Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) is an anarchist and author from Virginia (United States).

Quotes

• When we understand that privileged people derive material benefits from the exploitation of oppressed people, and that this means we benefit from the violence used to keep them down, we cannot sincerely condemn them for violently rebelling against the structural violence that privileges us.
  • Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 37.

• Capitalists and their predecessors—slaveowners, moneylenders, merchant-investors—owe their very existence to the State. In early times, concentration of political and spiritual power precedes economic stratification in society.
  • Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation (2017), p. 7

"The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013)

• We can never know whether our analysis and our methods are wrong, except sometimes with hindsight. Our movements are stronger when they employ diverse methods and analyses and these different positions criticize one another.
  • Introduction: Nonviolence has lost the debate

• “Violence” is whatever the person speaking at the moment decides to describe as violent. Usually, this means things they do not like. As a result, the use of the category “violence” tends towards hypocrisy. If it is done to me, it is violent. If it is done by me or for my benefit, it is justified, acceptable, or even invisible.
  • Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist

• We are all forced to participate in a society that is held together by structural violence, and rewarded for our participation with various privileges, though these privileges are spread unevenly across society. Given that those who use some form of visible, antisocial violence are often the least likely to enjoy the privileges of structural violence, there is no feasible way to determine who is violent and who is not.
  • Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist

• “Violence” was a euphemism for a threat to the ruling order and its illusion of social peace, with which the class struggle, the brutality of patriarchy, and the murderousness of colonialism are hidden. The newspapers did not talk about violence when cops killed strikers, when landlords evicted families, or when poor people died of hunger. They talked about violence when workers went on strike, when tenants stopped paying rent, when street vendors refused to surrender their wares to the cops.
  • Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist

• Freedom as a concept sides with those who are struggling for theirs, whereas nonviolence as a concept sides with the enforcers of normality and the rulers of the status quo.
  • Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist

• The goal of our criticism should be solidarity, not homogeneity.
  • Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist

• Government violence is not the result of violent revolutions, but the product of government itself. Any movement that leaves the State intact will fail in ending the oppressions we are fighting against. A nonviolent movement that replaces one government with another—and this is the greatest victory a nonviolent movement has ever achieved in the history of the world—ends up betraying itself, allowing Power to change its masks without addressing the fundamental problems of society. Nonviolence as an analytical tool has no means of understanding this kind of defeat—the kind that looks like victory.
  • Chapter 2. Recuperation is How We Lose

• Governments are by their nature aggressive and dominating. No society is safe if its neighbor is a state.
  • Chapter 2. Recuperation is How We Lose

• Democracy requires social peace, the illusion that, in a society based on exploitation and domination, everyone can get along and nobody's fundamental well-being is under threat.
  • Chapter 2. Recuperation is How We Lose

External links