Civility?!

Disobedience, Habermas, Marx and Direct Action

Morning Comrades.

I know we have tackled this subject in the past, however, considering that already omnipresent uptick in violence from the ruling classes just this year, the increasing radicalisation of our youth and the sure to come mindfuck from the ruling classes I wanted to touch on this subject once again.

Yes, it is a longer read and yes I will dip into some political and social philosophy here but that is what we are here for. Again, this is a typical type of dispatch I would send out to the patreons of this newsletter. For the month of January everyone will get everything for free. Starting February the paywall has to go back, your wage labouring comrade has rent to pay. For the time being, do enjoy this.

The short take on civility is this: Fuck It. Anyone that calls for civility has something to gain from your oppression and has no actual interest in your opinion, material realities let alone your liberation. This, of course, specifically goes out to the corrupt muppets we pay to be in our governments, their PR departments, their so-called free press and the bastards of the police, their henchmen. Civility in action and discourse solely aids the bastards that want to rule and oppress you. This is perfectly explained in the Overton Window Theory and more aptly the Paradox of Tolerance theory.

When your entire society is constructed around the rule of a minority over the majority by means of passive and active violence, the most effective measure to overcome said rule is through direct action. Now, direct action can but does not solely mean violence, that’s an important fact worth remembering. It also not to be confused with non-violence, that’s a whole different school of thought and action, and I will briefly explain the difference between passive direct action and the former shortly.

Now, language, it’s interpretation and application by various parties of power play a huge role role. Again, it is absolutely essential to keep in mind that those in power determine not only the narrative but its meaning - something worth changing in my opinion but you know that already. The word “civil” comes from the late 14 Century., "relating to civil law or life; pertaining to the internal affairs of a state," and directly from Latin civilis "relating to a society, pertaining to public life, relating to the civic order, befitting a citizen," hence by extension "popular, affable, courteous;”. Since the its meaning has been interpreted by the ruling classes as "not barbarous, civilized" since the 1550s. Hence, “civility” essentially meaning the non-disruptive, courteous existence with one another, as defined by those power.

Deep breath, that alone is reason enough to disregard civility as a political reality. Again, your entire existence is political and even if you are not interested in politics, politics is damn sure interested in you. Silence and Civility are Complicity. Simple as that.

“Civility” in our current times is nothing but a tool of extortion and suppression of dissent used by the ruling classes, irrespective of sex, race and religion mind you. Case in point the protest outside Supreme Justice’s Houses the last few days. It took all of 24hrs for the powerful to get together and remind it’s “citizens” that doing so, indeed was illegal whilst maintaining their stance that protesting- aka in most cases inflicting gross violence - outside of abortion and family planning clinics is absolutely legal. This is truly all you need to know about “law”, “legality” and “civility”

Civil Disobedience, Passive and Active Direct Action

My singular opinion has and will always continue to be that in the reality of oppression, dissent in all its forms is not only justified but necessary. Simple as that. Whilst it was a feeling I couldn’t verbalize in my early years of challenging authority it was of course, Thoreau that I read in my first year at University, that gave me more of a moral framework other than just being pissed off.

“If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”

Resistance to Civil Government, 1866, Thoreau

I could cite Thoreau over and over but bringing the idea from civil disobedience to passive and active direct action into the 21st Century took a little, a few more arrests over the years and learning from friends that again, have been at this for longer than I have.

Briefly, passive direct action is exemplified in protest that pisses and scares the ruling classes. There is no value in listening to any of the arguments against doing so when the entirety of their political will and action is harmful. Again, the call for “civility” is nothing but telling to you to sit down, shut up, take it and say thank you aka dictatorship.

Active Direct Action, in this case, would mean pulling a John Brown which I can happily explain should we ever meet in person.

The Philosophy of Dissent & Civil Disobedience

To bring this topic into 21st Century and into a deeper discourse other than “No More, Fuck This, Take That” - note, I am absolutely 100% ok with keeping it here - I can recommend a few words from Marx and then Habermas, a more modern German Philosopher that worked intensively on “civility” and “democracies”.

In regards to Habermas, confrontation, protest and incivility are all components of deliberative politics as Habermas understands it. These forms of conflict, of refusing existing norms and institutions, are what bring to light whether those institutions and norms can survive rational scrutiny. Habermas goes so far as to call the ability to withstand and even celebrate civil disobedience the ‘litmus test’ for the maturity of a constitutional democracy. Even as Habermas has a famously ambitious understanding of our capacity for the collaborative search for truth, his is an activist’s view of politics. Consensus is not the highest good. Rather, the possibility of a society based on rational consensus becomes visible only in moments of dissensus, when the failure of existing norms is unmasked. Enlightenment comes about when social groups show that the dominant social organisation fails to take into consideration their legitimate claims and concerns. This is why Habermas is clear that he is interested, not in rational political communication as such, but ‘the history of its repression and re-establishment’.

For Marx “civility”, predictably was a bourgeoisie luxury unaffordable to the working class. In a 1848 newspaper article he wrote:

“…there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

More specifically, for Marxism there is stronger philosophical reason that rules out democratic reformism: environmental determinism. Marx holds that except as a malleable potential, there is no human nature — “the human essence has no true reality,” wrote the early Marx. Consequently, humans are plastic and shaped by their circumstances. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their lives,” Marx wrote, “but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

The word “social” is important in that quotation: the determining circumstances are fundamentally social. Marx sees individuals as vehicles of collectives and not as autonomous individuals:

“Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are a social activity and social mind.” And again: the individual “exists in reality as the representation and the real mind of social existence.”

Further, it is their economic circumstances that are the fundamental social-environmental forces. In Marx’s words, for example:

“As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”

So Marxism is committed to collective, economic determinism. Anyone’s belief system is a necessary consequence of their economic social being. What we think is true, reasonable, and good is determined by the economic circumstances in which we are raised.

It follows that for Marxism the democratic process as we are witnessing it today is a pointless sham. Democracy presupposes the effectiveness of reason — that individuals can observe, think, and judge for themselves, that they can learn from experience, be open to argument, and change their minds. Marxism, however, rules that out on epistemological principle: knowledge is conditioning, not rational judgment.

In final consequence, it follows that when differently-conditioned individuals meet, the conflict can be resolved only by force. Socialists cannot argue capitalists into socialism. They cannot objectively present reasons or appeal to reason. They can only take over by violence and remove their social enemies. As Engels put it longingly in 1849:

“The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”

As with every step towards liberation from dictatorship, it takes all kinds. I have never understood non-violence in the face of violence. As Stokely Carmichael put it:

“Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

As far as I am concerned this applies to all minority power structures under capitalism that exist in direct opposition of the liberation of all people. The time is now, civility in dealing with our oppressors is a losing game and no one in power throughout the West deserves another moment in peace. They have ruled with impunity and utter disdain for all of us for centuries and considering the looming destruction of our planet due to their greed, the time for small talk and marches allowed by them, is over.

You know what to do. I’ll see you out there.

Forever in uncompromising solidarity, yours,

V.