Calls for exclusion from the police, the creation of self-help networks and other efforts to reduce contact and dependence on the state force finally pose the same challenge: we are living in a state explained through their violence. Let’s organize without him.
I first taught the definition of the state as the entity that has a monopoly on valid violence in a philosophy course of the h8 school. That word stayed on me and has kept rubbing me ever since. As a political science student, I come face-to-face with a relative frequency.
To put it bluntly, the unconditionally accepted definition of the state is inherently violent. According to this definition of state, to be governed is to be violently forced to act in a bound manner, either a great friend or knowing that supposedly valid violence inflicts you if you walk away.
After more than a month of following the protest policy after the death of George Floyd, the most important friend of the sustained protests in Portland, Oregon, my concern about the acceptability of this state definition is less difficult to articulate. Can we call state violence and state-sanctioned violence legitimate, adding the severe and excessive logical use of force and chemical weapons through the police?
In Portland, our fellow Americans are fighting the violent and irguided federal occupation, being thrown into vans not marked by federal agents and violently violating their constitutional rights. Can we call what’s happening there, adding the violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, a valid violence exercise?
I will no longer accept a definition of society that accepts anything as valid, and I should never have done so. Portland reminds us that if we prefer to live as loose people, we should avoid if we prefer to live in a world where lousy state violence, from the daily use of police forces above the maximum to federal occupation, is valid and necessary.
Violence at the game station is truly an inherent feature of the stand, and nonviolent alterlocality would be anarchy. However, I am not obliged that Appleone has tried everything to conceptualize an alternative way of seeing and structuring a state. Since George Floyd’s death, The American giants of the apple have found for the first time concepts such as the abolition of the police and the abolition of prison. And for those who board, or if they’d like, there are giant apple questions left.
The big apple of disorders that immediately reach the brain is well documented, obvious, and widely addressed. You know them: what about violent crime? Won’t there be anyone to call in case of emergency? But the contradictions we bring to the people in question are less discussed, perhaps because they are less perceived.
We have a deep urge to punish our fellow citizens, in connection with support or rehabilitation. Funding or the abolition of the police is never the best friend imaginable if we do not suppress our momentum towards the police, if we do not begin to see justice as separate from imprisonment and punishment.
As the New Yorker’s article on America’s fury in Jussie Smollett in 201 states says: “To stop the wave of mass incarceration, we get used to fewer sanctions, even for some other Americans who find our reprehensible best friend.”
If we live in a society that is never very violent, or no less violent today than yesterday, we have to be comfortable with less punishment. We will have to invite ourselves: what can the social contract also mean without a coercive apparatus? What can the state and its legislation also mean without violence? Do we live and die in a police state or in a military career through our own government, in the land of the free?
I don’t have the solutions. As erroneous as I locate our unusual definition of the state, I am finally still a student of it. But I know that scorridors have to look for answers and solutions, guided through those who revel in making these paintings for decades. Out of respect for them, the scorridors have to seek to build a kickback and a global in which we do not have to define how we organize through violence.
Kaitlyn Radde (she/she) is a junior political science student. She plans to pursue an educational career.
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