Re: Strategy and violence

["FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Laura:
> >But I think that there is something more to say about the idea of violence
> >in class struggle. There are somebody that thinks that class struggle means
> >violence or does not distiguish class stuggle from violence.
(...)
> >One of the form of the struggle he [Steve, FB] showed was self-
> >reduction of telephon,
> >electricity, bus, bills...and commodities. Let us take this last one. It
> >was a mass individual practice: I (anybody: a student, a worker's wife, a

Hobo:
>
> let me call this as an anarco-romantic vision. it was surely a diffused
> practice, even if not as massive as you say, but it was started from
> *organized* groups in an *organized* form. later it became also an
> ''individual practice'' penetrating into the same culture of the
> proletarians, but losing, under certain aspects, its characteristic of mass
> action done to claim the right of access to the wealth and to affirm the
> real counter-power of the people.

I am very sorry to contribute to this discussion on strategy in such
a piecemeal way (I'm still working to comments to Monty's papers and
inputs from John Holloway, Massimo and Bruce!). Concerning this
point, I substantially agree with Hobo. I don't think that any mass
extra-legal practice such as self-reduction is possible without a
visible change in social balance of forces, produced by a *political*
subjectivity able to translate acts of extra-legality into an
organizational and analytical perspective. This perspective is, in
fact, necessary just to prevent the adversary (state, capital.
shop-owners) from exercising that Foucauldian "normalizing" power
mentioned by Laura (what would happen if the repressive apparatuses
were able to categorize the self-reducing comrades as mere
shoplifters). Now, I think that the individualized acts of subversion
Laura talks about would hardly have fallen outside the
individualizing/normalizing/criminalizing power of the state without
a clear and organizationally visible connection with a more general
discourse of rejection of waged labour and the nexus between
productivity and purchasing power. The question of violence should
then be brought down from moral consideration and related to the
question: which *degree of force* (more than abstract "violence") is
required to guarantee the *political sustainability* of acts of mass
everyday anti-statist, anti-capitalist subversion? I think the role of
armed struggle in the Zapatista struggle addresses precisely this
question.
I agree with Laura when she writes that violence *may* become a
problem for the movement under certain circumstances. But I am also
convinced that violence definitely *is* a problem for the
revolutionary movement if this latter is unable to counter on a
practical ground the state's "Weberian" claim to the monopoly of the
use of the legitimate force.

Hasta siempre

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
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University of the Witwatersrand
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