this is an interesting thread.
i dont buy the conclusion crompsin arrived at before it started, however.
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I propose that violence governs all, is responsible for all of society's constructs, etc.
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this is obviously too simple--most of the posts to the thread are one way or another about this problem.
to condense the range of objections into two or three points:
--the idea of violence is relational
--the relation of violence to power is much more complicated than the op makes it out to be.
from which follows the claims, variously made, that the exercise of power (from either the side of the governing apparatus or resistance movements) often works best to the exclusion of violence.
somewhere along the way, the discussion began drifting toward a strange category: "absolute violence.."
i dont know what that is.
but it seems linked to a consistency in crompsin, us2 and maybe one or two other posters' positions: the claim that violence is not relational, that there is some kind of essence to violence that enables you to think about it in isolation.
from this it follows that crompsin would say: "Violence always has value to people."
i dont buy it.
first violence is a category that denotes a range of actions, not the actions themselves. these actions "are" violence because we call them violence. that this term operates in relation to other terms is obvious. from this it would follow that "absolute violence" is meaningless, except as a thought experiment that uses the possibilities opened up by the noun "violence" to shape speculative games.
another way: the thread is about the word violence, the category violence, and not about the actions its groups together. given that, all the problems of usage/meaning that you can run out with reference to any noun obtain here.
in the context of the relation of violence to "social constructs"---power and its exercise being a convenient example---it is also obvious that what constitutes violence changes and changes quite often. it is a waste of time to indulge trans-historical claims, shifting arbitrarily back and forth from system to system. this is a consequence, unfortunate or not, of the claim that violence--like any other noun--is relational. it means that its meanings are particular. you strip away situation and you strip away meaning.
another version of the same problem: in the context of modern states (products brough to you by 19th century capitalism) violence is most often (it seems) used to designate actions that are excluded or sanctioned, as over against forms of "legitimate" violence, which are called something else and so which are, in a sense, something else.
to counter it, there is max weber's definition of the state, which is that entity that "holds the monopoly on legitimate violence"---this means that behind all state actions is coercion and behind that violence or the threat of it.
you could argue from here, but that argument would be entirely different from this:
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Violence always has value to people.
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imagining that this kind of statement implies the critique of modern state and its mode of power is like saying that standing on a street corner for 4 hours implies that you have been to a baseball game. you did some of the same things (not a hell of a lot for a specific duration)--but you did not do the same thing.
another line of argument here has concerned the use of non-violence in political actions.
so there are a number of different arguments, most of which have been dodged in favor of a line that prefers to imagine that a category and what it designates are somehow essentially linked.
there is no way to justify that move, and so the claims built on its basis dont work.