Violence and Morality
Who benefits from Morality?
Morning Comrades.
I am keeping today’s dispatch free and not behind the paywall that pays for my groceries and what not mostly due to the fact that I have more questions than answers and those questions are relevant to us, more so than most of us really want to admit.
The question of violence once again is abound and as usual it is a fascinating reality check, personally, in any case. Originally, the plan for this dispatch was to highlight and present several philosophies that very clearly and logically lay out the cases where violence is justified. Now obviously, the initial question will be: what the fuck does philosophy have to do with violence? Furthermore, the more I wrote about the philosophies in question I realized that the question of morality and violence needs to be rephrased, or rather, it isn’t a question of violence and morality, but the necessity to identify what violence is outside of the manufactured framework that is rooted in our understanding of morality.
To answer the first question, philosophy has everything to do with violence. How we defined it so far, how we dealt with it and how we feel about it. This is the fuckery already starts:
Who defined what violence is?
As far as our existence here, today, in the West, you will have people arguing that it dates back to Ancient Greece, but you know what, yes, I can follow that pseudo-intellectual path ( what this really is, is a bullshit pot by the land owning classes to give gravitas to its violence - it’s always been this way, thus, like the divine rights of kings, this is how it is - horseshit ) but for an adult conversation lets be clear and say that the roots of our modern legal, justice and punitive system go back to the 18th Century - “coincidentally” at the same time when the moralists re-emerged on the European Philosophy scene. You seen, master and servant, etc - I know you know what I mean. With that in mind, “violence” within a society was defined as a potential or actual threat to the property owning class, and out entire world was built around that notion - again, if violence is punished by a monetary fine, as its always has, who then is protected against the ramifications of society. Skipping a billion ages of philosophical work - you get to the reality that our existence is ruled through an by violence of the ruling ( property owning ) classes that protect themselves through the concept of legality, and more importantly, morality. We’ll get to that in a second.
If we then accept the above, how can our ruling classes then cry about violence when their entire existence is based upon inflicting violence on the working classes. Yes, we dealt with the concept of hypocrisy on Wednesday, but take a moment. Why is violence, Violence, when Trump gets his ear shot off but it is not violence when the entire ruling class decides that homelessness, hunger, is not violence, let alone violent, when those two realities for one, can be eradicated across the western world in a year, and secondly, perversely, is now being criminalized and thus subject to further violence. When you torch your masters house, its violence, when they deny you your share of the pie, it is not.
That’s a big question, but that’s been answered.
So what then stops us from infliciting violence on our violent masters? Punishment, of course, mostly, I would argue for myself, but equally important, is the idea that this is wrong, it is morally wrong to shoot the person responsible for all your suffering, your family’s suffering, your neighbourhood’s suffering and so on. The idea that violence is wrong is so utterly and deeply embedded in the white, christian, working class European history that even asking the question will get you ostracized from most “normal” social circles. Again, why? If we can clearly identify those that are responsible for the destruction of our planet, man-made human suffering, why cannot we not enforce the same violence they use to rid ourselves of the problem that they are?
Because it is wrong, right? We’ll get sent to hell! Eternal suffering, fuck you might have to hang out with Reagan after all. Because we are better than that, we are moral!
Ask yourself, who came up with that repressive nonsense and why, and more importantly who paid them to do so? Philosophy, like any science under Capitalism, Feudalism etc - is absolutely NOT neutral, but entirely based on the well-wishing of the respective ruling classes. So again, if we know who is to blame for suffering, why don’t we get rid of them?
Once you answer the above question in a way that I suspect, what is left, is punishment. This is where Dr. Angela Davis’ work is beyond vital to read and I don’t have the mental capacity after today to go through it all but yeah, read it. It’ll radicalize more than anything I could ever say.
With that, is violence justified, morally acceptable and so on? Well, whose morality? Whose justification? Whose hell? Or whose heaven for that matter. We have to be so brutally honest in our assessments of where we stand in regards to our well-being and understand that none of these questions, these realities play a role in the decision making process’ of the ruling class when it comes to anything. Even if we just look at the last 9 months of a supported, encouraged genocide, with any and all dissent against it punished, you do have to understand that their violence does and will apply to us. If those bastards can sleep at night knowing full well that they facilitated the genocide of a people only because it serves the short term material greed, man, you would be a fool to think that they will not send in their death squads to your home if it made them just a little richer.
Like I said, I have more questions than answers - well, none that I dare write down for everyone to see - and if anything, let this serve you as an impulse to at least think about these questions, knowing full well, you are all smart enough to draw your own conclusions.
Start a gang, comrades, we only have each other.
Yours, warmly,
Steven