I was walking outside with my gf on a pedestrian crossing when a guy on a scooter didn’t feel like breaking and almost hit us when crossing the street. I’m a calm person but at the same time I can feel intense rage with stuff like this and my first thought is to kick the guy off his scooter and beat him to a pulp. This, of course, never happens and I can remain calm. I did a civil fuck you symbol to the guy to get my point across.
I was discussing my rage feelings with my girlfriend and we got into a rather heavy discussion about violence. So, I get called gay a lot because of the way I dress and act sometimes. Especially in my smaller hometown. I said to my gf that I could reach a point where I just beat the next guy calling me gay for being a homophobic shit. She could not agree with me on this and she got mad about it, and we had a debate on using violence (with gay people, minorities and Palestina vs Israel as examples being used). She could follow me on supporting armed resistance in Palestina but she could not accept gay people snapping and beating a homophobic guy, which I can totally understand. Eventually we agreed to disagree, sort of, and we let the topic rest.
Which made me wonder how you guys think about this. Is using violence against injustice acceptable? Is there a certain line for when you can use violence and when not? We socialists fight against injustice, and violence may be a part of that fight somewhere along the line. How should we view the use of violence?
politics is defining what is and is not violence
I think its a force of nature, like physics, where there is life with higher thought there is abstraction and violence as a result of these abstractions (group over there wants to hurt us lets hurt them first, its apparent in apes and we arent immune to this)
Given that in a non-idealist reality the question I arrive at is not how can we stop violence, but how can we control it and the best way I can think of to do that is through a worker controlled democracy.
Its why id want a police force even in a socialist society; I think a lot of the issues we have with the police, mainly that they target minorties and act as gangsters for capital changes when the brain telling them what to do is no longer infected with capitalist brain worms; Imagine a world where reactionary issues like drug use and sex work are no longer criminalized and the goverment in charge is a worker controlled democracy that understands things like moral panics and capitalist media modes of scapegoating and chooses to not utilize those tactics and structures the police and media around this, I think a lot of the issues dissapear and what we’re left with is simply agents of the state with clearance to use violence against people commiting actual crimes like murder or sexual violence.
It would mean we would need to reshape the police to not serve capital but the people; the first step toward that would be the abolition of rent.
I would make an argument that politics is not defining what violence is but what is an acceptable use of it. Violence is basically any action or intent to cause harm to another party. If I punch you that’s physical violence. If i use my wealth to force destitution upon you that’s economic violence. If I point a bunch of missiles at you and say “you will give us your resources” that’s the threat of violence. If I own a hospital and then close it down in the middle of a pandemic in order to strong arm the city I to paying me more for the use of the building thats… Fucking evil? (Legit happened in New York during the pandemic).
So I think we have a logic drive definition of violence as a whole. What politics is, imo, is what we find to be an acceptable use for violence. In a capitalist system it’s to protect the interest of the capitalists. In a socialist system it’s to protect the interest of the worker. Both societies have police, weapons, etc. Both societies use violence to a degree. It’s the way in which it’s used, directed, and justified that changes.
It gets more abstract when you consider trade with african countries, or me keeping you homeless because I need rent.
Sort of what crime and punishment gets at, is it ok to kill someone if it benefits the entire city (killing a debtor holding thousands of people in generational debt in the book specifically)
I’d also say check out ‘Power’ by Steven Lukes, it gets into what I refer to when I say abstract violence through stuff like the media/ideology.