J. P. Morgan, a thief
When the rich rob the poor, it’s called business. When the poor fight back, it’s called violence.
— Anonymous (apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain)
None of us are ourselves.
— Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (on life in a race or slave-based country)
Whoever or whatever defines our terms, defines us: defines us by force without our knowledge, and without even leaving us any ability to articulate any objections. By robbing us of our common language, such coercively imposed definition robs us of our very selves. It enslaves us so deeply that we are not even able to perceive that we are in chains, let alone have any chance to break them.
By such theft of our common language we are expropriated from ourselves in the most literal sense: what is stolen from us is, above and beyond all else, what is most truly definitive of us as human beings, most truly proper to us, most truly our own — our very capacity to articulate who we are.
That is the status of women under patriarchy, for example.
It is also the status of the human being as such under capitalism, based as it is on the privatization of property, first and last of our proper claim on ourselves, our own-most property as humans.
Jeff Bezos, another thief
* * *
Violence alone, perpetrated by the people, violence organized and guided by the leadership, provides the key for the masses to decipher social reality. Without this struggle, without this praxis there is nothing but a carnival parade and a lot of hot air. All that is left is a slight readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag, and down at the bottom a shapeless, writhing mass, still mired in the Dark Ages.
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
What is my own is what belongs to me. Above all else, what so belongs to me is my very self — the very self that Nietzsche, for one, enjoins each one of us to become.
When that self has been stolen from us, however, before we can become who we are we must first recover that most proper piece of our property, taking it back from the robbers who did the stealing. Like all theft, that theft from us of our very selves is an act of violence. It violates us, inflicting deep wounds upon us, wounds with roots in the deepest depths of our souls. By such theft of our very ownership of ourselves, we are utterly dishonored. We are completely bereft. We are profaned in the deepest, truest sense of that word.
Having stolen us from ourselves, the robbers do as all robbers always do. They cover up their theft as best they can, that they may not be found out in their acts of violation, plunder, and profanation. The cover the robbers drawn over their theft from us of ourselves is the conjoined robbery of our common language, thereby depriving us of the very words we need to cry out our rage at being so deeply wounded.
That theft of the very language we could use to proclaim the pain of our loss of our most personal property, our proprietary right to become and claim—to “own up to”—who we are, is the most effective cover for which any thief could ever wish. It covers the theft so completely that the robbed are even denied any awareness that a theft has occurred. Our profanation is so complete that we are not even allowed to be aware that we have been profaned. No more offensive, dishonoring, unholy profanity than that could ever be imagined.
With the Christian apostle Paul, we might well ask who will free us from this body of death — free us so that we might be empowered to listen, hear, and heed the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ Nietzsche’s call to become, at last for the very first time, who we are.
Frantz Fanon, a liberating voice
* * *
This specter of slaves freeing themselves is American history’s first image of Black looters.
—Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action
What really matters is not who speaks to us the words of liberation, thereby freeing us from the body of death. All that really matters is that those words be spoken, so that we may hear them when we listen, and heed them when we hear.
The system that robs us of ourselves is, fortunately, self-escalating. As I have often explained in various posts before this one as well as in more than one of my books, such self-escalating systems — a prime example of which is the United State’s war in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s — always just keep on escalating themselves until they finally reach the point beyond which they can escalate no further. That is the point at which such systems at last break down. When that happens, voices of liberation begin to speak, and to be heard.
The French escalation of the colonialist system in Algiers eventually reached that breaking point around midway during the twentieth century, and such liberating voices did indeed begin to speak, to be heard, and to be heeded, at least in Algeria itself. One such voice, a loud and effective one, was Frantz Fanon, who died of leukemia in 1961. When he died, he was only thirty-six, and the formal declaration of Algerian independence was still a few months away. Even in death and to this day, however, his voice continues to call not just Algerians but also all the rest of us to liberation.
Fanon’s voice is one that calls us to reclaim what is our own—or own true estate, which is first, last, and above all our sovereignty, as it were, over ourselves. One crucial aspect of the reclamation to which Fanon’s voice thus calls us is that of the proper use of the word violence. That word belongs to us, not to the robbers who long ago stole it from us, to use as a cover for their violation of our self-sovereignty, our individual (and collective) autonomy.
Today, almost fifty-nine years after Fanon’s death, one other voice that has added itself to his, calling us all to freedom, is the voice of Vicky Osterweil, most especially in her new book In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, just published last month by Bold Type Books of New York. Just as Frantz Fanon calls us to reclaim the word violence as our own common — which is to say “personal,” but as such far from “private” — property, so does Osterweil, who was not even born until well after Fanon’s death, call us to reclaim the word looting.
Both Osterweil and Fanon also, I will add, call us to reclaim the right of our own common use of the word riot. On that point, I am happy to be able to add my own voice, which I have most recently sounded to that very end in the first two sections of the final chapter of my own new book, The Irrelevance of Power, available at the store at this website — “What Is a Riot?” and “What’s a Riot For?” being the titles I have given those two chapter-sections. I am proud to add my voice to that reclamation project.
Vicky Osterweil, another liberating voice
* * *
Resistance is not for anything beyond itself. Rather, it is pure riot of the real.
— My new book, The Irrelevance of Power
I’m also proud of my daughter Freya, a professional cellist who goes by the name Cellista, for adding her own voice to call us all to the same linguistic-reclamation project. My daughter’s voice calls us to reclaim our common use the word rage, and our right to feel — and more importantly to express loudly — our shared rage at the brutal plundering to which we have all been far too long subjected.
I’m even prouder that Freya Cellista’s call to reclaim our right to rage was itself evoked as a response to my own call to reclaim our right to riot in my book The Irrelevance of Power, which was brought out just this past spring by Juxtapositions, Freya Cellista’s own production company.
My daughter is calling us all to reclaim our rage in a new album and film of that very title — Rage — which is set for initial online performance on October 15 of this year. Please join her and the other artists she has assembled for that event, which can be accessed through this link: https://www.facebook.com/events/298844981417105/
