by
Max Haiven
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Then we have the unpayable “debts from below”: those debts which are owed to and sometimes claimed by the oppressed, but which are not honored or acknowledged by the powerful. These include demands for repatriation, reparation, and restoration of lands and artifacts stolen in the process of colonialism, imperialism, or restitution for harms or deprivations suffered. I suggest that, while sometimes the claiming of these debts does manage to articulate itself in ways that can be registered and accommodated within reigning legal and economic orders, they are at the most radical when they make a demand that is practically or ontologically impossible within those orders, when they call into question the legitimacy and foundational narratives of those orders. Here, unpayability strikes at the fundamental injustice of those systems; the only true recompense is their abolition, such that the violence is impossible for anyone.
[...] Enclosure 2.0 represents the further combustion of social wealth into capital through, for instance, the privatization of public services, or the deregulation of industry that destroys ecosystems, or the extractive politics of unpayable debt, where social wealth is funneled away. Enclosure 3.0, or hyperenclosure, represents the use of technology to seize upon the commons of imagination, cognition, communication and creativity,
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 [...]
[...] 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. [...]