“Political violence has become all too common” when Nazi media-men die, when law-makers die, when the big dogs die. But this is merely a cherry-picked collection of those rare (but increasingly regular?) reversals where the ones at the top meet the same fate as the ones at the bottom. This isn’t acceptable, for what is the point of being at the top if you are still subject to a shocking and sudden death at the hands of someone with more power than you?
To be at the top means to be in the most control of dying. How you die, when you die, how you look when you die, what you did before you died, how you will be represented after you die, and, so you can have all of this, you control how others die and how their deaths can add value to your life (why should they die without you getting something out of it?). This is the vampirism of capitalism: your death keeps me alive. And so, death will always come as a shock if you’ve spent your life trying to evade it, for death only comes naturally to poor people. It suits them. It doesn’t suit us.
Under capitalism, violence as disruption can only happen upwards, because only in the upwards direction—from low unto high—is violence an aberration. But to say violating the order of capital is the only violence that qualifies as “political” is absurd, because capitalism is not the only system we live under. We live under systems of care—family, friendships, communities—these are systems where we do not take without give, where we are held accountable, and where we consider without special entitlement who ought to get what. In my idealism, this is the origins of good politics: a desire for effective and beneficial governance so everyone can take advantage of living in very large communities.
What is remarkable about capitalism is that it is entirely violent towards this project, and thus every violation out of the desire for capital is political. But why is this not obvious to so many people?
One issue is the “message-sending” quality of anti-capitalist violence, which gets it special attention compared the day-to-day afflictions us bottom-dwellers experience. Writings on bullet casings, manifestos, the sick idea that one could murder just to get a point across! The reality is that all violence sends a message. That is what violence consists in. There is a symbolic affect to all violence, inseparable from “the act itself.” Capitalist violence is just so fundamental that it often appears to have no message, to be “apolitical,” but the mechanism by which systems endure is reiterating themselves until their message becomes background noise. Thus, violence need not be shocking. Famine, poisoned air and water, family separation, impossibly expensive medical bills and housing is all political violence. This is fundamentally how capitalism communicates. You can hear it in everything, echoing through every moment of our damned existences.
We live and then die. We take care of each other. We recognize each other in our humanity. I see these as the fundamental systems I want to live under, and they are antithetical to capitalism; to act under one is to violate the other. So I say go forth and be politically violent.
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