Wealth is Violence

Inspired by the riots in the UK. Why are people surprised that violence flames up in their cities when they're living on the backs of the poor every day? When you have money, your relationship with everyone who doesn't have money, with the street cleaner, the dishwasher, the shoplifter, the bum, the unemployed, the squatter, the sex worker... is a relationship of violence, of coercion and domination. Every day the police occupy our cities to do violence against the poor on behalf of the rich. Gross inequality doesn't perpetuate itself; it has to be maintained by the most violent force of all, the State. Don't be surprised when we fight back and take what's ours.

From "The Coming Insurrection":

"This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and anonymous attacks, this wordless destruction, has widened the breach between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious: this was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it had nothing to do with “politics.” One would have to be oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years not to see the purely political character of this resolute negation of politics. Like lost children we trashed the prized trinkets of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris at the end of the Bloody Week- and knows it."