Part 4, Section i:
4b. Property Damage: A Symbolic Liberation from Capitalism
Public non-injurious violence, such as property destruction, creates new subjects without adhering to the dehumanization that is a cornerstone of capitalism: the subject inevitably unlearns their submissiveness. Violence then becomes the integration of trauma into unity.
Property destruction is not just violence against inanimate objects; it is violence against what that property is used for, those who get to decide that, and what property represents. The verb “profane” describes the process of transforming the sacred into something mundane again, to be used by humans, and that is exactly what property destruction attempts to do: give back what rightfully belongs to the public. Property destruction targets not only the institutions that own the property, but also the relationship to property. The destruction of personal property during riots is minimal and never the goal of anticapitalist property destruction.
The way some bystanders choose to physically defend property by hurting protestors shows the way some people actively choose property over life, even when the property does not belong to them. In the United States, protestors attacking property is synonymous to them attacking the only thing this country sees as sacred, and this is why targeted property destruction is so powerful: it breaks the myth surrounding the sacredness of private property and becomes a tool for liberation.
References
This piece was inspired by Shon Meckfessel’s “Nonviolence Ain’t What it Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance.” You can find the full work at akpress.org.
Further Reading:
“How Nonviolence Protects the State” and “The Failure of Nonviolence: From the Arab Spring to Occupy” by Peter Gelderloos
“Pacifism” by Tom Nomad
“Concerning Violence: Fanon, Film, and Liberation in Africa, Selected Takes 1965-1987”