Originally Posted by roachboy

mm--you know, if the conditions that shape such actions really were adequately described this way:



maybe i'd agree with you.
i mean sitting in a chair in chicago, thinking about politics and possible courses of action, the idea of engaging in violence as a political action seems, well, remote at best.
but not all contexts are like this.
not all contexts allow for the same modes of sublimation of the sense of political impotence (posting here, for example--which requires, you know, electricity, a working phone system, regular access to food, a way of life that is degrading only at the margins or which is disempowering in particular, containable ways, say.)

sitting in my chair in chicago, i am not under direct colonial occupation, my sense of possible redress for political grievances are not wholly circumscribed by an everyday brutalization of myself, my family, those i love, those around me; i might feel as though the options for meaningful political action are limited in the states, but it nonetheless sits on me lightly, functioning as an intellectual topic that i can choose to think about or not think about--my sense of possibilities is not circumscribed by direct violence administered "legitimately" (that is via a military or police apparatus) as a functionof occupation----my life is in relative terms a bubble, as is yours.

but unilateral statements have their appeal.
so here's one:

to act as though these conditions that we live under encompass or even imply all conditions is the viewpoint of a tv viewer. to make ethical judgments on "violent political action is wrong" presupposes that conditions like the ones you live under, that i live under, are universal. that is false.