Violence

Structural, Necessities and Indoctrination

Morning Comrades.

The other day I read a line somewhere, pretty sure it was on twitter, that made my brain tingle, that was:

“The violence it would take to rebalance our economics is nothing compared to the violence it takes to sustain it.”

and after a few days of rest, a few thoughts.

There is an uncomfortable truth concealed within this proposition, one that liberal political morality has spent considerable intellectual energy preventing us from confronting: the violence associated with changing an economic order is almost always made visible, while the violence required to preserve that order is rendered ordinary, procedural and therefore morally invisible.

We are taught to recognise violence when a crowd occupies a building, when property is damaged, when a strike interrupts production, when a government is challenged, or when an established distribution of wealth is threatened, yet we are encouraged not to recognise violence when a person works forty or fifty hours a week and remains unable to afford housing, when a family chooses between heating and food, when a hospital closes because its operation is insufficiently profitable, when a community is displaced by financial speculation, when workers die because production has been organised around cost reduction, or when entire populations are condemned to poverty despite the existence of sufficient productive capacity to provide materially secure lives for everyone. Capitalism has developed an extraordinarily effective moral vocabulary in which the disruption of property is called violence while the deprivation necessary to preserve property is called economics.

The first task, therefore, is not to decide whether violence is desirable, nor to romanticise revolutionary violence, nor to pretend that social transformation can be accomplished without conflict, but to ask a prior question: what exactly are we calling violence? If violence is defined exclusively as the direct physical infliction of injury, then the existing economic order can appear remarkably peaceful, particularly in wealthy Western societies where coercion is generally mediated through institutions rather than performed in the open. If, however, violence includes the systematic organisation of social relations in ways that predictably expose human beings to deprivation, insecurity, premature death and dispossession, then the apparent peace of capitalism becomes much more difficult to sustain as a description of reality. The violence has not disappeared, it has been institutionalised, distributed, legalised and concealed within the apparently neutral mechanisms of property, employment, debt, rent, finance and the state.

This is already implicit in Marx’s analysis of capitalism, particularly in his insistence that the apparently free exchange between worker and capitalist conceals a relation of compulsion. The worker arrives at the market possessing labour-power but lacking independent access to the means of production necessary to reproduce life. The capitalist, meanwhile, possesses those means and therefore purchases labour-power under conditions that are formally voluntary but materially coercive. The worker is not ordinarily dragged into the factory by physical force; the more sophisticated mechanism is that the worker must sell labour in order to obtain the means of subsistence. The coercion has therefore been transferred from the visible violence of direct command into the economic structure itself. What appears as freedom at the level of the contract is conditioned by unfreedom at the level of social reproduction.

This is why Marx’s distinction between formal freedom and material dependence remains indispensable. Capitalism does not need to abolish freedom in order to exercise domination, it needs only to organise the material conditions under which freedom can be exercised. A person who owns no productive property is legally free to refuse employment, but that freedom has a profoundly different meaning when refusing employment means losing one’s home, healthcare, food security or capacity to support one’s children. The formal possibility of saying no does not eliminate the material compulsion to say yes.

Engels recognised this problem with particular clarity when he described the condition of the working class not merely through individual acts of exploitation but through the social consequences of an economic system in which poverty, disease and premature death are systematically produced. The violence of industrial capitalism did not require every capitalist to personally desire the suffering of workers. Indeed, the capitalist could be personally benevolent while participating perfectly rationally in a structure that compelled the reduction of labour costs, the extension of working hours and the intensification of production. This is precisely what makes structural capitalist violence so difficult to confront politically: responsibility is dispersed through a system in which individual intentions become secondary to the imperatives of accumulation.

The contemporary West has not escaped this logic; it has refined it. The violence of accumulation has been internationalised while its beneficiaries are encouraged to experience themselves as merely consumers exercising individual preferences.

The violence involved in these processes is rarely recognised as violence because it occurs through contracts, legislation, markets and balance sheets. A family losing its home to foreclosure does not look like an act of violence because no gun is visible. A public service being privatised does not resemble an act of violence because the transfer is executed through parliamentary procedure. A community being transformed by property speculation does not resemble dispossession because the eviction notices are legally valid. Yet legality cannot be the final measure of violence, because legality itself is historically produced within relations of power. The fact that something is permitted by law tells us that the state recognises it as legitimate; it does not tell us that the consequences are socially benign.

Walter Benjamin’s distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence is therefore particularly useful. Liberal societies tend to imagine violence as external to law, as something that threatens an otherwise peaceful juridical order. Benjamin’s analysis complicates this assumption by showing that law is inseparable from the coercive power through which it is established and maintained. Law does not merely constrain violence; it monopolises legitimate violence. The eviction carried out by a bailiff, the seizure carried out by a court order, the enforcement of a debt, the imprisonment of someone who violates property law, or the policing of a strike can all be executed within legal frameworks and therefore appear fundamentally different from violence committed outside the law. But the distinction between legal and illegal violence is not identical to the distinction between violence and non-violence. Often it is a distinction between authorised and unauthorised coercion.

This is why the political language surrounding economic transformation is so revealing. When workers demand higher wages, the economy is said to be threatened. When tenants organise against landlords, property rights are said to be under attack. When governments attempt substantial redistribution, investors are said to require confidence. When public ownership is proposed, markets are said to face uncertainty. When wealth itself is questioned, the discussion immediately shifts towards social stability. Yet the economic violence preceding these demands rarely produces the same vocabulary of crisis. A person cannot afford rent and this is called a personal difficulty. A worker cannot survive on their wage and this becomes an employment problem. A city becomes unaffordable because housing has been financialised and this becomes a supply problem. The causes are systematically translated from relations of power into technical problems of administration.

This is why the most important violence of capitalism may sometimes be ideological rather than physical: it is the violence committed against political imagination itself. The system does not merely determine what people possess; it progressively narrows the range of futures they can imagine. Capitalism therefore colonises not only material production but the boundaries of political possibility.

Nancy Fraser’s analysis of capitalism’s crisis tendencies extends this argument by demonstrating that accumulation depends upon social conditions which it simultaneously undermines. Capital requires workers capable of reproducing themselves, communities capable of sustaining social life, states capable of maintaining infrastructure, and ecological systems capable of supporting production, yet the competitive imperative of accumulation continually pressures capital to externalise the costs of reproducing those conditions. The exhaustion we experience as work-life imbalance, the loneliness produced by commodified social life, the destruction of care infrastructures, the ecological degradation upon which production depends, and the privatisation of collectively produced resources are therefore not isolated social problems. They are expressions of a system that continually consumes the conditions of its own reproduction.

Federici’s work is also particularly important here because it reveals how much capitalist accumulation has historically depended upon forms of labour that were systematically rendered invisible. The reproduction of labour-power does not happen spontaneously. People must be fed, cared for, educated, housed, nurtured and restored. Yet enormous quantities of this labour have historically been assigned to women and excluded from the formal accounting of capitalist value. Capitalism could therefore present itself as an economic system based upon free exchange while depending upon vast reservoirs of unpaid or underpaid reproductive labour. The violence is concealed precisely because the labour necessary to reproduce society is treated as though it were outside the economy.

The same concealment operates geographically. Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonialism reminds us that Western prosperity cannot be separated from the historical organisation of global hierarchy through colonial extraction. Colonialism did not merely represent a political relationship between European states and distant territories; it was a material system through which land, labour, resources and markets were reorganised to serve accumulation. The violence of colonialism was spectacular when necessary and administrative when possible, but its fundamental purpose was economic as much as political: to make territories and populations available for extraction.

The post-war Western order did not abolish this relationship so much as transform its mechanisms. Formal colonialism receded while economic dependency, unequal trade, financial institutions, military alliances, resource extraction and geopolitical intervention continued to structure global relations. The Western consumer could therefore experience unprecedented material abundance while remaining insulated from the violence through which that abundance was produced. The colonial frontier had moved further away from the metropolitan centre, and with it moved the visibility of exploitation.

The contemporary concentration of wealth in Western societies must consequently be understood not merely as an unfortunate inequality within an otherwise successful system but as the cumulative result of these processes. Wealth is socially produced and privately appropriated through institutional arrangements that determine who owns land, who controls capital, who receives rent, who collects interest, who holds intellectual property, who controls infrastructure, who benefits from public investment and who possesses the legal authority to command the labour of others. The enormous fortunes accumulated at the summit of Western capitalism are therefore claims upon a vast social apparatus whose construction depended upon millions of people.

This is precisely why the question of redistribution is so politically explosive. To substantially redistribute wealth is not merely to move numbers from one column to another; it is to challenge the social power attached to ownership itself. It raises the question of whether an individual should possess extraordinary economic power merely because the legal system recognises their ownership of assets whose value depends upon collective labour, public infrastructure, social stability and accumulated knowledge. It asks whether the wealth of the few can legitimately be understood as private achievement when virtually every condition that makes that wealth possible is social.

At this point the original proposition becomes clearer. The violence required to rebalance ( with rebalancing being the key word here, not the necessary destruction and re-organisation ) an economic order may be imagined as catastrophic because political discourse focuses upon the disruption necessary to change established property relations, while ignoring the continuous violence required to maintain them. Yet redistribution need not mean physical violence at all. It can mean taxation, public ownership, democratic control of investment, universal provision, decommodification of essential goods, stronger labour institutions, socialisation of housing and infrastructure, debt cancellation, inheritance reform, and the democratic transformation of productive property. The violent responses of the current ruling class to even this moderate rebalancing, which does not tackle the subjectification of the Global South for this wealth, tells us all we need to know. If this moderate “appeal” is opposed, we might as well go all the way.

The point is not that the suffering produced by capitalism can be measured against an imagined future and declared morally insignificant. The point is more fundamental: we cannot ethically evaluate the risks of changing a social order without simultaneously evaluating the harms involved in preserving it. To demand that society remain peaceful while millions remain structurally subordinated is not neutrality. It is a demand that the existing distribution of violence remain undisturbed.

The Capitalist order has made the violence of preservation appear peaceful and the possibility of transformation appear violent. It has taught us to fear the disturbance of property more than the deprivation of human beings, to regard economic disruption as a catastrophe while treating permanent insecurity as normal, and to imagine that stability is inherently virtuous irrespective of what that stability is stabilising, but stability is not itself a moral good. A stable system can be profoundly unjust, and the longer an unjust system remains stable, the more thoroughly its violence becomes invisible.

The question is whether an economic order that systematically concentrates wealth, commodifies necessities, subordinates human labour to accumulation, externalises ecological destruction, reproduces global inequality and protects private property through institutional coercion can reasonably describe itself as peaceful simply because its violence is administered through contracts, markets and laws. It cannot.

The task of emancipatory politics is therefore partly a task of making violence visible. Once this violence becomes visible, the moral equation can changes and redistribution no longer appears as an inexplicable assault upon an otherwise peaceful system. It becomes a question of how much disruption is necessary to dismantle institutions that already impose immense disruption upon human life every day.

This is where the proposition should ultimately be understood: the violence it would take to rebalance our economics is nothing compared to the violence it takes to sustain them, because the system we call peaceful has already incorporated violence so deeply into its ordinary functioning that we no longer recognise it as such. The real political obscenity is not that anyone might wish to transform this order, but that an economic system capable of producing extraordinary abundance alongside extraordinary deprivation has persuaded us that preserving the arrangement is the responsible choice. It is not the absence of violence that defines the stability of capitalism; it is the successful concealment of violence beneath the language of property, legality, efficiency, markets and necessity.

The real violence, then, is not simply what happens when the existing order is challenged. It is what must happen every day to keep that order intact: the labour that must be compelled, the homes that must remain commodities, the debts that must be serviced, the borders that must be enforced, the resources that must be extracted, the commons that must be enclosed, the care that must remain undervalued, the ecosystems that must be sacrificed, the populations that must remain sufficiently insecure to accept employment on capital’s terms, and the political imagination that must be disciplined until alternatives appear more frightening than deprivation itself.

Capitalism does not survive because it has abolished violence. It survives because it has learned how to make violence look like ordinary life.

Yours, warmly,

V.