Every time we chat, and the discussion turns towards capitalism, she’s the one who without any hesitation just says we should kill them all. Now, though, it’s gone further to torture. And she names names. In addition to people like Bezos and Musk, she includes Ben Shapiro, Andrew Tate and others.
I say we should force them to work and maybe learn the error of their ways (After the revolution of course. During it many of these fucks will die and I’ll be glad).
Her current jobs is extremely horrible. She’s being massively overworked, verbally abused and, of course, underpaid. So I get her frustration. But it’s also scary. I don’t want her to get in any trouble.
I don’t know if I should be gently turning her away from imagining a slow and painful torture of capitalists or not. Am I being a lib or is she too extreme?
Comrade Che said it best;
Anger is justified and useful, hatred is justified and useful, but violence needs to be a means to an end and not an end unto itself. The point of the terror is to upend bourgeois society and destroy it's ability to coordinate and respond, not to have fun. That always ends up as banditry and death squads.
Though like others have said, if she's just now realized the whole huge enormous deception and the incredible violence of capitalism she's got every right to be pissed. Give her some theory to read, Maybe George Jackson's "Blood in my Eye". He was angry as hell, and writing from prison, but he was also clear about goals and what we're trying to achieve, and why we use the tools we use.
justified maybe but I don't see how hatred is useful
I don't hate Bezos in the same way I don't hate a storm that destroyed a house. Capital is too impersonal a force for me to have such a relationship with it
Oh I don't hate Bezos. He's just some dweeb elevated by forces beyond his understanding. I hate capitalism itself, the real god emerging from the complex behaviors of billions of human beings until it attains something like sentience and something like malice. All that rhetoric I throw around about killing god isn't just talk. As soon as I fix my brain I am going to make a knife so sharp it can cut emergent processes.
Marx, in a letter to James Mill, 1844
I have to say it was both reassuring and horrifying to find that other people, not just Marx, believed that Capitalism had become an emergent system of sufficient complexity that it has attributes and behaviors comparable to thought processes and malice. I'm not even sure when the concept of an emergent system was developed, I think very recently, but I think it's useful in conceptualizing how capitalism behaves as an entity unto itself that seeks to constantly grow, expand, and change, while also healing wounds and compensating for novel situations, all at a degree of complexity that is difficult for theorists to fully explain and largely impossible to predict
I don't mean to be all mystical, this is an extension of how things like culture or language exist not in any one person, but in the social interactions of many people. Likewise capital isn't in any person, it exists between us in the way we act, making otherwise absurd concepts in to real phenomena with real observable behaviors and results.
The take away being we're gonna need a really handsome person with a sword made out of some really cool meteor if we're ever gonna win this thing.
As for the utility of hatred - I think hatred is a very pure and elevated understanding that a thing is utterly incompatible with your way of life. When you encounter something so utterly alien and inimical to your existence that no course of action exists but to undertake its complete destruction hatred is the motivating emotion that you embody. Hatred absolves you of mercy and nuance. It cleanses your doubts and uncertainties. It is terrible and awesome, a force for enormous change, for good or ill. Hate gives you license to kill a thing so completely that it's memory vanishes from the earth as though it never existed.
I don't want to reform people like Musk and Bezos out of love. I want to reform them for hate's sake (CW: mention of pornography, liberalism). Simply killing them achieves nothing. They remain intact to the end. But for hate's sake I would see them made in to good communists, in to trusted and dedicated comrades. This would be not mere transformation, but their utter annihilation. The most complete and total destruction possible. Not the mere destruction of the body, but the destruction of the person enacted by the person themselves. The refutation of everything they were and everything they believed in. A dagger thrust in to their own soul, wielded by their own hand. It is the ultimate victory, the ultimate expression of bloody lust and savagery, to conquer your enemy so completely that they unmake themselves to become you. When we achieve such a thing, when we can reform such cruel and terrible people, then we can truly say that we have slain a god.
I'm picking up exactly what you're putting down, I've realized in the last year or so that Capital is an actual dark god, the literal Azathoth, and it feels good to be able to say that without having to qualify it.
Lovecraft is what got me thinking in that direction, too. A completely alien, indifferent, unfathomable horror that drives humans to madness and self destruction, nearly beyond our conception.
Capital is no more a god than Baal was. it is an impersonal force in this case made up of socially organised processes rather than the sea as Baal represented. Grapes of wrath has a good chapter on this. If it is a god then it is a false god for they worship the work of their own hands
I agree the wish to free people of this false god is a good one.
I think we're mainly on the same page
Fair nough, but if we win I'm still gonna claim we stormed the gates of heaven and put god to the sword.
The Christian imagry is a little out of place as Capital is a god in the way of the old pagan gods of Rome rather than in the Abrahamic way
Guilty. I grew up in a Christian context and the bible is far and away the religious text with which I am most familiar with. And the whole "Kill god and overthrow his Kingdom" thing is hard to apply to like, a hindu or buddhist or taoist paradigm. It works better for the Christian god because Christianity is so patriarchical and hierarchical, and because they have a singular god that they assert is responsible for and aware of everything that happens, including the evil stuff. I guess a Manichean or Zoroastrain adjacent thing could apply, since as far as i can remember they assert that there is a great evil god locked in combat with a great good god, with the outcome uncertain.