Daniel Bensaïd (2009): A strategically regulated violence

‘Present-day society, which breeds hostility between the individual man and everyone else, thus produces a social war of all against all which inevitably in individual cases, notably among uneducated people, assumes a brutal, barbarously violent form – that of crime.’

– Friedrich Engels, ‘Speeches in Elberfeld, 1845’ⁱ

‘The foundation of all states occurs in a situation that we can thus call revolutionary. It inaugurates a new law, it always does so in violence.’

– Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of law: The “mystical foundation of authority’ⁱⁱ
 

Today, Sartre would find himself in prison with Jean-Marc Rouillan and Julien Coupatⁱⁱⁱ for having written ‘the native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms […] to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man.’^iv

It is important to recall the context of such fiery rhetoric. It was the epoch of national liberation struggles, of wars in Algeria and Indochina, the Cuban revolution; the epoch when power came ‘out of the barrel of a gun’, in which in his message to the Tricontinental Che Guevara could call on people to rise up and ‘intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine-guns’,^v in which, before the Cambodian genocide, liberating counter-violence could still appear as legitimate and innocent. It was the epoch in which Sartre wrote about the rebellious colonized people: ‘we have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind. The child of violence, at every moment he draws from it his humanity. We were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours.’^vi

However, as Alice Cherki underlined in her preface to the new edition of The Wretched of the Earth, the colonial subject who was Fanon wrote something quite different from what Sartre thought he had read. Fanon analysed violence without justifying it as an end in itself. Certainly, ‘for if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.’ One must then use all possible means to turn the scales, ‘including, of course, that of violence’. For the colonized person who decides to emancipate himself ‘is ready for violence at all times’; ‘from birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.’^vii A sober observation that does not imply lyrical mystification nor fetishization of this violence that has become necessary in the face of already existing colonial violence.

All through the colonial period, this ‘same violence, though kept very much on the surface’, ‘turns in the void’; ‘we have also seen that it is canalized by the emotional outlets of dance and possession by spirits; we have seen how it is exhausted in fratricidal combats. Now the problem is to lay hold of this violence which is changing direction. When formerly it was appeased by myths and exercised its talents in finding fresh ways of committing mass suicide, now new conditions will make possible a completely new line of action.’^viii Redirecting violence means politicizing the violent subjectification of the colonized ‘for whom it represents the absolute line of action [praxis]’^ix and fulfils a kind of therapeutic function; ‘at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the colonised from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.’^x

To make this potential part of a strategy for liberation, one must ‘reflect on this issue of violence’.

‘What is the real nature of this violence? We have seen that it is the intuition of the colonised masses that their liberation must, and can only, be achieved by force. We have seen that it is the intuition of the colonized masses that their liberation must, and can only, be achieved by force. By what spiritual aberration do these men, without technique, starving and enfeebled, confronted with the military and economic might of the occupation, come to believe that violence alone will free them? How can they hope to triumph?’ 

That is because in gathering energy, this violence makes a collective conscience emerge: 

‘the violence of the colonised unifies the people. By its very structure, colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism does not simply state the existence of tribes; it also reinforces it and separates them. The colonial system encourages chieftaincies and keeps alive the old Marabout confraternities. Violence is in action all-inclusive and national. It follows that it is closely involved in the liquidation of regionalism and of tribalism.’^xi

Fanon however remains perfectly lucid regarding the possible manifestations of this violence, including ‘religious fanaticism’ and ‘tribal wars’. On several occasions, he expresses his fear that liberation might be hijacked by a post-colonial bourgeoisie or by a ‘tribalising of power’. With premonition he feared a ‘racialisation of thought’; ‘This historical necessity in which the men of African culture find themselves to racialise their claims and to speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley.’^xii

Such tendencies were amplified by the great movement of counter-reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, to the determent of hopes for emancipation of the preceding sequence. Then came a time of ritual, existential, spectacular, depoliticized violence, when the bonfire of commodified vanities resembles a funeral pyre more than a bonfire of joy. If it is ‘wild, objectless, formless’, Baudrillard could then write, this is ‘because the constraints it is contesting are themselves also unformulated, unconscious, illegible.’^xiii One is witness to the emergence of an anomic and autophagic destructivity: 

‘Some will look back longingly to the days ‘‘when violence had a meaning’’, the good old violence of war, patriotism, passion and, ultimately, rationality – violence sanctioned by an objective or a cause, ideological violence or the individual violence of the rebel, which was still of the order of individual aestheticism and could be regarded as one of the fine arts.’^xiv 

Since the 1970s and the shock that was the discovery of the Cambodian killing fields, the asymmetry between the violence of the dominant and that of the dominated has indeed continued to widen while structural hyper-violence has intensified. In the ‘asymmetric wars’ imagined by the fertile minds of the Pentagon, the death toll is now counted sparingly, down to the last individual, among the victors, and by the bucketful, in the hundreds of thousands, among the vanquished. This is what, by way of the media, was illustrated by two Gulf wars. 

Modern riots such as the one in Watts in 1965 could be seen as resonating with the emergence of Black Power and liberation movements. This is what enabled Guy Debord to immediately declare that the insurgents of Los Angeles were right and to take it upon himself to ‘side with [and freely interpret] their reasons’.^xv It was not just the status of Black people that was at stake, he said, but that of America itself. These were not race riots, but class riots, a revolt against the commodity system in which looting could appear as the fulfillment of the communist principle ‘to each according to their needs’; ‘the affluent society finds its natural response in looting because it there is no human abundance but an abundance of commodities […] the youth of Watts, with no future in market terms, have chosen a different kind of present.’^xvi They could move from feeling shame to taking pride in ‘being from Watts’. 

No doubt the 2005 riots in the French suburbs also helped to shift some of the ghettoized and stigmatized youth from shame to a sense of pride in ‘being from the 93’ (Seine-Saint-Denis department north of Paris), from Minguettes, or elsewhere. But its silent and often self-destructive violence has not (yet), unlike that of Watts (1965), Amsterdam (1966), Paris (1968) or Montreal (1969), found a place within a rising social movement for emancipation. Consequently, it may appear to confirm Baudrillard’s description of a violence that is no longer ludic, neither sacred nor ideological, but structurally linked to consumption, even if deprivation now competes with abundance: ‘From time to time, within our closed universe of consumed quietude and violence, this new violence very briefly takes over a part of the lost symbolic function, before resolving back into a consumer object.’^xvii Raids, rezzous, sporadic forays from the ‘neighbourhoods’ and ‘suburbs’ (in response to police ‘descending upon’ areas reputed to be dangerous) into the city centres that have been transformed into temples of wealth and luxury seem to confirm Debord’s premonition that ‘blissful acceptance of what exists’ can ‘merge with purely spectacular rebellion.’^xviii

Decaying capitalism produces violence and fear in large doses. What is at stake is to ensure that anger overcomes fear and that violence is once again elucidated by a political objective, in the manner in which Georges Sorel advocated a necessary violence on the part of the oppressed, but ‘with violence enlightened by the idea of the general strike’.^xix Provided it is linked to a political objective, for him as for Fanon, violence – whether that of the proletarian or that of the colonized – can be a defining feature of the oppressed person’s subjectification: ‘I do not hesitate to declare that violence would not survive without an apology for violence: it is in strikes that the proletariat affirms its existence’ (Le Matin, 5 August 1908). Just as war provided the ancient republics with ‘ideas which form the ornament of our modern culture’, so too the ‘social war’, ‘may engender the elements of a new civilisation’.^xx 

Such violence for which Sorel takes responsibility is the opposite of the institutionalized force of the victors, let alone their cruelty; ‘I have a horror of any measure which strikes the vanquished under a judicial disguise.’ This distinction between force and violence is the guiding principle of the Reflections: 

‘Sometimes the terms ‘‘force’’ and ‘‘violence’’ are used in speaking of acts of authority, sometimes in speaking of acts of revolt. It is obvious that the two cases give rise to very different consequences. I think that it would be better to adopt a terminology which would give rise to no ambiguity, and that the term ‘‘violence’’ should be employed only for the second sense; we should say, therefore, that the object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order.’^xxi 

There is, then, a radical difference between ‘the force that aims at authority, endeavouring to bring about an automatic obedience, and the violence that would smash that authority.’^xxii

As a reader of Sorel, Walter Benjamin also distinguished a ‘divine violence’, one that establishes a new right and is the only one capable of breaking the ‘mythical violence’ of the dominant forces, that conservative violence which perpetuates the vicious circle of domination. For him, as for Sorel, the very act of striking opposes one right (to existence) against another right (to property). The conservative violence of the state is exercised today through weapons of mass destruction, through the normalization of emergency procedures, through executions and ‘extra-judiciary’ detentions, by the temptation of preventive torture as the logical corollary to the ‘preventive war’.^xxiii

Marx strongly underlined the dialectic between violence and right. From that point on, there are no longer tablets of law brought down from Mount Sinai, nor divine law; the law is no longer absolute. The class struggle brings socially antagonistic conceptions of the law into conflict. And ‘between two equal rights, force (Macht) decides.’ The usual translation of the German term Macht as ‘force’ tends to confound Sorel’s foundational violence with force (Gewalt) that in German inextricably blends together power and violence, legitimate violence and justified authority.

The fact remains that there is no law that does not originate in force and is not maintained by violence. As Derrida rightly points out, this is precisely what the expression ‘force of law’^xxiv highlights. This implication of ‘force’ (or, for Sorel, ‘violence’) in law is necessary ‘to preserve the possibility of a justice that not only exceeds or contradicts the law, but which perhaps has no connection with the law at all.’

Curiously, Derrida reverses Sorel’s terminology by questioning the difference between force ‘which can be just’ and violence ‘which is always deemed unjust’. No doubt this distinction is precisely that of the dominant discourse, which Sorel turns inside out. What remains is the essential idea that there is always ‘an excess of justice over law and calculation’^xxv, that politicization compels us to constantly reconsider the very foundations of law, and that this reinterpretation inevitably entails a trial (of strength).

Sorel was therefore quite right to wonder, even back then, ‘whether there is not a touch of foolishness in [his] contemporaries’ admiration for gentleness.’ And a good dose of hypocrisy or insincerity, no doubt. For this dubious gentleness is nothing more than a new guise for a victorious force monopolized by the state. What Sorel wrote about the transformation of the mores of his time takes on disturbing relevance for today. He recalls that a royal edict of 5 August 1725 punished fraudulent bankrupts with death: ‘It would be difficult to imagine anything further removed from our present customs.’ Indeed: 

We are now inclined to consider that offences of this sort can, as a rule, only be committed as a result of the imprudence of the victims and that it is only exceptionally that they deserve severe penalties; and we, on the contrary, content ourselves with light punishment. In a rich society where business is on a very large scale, and in which everybody is wide awake in defence of his own interests, as in America, crimes of fraud never have the same consequences as in a society that is forced to practise a rigid economy; as a matter of fact, these crimes seldom cause a serious or lasting disturbance in the economic system; it is for this reason that Americans put up with the excesses of their politicians and financiers with so little complaint. […]. In Europe also, since it has become easy to make money, ideas analogous to those current in America have spread among us. Big-businessmen have been able to escape punishment because in their hour of success they were clever enough to make friends in all circles; we have finally come to believe that it would be extremely unjust to condemn bankrupt merchants and lawyers who retire ruined after moderate catastrophes, while the princes of financial swindling continue to lead happy lives. Gradually the new industrial system has created a new and extraordinary indulgence for all crimes of fraud in the great capitalist countries.^xxvi
 

Different times, different customs. Only yesterday, bankrupt bankers threw themselves out of windows by the dozen. Today, with a sense of comfort inversely proportional to their sense of honour, they equip themselves with parachutes – golden ones, preferably. This impunity perpetuates an omnipresent structural violence, what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘a law of the circulation of violence’. The visible or physical violence is but a small part of multiple, routine social violences. 

Consequently, ‘if one wanted to really reduce the most visible forms of violence – crimes, robberies, rapes, and even terrorist attacks – it is necessary to work on reducing overall the violence that remains invisible – the violence that occurs day in, day out, within families, on the work floor, in factories, police stations, prisons or even hospitals and schools – and which is the product of the internal violence of economic and social structures and the ruthless mechanisms that help to perpetuate them.’^xxvii Starting with the devastating ‘inert violence’ of suffering at work, harassment, bullying, redundancies, unemployment, job insecurity and poverty. 

In his twelfth thesis from ‘On the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin refers to the oppressed class as the ‘the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden’. He accused social democracy of having cut ‘the sinews of its greatest strength’, which is ‘nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.’^xxviii 

In his Théorie de la violence, Georges Labica seems to echo this view when he argues for a duty of hate: 

‘Hate is described as blind only so that it may be dismissed and declared anathema; yet, when informed by an understanding of the system and the power dynamics that structure it, it can demonstrate lucidity and show itself to be a shrewd strategist. The duty to hate transforms the anger against it that the system provokes from all quarters into a productive force.’^xxix

It is, he said, vague and confusing, at times liberating, at times enslaving: ‘violence is not a concept’ but ‘a practice inherent in social relations, of which it expresses the various forms.’ As he illustrates throughout his book, history, art and life are interwoven, and they are ‘prone to violence’. Starting with the original expropriation superbly evoked by Marx in Capital, capitalist modernity has only generalized and refined these techniques, to the point of giving rise to categories of genocide and crimes against humanity to characterize juridically the new phenomenon of serial social crime. 

Today, with military robotics, we are mechanizing killing and removing the reciprocal risk that made war the ultimate and paroxysmal form of conflict. Already, more than 5,000 robots have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their creators are considering formalizing the foundations of a moral sense to enable their machines to make decisions in unforeseen situations. A US Navy report notes that ‘the moral sense thus developed must be able to lead robots to kill the bad humans (the enemies) and not the good ones (the allies).’ The same report states, without the least sense of humour, that ‘having combat robots at our side will dramatically reduce the number of deaths’, so that ‘this weapon could become sufficiently feared that war will finally cease to be a desirable means of resolving differences between nation-states.’^xxx That robotic warfare with zero casualties on one side is, on the contrary, a means of making it acceptable to a public traumatized by the tally of body bags is a far more plausible hypothesis.

Added to this, and contradicting Weber’s definition of the modern state as the holder of a monopoly on legitimate violence, capitalist globalization is accompanied by a re-privatization of violence with incalculable consequences. Its dissemination among mercenary groups, mafias, gangs, churches and other sects heralds a new dialectic of force and law. 

Without doubt we can acknowledge the many forms of social suffering that have been widely shown to be closely linked to violent outbursts. But if, as Labica demonstrates through an extensive examination of historical accounts, religious myths and works of art, violence is above all a practice inherent in social relations, it is illusory to claim that it can be eradicated by preaching good intentions and goodwill. And it turns out that the use of physical violence and coercion cannot be regarded as just another form of struggle among many. It sets in motion, within each of us, a dark side that no one is certain they can control. This is why, while one might hope that a culture of violence could, in the manner sought by certain martial arts, succeed in mastering its personal use – after all, one can learn to drink without becoming an alcoholic – the social control of its collective use requires regulating it strategically ‘through an understanding of the system and the balance of power’.

In other words, to politicize it.

This is also what Fanon wrote, in other words.


Original title: Une violence stratégiquement régulée. Translation and footnotes in brackets by Alex de Jong.