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ON VIOLENCE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

All four of the readings excerpted in this section reflect revolutionary moments in world history: Hegel belonged to the period of the French Revolution, while Marx and Engels belonged to the period which saw the ripening and elaboration of the working-class revolution, even though the 1848 European revolutions failed to secure for the working classes the social and economic gains that Marx and Engels had envisioned. Fanon belonged to the period that saw the widespread decolonization that followed World War II and also the rise of anti-European nationalisms.

These readings highlight the relationship between violence and the economic world orders of their respective historical junctures: violence and feudalism in Hegel, violence and capitalism in Marx and Engels, and violence and imperialism in Fanon. Not only do these selections represent the revolutions of their times, but they also encapsulate thedialectical nature of those historical revolutions.

Consider Hegel. For Hegel the establishment of self-consciousness in the bondsman involves two moments of fear. The first moment of fear entails a containment of self-consciousness in relational space (with respect to the lord), while the second moment results in a crystallization of that space into a nonrelational, independent space. It is in this second moment that the bondsman changes. He is no longer the bondsman in relation to the lord: because he labors, he achieves independence through the independence of the product of his labor. At both moments, he fears death, but with a difference: in the first moment his fear of death finds its mediating object in the lord, while in the second moment his fear is immediately of death itself.

The bondsman's fear of the lord is "the beginning of wisdom." It is wisdom because the bondsman recognizes that his self-consciousness needs another in order to exist. It is at this moment that fear becomes a means of containing self-consciousness in a relational space; and it is this containment in space that marks its existence. But once self-consciousness becomes arrested in this relational space, that is, servitude in relation to the lord, servitude becomes its essence. The first moment of fear not only forms the self-consciousness of the bondsman but also establishes servitude as the condition of being, of life itself, and not simply as a mode of living. He exists because he is a bondsman, and for that reason he seeks to preserve his status of bondsmanship, fearing that it is only through this status that he can preserve his life.

This anxiety to preserve his status, and thus his life, produces the second moment of fear, the fear of death, "the Absolute Lord." The bondsman responds to this fear of death by producing the thing that he works on, a thing that now becomes the essence of his self-consciousness. In other words, the bondsman becomes an independent consciousness through work. He no longer needs the lord to rearm his existence, for in this second moment he achieves bondsmanship, and thus existence, through production of the thing itself.

Further, the production of work entails the manufacturing of consent in and by the bondsman. The bondsman must give his consent for fear of his life. It is in the production of this thing that the continuation of his life lies; "thinghood is the essential characteristic" for his consciousness, Hegel argues, yet it is this very thing "which holds the bondsman in bondage; it is his chain from which he could not break free in the struggle." Existence means voluntary servitude.

The terror of death which the bondsman experiences and which becomes objectivized and exteriorized in the product of his work also becomes the mediatory force between absolute freedom, or anarchy, and government, which is "nothing else but the self-established focus ... of the universal will." Freedom and control thus stand in direct opposition to each other in a life-and-death struggle. They constitute moments of a dialectical movement from the death of all distinction, of the individual self-consciousness and will in absolute freedom, to the reestablishment of the universal will through government. Such a movement is a halt, but it is a temporary halt, for as soon as this seizure of self-consciousness in its "allotted sphere" takes place, the dialectical movement begins all over again. There is no escape from that perpetual circularity through which social groups and classes move until they are again arrested into relational spaces of differentiation. Both movement and arrest must be preserved as negations of each other. "The negation coming from consciousness," argues Hegel, "... supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently survives its own supersession."

Absolute freedom, or anarchy, far from being an unqualified good, contains within itself its own death. For as soon as this "flat, commonplace monosyllable," which characterizes the universal will, is established, the unison fulfills itself in the establishment of the universal will through government, which, by definition, is a "victorious faction." Distinctions between this victorious faction and other factions are reconstituted, and with the return of these distinctions, individual self-consciousnesses also return to their state of containment in "allotted spheres." Universal will vanishes, and with it, absolute freedom.

Absolute freedom, then, is terrified of its own essence, its own work, or death. This "terror of death is the vision of this negative nature of itself." Stricken with terror at this vision of its own death, absolute freedom organizes itself into government, which results in its death by other means: since government is nothing "else but a faction," "victorious against other factions." The universal will passes into specific wills, and difference is reestablished. Terror thus becomes the force which drives the universal will first into arresting itself within a relational space of factions, then leads to its death in the reconstitution and recontainment of specific wills into "allotted spheres" marked by difference and distinctions. There is no escape from death, only from the choice of one means to death by the embrace of its opposite.

Despite its metaphysical pessimism, the Hegelian system does value the product of work and the social distinctions arising from division of labor. Only labor and its effects ward o the threat of a violence that lacks consciousness even of the self and of the violence done to one's whole being. Yet in the feudal schema, in bourgeois society, the threat of violence is seen to rest on production itself. It is this inversion of the Hegelian dialectic that appears prominent in Marxist thought. According to Engels, Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic "upon its head; or rather, turned o its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet." Locating the origins of capital in the process that he dubs "so-called primitive accumulation," Marx points to violence as a historical necessity in the evolution of capital. Capital is the original sin that "comes [into the world] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

Marx describes primitive accumulation as the "prehistory of capital"; it is not the "result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure." Look at the historical transformations in Britain in "the last third of the fifteenth century and the first few decades of the sixteenth," he observes, where one finds an example of the classic form taken by the process of primitive accumulation. It begins in England via "the rapid expansion of wool manufacture in Flanders and the corresponding rise in the price of wool." This prompts the new nobility, for whom "money was the power of all powers," to embrace with full force the transformation of communal arable land into sheep walks. They advocate the subsequent clearing of estates, which takes a most drastic form in the Scottish Highlands. Marx calls attention to the plight of Scottish clansmen who were deprived first of their land, then of their fishing rights, before being hurled into the labor market as free and rightless workers. The results were twofold: the concentration of the means of production-for instance, land, sheep, tools, money-in the hands of a few, and the creation of a mass of producers who had to work for the elite class in order to provide the barest minimum of subsistence for themselves.

It is not just in this forced clearing out of the people that the violent nature of primitive accumulation manifests itself; indeed, violence and force become necessary in order to compel these expropriated people to work and to conform to the discipline of the working day. Gradually, the worker is made to accept the discipline necessary for the capitalist mode of production. And in this process the elite makes use of the legal apparatus of the state and compels the workers through "grotesquely terrorist laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labor." Indeed, the emergent bourgeoisie uses the power of the state to regulate wages, effectively forcing workers into the limits suitable for making a profit while also lengthening the working day.

This creation of a proletariat, in Marx's view, requires comparison with the category of slavery. The workers' condition was effectively that of slaves. Marx paraphrases Isaac Le Chapelier, "rapporteur of the Committee" on the law in the French Penal Code, in order to advance his argument: "Every combination by the worker," noted Marx, "was 'an assault on liberty and the declaration of the rights of man.'" The former slave masters were now the entrepreneurs, while the workers were denied all but the fiction of liberty. They were not to be "permitted to inform themselves about their own interests, nor to act in common and thereby lessen their 'absolute dependence,' 'which is almost a state of slavery,' because by doing this they infringe 'the liberty of their former masters, who are the present entrepreneurs.'"

Indeed, the phenomenon of slavery is what makes primitive accumulation what it is. The compulsion to work created by the expropriation of these human beings finds its ultimate manifestation in precisely this analytic of slavery; it is not coincidental that Marx talks of wage labor as wage-slavery. Just as the process of primitive accumulation creates poverty, it transforms the poor into wage-slaves, actual slaves, and what Marx calls "slaves of the parish," comprising those poor people who could be employed by anyone "willing to give them food and drink and to find them work." Capitalist production from the fifteenth century on is like primitive accumulation, but it is worse. It is worse because the external force and violence of the latter are now internalized in the former: whereas during the stage of primitive accumulation, the worker has to be compelled, by circumstance, by law, or by violence, to work for another, the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the redundancy of this external use of force, for the worker has internalized the discipline necessary to earn wages; his dependence on the capitalist system itself becomes the driving force to work.

It is not coincidental that the simultaneous fostering of wage-labor and slavery in Europe, because of the growing demand for labor, is accompanied by the growth of slavery in the colonies. The capitalist mode of production corresponds to the emergence of the colonial mission; indeed, it could not have been made possible without the colonial era. In this sense, colonialism, by its very essence, reifies a form of primitive accumulation that is antecedent to the capitalist mode of production but is also instrumental to the success of the latter. That the colonial enterprise depended on an element of primitive accumulation becomes clear precisely in the role that it played in the slave trade and in the employment of slaves on plantations. While colonies such as India provided the grounds for loot and plunder, and later indentured labor to work on plantations in India itself and in Africa, the African colonies for a long time provided the labor power in the form of slaves, either kidnapped, or bought and sold by their own princes and chieftains, to work on the plantations in the Americas: "The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there." Although Marx is primarily occupied with the developed form that primitive accumulation takes in Britain, namely, the capitalist mode of production, he is nevertheless quite unambiguous that colonialism and slavery as its byproduct depend on, even as they demonstrate the power of, primitive accumulation.

While Marx speaks of slavery in the colonies as the "pedestal" on which wage slavery was built in Europe, Engels talks about the rise of slavery in Europe as a foundation for the Greek and Roman empires, and through these empires, for world civilization. Indeed, Engels makes the self-consciously "heretical" claim that slavery was "a great step forward" for world history, in the sense that at a certain juncture, "the advance to a society based on class antagonism could be accomplished only in the form of slavery," not simply because slavery meant that the prisoners of war who earlier would have been killed were now at least spared their lives to be incorporated as slaves into the labor power of the victorious faction, but also because the inception of the institution of slavery entailed an advance toward a society based on class antagonism, which was a step toward the anticipated and hoped-for Marxist ideal of the working-class revolution-the stage at which the worker would take control of the means of production.

In Anti-Dühring, written as a tirade against a then contemporary socialist, Eugen Dühring, Engels argues that the economic is a far more fundamental force for subjugation than the political (while Dühring had argued the reverse). Citing several historical examples, Engels asserts that capital has a logic of its own, that the use of force is merely the means to the ends, that is, economic power; speaking of the bourgeois revolution, Engels suggests that it happened because the "political conditions in France had remained unaltered, while the economic conditions had outgrown them." The bourgeois revolution was needed to create political conditions in which "the new economic conditions could exist and develop." As an illustration of the dialectical progression of history, Engels cites the history of warfare. He suggests that each innovation in the history of militarism had been effected because it was instrumental for economic gains. But, by the very same token, such innovations could take place only if a certain amount of economic power could be staked, which would "help force to victory without which force ceases to be force."

The prior necessity of economic power in effecting advances in military technology, however, becomes an economic burden on states. Engels suggests, first, that innovation in weaponry has created a situation wherein any "further progress which would have any revolutionizing influence is no longer possible." But second, and more important, he argues, militarism has reached a stage when it will collapse "by the dialectics of its own evolution," the weapons and their maintenance having become so expensive that they constitute an excessive economic burden on the states. Engels points to the modern warship, a "lavish waste of money," in his view, because it has been developed to such perfection that it is both "outrageously costly and unusable in war." The state now has to pay for one warship what it used to pay for a whole fleet of ships; hence, the cost of the production and the operation of warships has become prohibitively expensive. And what has happened in the navy is also happening in the army, with the result that it, too, is bound to fall into ruin.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ON VIOLENCE Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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