So I finally read Against the Logic of the Guillotine, and it is quite good. It’s not just about the titular guillotine so much as “revolutionary” leftists revenge fantasies of mass violence when We Finally Win.
Which I am getting real fucking tired of.
And more importantly, it talks about useful alternatives which don’t negate, for example, the necessity of self-defense or collective action.
Anyways, here’s an excerpt:
The guillotine has come to occupy our collective imagination. In a time when the rifts in our society are widening towards civil war, it represents uncompromising bloody revenge. It represents the idea that the violence of the state could be a good thing if only the right people were in charge.
Those who take their own powerlessness for granted assume that they can promote gruesome revenge fantasies without consequences. But if we are serious about changing the world, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that our proposals are not equally gruesome.
For what it’s worth I think this similar kind of imaginary-violent-revenge-justice-thing logic is why some ostensible leftists (especially younger ones) will argue in favor of incarceration or the death penalty but Only For Really Bad People and miss the point that state violence is bad regardless of who is doing it. Another quote to this effect:
Then, as now, there are people who want to think of themselves as radical without having to actually make a radical break with the institutions and practices that are familiar to them. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx said.
Anyways; a good read on some stuff that’s been bothering me lately.
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