Towards a materialist theory of revenge: The lives of Witches

… How else can we respond to a ruling class and a system of global capitalism that has led to the completely unnecessary deaths of  millions upon millions of poor, overwhelmingly  non-white people from starvation, lack of potable water or easily preventable disease? How else can we behave towards the naked collusion of capitalist interests to sabotage any meaningful action on climate change and other dimensions of wholesale ecological destruction while fully aware of the humanitarian consequences? What other sentiment is appropriate towards the progenitors of the evils of mass incarceration, the wholesale destruction of the urban fabric euphemized
as gentrification, or the obscene denial of care towards so many of us? How can we forgive and forget when our precious time on the earth with one another is being needlessly wasted by unpayable debts and useless work and endless, endless worry? And with our global imperialist warlords toying with the future of life on earth
in their hypermasculine nuclear wargames, who would dare tell us that our desire for vengeance is illegitimate?…

…It is also that late, financialized capitalism is so desperate to sustain itself through its manifold and fatal contradictions it turns to the worst forms of vindictive cruelty to support itself in its madness. Hyper-incarceration, gentrification, the debt crisis, the ecological crises: all of these are forms of capitalist vengeance that are, in fact, cancerous to and unsustainable within capital itself. Yet they accelerate thanks to the inherent momentum of the system, driven as it is by no single rational conductoror conspiracy, but by a million individual acts of frantic capitalist competition. As ever, the only way for capitalism to save itself from itself in situations such as these, as Rosa Luxembourg taught us, is to entrust itself to the care of authoritarian is more the cleansing fires of inter-imperialist warfare …

… Further still, as Benjamin insists, there is the matter of our oppressed ancestors to think of. Their spirits cry out for more than merely our happiness, or call us to a higher form of happiness…

 

pdf here

Fotot: Robby Basler

 

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