Abstract
The concept of ‘the violence inherent in the system’ was famously satirized by Monty Python in their movie The Holy Grail. In order to avoid ridicule, left-wing theorists and activists for a long time stopped using the expression. The underlying social critique, which had given rise to the expression, was also widely dismissed from serious consideration, merely through invocation of the phrase. Because of this, there has been little explicit discussion of the actual political theory that was being satirized in this scene. And yet the theory has continued to exercise considerable influence on the practice of many left-wing groups, particularly in the way that protest is conceptualized and carried out. The central objective in this paper will be to provide an explicit articulation of the theory, in order to show how it falls short of providing a meaningful critique of any aspect of our social practices.
Most people, when they hear the phrase ‘the violence inherent in the system’, are reminded of a well-known scene in the Monty Python movie The Holy Grail, in which a pair of peasants reject an order from King Arthur, on the grounds that they have formed an ‘anarcho-syndicalist commune’ where ‘supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses’. When the king finally gets tired of their banter and grabs one of them, the peasant begins to jump about, crying ‘now we see the violence in inherent in the system!’ Unfortunately, the prevailing social and political context has changed quite significantly since this movie was released in 1975, as a result of which not everyone fully understands what was being satirized. What the Monty Python actors were doing in this scene (as well as several others in The Life of Brian) was engaging in an anachronistic use of political vocabulary and theories that were ubiquitous in the left-wing oppositional movements of the 1960s. In the case of The Holy Grail, the satire was almost too effective. Because of this scene, left-wing theorists and activists for a long time stopped talking about ‘the violence inherent in the system’. And indeed, the underlying social critique, which had given rise to the expression, was also widely dismissed from serious consideration, merely through invocation of the phrase.
In part because of this, there has been little explicit discussion of the actual political theory that was being satirized in the scene. It fell into abeyance largely due to the effects of ridicule rather than refutation. And yet the theory has continued to exercise considerable influence on the practice of many left-wing groups, particularly in the way that protest is conceptualized and carried out. Furthermore, with the passage of time, many younger people have become attracted to the ‘60s view, or what might be called the ‘violence inherent in the system critique’ (VISC) of the present social order, apparently unaware of its rather grave theoretical deficiencies. Thus my primary objective in this paper will be to provide an articulation of the VISC, in order to show how it falls short of providing a meaningful critique of any aspect of our social practices. The secondary objective will be to show how the widespread rejection of the VISC in the late 20th century gave rise to a number of more sophisticated theoretical variants. I will conclude by showing how these more sophisticated theories nevertheless fail to escape from the basic deficiencies of the cruder view.
1. Origins of the theory
In its narrowest form, the VISC is a way of responding to some of the more hyperbolic claims made in support of the capitalist economy. Particularly during the Cold War, it was common for proponents of capitalism to draw an invidious comparison between the coercive organization of economic affairs in the Eastern bloc countries and the ‘freedom’ of markets in the West. In certain respects, they were just echoing remarks made by Karl Marx, who observed that there is no overt coercion in market relations, people are voluntarily agreeing to exchange goods with one another. 1 No one seems forced to do anything that they do not want to do, or to enter into any contract whose terms they do not accept. Government, on the other hand, even when it acts in ways that benefit everyone, is nevertheless coercive in its interventions. Thus the market was presented as a uniquely favoured institution that allowed for a reconciliation between pursuit of the common good and preservation of individual liberty.
The obvious response to this was to observe that markets are not a state of nature, but rather are based upon rules that are, in turn, coercively enforced. 2 While contracts may be entered into voluntarily, the underlying set of property rights, which define the entitlements that people bring to these exchanges, are coercive. Consider the case of Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean, arrested for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. No matter how great your need, if you take someone else’s property, the owner can call the police, who will not only force you to return it but may also drag you away to suffer further punishment, sometimes of a corporal nature. This is the violence that lies just beneath the surface of ordinary commercial affairs. 3 No one is forced to enter into a particular labour contract, and yet if the alternative is starvation, the result of being forcibly constrained from taking what one needs to survive, then the freedom being exercised in the contract is illusory. The only reason that we are not all exposed to the underlying violence, in our day-to-day affairs, is that most people accept these limitations on their freedom and so do not test the rules. Nevertheless, when we look at the distribution of wealth in our society, it is important not to mistake it for a natural pattern, or as the product of free choice, because any attempt to change that pattern, through anything other than a narrow set of officially approved means, will immediately be suppressed by force.
David Graeber articulates this view in an unusually clear fashion, when describing the violence inherent in the system of property rights: The violence that I’m referring to is not abstract. I am not speaking of conceptual violence. I am speaking of violence in the literal sense: the kind that involves, say, one person hitting another over the head with a wooden stick. All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by government in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force. “Force” in turn is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence: that is, the ability to call up people dressed in uniforms, willing to threaten to hit others over the head with wooden sticks.
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Given the obvious correctness of these remarks – this is a somewhat simplified but essentially accurate description of how policing in our society works – one might wonder why anyone considers it necessary to ‘expose’ this underlying violence. Graeber’s remarks are clearly intended to imply that there is something intolerable about this coercion, along with the distribution of property that it supports. The major reason that the system remains stable, on his view, is not that people live in constant fear, but rather that they have been tricking into thinking that they are free, or persuaded that the violence is not there. To use the common metaphor, they fail to notice the bars of their cage, because they never try to escape, and as a result, tend to forget over time that they are even confined. This ‘forgetting’ is often described as an effect of ideology, understood as a set of beliefs that, despite being untrue, are nevertheless reproduced because they are functionally required for the maintenance of the social system. 5 In the same way that Christianity made feudalism tolerable by promising peasants that there was an afterlife in which ‘the last shall be first and the first last’, the ideology of free contracting makes capitalism tolerable, by persuading the working classes that the distribution of wealth is the product of spontaneous, voluntary decisions taken by all (or that it is produced by natural forces that are outside anyone’s control).
So what is a revolutionary to do? Marx suggested that the central contribution of intellectuals would be to engage in a critique of ideology. By stripping away all illusions, demonstrating the falsity of claims to freedom and equality, the intellectual could force the masses to recognize the intolerability of their circumstances, and thus hasten the arrival of the revolutionary moment. ‘Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy; and once the lightning of thought has struck deeply into this native soil of the people the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished’. 6 Attempts to disclose or demonstrate ‘the violence inherent in the system’ are most naturally understood as part of this endeavour. To the extent that freedom is the antithesis of coercion, acts that expose the violent manner in which market norms are enforced constitute a clearcut refutation of the ideology of the free market. These acts can be understood as a form of practical ideology-critique, accomplishing through deeds what philosophers have, in the past, sought only to change through words.
This is the narrow version of the VISC, because it focuses specifically on the ideology of capitalism and the coercive enforcement of property law. The basic analysis, however, was subject to significant generalization in the post-war period, especially under the influence of Sigmund Freud. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud observed that there is a tradeoff between social order and individual freedom, understood in terms of our capacity to satisfy our instinctual desires. 7 To the extent that the progress of civilization requires an increasingly restrictive set of rules, ‘instinctual renunciation’ is a necessary feature of the modern condition. Thus Freud was inclined to view all rule-following as inherently repressive. This analysis became wedded, in the minds of many, to the view that capitalism requires conformity – whether it be through the tyranny of the clock in production or the acceptance of mass-produced goods in consumption – which requires the repression of creative thinking, free love, artistic expression, and other forms of spontaneous gratification.
This analysis became enormously influential through the countercultural movements of the 1960s, when many radicals drew the conclusion that the central structure of repression in society was not the system of property law underlying capitalism, but rather the social order as a whole (i.e. ‘the system’). 8 In other words, the ‘violence inherent in the system’ could be found in the enforcement of norms in general. The tendency of the police to engage in repressive disruption of non-conformist forms of individual expression and exploration – whether it be rock concerts, gay bars or marijuana grow-ops – seemed like particularly blatant evidence of this, but so was the everyday censure that hippies, peaceniks, artists and other non-conformists encountered from ‘squares’ in daily life. 9 Thus the movie Easy Rider was understood as a dramatization of the violence inherent in the system, this time with southern rednecks acting as instruments of social control, rather than uniformed officers. The electroshock therapy inflicted on the protagonist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was understood as part of the same system of repressive social control, this time aimed at suppression of free thought. 10
Again, the widespread conviction on the countercultural left was that ordinary people tolerated this system of repression only because they were largely unaware of its existence. They failed to see the bars of the cage, because they were conformists who had never tried to wander very far from its confines. Thus a generation of activists saw it as their role to strike lightning into the soil of suburban America, by showing how non-conformity was violently suppressed in contemporary society. One of the major strategies for doing so was inspired by the civil rights movement, especially the model of protest developed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Many of the southern states governed by Jim Crow laws had defended the arrangement by arguing that it was a mutually agreeable accommodation between whites and blacks. By contrast to the disorder in northern cities, apologists for southern states argued that race relations were actually more harmonious there, because everyone knew their place. Civil rights activists succeeded in showing that this supposed harmony was a facade. They needed only to scratch the surface – for example, by organizing a voter registration drive in a black community, or a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter – to expose the terror and violence that held it all in place. The images of police with cattle prods, truncheons and dogs attacking peaceful protesters, splashed across the pages of Life magazine and played out on the evening news, were sufficient to reveal to ordinary Americans the true nature of the Jim Crow south.
This example had an enormous influence on the way that activists thought about protest. The negative press coverage generated by what came to be known as the ‘Chicago police riot’ of 1968, at the time of the Democratic Political Convention, suggested that the strategy could be generalized. Unlike protesters in the Paris uprising, who barricaded roads and tore up cobblestones to throw at police, the American demonstrators, taking their cue from the civil rights movement, maintained fairly scrupulous adherence to the law, engaging in no more than symbolic confrontation and taunting of authorities. The police fell squarely into the trap, assaulting protesters in a way that generating countless images of ‘peaceful protesters attacked by police’ (PPAP), which in turn produced widespread public disapproval. Protestors quickly came to see this as an effective strategy for delegitimizing the major institutions of power and social control in America. (The arrest of 10 yippies outside the Chicago convention, including Jerry Rubin, for a stunt involving the nomination of a pig as presidential candidate, suggested that even very broad satire posed a sufficient threat to the system that its defenders would respond with force.) The broader objective became one of demonstrating to the ‘silent majority’ of Americans, sitting in front of their television sets, that the only reason they were not being attacked in their homes was because they accepted their servitude voluntarily. If they were to resist the deadening conformity of their daily existence, they would be violently attacked as well.
It was not long, however, before the limitations of this tactic became clear, in part because the police developed more sophisticated responses. Right through to the end of the 1960s, American police remained willing to fire guns directly into crowds of assembled demonstrators, using lethal rounds. 11 Since that time, Western police forces have acquired both better protective equipment and more effective nonlethal weaponry, and most police organizations have become more serious about enforcing officer discipline, as well as implementing better training for crowd control. American state governors also became increasingly reluctant to deploy National Guard troops (who are essentially soldiers, untrained in nonlethal tactics). 12 This forced protesters to become more provocative, or at least more creative in their attempts to generate police overreaction. The result was the emergence of a game that has been played, essentially unchanged, since the 1960s, between police and a certain segment of protesters, which involves the latter trying to generate PPAP images. This is why in the Monty Python scene the peasant begins to hop about and yell, inviting others to ‘come see the violence inherent in the system’ the moment King Arthur touches him (and afterwards calls out to bystanders, ‘did you see him repressing me?’), like a soccer player trying to draw a foul.
The fact that Monty Python were ridiculing this protest strategy already in 1975 suggests that the public at large had become wise to the game, which might in turn have prompted reconsideration of the value of the strategy. There were other grounds for reconsideration as well. A major negative byproduct of the protest strategy is that it has a tendency to turn every major mobilization, over time, into a public debate about policing. This is, of course, not unwelcome when the original issue happens to be police conduct. It has, however, become the object of some controversy with groups seeking to mobilize around other issues, who lament the way that it shifts public attention away from the issue that initially motivated the protest. The Occupy Wall Street protests, for example, which began in 2011 as a mobilization against economic inequality, over time ceased to generate headlines related to inequality, and became focussed entirely on police conduct, as authorities grappled with the problems generated by having urban parks around the world transformed into tent cities. (As Micah White describes it, the movement got its first big break from a PPAP moment arising from a so-called ‘snake march’ in New York City, designed to disrupt traffic flow, when ‘a police officer pepper-sprayed two women, who fell to their knees screaming in pain. The incident was caught on video from multiple angles by bystanders and rebroadcast nationally by the political comedian Jon Stewart’). 13 According to VISC theory, there is nothing wrong with this shift in focus, because police violence is the foundation of economic inequality. Indeed, although White deems the Occupy tactics to have eventuated in failure (and blames activists for ‘perpetuating failed protest behaviors and outdated social change theories’, 14 ), he does not question this aspect of the strategy. Indeed, he clearly thought that it would not be the occupations per se, but rather the police response to the occupations that would catalyse the Occupy movement into a revolutionary overthrow of the economic order. On this view, because the social order as a whole rests on violence, every injustice is, in the final analysis, a problem about violence, and so every protest is merely another opportunity to expose the violence inherent in the system. Violence, especially police violence, is of course an issue of social justice; the question is whether it is the only issue, or whether it is the issue that every other issue boils down to, as the VISC maintains.
2. Critique of the theory
The temptation to satirize VISC theory is rather strong. I have often invited my students to figure out for themselves what is wrong with it by offering the following ‘classroom’ reductio ad absurdum. I begin by pointing out the orderliness of the classroom (e.g. students are sitting quietly in their desks, facing forward, putting up their hand when they want to speak, etc.) They may feel that this is natural, but of course it is not, since out in the hall there is raucous conversation and movement. Within the classroom, order is maintained by the authority that I enjoy as the instructor (e.g. standing at the front, holding the floor, calling on students to speak, etc.). If a student were to become disruptive (e.g. physically agitated or threatening, excessively noisy or rude, etc.), I would order him to stop. If the student failed to comply, I have the authority to expel him from the classroom. If he failed to comply with that order, I can call campus police, who will then come and enforce the order. In the extreme, they will physically subdue and drag the student from the classroom. Thus it is not difficult to trace the line back, in order to show that the orderliness of the classroom rests upon a set of rules, and that these rules are in turn enforced, first through hierarchical authority, but if that proves ineffective, through recourse to physical violence. So my power, as a classroom instructor, is ultimately backed by campus police, and their power, ultimately, rests in their authorization (and willingness) to use violence against students. Does it follow then that the classroom is a repressive hierarchy in which order is maintained only because of the violence that is at my disposal? Is the only reason that students are sitting cowed and silent at their desks, taking notes, is because of the black-shirts that I have at my command, ready to start hitting people over the head with sticks? Or for those who comply voluntarily, is it only because they are too mired in conformity and blinkered by ideology to see that the university is a regime of structural violence? Having never strayed from the beaten path, they have no idea what agonies await those who do...
These suggestions, it should be noted, were taken quite seriously in the ‘60s, and formed an important part of the motivation for the creation of open schools, and later the unschooling movement (not to mention the soon-to-be-ubiquitous figure of the ‘cool’ teacher, who shows up in jeans, tells students to relax, and invites them to put their desks in a circle).
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Over time these ideas have become less persuasive, in part because the alternative models of education proposed have had rather dismal results, as far as the attainment of reasonable pedagogical objectives is concerned. Thus I have, in the past, relied upon what I took to be the self-evident absurdity of these conclusions as the basis of a reductio, inviting students to figure out for themselves what must be wrong with the VISC that it licenses such inferences. Graeber, however, does not see it as a reductio, but rather boldly answers ‘yes’ to the above questions. For example, he used to remind his own students that, as they enter the university library, they are the beneficiaries of a system of violent social exclusion: This [violence] is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on the fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required.
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The university is therefore just one of many institutions that ‘ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm’. 17 Graeber refers to this as ‘structural violence’, although he is at pains to emphasize that the latter term should be understood literally, not metaphorically. These social structures are ones ‘that could only ever be maintained by the threat of violence, even if in their ordinary, day-to-day workings, no actual physical violence need take place’. 18 Similarly, Slavov Žižek describes (without apparent irony) this sort of structural (or ‘objective’) violence as ‘the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence’. 19
The question is whether these observations constitute a critique of the institutions that are sustained in this manner. Does Graeber’s analysis show, for example, that there is something deeply problematic about the way that university libraries are organized? There are several reasons to think that it does not.
2.1. Violence is not necessarily bad
The most obvious point that can be made about the VISC is that, as an explicitly formulated critique, it relies upon a suppressed normative premise, which is that there is something wrong with this violence, or something that is unjustifiable about it. In my presentation of the view, I elided this difficulty by describing the violence as ‘intolerable’ or as provoking ‘disapproval’. But ultimately the basis of this judgement must be explained. For example, if the system of property rights is one that generates extreme inequality, such that Jean Valjean is unable to feed his children, then the simplest way to criticize it would be to complain about the inequality. After all, if the distribution of property were more equal, such that the Valjean family had all the food they needed, this would seem to resolve this issue. It is not clear where the conceptual or moral gain lies in directing attention away from the inequality, which would seem to be the major problem with the allocation of property, toward the violence that is inherent in the enforcement mechanism of this and every other legal prohibition. If anything, the VISC argument seems to take an ordinary social justice complaint and burden it with a far more controversial commitment to political anarchism.
In some cases, the idea that violence is never justified stems from a lack of life experience, or a privileged upbringing, which leads some to believe that people can always be reasoned with, and so violence is never required in human affairs. In other cases, the normative premise seems to be motivated by scepticism about value, of the sort that drives many people toward philosophical utilitarianism. From the disenchanted perspective of the modern scientific worldview, it is no longer possible to see nature as suffused with goodness, or as possessing objective value. Nevertheless, many are tempted by the thought that there must be something – some natural state of affairs – that can be unproblematically described as ‘good’, or as having value. This leads many to the thought that ‘pleasure’ can provide the foundation for a naturalistically respectable conception of the good. 20 Along the same lines, one might despair of providing a full reconstruction of the traditional notion of evil, and yet think that ‘violence’, as the intentional infliction of pain and suffering, is something that everyone can agree is wrong. Thus it is not difficult to imagine a minimalist moral view that treats ‘violence is wrong’ as axiomatic and unquestionable.
There are, however, two major problems with such a view. The first is that, even if some people find the analysis attractive, the overwhelming majority of the population subscribes to a more complex moral view, in which there is such a thing as righteous or justified violence. It is fair to say, as Walter Benjamin does, that in modern societies ‘violence is no longer exercised or tolerated naively’. 21 But this is not to say that violence is not tolerated at all. Most people consider it good when good things happen to good people, but also good when bad things happen to bad people. 22 This is the intuition that underlies retributivism, or the view that those who act badly deserve to be punished. Contrary to the utilitarian analysis, in which the punishment is prima facie bad, and so must be outweighed by some other benefit in order to be justifiable, the retributivist thinks that the punishment is not bad, but actually good. The fact that the individual being punished deserves it flips the signs, as it were, transforming what would ordinarily be a bad act into a good one. Violence, in this sense, is valued as a moralistic response to wrongdoing. 23
It does not matter for our purposes whether this sort of retributivism is justifiable or not in the final philosophical analysis, what matters is that this is how most people feel about punishment. Thus the VISC appears to rely on a controversial philosophical view. At very least, this means that merely exposing structural violence is unlikely to strike lightning into the soil of the people in quite the way that many activists have hoped. Contrary to White’s expectations, for example, protesters who disrupt traffic in New York City, while sometimes successful at generating PPAP images, are unlikely to be regarded by everyone as sympathetic victims once the police step in. Indeed, the protest tactic seems more likely to generate polarization than mass mobilization. And yet despite this fact, the tactic of blocking traffic has become increasingly widespread, even though it seems likely to irritate precisely the people that the protesters claim to be seeking the support of. Many suburban conformists are also commuters, who may perceive tactics such as traffic disruption as an expression of an elitist disregard, if not contempt, for their interests. 24
The second major problem with the blanket condemnation of violence is that it is very closely tied to political anarchism (explicitly so in Graeber’s work), which in addition to being controversial, has also been the object of what many regard as a crushing philosophical refutation. Indeed, Thomas Hobbes’s major contribution to political philosophy is to have shown that the use of force by the state need not be justified entirely through reference to punishment or desert. 25 His analysis of the state of nature is intended to show that private individuals, going about their own business, and bearing no particular ill-will toward one another, will nevertheless become locked in collectively self-defeating interaction patterns. Although they can see that it would be mutually beneficial to help one another, to keep their promises, to refrain from violent predation and to respect each others’ liberties, there is no basis for trust between them. They are unable to credibly commit themselves to refraining from acting opportunistically – accepting the benefits provided by others and yet failing to reciprocate. One way to enhance their credibility is to license some third party to impose a punishment upon them in the event of any compliance failure.
What Hobbes is able to show, through this argument, is that there need not be anything suspicious or problematic about the use of violence by the state. While he obviously had no inclination to minimize the role of violence in human affairs, Hobbes’ central insight was that, contrary to appearances, the use of force does not mean that someone must be forcing something upon someone else. Two people might happily put themselves under the power of a third – to pre-authorize the use of force against themselves – because it is mutually beneficial for them to do so, insofar as it enhances the credibility of their commitments. Although it is an admittedly counterintuitive point, once properly appreciated it becomes devastating to simplistic forms of both libertarianism and political anarchism. 26 This is why Hobbes’ argument forms the cornerstone of all contemporary liberal theories of state power.
It is not difficult to see the upshot of this analysis in my example of the classroom. The rules that govern student behaviour are aimed at creating a social environment that is conducive to learning, an outcome that is beneficial to (and hopefully desired by) the students. To the extent that something is being taught in a classroom, it is usually because it is difficult to learn on one’s own. The material often requires step-by-step explanation, which in turn requires a great deal of concentration on the part of the listener. This requires an environment that is relatively free from distraction. Maintaining this environment is, first and foremost, a cooperative enterprise among the students, since they are the ones who are the intended beneficiaries of the lecture. (The most basic ‘free rider’ strategy in the classroom is for students to fidget and make noise when they are not trying to concentrate, ignoring the effects on those who still are.) Granting the instructor the authority to discipline unruly students stands to benefit everyone in the classroom, by deterring those who would disrupt the learning environment, and thereby allowing everyone to achieve the mutually desired outcome. The Pink Floyd theory of schooling, that sees the authority of the instructor as part of a system of domination, is based on an extremely superficial reading of the institution. 27 It is, however, the same misreading that informs the anarchist interpretation of the power of the state.
2.2. Violence is not directed toward all
The second major problem with the VISC theory is the suggestion that, because violence is used to impose conformity to the rules on some people, that the orderliness of the system as a whole rests ‘ultimately’ on violence. The natural objection to this would be to claim that, for most people, conformity is purely voluntary. This is where the sheeple component of the VISC argument comes in. The suggestion is made that those who conform voluntarily to the social order are subject to some form of psychic control, brainwashing or ideology, which prevents them from acting on their true interests. If they were to free themselves from these false beliefs, they would then encounter its external complement, viz. the violence inherent in the system. So violence remains the essential backstop for the entire repressive apparatus of social control.
This analysis might make sense when applied to a system of pure domination, such as slavery, but it makes a great deal less sense when applied to systems that institutionalize a scheme of cooperation. Again, the classroom provides a wealth of examples. Even as simple a rule as conversational turn-taking, mediated by the authority of the instructor, creates a system of cooperation. If everyone speaks at the same time, no one can hear what anyone else is saying, and the attempt to exchange ideas will be a failure. One person must speak at a time, in order to be listened to by others, but of course everyone would rather speak sooner rather than later. So while there is a common interest in taking turns, there is a temptation to interrupt, raise one’s voice, talk over others, etc. If waiting one’s turn were to be labelled ‘cooperate’ and interrupting others ‘defect’, the interaction would be a textbook example of a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma. 28
Although economic models of the prisoner’s dilemma predict universal defection, studies by experimental game theorists involving actual people have shown, many times over, that approximately two-thirds of the population can be expected to cooperate, voluntarily and without further incentive, when placed in an interaction that has this structure. The other third (give or take) will free ride. 29 Thus the introduction of a punishment system to deter free riding does not switch the population over from universal defection to universal cooperation, typically it moves the population from majority cooperation to almost-universal cooperation. It has an additional, interesting effect in repeated games. In repeated games without a punishment system, the level of cooperation usually starts out high but then declines over time. The sight of defectors being able to free ride with impunity deters many of those who initially started out acting cooperatively from continuing. They retaliate against the defectors by withdrawing their own cooperation. Cooperative systems with unchecked defection tend to unravel in this way over time. The most important consequence of introducing a punishment system is that it prevents this unravelling from occurring. Cooperators continue to cooperate, not because they find the punishment motivating, but because it gives them the satisfaction of seeing those who defect get punished, and allows them to continue cooperating without fear of being suckered.
The role of the punishment system in sustaining cooperation is therefore Janus-faced. For the anti-social, it promotes cooperation by directly incentivizing those who would otherwise defect. But for those who are more pro-social in inclination, it promotes cooperation indirectly, by providing them with the assurance that the benefits they provide to others will be reciprocated. This is true not only in experimental games, it is a generally recognized feature of the law as well. Legal penalties exist not just to deter the wicked, but to give confidence to the just. Economists have been known to make the same mistake as VISC theorists in assuming that people obey the law only because of the penalties. This is why their forays into criminology and legal theory have been so fruitless. 30 Criminologists, by contrast, usually portray enforcement strategies as a pyramid, with ‘soft touch’ interventions like conversation and verbal warnings at the bottom, becoming somewhat stiffer as one ascends, until one finds coercion at the very top. 31 The reason it is an enforcement pyramid is that the softer interventions are all that is needed in the majority of cases. It is only a very small percentage of the population that needs to be threatened with tangible force, such as being hit on the head with a stick, in order to be brought into compliance with the law.
It is true that modern mass societies rely more heavily on explicit punishment than the small-scale hunter-gatherer societies familiar to anthropologists and studied by people like Graeber. But that is precisely because of their scale, which results in so many of our daily interactions being with strangers. Small-scale societies, in which everyone knows everyone else, can get by with more informal systems of social control. They are, for example, able to use teasing and ridicule as a very powerful tool to ‘put down’ those who become too selfish or unruly. 32 Classroom instructors know as well that public shaming and ridicule are extremely potent tools for controlling misbehaving students, so much so that the wiser among us are extremely sparing in their use. Most students are sufficiently sensitive to the perceptions of their peers that they are extremely vulnerable to even mild rebuke. As a result, the intervention of campus police is almost never required to maintain order – typically the police are summoned only in cases involving mental illness or severe emotional disturbance. Thus it is a fallacy to infer that, because persistent defection will ultimately be punished, all cooperation rests on the threat of punishment.
2.3. Poor strategic analysis
Finally, there has been very consistent confusion regarding the strategic objective of the demonstration tactics appropriated from the U.S. civil rights movement. The ‘freedom riders’ in the southern states in the early 1960s had a fairly specific, reasonably obtainable objective, which was to force the federal government to intervene in states that were refusing to obey various laws and directives aimed at dismantling racial segregation. The goal was to show that local police were either unwilling to defend the rights (and persons) of African-Americans, or were themselves the aggressors. Naturally, the PPAP images generated a great deal of bad publicity for politicians, police officers and white citizens of these states. But this was not the objective, it was merely a means to put pressure on the federal government to take over from state-level authorities. (As James Farmer of CORE put it, ‘Our intention was to provoke the southern authorities into arresting us and thereby prod the Justice Department into enforcing the law of the land’). 33 As such, the strategy exploited a peculiarity of the American criminal justice system, which is that significant law-making authority resides in the states, who are often less compliant with constitutional norms than the federal government.
As the tactic became more widely imitated, however, it became a great deal less clear what exposing the violence inherent in the system was supposed to accomplish. White, for example, despite demanding that the left engage in a more lucid analysis of its protest tactics, is remarkably vague when it comes to specifying exactly what he expected the Occupy movement to accomplish, or how he thought these effects were likely to come about. He admits that his ‘faith that brutal repression of dignified Occupiers would backfire against the United States, proved to be wrong’. 34 But he gives differing accounts of what he thought this ‘backfiring’ would amount to. Quite often he speaks as though he expected the police response literally to provoke a revolution, on the model of the French Revolution – American citizens would take to the streets and overthrow their government. At other times, however, his expectations seemed to involve preservation of the basic constitutional order, but of structural reform within it. On other occasions, he seems to have expected merely that Occupy would generate an upswing in support for left-wing political factions within the Democratic party (in the way that the Tea Party generated several electoral victories for Republicans, along with the formation of the “House Freedom Caucus”).
In the end none of these outcomes materialized. With respect to electoral gains, there is an interesting debate to be had about why the American left is so ineffective at translating popular protest into effective political action. 35 Even the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, which generated some of the most successful PPAP images of the decade, was a prelude to the election of Richard Nixon as President. The eruption of violence may generate a backlash against the ‘fascist pigs’ and other forces of order, but it may just as easily generate insecurity and fear that pushes the population to the right. Many on the left have naively assumed that everyone in society views PPAP images as a morality play between ‘dignified’ protesters and ‘brutal’ police. The population, by contrast, need only be a bit more cynical (e.g. viewing the two sides as playing a game) in order for the tactic to become ineffective. This has been clear since 1968. As Todd Gitlin observes, after the Chicago convention, even among Americans who were opposed to the Vietnam war, more than 40 per cent thought that police had used too little force against protesters. 36
With respect to more radical revolutionary ambitions, suffice it to say that there is simply no precedent for the type of consequences that proponents of VISC theory seem to anticipate. The idea that Americans will spontaneously rise up and overthrow their government, without any sort of coordination, and with no clear plan for its replacement, is quite literally magical thinking (as White himself acknowledges). 37 More generally, it overlooks a fundamental empirical point about social change, which is that it very seldom occurs except through a powerful confluence of ideas and interests. Revolutions do not result from the power of moral arguments alone. Moral arguments are not even effective at mobilizing more than a small fraction of the electorate. People must also have something to gain. Standard formulations of the VISC, however, tacitly concede that most of the population does not have anything to gain from rejecting the violence inherent in the system, because that violence is not directed at them, it is imposed only on a small minority of troublemakers. The fact that protest behaviour aimed at exposing structural violence alienates the broader population has been amply clear from public opinion research for over 50 years. The fact that protesters persist with the tactic suggests that they are not really concerned with the broader public, but that the objective is primarily to persuade themselves that their opponents are ‘fascist pigs’, which in turn relieves them of the need to admit any moral complexity into their analysis of the system. 38 Protest of this form has become, in other words, a form of what Gitlin refers to as ‘expressive politics’. 39
3. Variants of the theory
The discussion so far has focussed on relatively unsophisticated versions of VISC theory, which treat the notion of violence literally and explain the quiescence of the average person as an effect of ideology. More subtle versions of the theory, of the sort that Graeber complained about, argue that this quiescence is achieved, not merely through ignorance, but rather through transformation of the violence into something less obvious. The most influential instance of this can be found in the work of Freud, who argued that the violence and aggression of external authorities become internalized, or ‘introjected’, over the course of socialization, resulting in the formation of the punitive superego, which proceeds to rule over the individual in an equally tyrannical fashion. The ‘violence’ perpetrated by the superego is a type of psychic anguish. Through the process of internalization, ‘a threatened external unhappiness – loss of love and punishment on the part of the external authority – has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt’. 40 The result is a society that is based on a combination of external oppression and internal repression.
On this view, it is not sufficient simply to expose the violence inherent in the system, it is necessary to produce a more comprehensive psychic liberation of the subject, in order to free individuals from the effects of internalized violence. While exposing structures of external violence is not sufficient for this task, it may play a critical role. Seeing the violence played out externally may lead individuals to develop a more suspicious attitude toward their own inhibitions, by showing how they can be traced back to structures of domination and oppression. (During the 1960s the development of permissive parenting practices – in particular, the abolition of corporal punishment – was seen by many as an important step in disrupting the mechanism of internalization, which is how the American paediatrician Benjamin Spock became a countercultural hero). 41
Although Freud’s influence remains vast, one can find non-psychoanalytic versions of the basic model as well. Pierre Bourdieu argued that various systems of domination were sustained, not just through traditional violence, but through ‘symbolic violence’, which he describes as ‘the gentle, disguised form which violence takes when overt violence is impossible’. 42 This is anchored in certain durable dispositions, or personality structures, which in turn generate patterns of domination and deference. Bourdieu claimed that those who are subject to this violence participate in its perpetuation, in part by failing to recognize it for what it truly is. 43 As a result, critical reflection that draws attention to these forms of violence can be expected to have emancipatory consequences.
One can find a similar analysis of social relations in Michel Foucault’s conception of power. Although Foucault was insistent that power not be understood on the model of violence, many critical theorists have felt that exposing relations of power in society plays a role similar to that of exposing violence in the VISC. 44 On Foucault’s view, power is not only repressive, or destructive but also productive, playing an active role in the constitution of both systems of categorization and regimes of truth. Moreover, he regards individual subjects as ‘effects’ of power. This allows him to reject Freud’s psychological model of introjection while nevertheless thinking of socialization, and of social structures, as forces that are fundamentally antagonistic to individual freedom. The thought is that once the subject is constituted in a particular way, having adopted a particular identity, then overt violence is no longer necessary to produce the necessary ‘docility’. In Foucault’s view, power can take many forms, including domination, exploitation or ‘subjection’. He suggests that emancipatory struggles under feudalism were concerned primarily with the first, under early capitalism the second, but in the modern era they involve primarily resistance to various ‘forms of subjection’. 45
Each of these theories is, in its own way, extremely subtle – indeed, it is precisely this quality of subtlety that annoyed Graeber, on the grounds that it draws attention away from more unsubtle forms of physical violence. Yet despite this, each of these views has given rise to a style of critique that is unfortunately rather crude. The traditional VISC regards violence as inherently unacceptable, and so expects that exposing this violence will galvanize the public to revolutionary political action. The more subtle views focus instead on internalized violence, symbolic violence or diffuse ‘capillary’ systems of power, but maintain the expectation that there is something scandalous or unacceptable about this hidden system of control, such that individuals can be expected to rise up and resist it, once they have been made aware of its existence. As many critical theorists have pointed out, there are significant flaws with this analysis. 46
The major reason that human societies and cultures differ from one another so markedly is that social life is governed by a set of shared norms, or rules of conduct, that are not biologically fixed, but rather are reproduced through social learning. The content of these rules varies enormously from place to place and from time to time. The one thing that does not vary, however, is the fact that these rules are enforced. 47 In many cases, the enforcement can be quite subtle. Violations of everyday norms may be greeted with a meaningful stare, mild ridicule, a rude remark, or perhaps just a withdrawal of future cooperation. And yet when individuals ignore these more subtle social cues and persist in the offending behaviour, the sanctions can quickly escalate, leading often to physical confrontation and violence. Demonstrating this point was the objective of a series of influential ‘breaching experiments’ conducted during the 1960s, wherein sociologists sought to show that it is possible to generate a highly disproportionate response – including, in many cases, physical violence – by violating relatively minor rules and then refusing to do the ‘repair work’ that is ordinarily undertaken to restore good relations (e.g. acknowledging the violation, apologizing, etc.). 48
This vast body of norms, which is ubiquitous in ordinary life in every culture and society, is often referred to as constituting the social order. Perhaps the most common error made by aspiring critics is to mistake this social order for a system of domination. It has, for example, been a staple of feminist theory since Simone de Beauvoir to observe that a great deal of characteristically male and female behaviour is not biologically determined, but is rather the product of a set of gender roles that are institutionalized through social norms. It is quite easy to show that various forms of gendered behaviour are socially enforced, which is to say that individuals are subject to punishment, with escalating degrees of severity, for violating these norms. But one cannot conclude, on this basis, that gender is a system of domination, and that resistance to these norms represents some form of emancipation. The problem with this conclusion is that all norms are enforced, and so the mere fact that a particular set of norms is enforced is neither here nor there. It all depends upon their content. Gender norms as such are not oppressive, any more than the norms that structure student behaviour in a classroom, or the interaction of passengers on an airplane, are oppressive. In this domain, as in any other, it is possible to uncover the ‘violence inherent in the system’ by acting in a persistently contra-normative way. But what one is uncovering here is simply a basic fact about human society, and probably about human nature, which tells us nothing at all about whether the particular norms in question are good or bad. Unruly bodies are, as such, no more politically progressive than unruly passengers.
While it may make sense to want to be free from specific norms, one cannot reasonably expect to be free from all norms. The consequences of ignoring this were played out quite clearly in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Under the influence of Freud, many radicals formulated the objective, not to change the stifling set of rules governing sexual morality in the 1950s, but to free themselves from all forms of sexual repression. Since repression was caused by the internalization of norms, the objective became, not to change the rules governing sexual relations, but rather to abolish the rules, and to substitute for them a system of ‘free love’. This project was a failure for two reasons. First, it ignored the extent to which individuals abhor the state of anomie, or generalized normlessness. Norms do not just constrain behaviour, they also focus expectations in a way that dramatically reduces the cognitive and emotional burdens of social interaction. A well-established system of norms allows individuals to manage routine interactions with little expenditure of effort or attention. So while it is possible to overregulate behaviour in a particular domain, it is possible to underregulate it as well. Thus the disruption of all settled expectations in the domain of courtship, dating and sexual relations was experienced by many as extremely anxiety-provoking, and ultimately dysphoric.
The second point, which in retrospect seems almost too obvious to state, is that freeing individuals from all normative constraint has the potential to produce a great deal of anti-social behaviour. In the domain of sexuality, for example, there turns out to be a great deal to be said in favour of repressing certain desires and instincts that might otherwise find expression. People are naturally disposed to act in ways that are loving and kind, but sometimes also cruel and dehumanizing. Rolling back the effects of socialization across the board seems exceedingly unlikely to promote greater human happiness. In particular, an enormous number of problems in our society are due to the fact that certain aspects of male sexual desire are not more thoroughly repressed. As a result, many women eventually came to the conclusion that the ‘free love’ environment was highly inimical to their interests, and so began to call for a re-regulation of sexual relations. Thus the sexual revolution generated a counterrevolution, which is in many respects still being played out in the neo-Victorianism of the contemporary left. 49
This is why, as Herbert Marcuse observed, Freud’s basic normative framework cannot be used to motivate a coherent revolutionary practice. Freud speaks of ‘repression’ as though it were uniformly bad, the antithesis of freedom. Happiness comes from the satisfaction of our instinctual desires, and so to the extent that repression impedes this, it is the primary source of human unhappiness. And yet as Marcuse observed, a certain amount of repression is necessary in order for us to be able to enjoy any of the advantages of an ordered social life, such as being able to walk down the street unmolested. It is one thing to lament the instinctual renunciation imposed upon us by civilization, quite another to advocate the alternative. What we need to focus on, Marcuse argued, is the fact that in addition to this ‘basic’ repression, society also seems to impose a great deal of ‘surplus’ repression, which does not serve any function or produce any obvious advantages. 50 The goal of our emancipatory practices cannot be merely to resist repression, it must be to identify and resist specifically surplus forms of repression. But this of course requires normative criteria, to distinguish good repression from bad repression.
When assessing Foucault’s theoretical framework, many theorists saw just another version of the same problem that Marcuse had identified with Freud. 51 The discovery that all knowledge is imbricated in systems of power, or relations of force between individuals, is just a dramatic way of restating a commonplace sociological observation, which is that the production of knowledge is tied up with various social practices, which are structured by social norms, which are (by their very nature) enforced. Because this is true of all knowledge, and all practices, it does not impugn any particular body of knowledge or practice to point this out. And it most certainly does not provide any grounds for advocating resistance. If power is both ubiquitous and ineliminable, then again some sort of normative criteria are required to distinguish better and worse forms, which Foucault resolutely refused to provide. Some have tried to make a virtue of necessity, by arguing that an aesthetic of existence can be crafted out of this unending struggle for freedom. 52 The more common response has been to reject Foucault’s antinomian stance and grant the distinction between good and bad norms.
Again, it is worth emphasizing that the work of Freud, Bourdieu, Foucault and others has inspired an enormous academic literature, which addresses all of these issues with varying degrees of subtlety, nuance and forthrightness. My objective here has merely been to articulate the most fundamental and recurrent criticism that this entire family of views has been subject to. Like the VISC, these views go to great lengths to draw attention to phenomena that are rightly considered problematic, and yet stop well short of being intrinsically wrong. As a result, they provide no basis for normative judgement, they serve at best as a prelude to discursive contestation and critique. And yet they often ignore this secondary burden, acting as though the case for the prosecution is complete after only opening statements have been made. 53 Of course, like the more straightforward versions of the VISC, it is always possible to supplement these views in ways that will make them more serviceable for social critique, but it is important to see also why the unadorned versions are widely perceived as inadequate.
4. Conclusion
The essential problem with exposing the violence inherent in the system, as either a critical intervention or a revolutionary strategy, is that violence is not inherently wrong. It is, of course, neither politically nor morally anodyne. Violence carries a special justificatory burden. Most political philosophers, however, believe that there are circumstances in which this justificatory burden can be discharged. There are, in other words, instances of legitimate use of force by the state, as well as justifiable punitive action by individuals. Because of this, the mere fact that an institution exhibits some form of ‘structural violence’, in Graeber’s sense of the term, does not constitute a critique of the institution. The identification of underlying violence can, of course, serve as an important prelude to critique, because violence carries with it a special justificatory burden. And yet the mere identification of the violence provides no resources for deciding whether that justificatory burden can ultimately be discharged.
This is why there is not much interest in the VISC among contemporary political theorists, except among proponents of political anarchism, who believe that there can be no legitimate uses of force by the state. (It is not an accident that Graeber considered himself an anarchist.) And yet, largely due to increased understanding of collective action problems, facilitated by game-theoretic models of the prisoner’s dilemma, anarchism is in worse standing now than perhaps at any time in the modern era. 54 For example, the thought that we might solve a problem like global climate change just by encouraging everyone to pull together and do the right thing seems culpably naive. It seems obvious that people are not going to leave fossil fuels in the ground unless forced to do so. Thus the primary influence of VISC theory can be found in the model of protest that remains prevalent on the left, and the idea that there is something to be gained – other than just media attention – by provoking confrontations with the police. And yet there is considerable evidence to suggest that this tactic has never been effective at building support for progressive causes. In this respect, the Monty Python scene had the salutary effect of discouraging both a theory and a practice that never should have been seriously entertained, but in any case should have been subjected to more severe critical scrutiny.
ORCID iD
Joseph Heath https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6024-4371