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How does nonviolence fail our movements?
In the face of ecological crisis, police repression and white supremacy, there is an apparent lack of options for effective resistance. Here, Peter Gelderloos brings to life some of the conflictive and subversive events of the last couple of decades in a radical new criticism of nonviolence.
The book weaves history, vignettes, interviews and personal reflections to show how our movements suffer from an inability to pass on lessons learned from one generation to the next.
Learning from the antiracist rebellions triggered by police murders from Minneapolis to Bristol, and the climate campaigns that often fail to centre an anticolonial consciousness, we can understand nonviolence as a symptom of social amnesia, an inability to remember our places in this world and what we have learned from past episodes of resistance.
Cautioning against future waves of pacification and forgetting, this book urges us to collectivise memory and develop the methods we need to fight for our survival.
About the Author
Peter Gelderloos is a writer and social movement participant. He is the author of The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Non-Violence, and Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation. He has contributed chapters to anthologies Keywords for Radicals and Riots and Militant Occupations. His books have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Greek and Serbo-Croat.
What People Are Saying
"Maintaining and sharing revolutionary love, we strengthen intergenerational memories of creative resistance. Despite the beatings and burnings meted out by states, schools, corporations, police, prisons and militaries, our communities continue to weave overlapping concentric circles of care and resistance. This striking book reveals collective memories of freedom struggles, despite attempts to blur, distort or steal our inheritance." Joy James, editor of Beyond Cop Cites: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons
'As more and more people are mobilizing against war, genocide, poverty, and extraction, this book is right on time. Gelderloos' decades of participating in and studying resistance movements grounds this book's practical analysis of common misunderstandings cultivated by liberals to stifle resistance efforts. This book shows the costs—to our boldness, our effectiveness, our solidarity, our survival—of forgetting lessons learned in our struggles. A much needed tool for the difficult times we are in and the worse ones that are coming." Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
"Peter\n
"Peter Gelderloos reminds us that for our survival, we must keep the flame of memory alive, ensuring that the radical roots of our movements are not whitewashed by the gatekeepers of history. In remembering, we resist; in forgetting, we risk erasing our future." Franklin Lopez, anarchist filmmaker, founder of subMedia
\n"A much-needed intervention in this time of profound loss and erasure, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us is an impassioned counterattack against forgetting. An inspiring, intergenerational invitation to dig deep for a “memory of our roots” of resistance. Woven together from street-smart rebel voices, Gelderloos’s book is a powerful read from start to finish." Cindy Milstein, editor of Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice
\n'Once again, Peter Gelderloos offers us an important book coming from the frontlines of numerous struggles. A must read for all aspiring trouble makers and those wanting to free themselves from the grips of exploitation and state terrorism. While the authorities try to terrorize people into forgetting who they are, and what really matters, Gelderloos offers us memory, discussion and care to transform the world, but also ourselves and our neighborhoods which is where it all begins." Xander Dunlap, Research Fellow at Boston University and author of This System is Killing Us
"A bold, eloquent, and timely account of the powerful role collective memory plays in toppling the lies that uphold structures of injustice and inequality. Gelderloos also shows how the forces of counterinsurgency erase or manipulate collective memory as a form of social control. They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us brings into sharp relief the urgency of building social movements that have continuity and intergenerational memory. The social movement novice and the seasoned veteran alike will find this book a useful tool to think with." Tariq D. Khan, author of The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression
Table of Contents
Introduction: Memory, Disembodied
1. They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us
The Tipping Point
Statues
Sparks
2. They Will Promise a Future They Can Never Deliver
The Snare
Regeneration
The Reset
3. But We are Here, Surviving, Remembering, Passing On the Torch
Accompaniment or Loss?
Learning From Our Ancestors
Conclusion: Surviving Together