Little Red's Recovery Room

I don't know what to think about France. But I do know that it's unsettling to watch an argument about violence and social change turn increasingly violent itself. I'm hopeful, though, that the good will and respect among these people I've come to admire so will carry them to the other side.

I do want to register my ambivalence about the events in France, while repeating that I don't feel sufficiently informed. Isn't what's at stake in Franklin and Ange's responses to Jane the fear that means justified by an end become ends in-and-of-themselves?

Shit floats, politically speaking; even though in Republican Barcelona the anarcho-syndicalists outnumbered the Stalinists by about five-to-one, they opted out of participation, perhaps rightfully, in things like policing and hauling trash and establishing confederations. As such, they basically handed over control of the city, and what had been sixty years in the making was unmade.

I do believe that destroying property is perhaps the only thing that makes anybody pay attention. Nonetheless, bourgeois of me as it may be, I can't help but hope for a more tactical, and hence more productive, kind of destruction. As much as I believe Benjamin when he tells me that violence is the ground of law, I don't feel so good about hurting/maiming people. Even those attached to state power. A few choiceful assassinations every now and then, sure.