[lbo-talk] Does Vioence Exist?

[Carrol Cox]

Consider the parlor game of 21 questions: Animal, vegetable, mineral.
Does any one of these exist in any meaningful sense. Does "mineral" as a
description of everything in the universe which is not "animal" or
"vegetable" name a entity about which actually interesting things can be
said? We are back to Socrates distinction between good and bad
dialecticians as analogous to the distinction between good and bad meat
carvers: do they separate the meat at the joints or do they splinter the
bones.

Vioence as a category splinters the bones.

The most important "violence" in the south today is that constituted by
the prison system. And is that violence actually worse than the violence
constuted by the prison system in the north or by Guantanamo? And
certainly Chuck described in gory detail a really serious kind of
violence when he gave an account of his working life. I only spent two
months in an auto factory: Detroit Transmission Division of General
Motors, 1955. But I would argue that merely asking people to relax for 9
hours on a comfortable couch within that factory would have constituted
serious violence.

In other words, the term "violence," like the term "mineral" in the
game, covers too many incomensurable things to constitute a real entity.

Measures of violence are meaningless because violence as such doesn't
exist; it is a genralization covering entirely different entities which
have no real generic essence.

Carrol