File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/97-03-10.164, message 74


Date: Mon, 10 Mar 97 11:26:50 +0100
From: Fiocco-AT-ccuws4.unical.it (Fiocco Laura)
Subject: Re: Strategy and violence


>Laura:
>> >But I think that there is something more to say about the idea of violence
>> >in class struggle. There are somebody that thinks that class struggle means
>> >violence or does not distiguish class stuggle from violence.
>(...)
>> >One of the form of the struggle he [Steve, FB] showed was self-
>> >reduction of telephon,
>> >electricity, bus, bills...and commodities. Let us take this last one. It
>> >was a mass individual practice: I (anybody: a student, a worker's wife, a
>
>Hobo:
>>
>> let me call this as an anarco-romantic vision. it was surely a diffused
>> practice, even if not as massive as you say, but it was started from
>> *organized* groups in an *organized* form. later it became also an
>> ''individual practice'' penetrating into the same culture of the
>> proletarians, but losing, under certain aspects, its characteristic of mass
>> action done to claim the right of access to the wealth and to affirm the
>> real counter-power of the people.
>
>I am very sorry to contribute to this discussion on strategy in such
>a piecemeal way (I'm still working to comments to Monty's papers and
>inputs from John Holloway, Massimo and Bruce!). Concerning this
>point, I substantially agree with Hobo. I don't think that any mass
>extra-legal practice such as self-reduction is possible without a
>visible change in social balance of forces, produced by a *political*
>subjectivity able to translate acts of extra-legality into an
>organizational and analytical perspective. This perspective is, in
>fact, necessary just to prevent the adversary (state, capital.
>shop-owners) from exercising that Foucauldian "normalizing" power
>mentioned by Laura (what would happen if the repressive apparatuses
>were able to categorize the self-reducing comrades as mere
>shoplifters). Now, I think that the individualized acts of subversion
>Laura talks about would hardly have fallen outside the
>individualizing/normalizing/criminalizing power of the state without
>a clear and organizationally visible connection with a more general
>discourse of rejection of waged labour and the nexus between
>productivity and purchasing power.

Here I agree with both of you: I was talking about how violence can STOP a
movement (already started).
But I do not agree with Franco's last sentence below: capitalist state do
not "claim" monopoly of force, it *has* the monopoly of force. To counter
it on a
practical ground means or self-defence or to play the power game. The limit
between the two is so narrow that even to garantee self-defance political
sustainability becomes a problem in itself. I think we have to invent more
effective weapons than mere force.

ciao laura

 The question of violence should
>then be brought down from moral consideration and related to the
>question: which *degree of force* (more than abstract "violence") is
>required to guarantee the *political sustainability* of acts of mass
>everyday anti-statist, anti-capitalist subversion? I think the role of
>armed struggle in the Zapatista struggle addresses precisely this
>question.
>I agree with Laura when she writes that violence *may* become a
>problem for the movement under certain circumstances. But I am also
>convinced that violence definitely *is* a problem for the
>revolutionary movement if this latter is unable to counter on a
>practical ground the state's "Weberian" claim to the monopoly of the
>use of the legitimate force.
>
>Hasta siempre
>
>Franco
>





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