You might want to look up what happened at Kent State, when American soldiers fired on unarmed student protestors. The media spread all sorts of lies about the victims, like that they were a bunch of outside agitators putting LSD in the water supply, and things like that. A week after the shooting, a poll was conducted in which 60% of Americans blamed the students, while only 10% blamed the National Guard. Of course, the media’s narrative didn’t hold up in the long term, and they issued “corrections” about their “mistakes,” once the moment had safely passed.
Othering is not something that’s reserved for foreigners, and there are plenty of people without consciences who the state is more than happy to recruit to do whatever dirty work needs to be done.
A protest is easy to put down, and even then the propaganda machine had to go in overdrive. If a lot of your society is practicing prefiguration (and not just protests), violence like that becomes counter-productive.
Sure. But a lot of our society isn’t practicing prefiguration (at least, as far as I can gather what you mean by that).
Whether violence is effective or counterproductive can’t just be assumed ideologically, it has to be assessed based on the situation. The bulk of human history has involved violent state repression, that the perpetrators have frequently gotten away with (and made bank off of).
If we are in a position where, because of the lack of prefiguration, the state is able to use violence with impunity and then simply lie or blame the victims, then it follows that the state can use violence to prevent prefiguration from occurring, to the extent that it sees it as a threat to its power. It’s a bit of a Catch-22.
That’s not to say it’s a bad idea to try. It’s just a reminder that being right doesn’t stop bullets.
Whether violence is effective or counterproductive can’t just be assumed ideologically, it has to be assessed based on the situation. The bulk of human history has involved violent state repression, that the perpetrators have frequently gotten away with (and made bank off of).
Sure, but the bulk of human history was not ideologically anarchist. I.e. the people were not self-consciously trying to avoid hierarchies. If they didn’t have any, it was just the way things evolved, but they weren’t conscious about rejecting them actively.
If we are in a position where, because of the lack of prefiguration, the state is able to use violence with impunity and then simply lie or blame the victims, then it follows that the state can use violence to prevent prefiguration from occurring, to the extent that it sees it as a threat to its power. It’s a bit of a Catch-22.
In the 20th century, the Marxist-Leninist experiments sucked out all the oxygen from the room by turning all socialist momentum towards those failed projects which just became capitalist again. The world is not the same anymore and a lot of lessons have been learnt and as the empire hegemony weakens and collapses through its own contradictions, there will be space for prefiguration to be practiced and grow. You can’t just take the last 100 of the US at the height of its power and posit that this is how the world will always play out.
Anyway, the best part of prefiguration is that it allows people to do it based on their appetite for risk. What we’re doing right now is a form prefiguration. Supporting piracy, supporting distributed social media, rejecting VC-based capitalism and so on. Not everything can be solved by violence and we can and should flow around it.