in an era of “punch a nazi” memes, it gets lost that even if violence is justified & necessary, it’s not itself a revolutionary strategy. it’s a necessary means of defending attempts to self-organize & self-govern, but without that, no amount of dead fash can transform our world.
killing a nazi doesn’t destroy the material conditions that lead to people becoming nazis. killing a ceo doesn’t redistribute the power held by the company. i’m not saying that individual acts of violence don’t protect anybody—obviously a nazi who is too scared or otherwise unable to terrorize a community is a good thing. but it’s not transformative. it may be a bandage, but it’s not going to change the world.
the role of violence in revolutionary change is to defend the actual revolutionary work.
what does that mean?
when a revolutionary movement attempts to establish autonomous neighborhood councils, or redistribute resources and the means of producing goods, the state will react (using cops, military, etc.) with incredible violence. revolutionary violence is unavoidable if a revolutionary mode of organizing society is to last—that way of life will inevitably come under violent assault that can only be resisted by violence. but that violence is a way of protecting the real work of revolution: reorganizing society to meet our needs & make decisions collectively.
moreover, when we systematize violence, even just in an effort to get rid of every cop, every fascist, every ceo, every nazi, we take on an incredible risk to the long term health of a revolution. history shows again and again that when you build a system dedicated to carrying out systemic violence, it is very, very hard to get it to ever stop carrying out systemic violence. how to defend a revolution from reactionary violence by global capital without turning that revolutionary government into a permanent executor of systemic violence is a historic problem which socialists are still struggling to find an effective answer to. this only makes it more important not to mistake the violence for the revolution. when we allow ourselves to believe violence produces rather than defends change, we set ourselves up for failure.
in the end, in a world full of capitalist militaries with a history of violent reaction to change, violence will be necessary to ensure that change survives. but it will not produce that change. building systems for organizing production, making democratic decisions, and settling conflict that allow everyone to participate equally, to give only what they can and receive, always, what they need—that is the real work. every ceo and fascist could disappear right now and without that framework in place, we would fall into the ways we already know.
when fidel tried to give salvador allende a gun, the intended message was not that that he & the Popular Unity party must socialize chile’s resources at gunpoint, but rather that no matter how democratically & nonviolently they tried to socialize those resources, history showed that empire would never allow them to do so without violently crushing that peaceful democratic effort. the CIA would prove him right in just years.
we cannot abdicate the responsibility to defend the revolution with violence, but nor can we mistake violence for revolution.
Of everything I read on Cohost, this is probably the serious post I think about the most.
(I'm not going to try to pick a winner from the joke posts. There were too many of them.)
