In class struggle: Unpacking "Violence"
I teach social studies to high school students and I have learned that before we teach historical content it is important to have a conversation with students about violence.
The very first unit that I taught covered the French Revolution, and when we discussed the Reign of Terror I asked my students whether or not they believed that these policies were justified. The majority of the class responded “no” emphatically citing the violence of the Jacobin government.
I realized then that school and media tend to give us a specific perception of violence that highlights interpersonal violence and neglects structural violence. Even property damage may be constituted as “violent” in our popular conception, but poverty, surveillance, policing, and austerity rarely are.
I asked my students what violence is and they gave me lots of examples. Fighting someone, hitting, punching, and shooting is violent. Even words can be violent, they pointed out. I tried to get them to come up with a definition of violence and they agreed that violence is the act of hurting people, but disagreed on whether violence has to be intentional or not. Can policies be violent? Yes, they agreed, they can. What about the existence of homelessness or deny- ing medical care to those without health insurance?
The questions led to lively debate and the class had mixed responses. Students do not need to agree with each other or me, but we should challenge them to think beyond liberal conceptions of violence that erase the state as an actor.
Oftentimes “violence” is ascribed to the reaction to poor conditions, but not to the people and policies that created poor conditions themselves. The police are not violent, but rioters are. The monarchy isn’t violent per se, but revolution aries definitely are. It is important to point out these hypocrisies to students and make sure that topics surrounding resistance and revolution are properly contextualized within the material conditions they occurred in.
I am about to teach about the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union (USSR), a topic that students are likely to have a lot of preconceptions about. I will need to return to this lesson on violence before I teach this topic, and I urge other teachers to broach this idea in class too!
★★★★★
Red Reads: 100-page impression...
With the intention of soon writing a full review I wanted to share first and strong impressions from the first 100 pages of Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts.
The new novel, released in 2022, has been met with much mainstream fan fare.
Self-described as a novel about the “…unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear…” Ng’s book takes place in a dystopian U.S. amidst what can only be described as liberal-fascist (see glossary, page 6) late-stage fascism.
The characters exist in a “fictional” version of the U.S. that is ruled by the “fictional” PACT.
PACT is defined as “…more than a law…a promise we make to each other: a promise to protect our American ideals and values…” and is responsible for disappearing anyone who revolts, rebels, or challenges the ideals of PACT.
Based on an early impression I suspect this book is written and championed as a warning cry should democracy not be protected, a rationalization for lesser evil politics.
But what the readers and maybe even the author can’t quite see is this is a road map, a foretelling of what’s to come BECAUSE of lesser-evil politics (see editorial, page 2).
Progressive Labor Party has warned that this is where the road to voting leads.
Is Our Missing Hearts actually the world Big Fascists have dreamed up?
Stay tuned as this red reads on.
★★★★★
New Year, more communism
New Year’s Day, New York and New Jersey Progressive Labor Party members and friends gathered to share uplifting experiences. Reflecting on the year and hopeful for the future, conversations on what it means to be committed to communism, politics and the Party challenged me to think of how I am embodying the politics and struggles beyond events to a more holistic practice in every aspect of my life. Games, music, laughter, and the spirit of hope and the wholesomeness of children’s joy filled the afternoon and night.
Thank you PLP for providing a space for such radical joy and community.
★★★★★