Saturday 20 April 2024

Critique of violence, critique of the state

Walter Benjamin's Critique of violence is a seminal text that in just a few steps dismantles the very idea that any form of legitimate violence can exist, or that means can be separated from ends so that a just end can make a wrong mean just.
For that alone, this would be a great text, and the theoretical foundation of consistent and absolute nonviolence.
Yet there's even more in it: as David Graeber pointed out, Benjamin’s ruling out of legitimate violence hits the very notion of modern State, as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (as per the definition popularized by Max Weber in “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), since if there’s no such a thing as a legitimate use of violence, because of the contradiction that forbids, then there’s no such a thing as a legitimate, democratic monopoly of this use. In David’s words:

“The contradiction is not simply one of language. It reflects something deeper. For the last two hundred years, democrats have been trying to graft ideals of popular self-governance onto the coercive apparatus of the state. In the end, the project is simply unworkable. States cannot, by their nature, ever truly be democratized. They are, after all, basically ways of organizing violence. (...) the coercive nature of the state ensures that democratic constitutions are founded on a fundamental contradiction. Walter Benjamin (1978) summed it up nicely by pointing out that any legal order that claims a monopoly of the use of violence has to be founded by some power other than itself, which inevitably means by acts that were illegal according to whatever system of law came before". https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west#toc9

In days like theses, when the appeal to violence and the make-believe of people identified with nations, and nations identified with States are stronger than ever, it is particularly important to revert to this text, and discuss, with Walter Benjamin and with David Graeber, what the possibilities, the consequences and most important of all, the logic of violence are.

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