We posted this a few months ago. But we wanted to repost this on the anniversary of Bastille Day from our archive….
In left-leaning and leftist circles, the guillotine has become a symbol of revolution and used ironically in memes or even somewhat seriously in social media posts. We’ve even produced a satirical video called: “Make A Guillotine Again (MAGA).”
In the article Crimethinc: Against the Logic of the Guillotine: Why the Paris Commune Burned the Guillotine—and We Should Too, we see that the guillotine is not a symbol of liberation. In reality, it’s a tool of authoritarian revenge, revenge against the previous regime and the repression of revolutionaries outside the ideology of the revolutionaries who have gained power.
The problem with this is that the guillotine is often then used by the reactionaries who then gain control back from those currently in control and it continues as a whole bloody cycle.
…we repudiate the logic of the guillotine. We don’t want to exterminate our enemies. We don’t think the way to create harmony is to subtract everyone who does not share our ideology from the world. Our vision is a world in which many worlds fit, as Subcomandante Marcos put it—a world in which the only thing that is impossible is to dominate and oppress.
Because:
Anarchism is a proposal for everyone regarding how we might go about improving our lives—workers and unemployed people, people of all ethnicities and genders and nationalities or lack thereof, paupers and billionaires alike.
We highly recommend this post and its assertion that we can work towards revolution without mindless revenge using a tool of authoritarian repression.