#statemonopolyonviolence — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #statemonopolyonviolence, aggregated by home.social.
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I wrote up my recent thread as a blog post if you prefer to read things that way.
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The ability of individual people to defend themselves is a central aspect of anarchism of every variety. One of the first things every state does is monopolize violence and so prevent people from defending themselves as they see fit. Every anarchist understands that under the state “people are institutionally prohibited from defending themselves.”1 Every anarchist understands how absolutely necessary this prohibition is for the survival of the state.
How can this be true?! As a recent interlocutor had it, “I’m not sure where you get the idea that most people are institutionally prevented from defending themselves. There are statutes in every state that delineate the legal means of doing so, up to and including homicide.”2
But self defense to an anarchist is a very different thing from self defense as defined in state laws. The ruling class writes laws to serve their purposes, and self defense laws are no exception. Sure, if someone is trying to kill you or your family right at this moment the law lets you kill them to prevent it. This doesn’t hurt the state, and the possibility helps them in at least a couple of ways.
First, allowing this increases the state’s legitimacy. If they punished people for defending themselves like this people would tend to rebel. Second, the state needs people to exploit. There’s no percentage in allowing its victims to be killed off if it can be prevented. Anyway, deadly self defense by private citizens is incredibly rare in the US. Since 2007 the number of such killings ranged between 250 to 450 per year.3 From the point of view of ruling class policy makers, considering how many people they kill every year, this is negligible.
State self defense laws only allow people to use force against immediate threats of violence, but, as the numbers in the last toot show, this is an incredibly rare situation. As I said above, these laws are written by the ruling class for their own benefit, and as such they absolutely forbid people from defending themselves against a large, large majority of the actual threats they face, which mostly involve violent exploitation by the ruling class. Violent exploitation is how the ruling class lives. They’re not going to make it legal to defend yourself against it.
Just for instance, here in Los Angeles County we have about 75K people living on the street.4 Every year about 2,000 of them die, mostly from being homeless.5 This is a death rate of about 2700 per 100K people, approximately three times the overall US death rate of 984 per 100K.6 Meanwhile there are close to 100K empty homes (including both apartments and single family houses).7 There is close to a million acres of publicly owned parkland in the county.8 Homeless people are dying because it’s illegal for them to occupy those empty homes or build homes on public land. The cops will hurt or kill anyone who tries to save themselves, their family, using these empty homes, this empty land.
And yet they can’t defend themselves against the cops. The ruling class needs trespassing laws to be enforced or it wouldn’t be possible to make money from being a landlord. No matter what state laws about self defense allow they’re never going to allow people to kill cops who are trying to drag their family out of a squat, even though that’s a real, significant threat to people’s lives, much, much more common than the threat of immediate violence. You can’t defend yourself against cops, and cops violently prevent people from defending themselves against the real threats they face. Homelessness, hunger, eviction, wage theft, rape, and so on.
But when anarchists talk about self defense they mean actual self defense. As @HeavenlyPossum put it, “The point is to empower every person to be able to be free to defend themselves if and how they choose, alone or in voluntary cooperation with others.”9 If the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence then the only kind of self defense they’ll allow will either further their goals or be neutral. And yet most of what we need to defend ourself against is state violence. The words are the same but they mean very different things.
States habitually redefine common words to suit their purposes. Self defense is one example, and Orwell has plenty of others. It’s even easy for anarchists, to whom nothing I’ve said here comes as a revelation, to be fooled. For instance, the Los Angeles City Council is forever authorizing new “affordable housing” projects. Dozens of them every year. And when people ask them about homelessness they’re happy to list the projects.
But “affordable housing” in this context means privately owned apartment buildings with a few units set aside for people making less than the average amount but still more than homeless people can afford. These requirements often expire after a few decades, subjecting tenants to ruinous rent increases and impending eviction. When normal people hear the words “affordable housing” they think it means housing people can actually afford, but that’s not what it means at all.
And it’s easy to be fooled, I know it has been for me, because it’s hard to remember just what violent cynical liars our masters are. I know none of this is a revelation to anarchists, but it was useful for me to think it through, to try to internalize how thoroughly deceptive these people are. Maybe it’ll be useful to others to read it.
- https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/112961155204138076
- https://kolektiva.social/@[email protected]/112965895241148429
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/251894
- https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=927-lahsa-releases-results-of-2023-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count
- http://www.publichealth.lacounty.gov/chie/reports/Homeless_Mortality_Report_2022.pdf
- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
- https://www.acceinstitute.org/thevacancyreport
- http://www.laalmanac.com/parks/pa01.php
- https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/112961155204138076
#Eviction #Police #SelfDefense #Squatting #StateMonopolyOnViolence #TenantsRights #Trespassing
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The ability of individual people to defend themselves is a central aspect of anarchism of every variety. One of the first things every state does is monopolize violence and so prevent people from defending themselves as they see fit. Every anarchist understands that under the state "people are institutionally prohibited from defending themselves."* Every anarchist understands how absolutely necessary this prohibition is for the survival of the state.
How can this be true?! As a recent interlocutor had it, "I'm not sure where you get the idea that most people are institutionally prevented from defending themselves. There are statutes in every state that delineate the legal means of doing so, up to and including homicide."**
#Anarchism #Anarchy #SelfDefense #RuleOfLaw #StateMonopolyOnViolence
* https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/112961155204138076
** https://kolektiva.social/@TessRants@mastodon.social/112965895241148429
H/T @HeavenlyPossum
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