If you support the state, you support violence. The state’s edicts can only be enforced by violence. There can be no states, and no borders, without the constant threat of violence.
If you support the market, you support violence. Market relationships require bodies to enforce contracts. Currently the state serves this role, but if you dream of a market without a state, you are only dreaming of a new apparatus to enforce contracts through violence.
We have been subjected to a lifetime of propaganda that tells us to ignore the violence that benefits — and can only be carried out by — the ruling class, and abhor violence done by regular working-class people. It’s easy to see who benefits from this asymmetry. But the conditioning will never be complete. We’re miserable about the violence that occasionally slips into our awareness — images of genocide, videos of police brutality — and can only numb the dissonance.
Fascists fetishize violence, and seeking glory through violence is the fascists’ domain. It’s healthy and good to abhor acts of violence, but it’s wrong to be selective in that disgust, especially when your blind spots enable others’ oppression.
Very few people are complete in their commitment to non-violence. I respect their position, but I don’t agree with it. Violence should only be a tool of last resort, but it is sometimes necessary to threaten violence — or even commit it — to prevent another person from doing harm.
The carceral state insists that only its agents be allowed to commit this violence. Professional violence-doers, it argues, will be more judicious in their application, resulting in less violence being done. But the lived experience of all but the most privileged members of the working class disproves this claim. Granting some people a monopoly on violence changes them for the worse, and these positions are irresistible to abusers and sadists. This system was never meant to reduce violence anyway; it was created to enforce class relations. It’s by design that the police will murder a man accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill, but every time a boss commits payroll theft that’s “a matter for civil courts.”
When the odious task of doing violence must be undertaken, I’m afraid that it falls to us to do it. The sooner we accept this the less violent the world will be.