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Enjoyment and political violence
May. 16th, 2024 12:04 pmI had a discussion with some friends back in February while the coast was on fire. I don't live on the coast, I live in the capital, but the air was still burning red and stained with ashes for days on days. I actually made the mistake of leaving my window open one night, because the heat in my apartment was suffocating, and I woke up to the taste of smoke in my mouth in the morning. The reason for the fires is simple: razed land sells cheap, and you can't build new condos or highway concessions on native forests or inhabited areas. The reason the fires get out of control is that pine and eucalyptus monocrops, which the forestry industry uses to maximize growth and gains, are perfect kindling. In simpler terms, there is an arsonist cartel operating in favor of real estate and extractive capital; there has been for decades, their death toll numbers in the thousands.
So anyway, one of those days, shortly before a few of my friends joined a mutual aid brigade to help reconstruction efforts in the coast after the fires subsided, we were walking around the city center, and there was a poster on the wall of a supermarket that said,
"The real estate and forestry industries murder our siblings. Mutual aid, organization and vengeance!"
Vengeance, huh?
The concept rattled around in our conversation as the sun went down and the heat didn't. Is it appropriate to call for vengeance, specifically, instead of something more transcendental like justice, or something more open like direct action? Whether the poster had said "Mutual aid, organization and justice" or "Mutual aid, organization and direct action", it still would've clearly been instigating the same kind of action, the difference is the wording used to talk about it.
One of my friends was really uncomfortable with calling for vengeance in a political context (the call for vengeance as a political action is not uncommon here, but it is mostly associated with anarchism, especially with more individualistic/nihilistic/insurrectionary anarchist tendencies which aren't his thing) because something about vengeance implies a certain degree of pleasure. Joy, even. Joy in the exercise of violence. To be very clear, all of us agree on the necessity of revolutionary violence and believe that any serious revolutionary movement needs to reach a point of armed insurrection to have any chance of challenging capital, so the question is not on violence, it is on the enjoyment of violence.
( Read more... )
So anyway, one of those days, shortly before a few of my friends joined a mutual aid brigade to help reconstruction efforts in the coast after the fires subsided, we were walking around the city center, and there was a poster on the wall of a supermarket that said,
"The real estate and forestry industries murder our siblings. Mutual aid, organization and vengeance!"
Vengeance, huh?
The concept rattled around in our conversation as the sun went down and the heat didn't. Is it appropriate to call for vengeance, specifically, instead of something more transcendental like justice, or something more open like direct action? Whether the poster had said "Mutual aid, organization and justice" or "Mutual aid, organization and direct action", it still would've clearly been instigating the same kind of action, the difference is the wording used to talk about it.
One of my friends was really uncomfortable with calling for vengeance in a political context (the call for vengeance as a political action is not uncommon here, but it is mostly associated with anarchism, especially with more individualistic/nihilistic/insurrectionary anarchist tendencies which aren't his thing) because something about vengeance implies a certain degree of pleasure. Joy, even. Joy in the exercise of violence. To be very clear, all of us agree on the necessity of revolutionary violence and believe that any serious revolutionary movement needs to reach a point of armed insurrection to have any chance of challenging capital, so the question is not on violence, it is on the enjoyment of violence.
( Read more... )
