WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, OCL: NON-VIOLENCE DOES NOT EXIST (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

For ages, the debate opposing non-violence and violence has run through
social movements. The violence is not only physical, but also
institutional, symbolic, psychological, etc. This opposition is greatly
maintained by the State. He criminalizes our mobilizations by accusing
them of being violent, going so far as to accuse them of terrorism or to
advocate it. It is imperative to get out of this opposition and try to
act by taking into account and articulating the multiple forms, actions,
initiatives that social movements take.

The main function of the state is to maintain social order: capitalist
society. It is based on exploitation, the maintenance of a social
hierarchy, patriarchy, the division of the dominated among themselves,
by racializing some, by inferiorizing certain genders, by criminalizing,
by creating artificial competition... All of this generates violent
conflict. daily. Faced with challenges to these different aspects, the
State can only respond violently. In this context, the
non-violence/violence debate is sterile. It only serves to maintain
divisions within social movements.

This violence takes different forms. The first, the most visible, is
physical violence, for which only the State would have legitimacy. This
requires police forces, or even military forces if necessary. The
judicial system is one of the tools of this violence. The goal is to
crush by force any form of social protest and to lock up anyone who does
not submit to this social order.

Politically, the bourgeoisie can appeal to the most authoritarian
governments when it considers that the situation is becoming too
dangerous. Thus in the 1930s, certain capitalists declared "rather
Hitler than the Popular Front" (for example, from Wendel, owner of
steelworks and member of the Forges Committee). In an attempt to analyze
the interwar period, we mainly focus on the rise of authoritarian
regimes in Europe, the best known being fascism in Italy and Nazism in
Germany.

However, since February 1917 and until 1939, a revolutionary impulse
crossed part of the planet. It began with the Russian revolution in
1917, then the German revolution in 1918. This process extended to Italy
with the creation of workers and peasants' councils and to Central
Europe. From 1936 to 1939, Spain experienced the revolutionary upsurge
that most challenged capitalist society. The United States was also
affected by this social turmoil: many factories were occupied by
proletarians who could no longer bear the consequences of the 1929
crisis. This inspired workers in France during the Popular Front who
also occupied the places of exploitation. . This will greatly worry the
capitalists. In France, after having shamed the Popular Front, they will
appeal to Léon Blum, President of the council, to resolve the conflict
so that the workers "liberate" the factories and return to work.

Rule by fear

Currently in France, entire sections of the population are subject to
this physical violence. Residents of working-class neighborhoods are
subject to it on a daily basis. This results in many injuries and
deaths. Special police forces are assigned to maintain order in these
neighborhoods. The State, through Justice, the administration, the
dominant media, attempts to hide this violence, either by minimizing it
or by disqualifying the people who are victims of it and those who
demonstrate their solidarity. Legal proceedings can be initiated when
individuals, political or artistic groups declare that the police kill.
The State must imperatively trivialize this police violence to maintain
fear in these neighborhoods so that they remain silent in the face of
their increasingly degraded living conditions. It is a real government
by fear that is being put in place. When certain residents revolt, the
repression is most violent.

This form of government by fear has, for several years, been used to
repress social movements (movement against the El Komri law, Yellow
Vests, pensions, etc.). Mobilizations can be significant (several
million people), the State only responds with violence, seeking to break
them up by force. He refuses any questioning of his political choices.
Macron clearly shows what the State is for. He governs to satisfy the
richest few percentages of the population and big businesses, mainly
multinationals. The rest of the population must suffer the deterioration
of public services (school, health, etc.) and pay so that an
increasingly unequal budget can be implemented. Likewise, the sharing of
wealth is increasingly unequal.

Under these conditions, the State must give itself the means to be even
more repressive. Given the deterioration of living and working
conditions, it cannot be ruled out that people will organize to oppose
these societal choices, leading to the impoverishment of ever-larger
sections of the population.

But as the State alone holds the legitimacy of physical violence, any
form of popular physical violent opposition is condemned. Social
movements are delegitimized in order to depoliticize them. The term
terrorist is often attributed to them. Thus, he invents new categories,
such as ecoterrorism, or recently the movements denouncing the massacre
of the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli
state are denounced as being anti-Semitic and advocating terrorism.

Until any protest or mobilization becomes a terrorist act, there is not
far! Neoliberalism must impose itself at all costs. Thatcher declared
that there is no other choice. Obviously, she has descendants!
Contesting this form of capitalism is synonymous with a "crime of
lèse-bourgeoisie". All means are good to maintain the hegemony of the
bourgeois class, even if it means killing people, massacring
populations, refusing to eradicate genocidal processes, even destroying
the planet by refusing to call into question productivism and therefore
the creating ever greater profits...

This unconditional support for the policy of apartheid and colonization
of the Zionist state serves to criminalize all Muslims, by extension
immigrants of Arab origin. They are presented as backward, wanting to
impose Sharia law and call into question "democracy", "equality between
men and women", even for some "replacing" whites with Arabs etc. But do
we live in a truly democratic country? Are elections a democratic
guarantee? Can we really take charge of our affairs in the current
institutional context? Can we collectively determine what we produce,
how, with what means and for what purposes? Can we appropriate these
questions (it is exclusively the capitalists who answer them according
to their interests) to prioritize socially useful work? The patriarchy
has disappeared? Has racism taken off?

Social, institutional, symbolic, psychological violence...

The State and those in power exercise other forms of violence. Who has
not been confronted with institutional violence from administrative
services, for example. The latter often receive us with suspicion. An
unemployed person is often seen as a fraudster who must be controlled
more and more strictly. A person of foreign origin is often faced with
racism, contempt, and again, suspicion. It is becoming more and more
difficult to assert your rights, even if they are regularly reduced by laws.

It is very difficult to provide answers due to the isolation of people,
while the interlocutor relies on the institution for which he works. In
fact, we are confronted with our solitude in the face of these state
machines. At times, revolts are expressed individually or collectively.
Here again, it will be authoritarian responses (police, justice) that we
are faced with.

Psychological violence can also be committed. For example in businesses.
In general, employers benefit from state support when employees fight
them by occupying the company. The cops, on orders from the prefect,
generally come to dislodge them violently while they are fighting, for
example, for their dignity.
The increasingly degraded working conditions are also experienced as
violence against workers. Concretely opposing it can also lead to often
violent repression. What about housing evictions? Finding yourself on a
sidewalk overnight can only be extremely violent. Being locked up in a
detention camp, then forcibly put on a plane while tied up to be
"returned" to a country from which we felt it was vital to leave is
extremely violent.
We could continue this list of examples of daily experiences.

This shows that it is very difficult to separate all these forms of
violence. Some mutilate bodies, others cause psychological pain. Some
carry physical blows, others leave no trace on the bodies. But all of
them are the expression of a desire to dominate us, to impose the
capitalist social order on us, to humiliate us, to remind us of our
status as lords.

A sterile opposition

We cannot accept the division imposed by the State. On the one hand, the
physical violence for which only he has the legitimacy; on the other,
symbolic, institutional, psychological violence, etc. can be exercised
by many as long as in certain situations or thanks to a social status
(like a boss for example, a zealous civil servant with a high idea of
his function, etc.), a person is in a dominant position.
When faced with violent situations, it is difficult to distinguish
between violent and non-violent responses. When faced with violence, all
responses are violent. Whatever responses we give to thugs or directly
to oppressors, they will always be experienced violently. Whether we
strike peacefully (railway workers on strike: it's a hostage-taking!) or
whether we kidnap a boss to obtain a salary increase; whether we prevent
the expulsion of an undocumented migrant by a sit-in or by forcing a
police blockade, it will always be received as violence on our part.
Refusing the opposition between violence and non-violence means refusing
categories into which the State wants to lock us; it is to refuse the
separation between so-called responsible citizens (that is to say
ultimately accepting to accept state violence or supported by it) and
supposed terrorists, to use the popular vocabulary in the corridors of
the state. This allows us to escape from this sterile debate, of which
only those in political power have a monopoly in the end. The fact of
mobilizing necessarily attacks those against whom we are mobilizing,
whatever the forms of mobilization. The fight against exploitation and
domination is always violent! The construction of power relations
(doesn't this very common expression contain a form of violence?)
requires diverse and complementary modes of action allowing us to impose
our demands, but also to glimpse imaginaries at the same time in
everyday life and build futures that break with capitalism: creative
utopias.

J Christophe

We would like to remind you that beyond what the author says, the
capitalist state, whatever its form, is not the only vector of
oppression. In capitalist society and with Macron's neoliberal policy,
trivializing the state of exception (49.3, state of emergency, etc.),
class violence is experienced on a daily basis. It is structural
violence, theorized by Johan Galtung, which produces oppression and
inequalities in access to common goods (care, education, resources,
etc.). This can involve deprivation of employment or fixation in poorly
paid jobs which deprive the worker of part of the production for the
benefit of the wealthy classes. It is also the domination and suffering
of the most precarious that the world of productivist work generates, as
developed by Michel Foucault[1]. Let us remember that one of the
characteristics of this structural violence is to make the lives of
proletarians "uncertain" at the intersection of social reproduction,
patriarchy, downgrading, racism and class racism. In the current context
of radicalization of anti-social policies and repression, if we publish
this point of view on state violence it is because, in our opinion, it
reflects questions heard in the demonstrations and feelings shared as
well. of isolation than of hope of finding the strength to act. Finally,
this text addresses, in its own words, the fact that the State has
succeeded in imposing "the collective belief" "of the monopoly of
legitimate physical violence" of Max Weber[2], but also the symbolic
violence dear to Pierre Bourdieu. This text also questions the notion of
non-violence[3]and moves towards the notion of counter-violence which
liberates to oppose to the dominating violence which oppresses of
Herbert Marcuse[4]. Questioning these notions seems to us a necessary
step to re-establish more solidarity, which can only be revolutionary in
our opinion.

Notes
[1]"the body only becomes a useful force if it is both a productive body
and a subject body" in Discipline and Punish.

[2]in The Scholar and the Politician (2)

[3]read on this subject "How non-violence protects the State: Essay on
the ineffectiveness of social movements" by Peter Gelderloos

[4]"violence thus has two very different forms: the institutionalized
violence of the dominant order and the violence of resistance,
necessarily doomed to remain illegal in the face of positive law.[...].
These two forms therefore fulfill opposite functions. There is a
violence of oppression and a violence of liberation; there is a violence
of defense of life and a violence of aggression.» in The End of Utopia.

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4224
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