The spread of capitalism around the world has been accomplished by a symphony of fundamentally military operations.
The smooth functioning of capitalism requires the effective police occupation of a territory.
What it all comes down to is that in order to be exploited and ruled, we must be deprived of everything.
The process of deprivation has taken hundreds of years, but it is realised in an ever more intensive way.
By force of arms and leaving a trail of bodies, the State has enclosed communal lands, privatised the forests and the water, professionalised traditional skills - like healing, midwifery, or teaching - within exclusive institutions, and punished unlicensed practitioners, asserted its control over public spaces and limited the ways we can use them, criminalised autonomous networks of exchange, and imposed regulations that favor big industry, making self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, or artisanal handicrafts all but impossible.
The citizen of a prosperous democracy must be surrounded by spectacles of having without really being able to directly affect their surroundings or having any control over anything.
The only activities permitted are buying and selling. The cityscape in its entirety is dedicated to consumption. Cities are increasingly being designed without spaces of encounter or public space, and even what is public is owned by the State.
Trying to change just the surface of this carefully arranged ensemble is punished as vandalism. Acquiring a legal right to any bit of space can only come about through purchase - everything is reduced to its status as property - and even then, those who can afford it must put it to an economically productive use, following the accumulative logic of capitalism and private property, because governments levy taxes on ownership. Often, that taxation is specifically calculated to put 'unproductive' property back into market circulation.
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To take the case of Greece, many working class people owned their own homes, after a lifetime of working, and they passed these homes down to their children. The government deliberately imposed an annual housing tax that many homeowners would not be able to afford. Without the blackmail of forcing people to pay a third or a half of their salaries for the right to live in their own homes, capitalism cannot function. Economists and bankers do not like the idea of people owning their own homes, and not having to pay rent and home loans. The new tax, recommended by economists and bankers, caused many Greeks to lose their homes, forcing them to take out mortgages or start paying rent. In the parlance of those of those on top, this was ''boosting the economy''.
This is what the government does when people are not being productive enough. And we should also say it plainly, when people are not being productive at all, government declares ownership void, invades, and gives the land and resources away to those who will use it according to a capitalist logic.
The founders of the United States justified robbing indiginous lands with the argument that native peoples had not put those lands to productive use, therefore they did not constitute property. A similar tactic was used when the Pinochet dictatorship, advised by economists trained in the US, gave away public lands to forestry companies in the 1970's. In the seminal philosophy of John Locke, property comes into being when one mixes their (servants') labor with it to make it productive. Such is the nature of property under capitalism.
The only way to alter this world, insulated by invisible layers of protection, as though frozen in glass, is to break something.
And the only way to open space to create something wholly new and sustaining is to seize that space, to disrupt the control of the agents of law and order, and to smash through the asphalt.
It is also worth noting how versatile capitalism is at co-opting initiatives that seek to provide an alternative. Capitalism makes sure that nothing is free, but there are always plenty of options for renting or buying. People can encourage whatever different kind of lifestyle they want, as long as that lifestyle pays the rent. All of the means we are presented with for gathering together, for building a community, for creating, sharing, and communicating, must rely on the logic of accumulation , and at some point must pass through the activity of buying and selling.
When the participants of a struggle who engage in creative acts - the very acts that capitalism can co-opt and turn a profit off of - wholeheartedly embrace the destructive parts of the struggle, they create a force that cannot be easily recuperated. The negation of the current system, the commitment to destroy that which oppresses us, and a practice of attacking power allow all of those creative acts that might otherwise be mere lifestyle choices or even entrepreneurial initiatives to hold on to their revolutionary potential.
In sum, a combative practice, by which I mean the use of sabotage, a capacity for self-defence, an ability to confront the forces of law and order, and a determination to attack the existing power structures, allows people in struggle to seize space in which the seeds for a new world can begin to take root, and helps prevent those experiments in freedom from being co-opted by the dominant system.
The need to create new social relations also has an immediate aspect that cannot be resolved in a future utopia. We don't fight against the present system because we expect to one day be rewarded with a better world. The State is so powerful, it is very possible that we will never win, that capitalist civilisation will make the planet uninhabitable or that new technologies will make revolt or even simple transgression impossible. Or, less dramatically, that we continue to fail in our revolts and we have to put up with this miserable system forever.
Without creating any false hopes, i think it is important to fight to win, but much more immediate than the question of the future is the fact that many of us fight for our lives, that struggle is survival and that no life worthy of living can be had in complicity with a society that steals everything that is ours and gives us only the opportunity to participate in our own domination.
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