I freely admit that spending family tv watching (well internet) time watching almost exclusively BBC stuff is probably warping the child’s brain. Probably. Since we’ve run through the only American shows he’ll watch with me (Eureka and Warehouse 13) and Doctor Who is over and we’ve watched Torchwood America: Now with more graphic but strangely less sexy gay sex. So we needed something.
That Mitchell and Webb Look seems to be filling the bill at the moment.
Let’s get one thing straight, shall we.
Vandalism is not equal to, the same as, or even remotely like, violence. One is damage to property, inanimate objects that have no feelings what so ever. One is damage to people.
Graffiti, which may be the oldest form of political expression being that it is at least 2000 years old, is just that, political expression. Even when it’s just some kid, who is probably not old enough to vote, leaving his or her tag on a wall somewhere. I love graffiti. Graffiti is not violence.
Window smashing, while scary and loud and full of breaky glass, is not violence. It is property damage.
Property is theft, and pardon me while I quote the Marquis de Sade: “Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft.“
In order to get the elites to release their stranglehold on the rest of humanity, the elites must scared. Yes, scared. That’s an ugly truth, but it is truth none the less. And to scare them without committing acts of violence means that they must be afraid of something else, loss of property. And they should be afraid of that. They should be shaking in their boots, unable to sleep at night, haunted by the ghost of Jacob Marley in the wee small hours telling them to repent.
We know what violence looks like at the Occupy sites. It looks like cops pepper spraying young women behind a barricade. It looks like war vets getting skulls crushed and spleens lacerated by “non-lethal” weapons. It looks like douchebags rapists who rape women in tents. Violence causes actual harm to the bodies of actual people and is generally performed by those with power over those with less.
Vandalism is acts of destruction done to pieces of property done by those with less to property owned by those with more.
These things are not the same, and should never, ever be uttered in the same breath as if they were.
It’s been said, many many times at this blog and in various and sundry places, that if you don’t deal with the racism and the sexism in the Occupy Movement, then it isn’t really a revolutionary movement at all. That is fucking obvious and elementary to those of us who’ve been victims of racism and sexism, it’s less obvious to the newbies, the shoulda been middle class white doods who are just now seeing what it feels like when the people we give power to just don’t give a flying fuck about you.
But capitalism is a system that requires an ever-growing population of people providing labor for free or for damn near free. It starts by devaluing the work done predominantly by women. That work, without which there would be no society because there would be no people, is the real work. It is the work of having children, maintaining a home, cooking dinner, doing laundry, caring for the sick and the old and the young. And in cases where you couldn’t get that work done for free, capitalism has devalued so that the people who are paid to do it don’t make a wage that provides for the basics. Think about any mom earning minimum wage. Her paycheck will to paying someone else minimum wage to look after her kids, effectively cancelling out her earnings.
Now if you have a system that requires half your population to provide labor at no cost, you have to have some mechanism for preventing that group from grabbing the nearest pitchfork. Fortunately, misogyny was old when capitalism was new, so there was already a system of violence and coercion in place.
My French Microsoft Outlook has this menu item:
It turns out that in French police has two meanings:
I had been wondering why Outlook was offering to call the cops on my email. I thought I had the Microsoft Outlook Feminist Blogger Edition.