Breaking patterns

(http://www.practicalanarchy.org/fnb_crass.html)

"Anarchism and Non-Violence:

There have been many concerns raised about whether or not anarchism and non-violence are compatible. We argue that anarchism and non-violence are inseparable.

First, let us look at the historic role of the state. Christopher Day, of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, writes: "The state - by which we mean the police, the army, the prisons, the courts, the various government bureaucracies, legislative and executive bodies - is the enforcer and regulator of authoritarian rule. The state maintains a monopoly on organized legal violence." Day writes further, "The state has always been an instrument of war. It is impossible to conceive of a society without war in a society still dominated by states."

In the Food Not Bombs book Feeding the Hungry and Building Community, it is explained that, "The name Food Not Bombs states our most fundamental principle; society needs to promote life, not death. Our society condones, and even promotes violence and domination. Authority and power are derived from the threat and use of violence."

The state and correspondingly capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy, concentrate power into the hands of the few, which systematically denies power to the majority of humanity. The denial of power over ones own life contributes to the violence that permeates day to day life. Violence happens in hundreds of different ways, everyday, as a result of this system of inequality. Whether it comes through rent, food with pesticides and price tags that hide the damages done to workers, taxes, jobs working to make someone else rich, malnutrition, police sweeps of homeless people, forced sterilization of women of color, social exclusion of poor people, and the list goes on.

So what is the connection between anarchism and non-violence? We must recover the long history of anarchist resistance and movement that has existed, and we will find that in fact anarchism and the struggle for a non-violent world have a long history."