by
Max Haiven
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I emerge from this book anti-anti-revenge. The people who are destroying the earth and our future have names and addresses. They ought to be brought to justice. We know that, in the current system, they will not be, but also that any one of them is almost instantly, replaceable, with so many already competing for places at the top. Without a revolutionary movement, their power will be undiminished and capitalism will continue to wreak its vengeance. [...]
[...] such systems project vengefulness onto those whom they oppress and exploit precisely to hide their patterns of systemic revenge [...]
It does not occur to any Communist to wish to revenge himself upon individuals, or to believe that, in general, the single bourgeois can act otherwise, under existing circumstances, than he does act [...] Communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual. Thus the more [...] workers absorb communistic ideas, the more superfluous becomes their present bitterness, which, should it continue so violent as at present, could accomplish nothing; and the more their action against the bourgeoisie will lose its savage cruelty.
in the condition of the working class in england (written 1845)
[...] The primary act of vengeance is always that of the oppressor against the oppressed, but this vengeance is presented by the oppressor as the legitimate, legal, and even benevolent, in this case the business of the East India Company. Even more profoundly, this vengeance is endemic to the system itself, so normalized and routine that it becomes invisible, at least to the abusers. The economy of revenge only becomes visible when its typically one-way flows are reversed. [...] the punishment always already comes before the crime.
[...] for Marx, a transformative revenge is the task of the industrial proletariat who have the historically unique possibility of avenging not only the crimes enacted upon them, but the crimes of capitalist history leading up to the present. Their capacity to elevate revenge from isolated acts of violence to a transformative, truly revolutionary movement stems from their unique structural and systemic position as, we might say, the necessary targets of truly capitalist vengeance, which is to say that the violence they endured was endemic (rather than incidental) to the economic logic of the system itself. [...]
reading marx through benjamin
[...] cities built - literally and figuratively, materially and culturally - by the collaborative, coperative labors of citizens are expropriated from those citizens thanks to increased housing costs; on the other, this stripping is facilitated by, and helps reproduce, finance capital. [...]
To return to Fanon, the signature maneuver of the oppressed has always been to blame the oppressed for the dissonance between the propounded ideology of normalcy and the actuality of constant oppressive violence, to insist that it is the oppressed who are responsible for the turmoil of their lives, and to render anti-colonial violence, rather than colonialism itself, barbaric. [...]
Fanon, for similar reasons to Marx and Engels, is distrustful of revenge. He offers the following: "Racialism and hatred and resentment - a 'legitimate desire for revenge' - cannot sustain a war of liberation ... hatred alone cannot draw up a program." Revenge here is legitimate, but not strategic - it is not morally wrong but rather insufficient for generating a movement of liberation that can sustain itself. [...]
[...] Graeber's overarching argument is that debt (and money) don't emerge naturally from some neutral mechanism to hold society together; they emerge from power and coercion. Rather than money being a neutral human tool that then inequitably accumulates in the pockets of some rather than others, money and debt were "invented," so to speak, in order to normalize, legitimize, and facilitate power. [...]
What would it mean to take this debt to future generations seriously? It would likely mean the relentless struggle to abolish a system that condemns so many of them (of all of us) to a fate of unpayable debt, financial debt but also the toxic legacies we leave behind: climate debt, ecological debt, the sociological debts of a world riven by inequality, and the violence it products.