Taking a breath to process what’s been going on over the past two weeks, we delve into the concepts of violence, curfews and looting from an AnCom (anarcho-communist) perspective to help make some sense of all the online chatter and hopefully give some organization of how to talk about these things to friends and family.

Pop Tops

We quickly cover a few news items this week, some good news and some proof of ACAB:

* Minneapolis public school board votes to terminate its contract with police (The Guardian)* University of Minnesota Ending Contracts With Minneapolis Police Department After George Floyd’s Death (Time) – CW this article autoplays a video of George Floyd’s murder at the top* Buffalo Cop Loses Job And Pension After She Intervenes With Fellow Officer Choking A Suspect (Vice)

Joke

How do conservatives get their B12? (Thanks, Dimitry!)

Main Topic: Violence, Curfews and Looting

Property

Before we get deep into the concepts of violence, curfews and looting, we first define property, which is core to really understanding an anti-capitalist perspective:

Property: anarchists put forward a specific definition of property: ownership claims on those things that one neither occupies nor uses. Anarchists usually juxtapose this with possessions, or those things that we use or the homes that we live in (i.e. no anarchist wants to take your home or guitar away). This is how bosses and landlords exploit workers, by claiming to own the things they do not use or the places in which they do not live, then extracting rents and value from the people who do actually use them. In place of private ownership, anarchists put forward visions of a social system in which we produce for the needs of the people instead of the profits of capitalists.

FROM: C.B. Daring; J. Rogue; Deric Shannon; Abbey Volcano. Queering Anarchism (Kindle Locations 160-164). AK Press. Kindle Edition.

NOTE: The distinction of property vs possession is a VERY critical one to understand. This can help make sense of a lot of liberal arguments where these two concepts are often conflated.

Violence

We then explore the idea of violence from an anarchist perspective, of which there is of course no agreement but we generally define this along lines of a willingness to do destruction in order to move towards a goal of community care and breaking systems of oppression, as well as talk about how we see violence in things that expand beyond the borders of physical brutality. To this end, we critique a recent article by Nathan J. Robinson (link below) in Current Affairs that talks about how we define violence. While we agree with his overall premise and respect him greatly as a journalist, we thought the article was missing this anarchist perspective to allow for a larger definition of violence and even a claiming and acceptance of violence in a rebellion (rather than trying to run away from that label being put on destructive actions to try to sugarcoat the rebellion).

Curfews

Nichole snagged an awesome quote from Irami Osei-Frimpong about curfews (link to full video below): “Curfews are an escalation of violence: when you criminalize behavior you are legitimizing the people wh...