What Does Peace Mean in the Heart of Empire?

Let’s talk about violence and the way “political violence” is being discussed in the mediasphere right now. Both major parties in the United States are guilty of violence at any given time. Sometimes, that violence is thunderous, earth-shaking, and genocidal. Sometimes, it surrounds us without much notice, like a familiar beat or a hum in the background. We live in an incredibly violent society where a significant amount of violence is professionalized, bureaucratized, and normalized. People without health insurance die because they lack access to life-saving treatments. Homelessness devastates the health of people who are violently ejected from their homes. People experience the brutality, indignity, and trauma of incarceration at the whims of racist police. People in prison are dying from hyperthermia right now because there’s no air conditioning. When I visit an imprisoned student I’m supporting at Stateville Correctional Center, I am reminded not to drink the water. Prison officials know it’s toxic, and the staff knows it’s toxic. They don’t drink it, and I don’t drink it. But imprisoned people are expected to drink it. Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately exposed to environmental conditions that cause asthma, cancer, and other life-shortening ailments. Premature death is manufactured steadily, and when it is manufactured without interruption and no one makes a fuss, we are told we are experiencing “peace.” What does peace mean in the heart of empire amid the realities of racial capitalism? What does it mean to politicians whose primary concern is the maintenance of an economic system that is driving most life on earth toward extinction? It means order. 

There is a lot of discussion of “political violence” right now. Donald Trump, who may soon become president of the United States, again was the target of gun violence over the weekend. A man who revels in violent rhetoric and deeds got his ear bloodied, and now pundits and politicians are blathering on ad nauseam about how “political violence” must “always” be opposed. While rally attendee Corey Comperatore was killed, and two other spectators were seriously injured before Trump’s would-be assassin was killed by the Secret Service, it is not their experience of violence that has usurped successive news cycles. If these men had been cut down while simply going about their lives, their fates would have faded into the background noise of gun violence in the United States. Even if they were shot over an argument about politics, our political system would not be rocked by talk of stopping “political violence” right now. It’s Trump’s bloodied ear and raised fist that has captivated the press.

As the words “political violence” are reiterated again and again, we can see the hierarchy of our system at work. When violence is visited upon people whose only crime is being Black, poor, disabled, or Palestinian, politicians and the corporate press do not characterize those harms as “political violence.” In fact, the politicization of tragedy is often discouraged, even though politics drive the conditions that dictate all of our fates. So, what does “political violence” mean to the people who rule us? It means violence against the people and structures that execute their power, violence against targets that they deem meaningful, and, most importantly, it means violence against them. The ruling class is supposed to be exempt from the daily churn of violence that is completely normalized in our society – and that includes gun violence. They are perfectly willing to deem a great many deaths inevitable or unavoidable, but those deaths are never supposed to be theirs. The norms of this society are supposed to exempt them from any experience of violence, and so, when violence comes their way, the moment is inherently extraordinary. Tens of thousands, or even two hundred thousand dead Palestinians, that’s a “complicated” situation. Certainly, no reason to stop arming Israel. A bullet flies past a would-be boss of empire – now, that’s an emergency and a reason to rework everything. 

We have seen hubris and cowardice in the wake of this shooting. Hubris on the part of Republicans like Senator Ron Johnson, who falsely claimed that large public schools were responsible for the Trump rally shooting. Johnson said of the shooter, “This was a loner, in probably a large school, being bullied all the time.” While Johnson folded the shooting into the scheme of Republican attacks on public education, other Republican leaders blamed rhetoric that characterized Trump as a threat to democracy for the attack. (Evidence currently indicates that the shooter had hoped to target both Trump and Biden.) While the GOP advances an agenda that will accelerate all manner of professionalized, militarized, and bureaucratized violence, Democrats are now calling for “civility” and less heated rhetoric. Under Trump, we would see rollbacks of environmental protections that would heighten climate chaos, which is already set to displace over a billion people by 2050 and kill millions. But it has been deemed unacceptable to talk about that this week or to talk about the violence the right has been stoking and committing against migrants, protesters, Black people, trans people, and leftists. All of that is taboo right now because someone who was supposed to be exempt from violence got his ear pierced by shrapnel. 

As the Democrats continue to debate whether Biden will be the party’s nominee in November, the party is flailing in a time of crisis. (Two out of three Democrats reportedly want Biden to withdraw from the race, as Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama express doubts he can defeat Trump in November, but the president has given no indication that he plans to step aside.) According to a recent report in Reuters, “Rather than verbally attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and the Biden campaign will draw on the president’s history of condemning all sorts of political violence including his sharp criticism of the ‘disorder’ created by campus protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict, campaign officials said on condition of anonymity.”

After an afternoon of intense social media backlash, the White House characterized that report as inaccurate. The quote was subsequently removed from the article without an editor’s note or any official retraction. 

While I am heartened by the backlash, I was not surprised to see Palestine solidarity organizing being lumped into the same category of “political violence” as the attempt on Trump’s life. Biden has previously characterized the recent wave of on-campus Palestine solidarity protests as violent, saying that “violent protest is not protected” and that dissent must “never lead to disorder.” 

This is how the distinction between so-called violent and nonviolent protest works in the United States. Some protesters are idealized for their actions and held up as models, and when they are, a categorical line is reinforced. On one side of the line, you have people whose work is co-opted to sanitize the state. “We allow these good people to express themselves,” they say. “This is the proof of our democracy.” When protesters are accused of operating outside of the realm of “good” and “peaceful” protest, they are characterized as deserving of brutality and incarceration. Marking protesters as violent gives the public permission to forget about them, just as we are given moral permission to forget about imprisoned people. If you complain to people about the crushing, life-shortening conditions people in prison are faced with, you’ll often hear, “Well, they’re in prison for a reason.” Imprisoned people have been marked for violence, disposal, and forgetting.

We live in a time when more and more people are being marked for violence and social disposal. The most important work before us involves a commitment to the idea that we are all worth fighting for. A counterculture of care and a refusal to abandon one another must be at the heart of our antifascist politics. During the pandemic, we have seen the further normalization of mass death, and in Palestine, we have seen the further normalization of mass murder. I am sorry to say that this is only the beginning. Even if Democrats pull off a seemingly unlikely recovery in November and keep the White House, the criminalization of homelessness in the US is a bipartisan project. Some of the most fascistic policing that I have witnessed in my lifetime has been occurring in Atlanta, a city with a Democratic mayor. And it goes without saying that the distinction between Democrats and Republicans is meaningless to a displaced family in Gaza. 

To the people who rule us, this era of catastrophe and collapse means that civilization is a collapsing box. As habitable land decreases and resources dwindle, their objective is not to save as many people as possible. Their objectives are to hoard resources and push anyone who does not have a constructive role in the economy out of the box through bordering and incarceration. Unwanted people will continue to be walled off into death zones or forcibly contained in spaces that manufacture premature death. This is not a theoretical, dystopian future. This is our reality here and now, and the future will be much bleaker unless we fight for a different one. What we are faced with right now is an orderly destruction under the norms of racial capitalism. For some people, that destruction is well underway. For others, it will arrive in fits and bursts as social, economic, and environmental systems fracture and fray. If we cooperate with this death march, they will call us peaceful. If the ruling class is exempt from the munitions of militarism and unrest, they will tell us that everything is under control. 

I cannot tell you what all manner of necessary resistance will look like in the coming years, but I can tell you that it will not always be popular and that our protests will often be characterized as “disorder.” As we strike, hold space, march, and shut down business as usual, they will call us violent, but we must not shy away from disrupting the death march of racial capitalism. The order of things cannot be honored, and that includes hierarchies that have taken hold in our own minds. We have to recognize victims of police brutality, Palestinians, our disabled and unhoused neighbors, and so many others who are subject to forgetting as worthy of grief, outrage, and action. Everyday people who are fleeing violence, hunger, and militarism, everyday people whose cities are running out of water or that are in danger of disappearing beneath rising flood waters, everyday people who are dying right now because they lack air conditioning amid heat waves – these are the people whose plights and fates should shape our politics. If we are going to fight for any semblance of human decency, we need to reclaim and reassert the value of our lives.

Organizing My Thoughts is a reader-supported newsletter. If you appreciate my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today. There are no paywalls for the essays, reports, interviews, and excerpts published here. However, I could not do this work without the support of readers like you, so if you are able to contribute financially, I would greatly appreciate your help.