The family is marketed as a safe space, a place of love and mutual care, but this is not supported by the data—How do we bring our experiences of mutual support networks to the centre of society?

~ written by Alana Queer, original text in Spanish: El Salto ~

Something is wrong. We already struggle to imagine the end of capitalism, but abolishing the family? Feminism seems to have long since abandoned this old feminist demand, and this year the LGBTQIA+ movement in Spain will celebrate twenty years of equal marriage, that is, its inclusion in this patriarchal institution of marriage and family that marks a new “homonormativity,” which is primarily a copy of heteronormativity. We’re in trouble. We lack imagination, we lack visions of other forms of coexistence and parenting.

I write this article from my perspective as a family survivor. A survivor of sexual abuse, psychological and emotional abuse and neglect, abuse that has left me with complex trauma that I am still learning to live with. To live, not just survive, as I have done for decades of my life. Writing from a survivor’s perspective, in a way, is writing from the perspective of a child, providing a counterpoint to the debate dominated by adult-centric perspectives.

When I think of family, the first words that come to mind are violence, (sexual) abuse, abandonment, mistreatment, emotional blackmail… Not for a millisecond of my life have I considered starting a family. 

While I strongly agree with the diagnosis of the family’s role in the economic and political order, as put forward, for example, by Nuria Alabao in this article or Sophie Lewis in her book Abolish the Family, in a way, this diagnosis is unnecessary. I only have to think about my own experience, look at my surroundings, my friends, and what I see is violence, mistreatment, abuse, emotional neglect, and all the resulting traumas. Is it possible that so many of us have simply been unlucky? Perhaps there is a more structural problem, that it’s not something failing in some (many) individual families, but the family system itself that is at fault?

The family, a system of mistreatment and abuse

The family is marketed as a safe space, a place of love and mutual care. Above all, it is said that the family is the best place for children. This could not be further from the truth.  According to a meta-analysis of physical violence experienced or witnessed in the family at the global level, in Europe 12.7% of children have been victims of physical violence in their family, with a higher rate for boys compared to girls (girls are not included in the analysis), and 10.5% have witnessed physical violence in their family. Another global meta-analysis of more types of abuse and neglect reaches even higher results: 14.3% of girls and 6.2% of boys had suffered sexual abuse, 27% of boys and 12% of girls had suffered physical abuse, 6.2% of boys and 12.9% of girls had suffered emotional abuse, and 14.8% of boys and 13.9% of girls had suffered neglect during their childhood. Overall, boys suffer more physical abuse and neglect, and girls more emotional and sexual abuse. Fathers perpetrate more physical and sexual abuse, while mothers perpetrate more emotional abuse and neglect.

A study in the United Kingdom concluded that 41.7% of children were exposed to some form of child abuse—physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or physical or emotional neglect. Some 19.3% witnessed domestic violence between their parents or care-givers within the family. The famous ACE Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences Study) of 1998 in the United States reached prevalence rates of 11.1% for psychological abuse, 10.8% for physical abuse, 22% for sexual abuse, and 12.5% ​​for exposure to domestic violence against the mother. Children often suffer more than one form of abuse at a time.

In Spain, an estimated 18.9% of the population has been a victim of sexual abuse in childhood (15.2% of men and 22.5% of women), more than half of whom were perpetrated by a family member. According to a report by Save the Children, more than 25% of children in Spain have been victims of abuse by their parents or care-givers.

Despite considerable variation across studies, all of them show the family as a site—the primary site—of abuse, mistreatment, and neglect. Studies that differentiate by sexual orientation, such as one from the United States, generally find much higher prevalence rates of abuse and mistreatment across all categories for LGBTQIA+ people compared to heterosexuals. And children who exhibit behaviours that do not conform to their assigned sex at birth suffer even more abuse of all kinds.

Beyond abuse, 40% of children never develop a secure attachment to one of their care-givers. According to research by the Sutton Trust in the United Kingdom, “Many children lack secure attachment relationships. Around 1 in 4 children avoid their parents when they are upset because they ignore their needs. Another 15% resist their parents because they cause distress.” According to the same research, insecure parental attachment is the most important risk factor; that is, insecure attachment is reproduced from generation to generation if parents with insecure attachment do not work on their own attachment styles and traumas.

To these figures of child abuse and neglect, we can add the high prevalence of intimate partner violence, gender violence, and domestic violence. Witnessing this violence also has negative consequences for children.

Is the family a safe place of love and care? The numbers debunk this myth. We can say that for children, the least safe and most dangerous place is their family home. With these figures—a prevalence of abuse between 15% and 40%—how can we think that something is wrong at the individual level, that the problem isn’t the structure (the family), but a lack of education, resources, etc.?

I invite you to a thought experiment. Let’s imagine a society wants to choose between several models of coexistence and parenting: tribal or community parenting, other models I have no idea what they might be, and family parenting. Predictions of child abuse are estimated for each model. Can we imagine that a model with a 25% prediction of abuse would be chosen? I doubt it.

Child abuse: lifelong damage

Child abuse leaves lifelong damage, I know this from my own experience. For example, complex trauma refers to early negative experiences involving neglect and/or abuse that occur within an attachment relationship with the primary care-giver. This means that the figure who is supposed to provide affection, love, and protection to the child is, at the same time, a source of anxiety, threat, neglect, and/or abuse, resulting in distressing experiences such as verbal abuse, abandonment, bullying, emotional invalidation, abandonment, and so on.

Because of their ongoing nature, such abuse generates a stress response that leaves a mark on the brain. Furthermore, these situations go unnoticed externally and are cumulative. In many ways, complex trauma is related to “non-events,” things that didn’t happen when they should have—a look, a smile, being considered, or a comforting hug. These non-events have a significant impact, although they don’t remain as memories beyond emotional sensations.

I know all this very well. It’s estimated that up to 7.7% of adults suffer from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (c-PTSD or complex PTSD) and up to 20% suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. To me, these numbers seem too low. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t a simple binary—either you have PTSD or complex PTSD according to strict diagnostic criteria, or you’re fine. Problems with emotional regulation, forming close relationships, behaviour, trust, and a negative self-image can all be present and can cause considerable problems without meeting all the diagnostic criteria for PTSD or complex PTSD.

Complex trauma, often also called complex developmental trauma or developmental trauma, is in the vast majority of cases the result of prolonged emotional abuse and neglect in childhood and adolescence. Here we see many of the 15% of children who avoid their parents because they cause distress: survivors of sexual abuse and other forms of prolonged maltreatment.

There are also other consequences for mental and physical health: eating disorders, depression, other mental disorders, substance use and abuse, and much more. From the ACE study in the United States, we know that adverse childhood experiences have a profound impact on many areas of adult health.

Towards other models

So, we abolish the family. Okay! But what do we put in its place? Sophie Lewis says: “Nothing.” Perhaps an overly simplistic answer. 

It’s true that in the current system, the family fulfils functions for which the best answer is “nothing”. As Nuria Alabao says, “The family is not a neutral institution: it is still sustained by hierarchical relations of subordination based on gender, age, and race/migration origin. […] As an institution, the family has a central economic function; it has always been essential to the reproduction of classes in capitalism, to allocate inheritances, transmit property, or guarantee the payment of debts”. These are the functions we don’t want to replace. Enough with Sophie Lewis’s “nothing.” We don’t need a gender police force, we don’t need an institution that reproduces patriarchy and prepares children to function well under capitalism.

However, there are other functions of the family in the current system, such as parenting and caregiving, which the family performs quite poorly, as I’ve shown above, but which are nonetheless necessary. We need other models of living together, of relating, of parenting, and of organising caregiving.

Today, mainstream feminism has nothing more to offer than promoting “co-responsibility” in parenting, that is, equal participation of fathers in childrearing. Where are the more radical visions?

I don’t mean that children need their mother, father or biological parent, but they do need adults who allow them a safe and stable attachment.

According to Nuria Alabao, “In 19th-century socialism linked to the labour movement, and later in the 1970s, class-based feminism called for the socialisation of social reproduction: soup kitchens, 24-hour day-care, or innovated experiences of nurturing or support on the margins”. However, even these proposals don’t question the family itself in a deeper way. They are proposals more focused on allowing women to participate in the labour market. Ultimately, they are adult-centric proposals. And, regarding the miserable figures of children with secure attachments, I fear that these proposals could even worsen the situation for children if the nuclear family model is maintained. By this, I don’t mean that children need their biological mother, father, or parent, but they do need adults who allow them a secure and stable attachment.

In this sense, it might even be helpful to “de-centre” biological parents, to think about care and parenting in a community, a tribe, parenting models that include a network, a community of adults in the children’s lives. The African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” points in this direction. Children need more secure and stable relationships with adults, beyond their parents, a “village.”

There is some research on the perspectives of children raised in consensually non-monogamous relationships. According to Elisabeth Sheff, “The presence of more than two adults in the family provides several advantages to children, such as receiving more attention, nurturing, and time from significant adults, receiving more gifts for special occasions, and being exposed to a greater number of positive role models. It also allows them to form family bonds with other children beyond biogenetic kinship and to have more siblings”.

The parenting network does not have to be limited to the sexual and emotional bonds of the parents: I am thinking of networks of relational anarchy, networks that decentralize love and the couple.

Other recent research with children says: “Children living in polyamorous households often view their parents’ romantic partners as resource persons, which fosters the development of a positive view of these adults in the child. Many children explained their affection for their parents’ partners by highlighting how these adults cared for them and supported them, emotionally and materially. This echoes studies conducted with parents practicing NMC, who described their extra-dyadic romantic partners as supportive, loving, and understanding, not only for them but also for their children.”  Thinking further, in terms of the concept of “village” or community, the nurturing network need not be limited to the parents’ sexual affective ties. I’m thinking of networks of relational anarchy, networks that de-centre love and the couple (or couples).

This isn’t so simple. Myriam Rodríguez del Real and Javier Correa Román say in an article in El Salto: “The central issue is understanding that friendship has been emptied of material content in order to centralize the couple. Societies construct systems of kinship and affinity that determine which bonds are recognized and which are left on the margins. The heterosexual monogamous couple constitutes the center of these systems, and the rest of the relationships (including friendship) are reconfigured in response to it”.

And: “Therefore, it is not simply a matter of ‘giving more importance to friends,’ but of rejecting the current configurations of both the couple and friendship to create new relational forms. We need to ‘disorient’ (…) the normative notions of affection in order to imagine other forms of relational inhabitation. Only to the extent that we think of other forms of friendship does the couple cease to make sense as the organising centre of our lives”.

In a talk about abolishing the family in Seville two years ago, considering alternatives to the family, Nuria Alabao spoke about building relationships with a reciprocal obligation (in order to assume caregiving), and that these types of relationships take time to build. We already have this obligation in today’s family, and I seriously doubt it contributes to adequate care, neither for children nor for adults or the elderly. For me, caregiving out of obligation isn’t care, but rather a sacrifice. And, today, the vast majority of women have to make this sacrifice to care for their parents or another relative.

How do we bring our experiences of mutual support networks to the centre of society? How do we change our perceptions so that we see ourselves as capable of trusting these networks?

Personally, I think more about making commitments—that is, I voluntarily make a commitment in a relationship (of any kind) that doesn’t require reciprocity. It’s more about trusting the network (of relational anarchy, of my community), that when I need care or support, there will be a person in the network (or several) who can take it on, and they don’t have to be the same people who previously received support from me. I feel like this is something we’re already trying to practice in my network.

Hil Malatino, in his book Trans Care  (Bellaterra, 2021) ,  offers this minimal definition of community: people who are re-weaving. And when I review my experience of the last nine years, facing my family traumas, it has been a constant re-weaving of my networks. Some people left my networks, others joined. Perhaps we should leave behind the idea of ​​a stable, lifelong mutual support network that should assume the care and support—emotional, financial, parenting, when we are sick—that today is assumed (often poorly) by the family, and instead rely on our networks, always fragile, always in reconfiguration, but capable of sustaining us when we need them? I don’t know. I’m still afraid of it myself, but, at the same time, my networks have sustained me over the past few years, and they continue to sustain me.

How do we bring our experiences of mutual support networks to the centre of society? How do we change our perceptions so that we see ourselves as capable of trusting these networks? How can we strengthen them?

I don’t have the answers. I think it’s about building by walking and experimenting. This is just a start. And, for me, building alternatives to family, new structures of mutual support and care, is a matter of survival. I’ve outlived my family, and I’ve gotten this far thanks to my networks.

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Source: Freedom Press

The post Abolishing the family: A survivor’s perspective appeared first on Void Network.

BRAD EVANS: For those of us who remain deeply concerned with understanding the worst episodes in human history, the life and work of Walter Benjamin still appear all too resonant. This in part has something to do with the tragedy of what he came to represent, along with the undoubted brilliance of his insight and challenges to political dogmatism. What is it about Benjamin that captures your attention as an author and critic?

JAMES MARTEL: I think that Benjamin has never been as relevant to questions of politics as he is today with the exception of his own lifetime. As I read him, Benjamin offers one of the best explanations both for the ongoing resilience of capitalism, despite all of its predations and all the instability that it creates, as well as the connection between fascism and liberalism that we are seeing being expressed today. He also offers, I think, the best way to understand how to address our contemporary moment and how to resist and upend capitalism, liberalism, and fascism all round.

In my view, Benjamin’s understanding of what he calls mythic violence is the key to understanding all of these questions. Mythic violence is Benjamin’s term for the way that illicit economic and political power has asserted itself over all human life, projecting a form of authority out into the world that then becomes accepted as reality itself. It is mythic because there is no true or ontological basis for the powers of liberalism and capitalism; its right to rule is self-proclaimed and then naturalized so that it becomes seen as fated and inevitable. It is violent because, without a genuine basis for its authority, mythic violence must endlessly strike out, killing and hurting over and over again to establish its power and even its reality.

In describing mythic violence, I think it’s very important to remember that this doesn’t always refer to actual physical violence per se. The German term that we translate into English as “violence” in Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” is gewalt, a word that may be better translated as force or projection. This is important because it shows first of all that a lot of what Benjamin calls mythic violence is not actually always literally violent (although, as already noted, literal violence is a critical part of what does). Mythic instantiations such as that are violent in a much deeper sense with physical violence being only the ultimate and last resort in their arsenal. But it is also important to note that Benjamin is not against responding to mythic violence with an answering form of physical violence at times. In the “Critique of Violence,” he tells us that even so seemingly clear a commandment as “thou shalt not kill” does not mean that we can never kill. It means, as he tells us, that we must struggle with the meaning of that commandment both separately and together and at times ignore or abandon it (that is to say to commit violence but in a way that sits squarely on our own shoulders, in a way that can’t be pawned off as “following orders” or obeying dictates from God or some other transcendent form of authority).

If we keep these two things in mind (that the state and capitalism are not always physically violent and that the resistance to these things can itself be violent at times) it helps to specify what Benjamin means in terms of a critique of and resistance to modern forms of mythic violence. The key thing to resist is not physical violence per se but rather projections of some kind of external source of authority (whether it is God or gods, nature or some mystical origins) which become the basis for illicit and anxious — hence often physically violent — forms of control.

What seems important to recognize here is how these categories, most notably concerning our allegiance to the mythical order of things, are applicable to both leftist and conservative ideologies, which history shows can author the most extreme violence.

For Benjamin, without an understanding and critique of mythic violence, any would-be vanquisher of capitalism and liberalism will swiftly become co-opted into the very same political and economic forms that it opposes, ultimately replacing one form of mythic violence with another. In Benjamin’s view, the left itself is far from immune from projections of authority (and anxious and violent ones at that). Even so, there is a key difference between the left and the right for Benjamin insofar as the right is based on nothing but mythic projection, projections about racial purity, ancient (false) forms of authority and hierarchies and so on, whereas the left tends to seek to denaturalize these relationships for the sake of a different and better form of political life. Benjamin speaks of a political and aesthetic form that is “useless for the purposes of fascism,” which means that it does not allow for the sedimentation of mythic projections. Instead of such projections, Benjamin looks to local and episodic forms of collective decision making, akin to what he calls “pure means” (that is to say, forms of politics that are not related to ends or teleologies which are invariably mythic).

Such a political form would indeed be useless for the right insofar as it denies and undermines precisely what the right is based on even as it is useful for a left that sought to discern political forms that do not reproduce mythic violence. This discerning mechanism, one that allows us to distinguish between what is mythic and what is not, determining what comes from false projections onto externalities and what comes from within our own communities, is, I think, the key political insight that Benjamin offers us for our own time.

While he wasn’t the first to ask what makes humans violent toward each other, we owe it to Benjamin for raising in union the two most pressing of all questions. Namely — “what time are we living in”? And “how can we develop a critique of violence adequate to these times”? What do these two questions say to you in the context of his legacy?

I think we are living in a time when the contradictions of mythic violence are perhaps especially legible in a way that has not been the case since Benjamin’s own time. More precisely, these contradictions are more visible in the West and the North; even in the richest and whitest of communities, the conflation between fascism and liberalism, the violence that undergirds both systems, has become particularly evident even to those who would prefer not to be reminded of this. In much of the Global South and in communities of color and poor communities within the West and the North as well, that violence has always been plainly visible (and by design).

In my view, Benjamin helps to explain why the neoliberal order seems to be collapsing into a fascist one. For Benjamin, liberalism and fascism are not as distinct as they are usually considered to be (at least by liberals and fascists!). It’s not that liberals and fascists are somehow in secret league with one another; they don’t have to be for the homeostasic nature of the systems of mythic violence to function. All that is required is the common mythic form itself and the deep anxieties that this produces in the system. As the inequalities fomented by neoliberalism become increasingly apparent, a turn to more violence (and thus fascism) is required to keep the core capitalist center of mythic violence protected and intact.

Clearly, we live in very scary times, but from a Benjaminian perspective this is also a time of tremendous potential for a revived radical left politics. One of the first things you get taught in a political science department (my own discipline) is that authority weakens the more you have to demonstrate the violence that underlies it. If you have to resort to outright violence, that is a sign that the fabric of reality that Benjamin calls the “phantasmagoria” is unraveling and is no longer doing the job of producing political and economic quiescence.

This is where the opportunity for radical change comes into play. For Benjamin, even as liberalism gives way to fascism, the vulnerability of mythic systems becomes that much more exposed. The need to resort to physical violence, and, perhaps just as critically, the need for those subjected to such violence to respond with terror and awe instead of defiance becomes that much more central to the perpetuation of mythic violence. The exposure of this vulnerability may be the reason that we are seeing an increasing refusal on the part of political subjects in our time to obey or even recognize these powers as such. Today we are seeing outbursts of resistance all over the world to mythic and neoliberal power. In Lebanon, Iraq, France, the UK, Bolivia, Chile, Hong Kong, and so many other places, resistance is growing even as repression and state violence are growing in equal measures (as Benjamin would predict).

I am reminded here of Arendt’s insistence that violence and power are qualitatively different. Whilst I do find some of this analysis too deterministic, from what you say it is important to remember the reason why totalitarian systems require so much violence is that they ultimately cannot persuade people to follow their systems of empowerment. And in this regard, totalitarian systems are marked not by their absolute power but rather by how precarious they really are when it comes to their durability. Does this resonate with the types of potentiality in Benjamin?

Yes, I think one of the most important things that Benjamin has to tell us is that fascism, for all of its terrifying appearance, is always and inherently on the brink of collapse. That is to say, that fascism is trapped by its own violence, forced to turn to a greater and greater degree of violence as it continually seeks to ground and reground itself. Usually when we think of a very violent and powerful system, we think that it is utterly in control of the situation and that it only collapses, if ever, by virtue of some externality (kind of the way that the combined force of the Allies in World War II ended fascism, at least for a moment). Yet, fascism in some sense does not even need external enemies because it bears its own vulnerability within itself. I’m not saying that a fascist regime can’t last for a very long time — Franco’s regime lasted for four decades after all — but rather that fascism’s requirement for a display of its violence (and just as importantly, as I was saying before, the requirement that its violence be received in a way that supports rather than undermines its political authority) means that it only survives from moment to moment; each moment could be its end. It could vanish in an instant because its power is entirely mythic and not based on any collective decisions. (Even though it always clothes itself in a relationship to “the people”; for this reason, I think that “populism” is not the right name for what we are experiencing in our own time. I would not call this populism but maybe something more like mythic groupthink, which is something very different and actually maybe the opposite of something that is inherent in a collective.)

I agree that Arendt’s distinction between violence and power has its limitations but I think it might be helpful here to think about the difference between what Benjamin calls (mythic) violence and nonviolence (with the latter corresponding roughly to Arendt’s notion of power). If nonviolence for Benjamin is marked by a refusal of externalities, then we can see that it actually has a far more stable basis than fascism does. Again, this does not mean that moments of nonviolence have a longer shelf life than fascist moments do. History tends to show the opposite; the real expressions of collective power have tended to be short lived indeed. Yet this lack of duration does not itself mean that nonviolent political moments are always doomed to short forms of duration. I think that in this case, the situation is the direct opposite of fascism: while fascism is internally unstable (because mythic) and doesn’t require an external threat to end (although those do help, of course), with nonviolence, the internal form is very stable because it comes out of actual collective forms of decision, which are made without recourse to externalities like racial purity, ancient history, or the like. It is in fact only externalities that can bring it to an end. Unfortunately those externalities are all too readily found; the creation of a nonviolent society seems to always bring a fascist response. (At this point, even a liberal regime, recognizing the threat that nonviolence poses to its markets, will turn into a fascist regime until the “emergency” is dealt with.)

This sounds like bad news, but I think that in the long run nonviolence may have the stronger hand. Arendt’s notion that power is always stronger than violence is very important here. As she informs us, in a clash between nonviolence and violence (recalling yet again that nonviolence for Benjamin does not always mean that it refrains from actual violence; maybe that is one big difference between him and Arendt), nonviolence will win every time. That is precisely why mythic violence is always frantically trying to assert its own existence, why liberal regimes readily give way to fascist ones, why the state must always kill no matter how benign it appears (or desires) to be. But in a way, mythic violence is the one facing an uphill battle; it has vulnerabilities that nonviolent forms do not have; all it has in the end is its own violence, and that cannot be counted on to produce its desired results in every single instance that it finds itself confronted by a nonviolent alternative.

Returning to his most celebrated essay, “Critique of Violence,” while appreciating its theoretical richness, I am still nevertheless troubled by the way various scholars simply take its key terms and comport them into the 21st century as if the logics and rules for power and violence remained the same. What do you think is required in updating the critique?

That is such an important question. I think that Benjamin must be held in his own time even as he speaks to ours. If not, such a juxtaposition threatens to lose that critical distinction that for Benjamin is the basis for why the thought or materiality of one period of time can disrupt another (and vice versa). If we make Benjamin into a 21st-century thinker, then we are making him into something that he is not, and in so doing, the critical perspective that he offers us is lost as well. One example of what you are talking about that I already touched on comes from a failure to understand what Benjamin means by violence in his “Critique.” (I think a related failure is to misunderstand what he means by nonviolence too.) Another example is to think that any number of actions constitute a General Strike, which for Benjamin takes very specific — and nonviolent — form.

Perhaps an even better example is the question of what constitutes what Benjamin calls “divine violence.” He describes divine violence in the “Critique” as a way for God to reject the fetishism and mythic violence that is often projected onto or attributed to divine sources. For Benjamin, divine violence does not create new laws and truths but merely acts to remove false ones. In my view — and I’ll admit that this is hardly a settled point — it is crucial to distinguish between divine violence and any form of human agency. As I see it, if human beings themselves can be said to engage in divine violence, then that defeats the whole purpose of exposing what is mythic and what is not. If people can be said to act as agents of God, then that simply reproduces mythic violence in a new guise. (How would you know when they are acting on God’s behalf and when they are not?) Benjamin himself really muddies this distinction in the “Critique,” offering that some human activities, including education, may constitute acts of divine violence. For this reason, some thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek have offered that when the poor rise up and attack the rich they are acting as agents of divine violence. I think this is a big mistake. What I’d say instead is that people act in the wake of an opening that divine violence produces. Divine violence is, in this account, what offers human beings a chance to act in ways that are not constituted by mythic violence, that is to say, to act in ways that are nonviolent. The General Strike is an example of such nonviolence, a way to say no to the entire apparatus of mythic violence.

Despite the fact that we must, as you suggest, keep Benjamin’s concepts distinct from those of our own time, I think that there is a huge benefit in connecting his time with our own and thinking alongside him. For me, Benjamin has helped me to see the big picture even if I use different terms than he does to describe our contemporary political moment. The name that I would give to the projections from mythic externalities is archism, a basis for much of our political and economic structures today. The name that I would give to non-mythic and collective nonviolent practices is anarchism (a term that Benjamin himself often uses although he tended to call himself a communist). In my opinion, to speak of archism helps us to avoid the mistake of thinking that the state is the only form of mythic violence that matters. (If it were, then taking over the state would end the predations of mythic violence. Yet, as we have seen in history, such a takeover generally leads to a mere change in rulers.) To speak of anarchism offers us a way to think of a collective and widespread form of resistance that is not merely utopian but is already extant. In fact, I would say that for Benjamin, anarchism is a widespread practice, a form of political nonviolence that archism sits atop, claiming credit for the support and possibility of political forms that in reality it only predates and parasitizes.

In conclusion, I am taken by the already extant forms of resistance you allude to here. Despite the pessimism of the types, then as now, what I still find in Benjamin is the idea that people will resist what is patently intolerable and will try to retain something of the human despite the desperate weight of historical persecution. If Benjamin offers us a single lesson moving forward, what do you think this demands from us?

I think that more than offering us something, Benjamin actually takes away one of the great conceits that allows us to remain ensconced in mythic violence, namely the idea that “there is no alternative.” This notion, akin to what Benjamin himself calls “left melancholia,” is a kind of self-defeatism that allows leftists and those who are against violence the comfort of thinking that there really isn’t anything that they can do, that leftist attempts to avoid violence all produce results that are no less violent than fascism and that therefore we must perforce make our peace with capitalism and just do the best we can. What Benjamin shows us, I think, is not only that a nonviolent life is possible, but that it exists all around us. We are actually engaged in it already. In his view, nonviolence is just another name for daily life, for the infinite decisions, agreements, arguments, and resolutions that we all make with one another each and every day and without any recourse to law or the state. This is what I like to call the anarchist life that we are already living. Nonviolence, then, is not some pie-in-the-sky utopia but an ongoing presence that we always have recourse too. We do not need to destroy everything and then start over. Rather we must remove the parasitic and mythic overlord that rules us through its violence and its lies. The greatest deception that mythic violence has ever pulled over on us is the notion (popularized by novels like Lord of the Flies) that if the state or other archist forms were to remove themselves from our life, we would all be stabbing one another within minutes. Benjamin shows us that it is the state itself, the veritable fox guarding the henhouse, that is the source of violence in our life. We may respond to it with various acts of violence of our own, but that is only to repeat the way that we are enmeshed in a violent and mythic order.

If I thought that nothing that I did could ever lead to things being better or different then I would probably be entitled to engage in a bit of left melancholia, to sigh over how awful capitalism is and romanticize the various failed leftist assaults on capitalism’s reign. But if I knew, as Benjamin informs us, that capitalism was far more vulnerable than I thought, that I lived amid an entire network of mutually nonviolent collectivity (however much it was overlaid with echoes of state and other forms of mythic violence) then the onus is on me to actually do something about it.

I so admire the courage and clearheadedness that Benjamin displays in his last essay, “On the Concept of History.” This was written in 1940, the year of his death and a year that fascism was literally coming down all around him. Rather than allow himself into being terrified into quiescence, at the (fascist) end of history, Benjamin wrote an essay where he understood time itself as defeating the linearity of history and the sense that fascism is fated and cannot be resisted. I don’t think we are today quite where the world was when Benjamin wrote that essay, although that depends, once again, on who and where we are talking about, but we are clearly getting closer to this situation on a global scale. I hope that we can demonstrate the same resolve in our time that Benjamin showed in his. Even in the heart of fascism, he saw its true colors, its vulnerabilities, and the fact that it was never as powerful as it seemed. He was able to see mythic violence for what it is even when it ended up costing him his life. If he could do that in the face of Hitler, I hope we can do the same in the face of Trump and Johnson and the like and whomever, or whatever, is to come next.

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Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director of the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base covering 143 countries.

The post Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Walter Benjamin Today appeared first on Void Network.

Sociologist Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores discusses how the concentration of class and racial privilege in gated communities takes place alongside the spatial concentration and confinement of the poor. She argues that gates help sort and segregate people, physically and symbolically distinguish communities, and cement inequality.

“You drive to the gate. The community is in the shape of a U. You come in one gate and leave through the other. When you get to the gate, you will have a dial pad. You have to dial my number. Here is the number. Wait for me to answer. I will ask you who you are. You will tell me. Once you talk to me I will push the button to open the gate and let you in. The gate will open. You will be allowed in. You will drive to my house. I will be outside waiting for you.”

Following Ramiro’s careful directions, I entered Extensión Alhambra a subdivision of colorful, concrete, one and two-story single-family homes located in Ponce, Puerto Rico’s second largest city, in the southern part of the island. Extensión Alhambra which looks like a mid-century American suburb, was intended to be an exclusive community for middle- and upper-middle-income families, its name evoking Spain’s famous Moorish castle, the Alhambra. When it was built in the early 1970s, Extensión Alhambra was open to all. But in 1993 residents took advantage of a 1987 law (Ley de Cierre, or “closing law”) that permitted communities to build gates for protection. With that law, many previously open and private middle-class housing subdivisions were gated—part of the vast array of communities worldwide that form neighborhood associations, erecting fences and fortresses, and taking protection into their own hands.

Less than half a mile from Extensión Alhambra is a very different kind of gated community. Here, in a development called Dr. Manuel de la Pila, twenty low-rise multiple-dwelling buildings, totaling 906 units, comprise the largest public housing community in the city of Ponce. Dr. Manuel de la Pila is one of 337 public housing projects built in Puerto Rico as part of the massive post-war U.S. federal public housing push that by the second half of the twentieth century had furnished Puerto Rico with more public housing units than any U.S. city—after New York.

Like Extensión Alhambra, when it was first built Dr. Pila was an open community. But early one November morning in 1994, two years after a private firm had taken over its management, three helicopters carrying national guards and police descended upon the project, officially occupying it. Operation Centurion, popularly known as Mano Dura Contra el Crimen (Strong Arm Against Crime), had dictated that the largest, presumably most dangerous public housing projects should be gated in order to reduce crime. Over the course of four years, nearly a quarter of
Puerto Rico’s 337 public housing developments were “rescued” or “occupied,” leading to arrests of residents, the establishment of police outposts, and the erection of fences to control movement. Dr. Pila became a gated public housing development.

Gates and guards have typically been ways for privileged communities to “defend” themselves, creating secure residential environments. In their quest for security, gates symbolize “withdrawal [from the city]” and they also produce fear, according to
Teresa P. R. Caldeira, professor of city and regional planning at the University of California. Promising to protect residents from crime, as well as from fears of declining property values and loss of prestige and exclusivity, gated communities enable affluent residents to imagine that they can leave the unruly, dangerous spaces of cities behind.
The concentration of class and racial privilege in suburbs, fortressed enclaves, securitized buildings, and private islands takes place alongside the spatial concentration of poverty in ghettos, favelas, and barrios. Residential gates for the rich have also led to the rise of gates for the poor—in favelas in Brazil, South African townships, peripheral urban migrant settlements in China, and even in some public housing developments in the United States. The built environment sorts and segregates people, physically and symbolically distinguishing communities from one another. Whether one is locked inside or kept outside is determined by one’s race, class, and gender. In both kinds of gated communities, controlled access points restrict movement in and out. However, living in gated communities of the rich and poor are vastly different experiences.

The privileged gates of Extensión Alhambra offer a retreat into a secure, idyllic community; newly privatized street and sidewalks are restricted to sanctioned, paying community members, who can decide who is allowed inside. In the impoverished community of Dr. Pila, in contrast, government and private overseers control the movement of residents. So while the gates of Extensión Alhambra permit their affluent residents to exert greater political and social influence over their home turf, in Dr. Pila they have the opposite effect, diminishing residents’ power. In privileged communities, gates lock undesirables out; in poor communities, they lock them in. In both cases, gates are erected to serve the interest of the upper classes, who are primarily white. In other words, gates reproduce inequality, and cement or—to use Michel DeCerteau’s term—“politically freeze” social distinctions of race and class.

In And/Or Out

Ramiro greeted me warmly. To enter the well-appointed homes and interior gardens of Extensión Alhambra, where he lived, I had to find people who would vouch for me and arrange for me to gain entrance. Once inside the gate, I had to justify myself and answer their interrogations about who I knew, what I was doing, and why. I came to understand that the residents of Extensión Alhambra were suspicious or confused about me because of my brown skin, which contrasted with the light-skinned people depicted in the photographs sitting on Ramiro’s living room coffee table. According to the 2000 Census, most residents of these privileged communities racially identified as “Caucásico” (Caucasian) or “Blanco” (white)— “race symbols,” in the words of economist Glen Loury, which are enlisted to help navigate these newly privatized community spaces. Negotiations of membership and belonging occur; outsiders and insiders are sorted and profiled.

The residents of Dr. Pila know that they are the ones affluent Alhambra residents wish to keep out. “The controlled access in Extensión Alhambra allows people from that area to enter,” one woman explained. “They think people from public housing want to go there to rob them. For them, we are society’s scum.” Another Dr. Pila resident agreed: “When they put up that gate in Extensión Alhambra, it was so that the people from public housing would not go there, so that the vermin would not enter.” Residents of both private and public communities told me that a race credential was required for someone to enter community spaces. A resident of a nearby private upper-middle class community that had been unsuccessful in putting up gates said that her whiteness prevented her from entering Dr. Pila: “I would be in a panic,” she said, “because I feel different even physically [as a] a blonde woman!”
Gates separate adjacent neighborhoods, freezing race, class distinctions, and demarcating social distances; they segment identities and mark the “unmarked.” Gates position and remind specific bodies of their rightful place, delineating identities and neighborhood limits, and discouraging movement. They also remind people that public housing is dangerous. Together with media representations of crime, they reinforce the idea that dark young males, in particular, are unemployable, dangerous, and criminal.
Rafa, a dark-skinned, bored young man who lived in Dr. Pila, explained, “You go and ask if they have [any work] and they say they don’t. And then they give the job to the favorites.” Residents of public housing projects often spoke about being turned down for jobs, which they saw as related to their place of residence. Don Ramon, an employer at a job fair organized by the social workers in Dr. Pila, said he was there to offer job opportunities that were typically denied to residents of public housing. Dinora, a resident, described a job interview. When she got there, the supervisor asked her where she was from. “When I told him I was from Dr. Pila,” she said, “his attitude changed to ‘I’ll call you if anything comes up.’ He went from an attitude that the job was for-sure to an attitude, once I said where I lived, of ‘I’ll call you later.’”
The physical and symbolic meaning of the gates were obvious to public housing residents. As one woman told me: “By putting up our gate,” they’re not interested in “protect[ing] our community, or its residents.” What they are doing, she said, is “isolat[ing] public housing from wealthy people. They have no reason to think they’re better than us. We’re all people.” The gates cement physical separation. Public housing residents resent not being able to take their children to trick-or-treat during Halloween in the more privileged areas. Opportunities for engaged contact are practically nonexistent.

Getting Inside The Gates

Getting inside Extensión Alhambra takes careful planning. Ramiro’s screening interrogation gave him decisive control over my entry and presence in the public streets and sidewalks of the community, much like the power he and his neighbors wield to make decisions about who enters their private home spaces. With the Closing Law that allowed private communities to gate themselves in the interest of safety, security technology came to facilitate the control rich people exercise over private spaces. Private guards follow orders through telecoms or telephones; electronically-powered gates allow owners to exert control through remote beepers, security spikes and electric currents, administering entry and exit as they see fit. In private communities, residents and visitors are welcomed into safe havens protected from outside perils. Whether one is welcome depends on who is seeking entry, and who is doing the credentialing. This credentialing is done by residents; in public housing, in contrast, the government makes such decisions, seizing control from residents. The gate in Extensión Alhambra “is private,” a resident of Dr. Pila told me: “here it is controlled.” When a temporary fence was first built, residents of Dr. Pila thought their own gate would function similarly to that of Extensión Alhambra, with residents controlling entry either through remote access or granting approval to the guard. But in time, their ability to control entry diminished. Rather than work in the service of residents, a police sentry with a one-way mirror came to control residents, federally inspired zero-tolerance regulations demanded that residents be screened, and the government appointed social workers to organize community activities. Residents, not visitors, came under scrutiny. As one woman explained: “I have been stopped, and asked what building I am going to, what am I going to do. They see the face of a crook in me.”

To enter the gated caserío (public housing) was, as one resident said, to lose the capacity to “move freely,” and instead to be controlled, isolated, and actively barred from freedom of contact both inside and outside. Just as residents’ movements were restricted, so were mine. Upon entering Dr. Pila, visitors and residents are signaled to stay out or wait by a sign in front of the guardhouse that reads: “Residential zone with controlled access. Any resident or visitor without identification must identify himself at the entry. Visiting cars are subject to search. Housing Administration.” The sign is a reminder that entering public housing makes one suspect.
As they block access to outsiders and turn public spaces—the street, the sidewalks—into private community property, these gates expand the power of privileged insiders over urban space and development. The gates that lock some in and others out hand control over the city to the privileged, giving the poor little recourse, little control, and less and less power.

Cemented Distinctions

Puerto Rico illustrates the ways social inequalities are physically and symbolically articulated in residential urban built environments throughout the world, underscoring differences in power and agency. Throughout the world, security policies have become a popular way to address feelings of insecurity in urban areas. Gates in residential areas and public spaces, security guards, security cameras, and metal detectors sort and divide city residents. In China, for example, new urban migrants are being locked in enclaves in the city’s periphery. There, as in Latin America and the rest of the developing world, as well as in the United States, grave social inequalities are spatialized in residential neighborhoods, new technologies delimit insiders and outsiders, and the rich exert power over the poor.
Community gates signal and reconstitute deep social inequalities, both imagined and real. For the rich, the public is increasingly privatized; for the poor, the private sphere is increasingly subject to public surveillance. For both, social activities are limited to the family unit and to intimate and exclusive spaces. Those who can afford to do so “bowl alone” and live alone. Those of lesser means are subjected to monitoring, control, and surveillance in their places of residence. This bunker mentality diminishes the spontaneity of public life.
Although the gates of Puerto Rico’s public housing are not in operation today, the fences are still there. The police no longer patrol the grounds, and only a boarded-up guardhouse remains. Entry and exit is no longer formally monitored, but the remains of the public gates continue to interfere with everyday routines, segregating and re-inscribing social inequality. Meanwhile, the gates around the private enclaves continue to be fortified by technology. The gates of the poor and the rich face each other, turning residents away from the city and its salutary social promises.

Recommended Resources

Atkinson, Rowland and Sarah Blandy. Gated Communities: International Perspectives (Routledge, 2006). Provides a wide array of gated community case studies.
Blakely, Edward J. and Mary Gayle Snyder. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Brookings Institution Press, 1999). The first book-length work on gated communities, it provides an account of how gated communities emerged in the United States.
Caldeira, Theresa P. R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (University of California Press, 2000). Examines gated communities and their relationship to crime and class segregation in Brazil.
Costa Vargas, João. “When a Favela Dared to Become a Gated Condominium: The Politics of Race and Urban Space in Rio de Janeiro,” Latin American Perspectives (2006), 33(4): 49–81. One of the few examinations of gates in poor communities, it explores the relationship of gates to urban poverty and race in Brazil.
Low, Setha. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (Routledge, 2003). Provides a historical background of gated communities and uses ethnography to see how privilege is contained behind gates.
Safa, Helen I. The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality (Rinehart and Winston, 1974). The first and only book-length study examining life in Puerto Rico’s public housing.

>>>
Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores is in the sociology and Latino & Hispanic Caribbean studies departments at Rutgers University. She is the author of Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City, from which this article was adapted. 

source: American Sociological Association 
http://contexts.org/articles/fall-2013/gated-communities-for-the-rich-and-the-poor/
 

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“To analyze the psychology of political violence is not only extremely difficult, but also very dangerous. If such acts are treated with understanding, one is immediately accused of eulogizing them. If, on the other hand, human sympathy is expressed with the Attentäter, one risks being considered a possible accomplice. Yet it is only intelligence and sympathy that can bring us closer to the source of human suffering, and teach us the ultimate way out of it.”

The opening lines of Emma Goldman’s essay The Psychology Of Political Violence are as resonant and applicable now, as they were when she wrote them nearly one hundred years ago. When looking at political writing pre-dating much of the bloodshed of the 20th century, it has become common to complain that they are written from a naive point of view, a point of view unacquainted with the results of the evils of Nazism and Stalinism; the two most oft cited examples of violent régimes associated with politically motivated violence. The 20th century was a violent century (though no more so than other centuries in context), but film and television allowed it to be seen and then seen again repeatedly; to confirm this for us and remind us of things and events that are apt to disappear into obscure textbooks and the fallible memories of people .

In addition the scope of history, which is now wider and deeper than previously, recalls far more than the “official histories” fed to schoolboys for generations. Despite the reluctance of historians to completely give themselves up to a proletarian view of history, the view of history from the other side; the history minus the double-barrelled names and powdered wigs, has permeated the subject to a considerable degree, so that instead of French history only being recalled in the guise of Napoleon’s “greatness”, we can learn instead about the uprising of the weavers of Lyon, or the Paris commune without it being considered non-history and the seditious behaviour of dangerous people trying to bring down the government. Indeed the possibilities are there, the histories can be read, but they are also muted by the very fact that they have become “official histories”. They have been assimilated (to some degree) into the mainstream and thereby blunted and rendered less radical than they might otherwise be. The other element is the great plan of the 20th century rulers: the calming and hypnotizing of peoples likely to rise up to rebellion, by means of force, propaganda and the drug of consumption.

Political violence has gone out of fashion only in a partisan respect: sixty years of, chiefly American, propaganda has associated political violence with anarchists, Marxist rebels, left-wing rogue elements, South American and Arab terrorists and every other movement to some degree associated with political uprisings. As certain newspapers and televisions have pumped out stories of the ‘horrors’ committed by ‘dangerous revolutionaries’ trying to enslave free-people and every other supposed anti-American element, it has taken much longer for a different picture to emerge of the widespread terror and murder and wholesale destruction of countries and peoples perpetrated by the neo-conservative/neo-liberal consensus of the United States and its allies. It is a picture sketched-out in declassified documents and the alternative histories, all of which is either mildly to vigorously suppressed or spun into a vortex of double-think by consummate and accomplished liars.

Within the left of politics, some of this has managed to filter through. As a method of dissociation from condemned régimes (Stalin’s USSR, Nazism and neo-fascism, the Khmer Rouge, the Iranian regime) dozens of socialist, communist and anarchist parties and groupings have declared themselves essentially non-violent. It is as if this act renders them more legitimate in a political climate that condemns one man’s violence on the one hand and presses the button to release cluster bombs on the other. The argument from sections of the official left is a product of anti-hypocrisy, or the fear of hypocrisy: that condemning violence from one quarter whilst perpetrating one’s own violence is the height of hypocrisy. They are wrong. They miss a crucial point: namely that there is a difference between violence used to oppress and keep oppressed, and violence used to break the cycle of oppression. It is the difference between anti-social violence and social violence.

The horrors and miseries of the 20th century have long been used as a powerful talisman to discourage what comes naturally to people under the pressure of too much social control and too much economic injustice. The neo-conservative/neo-liberal machine has used the results of its own crimes to discourage people from reaching for everything these crimes have suppressed. It has worked, the world sighs at the murderous horror of South American coups and counter coups; at the ceaseless bombings in Israeli-occupied territories. At this very moment, as street battles rage in Greece, there are condemnations of violence from the very quarters whose regimes and policies have made the situation the untenable one that it is, and anything else impossible. The mantras of “ballot over bullet” and “peaceful change” conceal régimes that sustain themselves on the very violence they condemn.

Reading Emma Goldman’s The Psychology Of Political Violence, puts vigour back into the idea of revolt and rebellion, and also the righteousness of rising up to take back humanity from minorities of people who dehumanize and oppress and hypnotize with lies and false freedoms. All the struggles remain essentially the same in character, only names and dates are different. Restoring the difference between glorified indiscriminate killing and violence in the name of freedom is long overdue.


Download and read: 
The Psychology Of Politcal Violence:
http://socialistpublishing.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/goldman-tppv.pdf

source:
http://socialistpublishing.wordpress.com/2008/12/19/social-violence-and-anti-social-violence-emma-goldman/

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