariat of the Western economies, owed its revolutionary character, its highly organized character, to tendencies pertaining to capitalism itself. Thus, it was precisely at this point that the conceptual importance of violence became most acute for it resolved the tension of theoreticians working in the revolutionary Marxist tradition – broadly conceived – while positing a revolutionary subject outside the sequential development of capitalism. To be sure, it was understood that certain objective and subjective preconditions had to exist for a successful revolution – nobody but Sartre would impute to violence the magical properties of Achilles’ lance (Fanon, 2001: 25). But in three overarching ways, violence was understood to be capable of producing the gravediggers that the colonial bourgeoisie were incapable of producing themselves.

First, violence ‘alone’ was conceived as permitting the masses to ‘understand social truths’ and attain self-consciousness. It provided a ‘knowledge of the practice of action’ crucial for moving beyond mere reform or the amelioration of existing conditions to an actual state of revolution (Fanon, 2001: 118). Closely related to this, violence was taken to instil revolutionary self-discipline. As José Moreno (1970: 115) contends, the central contribution of Che Guevara to theories of revolution was the idea that ‘highly trained guerrilla fighters’, arising in the Cuban case in rural areas, can create the conditions necessary for a revolutionary situation. In the Cuban Revolution, the conditions of the Sierra Maestra – hunger, boredom, solitude, fatigue and illness – were valuable lessons in revolutionary virtue. In this way, the mountains were said to ‘proletarianize’ the peasantry; and the city, a place of abundance, was said to ‘bourgeoisify’ it (Debray, 1967: 76–77).

Second, along with instilling revolutionary virtue violence was taken to have a ‘sociological function’ in unifying the ‘people’ by removing its ‘heterogeneity’ (Fanon, 2001: 35). The common experience of violence and the counter-repression it elicits from the colonizer were to constitute the disparate mass of the peasantry into a class for-itself. For Fanon in particular, violence was taken to have the capacity to ‘liquidate’ regionalism and tribalism, representing an essential step in the formation of the ‘nation’.

Third, the therapeutic quality of violence, along with humanizing the revolutionary subject, is also a source of productive and creative capacity. In Fanon, in what looks like a ‘theory of economic growth’, the creative capacity of violence increases technocratic knowledge, assimilates technological capacities and thereby accelerates economic and productive capacity (Forsythe, 1973: 168).

Capitalism, Racism, Imperialism

Surveying the campus revolts across the United States in 1968, Hannah Arendt remarked the curious ‘hodgepodge’ of Marxist rhetoric and not-so-Marxist avowals of violence made by the New Left, exemplified by the incantation of Mao’s dictum that ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun’, and an ‘inexplicable faith’ in Fanon’s violent action and a classless lumpen-proletariat as the source of societal change. This was a turn of events quite ‘baffling’, she wrote, ‘for anybody that has ever read Marx’ (Arendt, 1970: 18–21).

Arendt’s (1970: 13) felt need to remark this points to the way that shifts in revolutionary thought at this time produced a ‘new shift toward violence’. For some, the gradual ‘embrace’ of violence parallels the usual narrative arc told about the sixties. Here, the hopes and optimism at the early successes of a nonviolent, interracial politics, give way to despair as the incorrigibility of the US ‘system’ becomes stunningly and horrifyingly apparent (Gitlin, 1987; Vinen, 2018). However, for others, the turn towards violence was part and parcel of a critique of a domestic order which, suffering a legitimation crisis, was itself increasingly perceived as propped up by violence.

Sustaining this perception were events like the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago which, with its pitched battles and bloody clashes between 10,000 demonstrators – chanting ‘the whole world is watching’ – and 20,000 national guardsmen, beamed across the world on television, raised the prospect that state violence had no greater moral legitimacy than the violence of its opponents (see Gitlin, 2003). After the June 1968 Tet offensive, the war in Vietnam was increasingly looking less like a single misguided policy and more like the embodiment of a ‘repressive culture gone mad’ (Morgan, 1991: 132). Moreover, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr proved to many the impossibility of nonviolence as a tool for social change. But his death, when taken with the assassination of the two Kennedy bothers – JFK and Robert – ‘three men who greatly embodied the idealism of American life’, raised the prospect, even for liberal establishment figures, of a subterranean violence inhering to the American character. As the historian and former advisor to President Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, asked: ‘What kind of people are we, we Americans?’ (Schlesinger, 1968).

That the United States was a violent society was for many a fact beyond question. The appeal of ‘third-world Marxism’ – of figures like Che, Mao and Fanon – lay in the way that it critiqued and challenged America’s violence not, as the prevailing discourse had it at the time, as pathological, but as the product of three mutually reinforcing forces: capitalism, racism and imperialism. Crucial here was a growing sense among disaffected youth, aided by the recent invention of television, that ‘everything is connected’. That those same systemic forces were the cause of violence both at home and abroad, that the violence inflicted by the police on Black bodies in the ghettos of Detroit and Newark was the self-same violence inflicted by the military on the Vietnamese. As Carl Oglesby, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) president, had it: ‘what sets Vietnam aflame is the same force that brutalizes the black population and poisons everybody’s air’ (Morgan, 1991: 132).

At a time when, in spite of a legitimation crisis, old left institutions appeared sclerotic, sluggish, and unable to offer viable opposition to the state, and when the aforementioned intentional context, particularly détente, had left young radicals ‘twice disillusioned’ by the two superpowers, those successfully resisting the US behemoth abroad would expose many for the first time to ideas about the legitimacy of armed conflict (Elbaum, 2002: 15–92; Spender, 1969). For example, between 1966 and 1968, Cuba had been encouraging armed struggle as part of a hemispheric revolution, a struggle to which Che Guevara would lose his life. On the contrary, China was publicly lauding itself as the ‘rear area’ of Vietnam, and in an effort to escape Cold War stalemate Mao sought to cultivate a charismatic authority, positioning China as a new global centre of world revolution (Suri, 2003: 44–87).

To be sure, the influence of anticolonial struggles on late-sixties movements could be varied and uneven. Often movements were too fragmented to be centralized around a single, coherent ideological position. Different groups absorbed theories of revolutionary change in an ad hoc way according to particular experiences or internal debates on organizational tactics. Still others employed third-world Marxism rhetorically to provocatively reformulate pre-existing commitments (Elbaum, 2002: 59–92). Of utmost importance in the shift towards violence, however, was the influence of the BPP. In the BPP, worldwide anticolonial struggles found a privileged influence and, positioned as the vanguard for the rest of the US New Left, the party functioned as a conduit for the teachings and tactics of these struggles to other movements. As a resolution by the SDS (1969) declared:

Within this country the sharpest struggle is that of the black colony for its liberation . . . Within the black liberation movement the vanguard force is the Black Panther Party . . . We must keep in mind that the Black Panther Party is not fighting black people’s struggles only but is in fact the vanguard in our common struggles against capitalism and imperialism (SDS, 1969).

The BPP had been formed in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale as a self-defence organization in response to police brutality in the Black community in Oakland. Employing a distinctive uniform of black leather jacket and black beret, a military-like discipline, a keen grasp of constitutional law, and a little-known state statute which permitted citizens to brandish firearms in public places, the BPP provided a highly visible check on police power (Bloom and Martin, 2013: 17–62). Between 1968 and 1971, after well-publicized standoffs with the police, the BPP grew to become one of the most important, and undoubtedly the most well-known, revolutionary groups in the United States, with thousands of members and branches in 68 cities.

However, when the passing of the 1967 Mulford Act by Californian state legislature – at the behest of Governor Ronald Regan – prohibited the BPP from publicly bearing arms, depriving them of a key organizational tactic, the party pivoted towards the international to ‘transcend the tactics of armed patrols’ (Bloom and Martin, 2013: 66). Drawing on an influential critique which identified the Black community as an internal colony within the US imperialist system, the nationalist thought of Malcom X and a tradition of Afro-American armed self-defence, the BPP linked the struggle for Black liberation in the United States to anticolonial struggles around the world (see Joseph, 2006).

Drawing on the concepts of anticolonial revolutionaries, not least their theoretical transformation of violence, the BPP self-consciously positioned itself as the domestic – ‘internal’ – armed wing of the global anticolonial struggle becoming the ‘strongest link between the domestic Black Liberation Struggle and global opponents of American Imperialism’ (Bloom and Martin, 2013: 3). While the BPP’s leading figures were variously acquainted with different strands of revolutionary political thought, including Marx, Bakunin and Nechayev (Cleaver, 1968: 12), at an organizational level, the names of Mao, Che and Fanon were writ large.

Mao and Che were to provide a number of programmatic inspirations for the BPP, particularly the way that Maoism had raised nationalism to equal importance with proletarian internationalism, and the way that foquismo held that a small group of armed rebels could initiate revolution without waiting for mass popular uprising (Malloy, 2017: 24). Much of the appeal of Mao and Che, however, was to do with the material support offered the BPP by China and Cuba and for their being paradigms of revolutionary virtue. ‘We dig what they are doing’, as BPP education minister Raymond ‘Masai’ Hewitt put it (Malloy, 2017: 72).

While the influence of Fanon cannot be separated from the relations established between the Algerian state and the BPP, he was primarily influential for the theoretical fulcrum his works provided the party. It is hard to overstate his importance in this respect. Among Afro-American militant radicals, The Wretched of the Earth became known as the ‘black bible’. ‘Every brother on the rooftop can quote Fanon’, opined Daniel Watts, editor of Liberation magazine (Malloy, 2017: 23–24). To Stokely Carmichael, Fanon was a ‘patron saint’ and in formulating the BPP’s dogma Huey P. Newton drew extensively on Fanon’s thought. For an organization claiming to represent the Black urban poor overlooked by the liberal-integrationist Civil Rights movement, Fanon’s emphasis on the lumpen-proletariat as the source of a spontaneous revolutionary force proved vitally important. As Bobby Seale recounts, the first lesson of Fanon was that the BPP had to absorb ‘the brother who’s pimping, the brother who’s hustling, the unemployed, the downtrodden, the brother who’s robbing banks, who’s not politically conscious’, before the power structure did (Seale quoted in Malloy, 2017: 60).

Moreover, in linking the violence of racialized oppression with the psychological effects of colonialism and white supremacy on its victims, Fanon provided a ‘bridge between decolonization in the Third World and the Struggles of people of colour in the First World’ (Malloy, 2017: 23). In one sense, this ‘bridge’ was one permutation of the wider conviction that everything was connected, and it allowed the BPP to identify the police as a ‘brutal and illegitimate occupying force’ and ghetto riots as a ‘protopolitical resistance’ to that force (Bloom and Martin, 2013: 67). Frequently, circumstances had contrived to prove the literal truth of this, as when two infantry divisions, having recently deployed to Vietnam, were sent to help police quell the 1967 Detroit race riots (Bloom and Martin, 2013: 275). As George Murray, Education Minister of the BPP, remarked in a speech to a Black student union: ‘Every time an American mercenary is shot, that’s one less cat that’s going to be killing us in the United States’ (Murray quoted in Bloom and Martin, 2013: 273).

Fanon’s emphasis on colonization therefore accorded with an experience that Black neighbourhoods had long endured. The importance of Fanon was that he allowed the BPP to reformulate the violence it was already prepared to undertake in self-defence as violence which functioned for more than self-defence. It allowed the BPP to claim, both to its members, to the New Left, and a wider audience, that this violence could be both productive and revolutionary. By making decolonization, a violent process, by making that violence a self-creating force that ‘rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude’ (Fanon, 2001: 74) and as a contribution to the vocabulary through which the BPP could articulate the Afro-American experience as that of the colonized, Fanon provided a conception of violence for underpinning the legitimacy of the BPP’s violence. ‘[W]e can create a black world, a black nation’ stated Murray: ‘The way we can make this happen is through violence’ (Murray quoted in Malloy, 2017: 98–99).

Rhetoric and Redescription

The concept of violence provided the BPP, and the New Left more generally, with a vocabulary for critiquing capitalism, racism and imperialism. But it also helped them to attain international solidarity with anticolonial revolutionary movements, in turn permitting them to transcend local limitations like the Mulford Act. Yet the local persisted, and limitations overcome at one level generated challenges at another. Avowals of violence by the New Left, and most especially by the BPP, were met in the domestic (US) context with opprobrium and condemnation. They had, moreover, the unfortunate upshot of confirming accusations of ‘violence’ already levied at the New Left by a wider public. As Angela Davis put it:

Anyone who claims to struggle for revolutionary change, anyone who in fact announces his opposition to a system of domination . . . which ultimately rests on violence is immediately labelled a criminal; that is, an advocate of violence (Davis, 1971: 5).

The situation lead Herbert Marcuse, Davis’s doctoral supervisor and the so-called ‘father of the New Left’, to claim that ‘violence’ exemplified a type of ‘political linguistics utilized as a weapon by the established society’ (Marcuse, 2004: 108, 1969a: 74). Having been labelled the ‘prophet of violence’ by the right-wing press, Marcuse had good reason to contest this particularly emotive term (Feder, 1968). In an interview for the New York Times in October 1968, Marcuse noted how:

. . . we never use the word violence to describe the actions of the police, we never use the word violence to describe the actions of the special forces in Vietnam. Instead, the word is readily applied to the actions of students who defend themselves from the police . . . (Marcuse, 2004: 108).

The force of these condemnations is for the fact that the word ‘violence’ carries what Finlay calls ‘presumptive disapprobation’. Something described as ‘violence’ is something deserving prima facie moral censure (Finlay, 2017: 9:70). Violence therefore belongs to that class of socio-political terms that function as much as to evaluate as to describe. Through these ‘emotive-descriptive’ terms, a society enforces a certain conception of right and wrong, of the permissible and the impermissible (Skinner, 2002). For those that had countenanced, or advocated (or, indeed, celebrated) violence as a method of social transformation, the burden of legitimization engendered a sustained critique of these rhetorical uses of violence.

In the main, this critique entailed rhetorical redescription, the process by which ‘the application of a term of opprobrium or of moral praise is debated in relation to a particular entity or class of entities’ (Finlay, 2009: 755). Finlay distinguishes three rhetorical strategies that political actors may employ to redescribe, and thereby revise the application of, a term like ‘violence’. First, actors seek to revise the use of a term ‘to apply a form of censure based on widely recognised moral and political norms to particular acts or entities’ (Finlay, 2009: 755). Here, the norms which underpin the moral force of a term provide the descriptive criteria for its application. If ‘violence’ denotes entity ‘x’ then, ceteris paribus, it should be used to denote entity ‘y’ on account of those norms. Second, speakers aim at ‘emphatic redescription’, entailing in essence a metaphorical extension of the term. Using this strategy, a speaker ascribes ‘violence’ to an entity which ‘manifests some but not all of the relevant descriptive features’ of violence, in an attempt to emphasize that entity’s moral affinity with violence (Finlay, 2009: 758).

The third rhetorical strategy is revisionary redescription. Under this strategy, speakers aim at permanently revising the criteria by which ascriptions of the term violence are judged appropriate. ‘Through this kind of redescription’, writes Finlay (2009: 757), ‘speakers try to alter public attitudes and achieve wider ideological change’. By challenging the descriptive criteria for the ascription of a term, the aim of the speaker is to challenge the norms which underpin that criteria, thereby opening up new forms of critique. Since the movements which comprised the New Left, whether or not self-described revolutionaries, sought a profound transformation of US society, it is hardly surprising that this was the strategy most frequently employed, almost to the point of exclusivity. In the US domestic context, this redescriptive strategy entailed challenging both the ‘legitimist’ and the ‘individualist’ elements which comprised the dominant, public understanding of violence. This critique was usually facilitated by drawing a distinction between different types of violence thereby typically expanding the scope of the concept of violence.

Legitimist. Under this understanding, ‘violence’ incorporated an idea of illegitimacy and was typically applied to those challenging a given normative order (Fortas, 1968; Wolff, 1969). On the contrary, ‘force’ incorporated a sense of legitimacy and was reserved for those upholding the prevailing normative order; for those commanding either de jure or de facto legitimacy (typically the state). Legitimist definitions were a device used foremost by conservatives as a way of disparaging those seeking to change the prevailing order. ‘In a system that provides the means for peaceful change, no cause justifies violence in the name of change’, declared Richard Nixon (Nixon quoted in Grundy and Weinstein, 1974: 33). However, as one commentator noted, legitimist uses of ‘violence’ had been ‘an article of faith among public officials and a large majority of the American citizenry’ (Grundy and Weinstein, 1974: 40).

The critique of the legitimist mode is intimated by Marcuse highlighting the discrepancy between the ascription of ‘violence’ to students, but not to the police and to soldiers in Vietnam. Marcuse thereafter urged a distinction between ‘defensive’ and ‘aggressive’ uses of violence as a substitution for ascribing violence according to the legitimacy of a political actor. A similar strategy is evidenced by SDS leader Tom Hayden (1967: 3) when, after the June 1967 Newark Riots, he implored Americans to ‘turn their attention from the law-breaking violence of the rioters to the original and greater violence of racism’. That the violence of the rioters was illegal, so Hayden claims, does not explain its wrongfulness.

Individualist. Such accounts typically take violence to be a direct, interpersonal act of force, usually beyond the ‘average’ of expected behaviour, involving the infliction of physical injury and often attended by a degree of psychological harm. Then as today, the individualist understanding of violence was the ‘normal’ understanding of violence as found in ordinary language usage. The most determined critique of this component of understanding violence is mounted by Stokely Carmichael. In a 1967 speech, Carmichael alighted on ‘the importance of definitions’ when discussing violence. ‘We want to talk about violence’, Carmichael (2015: 152) declares, ‘because the West is always upset by violence when a black man uses it’. Challenging hegemonic individualist definitions, Carmichael proposes a more expansive understanding of violence, reminding the audience that ‘violence takes many forms’. To do so, he distinguishes between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ types of violence (Carmichael, 2015: 151–152, 166). The first type, defined by ‘white society’ and often ‘recorded on TV cameras’, consists of ‘overt acts by individuals with usually the immediate results of the deaths of victims, of the traumatic and violent destruction of property’. Covert violence, on the contrary, is ‘the overall operation of established and respected forces in the society’, including poverty and racialized discrimination. This type of violence is ‘less overt, far more subtle’, and cannot be captured by ‘specific individuals’ committing specific acts, but it is ‘no less destructive of human life’ (Carmichael, 2015: 151). Here, Carmichael’s primary motivation for conceptualizing ‘covert’ violence is a desire to capture the racialized nature of violence in the United States. Carmichael (2015: 150) invokes Fanon – his ‘patron saint’ – reminding his audience that racialized violence cannot be an individual problem but a collective one, that its collective character must therefore be accounted for in its concept.

Conclusion: Evaluating Context and Contradiction

The sober realism which informs the ameliorative approach values evaluation as much as interpretation. The worth of the approach urged in this article will be gauged not only by the historical understanding it makes possible, but also by the critical value it provides in adjudicating and dismantling ‘manipulative’ uses of ‘violence’. There is not the space here to fully develop the normative implications of contextual shift – that will form the topic of further research. There is though the sense of a direction to be taken.

The insight underlaying Finlay’s evaluative criteria (outlined in the ‘The Ameliorative Approach’ section) for judging principled from unprincipled redeployments of socio-political terms is that, when innovating with concepts, political actors are beholden to exiting linguistic conventions and so, whether they like it or not, are obliged either to appeal to those conventions or to provide good reasons for not doing so. To borrow from Marx (1996: 32), actors innovate with concepts, just not under historical circumstances of their choosing. By introducing contextual shift and contradiction, we are afforded the opportunity to recognize an additional layer of circumstances against which actors are obligated to innovate. As Martin (1997: 430) writes, ‘by more fully recovering the author’s situation, we are better placed to appreciate the extent to which the author capitalized on, or even managed to expand, the available room for manoeuvre’. Unravelling the commitments which informed an actor’s redescription of a concept, along with the contextual shift which realigned those commitments, we are better placed to judge the sincerity – or not – of conceptual innovation. Who had greater opportunity for proposing a concept of violence, and who squandered that opportunity on pejorative uses or ad hominen attacks? Who, on the contrary, sought best to capture real-world violence, even while trying to meet those various other demands that political life places on us?

This last question raises the possibility that a concept of violence which best captures real-world instances of violence goes unutilized because it cannot be made to work with extant commitments and traditions; or that a less pragmatically suited concept is employed in its place. This, however, need not be deemed a ‘manipulative’ use of violence. It is more a reflection of the fact that political actors seldom live without contradiction. However, this does not relieve the actor of the fact that in some sense they chose those commitments. We are still obliged to ask where those commitments arose from and whether a specific actor was right to hold them. In turn, evaluating whether political commitments were legitimate and, therefore, worth holding, has long been a mainstay of political theory.

In addition, some actors will be better placed than others to capitalize or expand the ‘available room for manoeuvre’ when innovating with a concept. There was not scope in this article to detail reactionary conceptual redeployments of ‘violence’ by the right during the period under consideration, and so what could not be addressed here is whether those who have preponderant capabilities (the state, the media) are as encumbered in their deployments of ‘violence’ as those with fewer material or ideational resources. Using contradiction and contextual shift as a way of illuminating such inequities will make a valuable contribution to studies of the politics of naming violence. That the call for racial justice is making itself felt loudly once again, carrying with it a trenchant critique of different forms of violence, impresses the urgent need for such research.