I would like to emphasize that all political gains are achieved through illiberal struggle against the sort of Rawlsian conception in which we all simply discuss things and form some level of consensus but never a perfect one.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/rawls.pdfIt would appear that it is reasonable for you to ask me to accept private ownership but unreasonable for me to ask you to accept common ownership. The interests of rich and poor can be mediated in the liberal manner; the poor remain poor and the rich rich of course, but rich and poor can treat each other and free and equal persons and can reach a modus vivendi. Social safety nets, public health and education can all moderate the extremes of capitalism and so long as the liberals can hold sway in the capitalist camp all these things are possible to the extent that those who suffer are prepared to engage in the very illiberal struggle against the ills of capitalism.
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By committing itself to the domain of fact and seeking overlapping consensus by excluding counter-factual appeal to comprehensive doctrines, political liberalism does not just tolerate such practices but must actively place itself in opposition to emancipatory projects of this kind. Contrariwise, all emancipatory struggles are illiberal. That is a fact.
This is the reactionary nature of liberalism in that it always plays a moderating effect on such struggles and only in retrospect, after their success considers them within the purview of governing consensus.
But something reflective of this fact is that those who first step outside a nation's norms must be willing to endure it's harsh consequences, but many can continue to carry the torth of worthy causes to the extent that they do establish themselves as an authority within a tradition with institutions and norms comparable to the state itself. This is a point of context that not anyone's violence is worthy and that the beginning of movements to change society must always be experienced as wrong against the prevailing norms.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/hegel-civil-disobedience.htmIn 2018, the newly-appointed General Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Sally McManus, was asked on ABC TV: “We live in a country where there are laws that are established by a parliament that all citizens are expected to abide by ..., regardless of whether you agree or disagree with those laws.” Personally, I was delighted when McManus responded: “I believe in the rule of law where the law is fair, when the law is right. But when it’s unjust, I don’t think there’s a problem with breaking it” (7:30 Report, 15 March 2018).
Hegel would have agreed with the interviewer’s position. According to Hegel, moral choice is limited by the law of the land, as rightly interpreted, and whoever steps outside those limits bears responsibility for any wrong which may result. The question is: to what higher authority was Sally McManus appealing when (unlike her comrades who had an eye to a future parliamentary position), claimed the right, as ACTU General Secretary, to break the laws of the Australian government?
To be clear, McManus was not taking upon herself the right to violate the law; she was speaking as the representative of the labour movement in Australia. She was appealing to the history and principles of the self-legislating, institutionalised labour movement which is as ancient as the state itself and has as much right to objectivity as does the state.
There was no such thing in Hegel’s day; the struggles of working people were subsumed under the category of “social problems,” and Hegel’s conception of social class - a conception which was largely shared in his day even among working people in England - was that the employers were the leaders of the “business class” while the landed aristocracy were the leaders of the “agricultural class.” But since Hegel’s life time a labour movement has grown up through the same kind of historically protracted continuous struggle and suffering as lies behind any state worthy of the same. In Australia, as in many states, the labour movement has been institutionalised with many of the kind of compromises that have been extended to churches. The difference is, however, that the labour movement claims interest in the mundane secular life of the community, whereas the churches have an interest only in saving souls (in every other respect a church is like any other element of civil society).
It is then fair to say that the institutionalised labour movement stands as high an authority over the affairs of employees and employers as does the state. The subordination of the unions to the state, which predominates, is merely something relative, temporary and inessential. The labour movement therefore stands on an equal footing with the state in those actions which bear upon its responsibilities and duties. For Hegel there was no higher authority than the state. He specifically excluded the idea of a League of Nations. Nations should stick to treaties and contracts made with each other, but they could not be bound by any higher authority, even God or the Church. “The march of God in the world, that is what the state is” PS §258ad.
The right to break the law is possible only by appeal to a higher Earthly authority.
Apart from the labour movement, what other institutions can lay claim to authority which, at least in relation to a finite domain of actions, can stand on an equal footing with the state?
While Hegel seems to have approved of the British Raj in India, there can be no doubt that he would have wholeheartedly approved of the Indian Independence War, just as he approved of the Haitian Revolution against French imperialism. Not only did Gandhi lead his nation to national liberation - the highest right of all in Hegel’s eyes - but his followers did so both by laying their lives on the line and by civil disobedience, that is, but nonviolent struggle.
If we can presume Hegelian approval for the Indian Independence Struggle, then surely he must also approve of the US Civil Rights Movement which based itself on Gandhi’s principles. The Civil Rights leaders frequently represented themselves as continuators of the National Liberation Movements sweeping through Africa and Asia after World War Two. The difference being that they did not seek to cancel or overturn or secede from the state - they simply demanded inclusion on an equal footing with white Americans. This demand Hegel would undoubtedly have solidarised with. I can say this despite Hegel’s explicitly racist views because in Hegel’s views, the slave (for example) is morally obliged to fight for their own emancipation and would draw opprobrium from Hegel to the extent that they failed to do so. This is unambiguously demonstrated in his fulsome support for the slaves of Haiti.
Insofar then as the US Civil Rights Movement can be seen as part of a worldwide movement of Black people for their emancipation, then I think it deserves recognition as an equal to any state in its claim to objectivity.
The so-called second wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement took off explicitly under the inspiration of the Civil Rights Movement, coining the word “sexism” to emphasise the parallel of sex discrimination with racial discrimination. Feminism also has a long history stretching as far back in Europe to the Liberal Feminists of Hegel’s time, indeed including his own sister and the wives of two of his best friends. The question is indeed less clear-cut here, and becomes even more so when we move to the claims of the various movements claiming recognition of diverse gender identities. Nonetheless, I believe the principle is clear.
In so far as a subject acts on behalf of and in accordance with decisions of any great movement of emancipation then they may claim a basis for civil disobedience. This is not to say that any such claim may be accepted ipso facto, but simply that a claim to act as part of such an historically grounded liberation movement is legitimate. The rightness of action remains to proven by historical precedent or in terms of the founding concept and special principles of the relevant movement.
This right does not extend to made-up liberation movements such as White Supremacy or Men’s Groups. But does this give licence to every small Socialist sect to engage in civil disobedience at the direction of the sect’s central committee on the basis that the group is part of the labour movement? And what of Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or the Suffragettes who suffered persecution at a time when the right of their movement was not yet recognised?
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My point is that no left-wing (let alone right-wing) group can unilaterally claim the mantel of the right of heroes. The civil disobedient must act as the legitimate agent of a supra-state, historical movement. And even in doing so, the civil disobedient submits to the punishment appropriate for their transgression and accepts responsibility for all the consequences of their action including the impact of repression exercised against their supporters and followers. This is a heavy burden to bear, but no real relief from oppression comes without risk and suffering.
The above is in the context of civil disobedience rather than violence but I think helps situate where political violence would find legitimacy as not just an emotional build up of crazy persons who terrorize the masses for lack of any real political organization.
I would also emphasize that liberalism presented like with Rawls likes to subdue such violence and illiberal struggles as it is conceived as a kind of neutral managing of political differences and sees violence as the failure to properly moderate political aims. The issue of course is that one doesn't achieve consensus with inherently antagonistic groups like the working class with the capitalist class, but only a temporary agreement with partial concessions.
I also think it is an interesting point of much of todays activism that disavows violence against property, that we always see the valorization of the non-violent methods while ignoring the movements that do advocate violent struggle. You have Ghandi instead of the naval mutineers, you have MLK instead of Malcolm X, you have a whitewashed suffragettes instead of actual suffragettes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_of_tactics#SuffragettesBeginning in 1908, WSPU engaged in violent protests: smashing windows, fighting police officers, and eventually committing non-lethal bombings.[50][51] Pankhurst famously said that a "broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics," and considered suffragette struggle a form of "civil war."[52][53] When imprisoned, suffragettes often engaged in hunger-strikes, and were the first high-profile group to systematically engage in this tactic, preceding Mohandas Gandhi by a decade.[54]
Historian Trevor Lloyd wrote that "by [1913] the suffragettes were no longer looking for opportunities for martyrdom. They wanted to fight against society."[55] These activities drove away some of their sympathizers, but Pankhurst was unwavering, stating that:
…if you really want to get anything done, it is not so much a matter of whether you alienate sympathy; sympathy is a very unsatisfactory thing if it is not practical sympathy. It does not matter to the practical suffragist whether she alienates sympathy that was never of any use to her. What she wants is to get something practical done, and whether it is done out of sympathy or whether it is done out of fear…doesn't particularly matter so long as you get it. We had enough of sympathy for fifty years; it never brought us anything, and we would rather have an angry man going to the government and saying, my business is interfered with and I won't submit to its being interfered with any longer because you won't give women the vote, than to have a gentleman come onto our platforms year in and year out and talk about his ardent sympathy with woman’s suffrage.[56]
The above is quite compelling to me, bugger sympathy, force people's hands for what you consider right.
I do think that violence cannot be perfectly contained within a priori norms and those who totally disavow violence often want revolution without revolution, they care not for the injustices of the present and seem more concerned about the disruption to the status quo in open conflict.
However, the escalation of violence is a product of a failure to adequately respond to the wants and needs of a group, they are ignored and so one only experiences one another as enemies.
In such a case, there is not just one side to things, it's not as if the states violence is simply reactive and passive, but is quite active in suppressing and oppression people.
So I always think to the Joker's comment to two face in the hospital in Nolan's batman, everyone loses their heads if he says a mayor is going to be killed tomorrow, but no one gives a crap to a bunch of people killed by cops quite regularly. That violence is normal, expected.
Just as the French revolution made all of Europe shit themselves, all the while the terror cost less lives than in many wars wages for the gains of a ruling class of a nation. The plebs die en masse is fine, not a big deal, one big wig cops it and the world is falling apart, because they feel untouchable within the current situation.
So I am not against violence directed at people as a consequence in pursuit of other political objectives more so than the terrorist fixation on assassinating people and the like. I would think more about disrupting operations and willing to fight being more sensible while terrorism comes from a position of impotence for lack of mass political action.
But violence should not be treated in the abstract but seen within the context of it's conflict, as killing isn't an absolute wrong, but may be done for something good, to stop harm. It's just that everyone feels vindicated where the enemy is presented as violent and one merely defending one's self against that violence.
There is no easy answer other than to examine not necessarily the means always, but often the ends, we disavow the violence of those whose ends we disagree with typically.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/humanism-science.htmLenin wrote that Communists are opposed to violence against people in general and they resort to coercion only when it is imposed upon them by authentic admirers of violence. The only justification for violence is as a means of opposing violence, as violence against the violent, but not as a means of influencing the will of the majority of the working people.
Therefore Communists are never the initiators of actions such as war or the “export of revolution” at the point of the bayonet. Lenin always categorically and consistently opposed “left” ideas of this type. In his understanding the scientific spirit of communism is always inseparably connected with the principle of humaneness in the direct sense of the word.
This also forms the principal difference between Lenin and those doctrinaires who allow themselves the pleasure of cynically counting up the number of human lives “worth” paying for the victory of world communism. ... As a rule such calculations in today’s world are the occupation of people characterized by primitivity both in terms of theory and in their moral profile. ‘
In order to resolve the problem of uniting high moral standards with a maximum of the scientific spirit, the problem must first of all be viewed in all of the acuity and dialectical complexity which it has acquired in the difficult and tumultuous time we live in. A simple algebraic solution will not do. The problem of the relationship between morality and the scientific spirit has been resolved only in the most general fashion by Marxist philosophy. In concrete situations, on the other hand, it will occur again and again in the foreseeable future; each time it will have a new and unexpected twist. Therefore there can be no simple or ready-made solution for each individual occurrence of the conflict between the “mind” and the “conscience.”
There can be no simple prescription or mathematical formula capable of meeting every occasion. If you run into a conflict of this nature, do not assume that in each instance “science” is correct and “conscience” rubbish, or at best a fairy tale for children. The opposite is no closer to the truth, namely that “moral sentiment” is always correct, that science, if it runs into conflict with the former is the heartless and brutal “devil” of Ivan Karamazov, engendering types like Smerdyakov. Only through a concrete examination of the causes of the conflict itself may we find a dialectical resolution, that is to say, the wisest and the most humane solution. Only thus may we find, to phrase it in current jargon, the “optimal variant” of correspondence between the demands of the intellect and of the conscience.
To be sure finding a concrete, dialectical unity between the principles of mind and conscience in each instance is not an easy matter. Unfortunately there is no magic wand, there is no simple algorithm, either of a “scientific” or a “moral” nature.
So yes I think political violence as the destruction of property and even killing people who defend such property and would disrupt the pursuit of political objectives can be legitimate, but it can't be crudely thought of as violence is good or is bad in principle, but that it must be considered within it's context and the escalation of a conflict. I would think it quite silly for a group to remain totally passive if they are being brutal attacked and consider it a necessary consequence of some conflicts. It's just that violence can be an out of control fire and you will likely be burned just by being in proximity, it isn't a tool with perfect control.
This is a very general and vague rumination rather than an analysis of a clear case to see where my opinion falls on it however. But I am hesitant to principles over and above any situation as morality isn't so crude and simplistic, it seems to be nuanced by a lot of evaluative content and often entails tragic circumstances where even a somewhat decent decision isn't a pretty one.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
obviously yes. 
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