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I've been taking a look at some pretty apeshit anarchist forums recently, and I've got a thing or two to say.
People ought to be cautious in justifying revolutionary violence.
The argument that acts of destruction directed against representatives of political and economic authority and their property are justified, is based on a misunderstanding of the idea of the "state."
The Christian anarchist Gerrard Winstanley once wrote an essay in which he posed the following riddle:
If one unarmed person imposes his will on three other people, and those people don't stand up for themsleves, we call those three people cowards. The same title would apply to 10 people in the same situation as those three. But, what if 1,000,000 people refuse to stand up to one dominator? (This was a reference the despotic governments all over Europe in the 17th century.) What do we call this? To this question, Winstanely responds that the term "coward" can't apply, because no degree of cowardice could cause this behavior. The cause, he decides, must be some mysterious power this one dominator possesses to control people's behavior through means other than the imposition of his individual will.
What is this mysterious power of which Winstanley spoke? I would say that the mysterious power Winstanley noted was the ablity of the powerful to determine the nature of social interactions in a society. They secure their power to oppress by causing their subjects to desire to subordinate one another. They secure their right to violence by engendering in their subjects a love of violence.
The state is not a location in which statesmen meet, nor is it a collection of the coercive intitutions within a territory. "State" is a term that should be applied the patterns of social domination within a society, patterns which result from the imprinting of certain psychological habits on the subjects of coercive institutions.
One can not protest the violence of the state through acts of aggression. To eliminate the state, we must train ourselves to reject the aggressive psychological habits that result from the suppression of our creative potential by the powerful.
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Posted by julio on 2008-09-18 17:06:42 | Rating: | Views: 88
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