Violence is the exercise of physical force to damage, restrain, dispossess, or kill. Every political tradition claims to oppose violence. The question anarchism asks is: whose violence counts as violence?
The state defines itself as the monopoly on legitimate violence — Weber’s formulation. Police violence, military violence, incarceration, deportation, the enforcement of property claims through eviction, the enforcement of borders through detention and death — these are not called violence. They are called law enforcement, national defense, maintaining order. The violence is real — people are beaten, caged, killed — but its classification as “legitimate” renders it invisible as violence. It becomes the background condition, the way things are, the price of civilization.
Against this background, any resistance that involves physical force is immediately classified as violence — and condemned. A window is broken during a protest: violence. A worker sabotages equipment: violence. A community defends its land against extraction: violence. The framing is systematic: the state’s ongoing, structural, lethal violence is order; any physical resistance to that violence is disorder. The question “do you support violence?” is never asked about the police.
Structural violence
The concept of structural violence (Johan Galtung, 1969) names the domination that kills without anyone pulling a trigger. When people die because they cannot afford health care, that is structural violence. When life expectancy differs by decades between neighborhoods, that is structural violence. When Indigenous peoples experience epidemic rates of suicide under colonial conditions, that is structural violence. When workers’ bodies deteriorate from labor performed under conditions set by someone else’s profit calculations, that is structural violence.
Structural violence is what capitalism, the state, colonialism, and patriarchy produce as their normal operation — not as their failure but as their function. The landlord who evicts a family into homelessness is exercising violence. The employer who maintains unsafe working conditions because safety costs money is exercising violence. The border regime that lets people drown rather than rescue them is exercising violence. None of these register in the dominant frame as “violence” because they operate through institutions rather than through individual acts.
Anarchism insists on recognizing structural violence as violence — not metaphorically but literally. People die. The deaths are produced by identifiable structures maintained by identifiable institutions for identifiable purposes. The refusal to call this violence is itself ideological: it naturalizes domination by categorizing its lethality as something other than force.
The violence/nonviolence debate
The debate within anarchism and the broader left over violence and nonviolence is, from the anarchist perspective, usually misframed. The question is presented as: should the movement use violence? But this framing accepts the state’s monopoly on the definition of violence. It treats the state’s systematic, structural violence as the neutral baseline and asks whether resistance should “add” violence to the situation.
Anarchism reframes: violence is already happening. The question is not whether to introduce violence into a peaceful situation but whether to resist violence that is already being exercised. A community that defends itself against police eviction is not “introducing violence” — the eviction is the violence; the defense is the response.
This does not mean anarchism endorses unlimited force. Errico Malatesta argued that violence in service of liberation should be proportional, targeted, and used as a last resort — not because the state’s violence deserves a proportional response, but because means shape ends (prefigurative politics). A movement that normalizes cruelty will produce cruel institutions. A movement that uses force only when necessary, against identifiable structures of domination rather than against people in general, is more likely to produce the social relations it claims to pursue.
Bonanno’s insurrectionary position differs: the question is not proportionality but directness. Action against structures of domination — sabotage, expropriation, disruption — is direct action, not violence. The frame of “violence” is imposed by the state to delegitimize resistance. What matters is whether the action targets domination.
The function of the violence question
“Do you support violence?” is a disciplinary question. Its function is not to generate understanding but to force a binary that serves the existing order. If you say yes, you are marginalized as dangerous. If you say no, you have accepted the state’s monopoly on force and limited your resistance to forms the state permits — which is to say, forms that do not threaten it.
Anarchism refuses the binary. It recognizes that the question itself is an exercise of power: it defines what counts as violence, who gets to use it, and what resistance is permitted. The anarchist response is not “yes” or “no” but an analysis: what structures of violence already exist, who maintains them, who benefits from them, and what it would take to dismantle them.
Related
- the state — claims the monopoly on legitimate violence
- coercion — the mechanism through which institutional violence operates
- domination — the structural condition violence maintains
- direct action — action against domination, reframed as “violence” by the state
- property — enforced through violence classified as law
- colonialism — ongoing structural and direct violence against Indigenous peoples
- refusal — resistance that may or may not involve physical force
- prefigurative politics — means shape ends, including the use of force