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ComradeDeckard wrote

I love like 90% of it, but I do think there's at least some naivety regarding people's symbolic use of the guillotine.

I think they correctly identify a core problem with a lot of people who propose violent direct action ending in billionaire heads rolling, and bloodlust is something we should NEVER encourage. Violence may be necessary, but it has to be necessary. That can't just be carte blanche to start killing businessmen.

THAT SAID

Some of us, and I certainly count myself among this number, view the guillotine specifically as sort of "our threat." Fascists don't threaten people with guillotines, they have plenty of other sick shit to talk about. Neolibs don't threaten people with guillotines, they have armies and cops. Libertarians don't threaten people with...well they just don't really pose a threat to anyone so let's ignore them.

The guillotine is a tool like any other weapon. It has a job: kill. But in performing that duty, there are multiple reasons it works as a Leftist specific tool. First among them, it represents a sort of dark egalitarianism. Kings and peasants both met their end under the guillotine. It doesn't discriminate. It was constructed to be the fastest and most humane method of execution in human history, and frankly it still is. You lose consciousness before the blade cuts all the way through. You don't even hear it hit. Everyone is treated with equal dignity. Nobody has to hang there on an improper noose choking to death, nobody gets paralyzed by one set of chemicals only for another to light their blood on fire for their final agonizing minutes. Blade drops, it chops your head off, hose it down, raise it up, next Fascist step up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm against state violence. And I'm against getting the mob to do your dirty work while you sit back. I don't want anyone to have to die to overthrow capitalism. But we don't live in a world where that kind of unrest will go off cleanly. People will die. And at the end, there will be people left over who didn't do any of the fighting but nonetheless can't be allowed to survive, lest we see the kind of counter-revolutionary activity we've seen in various socialist experiments of the past.

And my final point is mostly just an objection to the author's assumption that guillotines must be STATE violence. Part of what's great about a guillotine is that they aren't that complicated to build, you can do it pretty quick and cheap, and they're super easy to operate with a basically foolproof mechanism. Effectively, if you make the track long enough and the blade heavy enough, you can't fail. Either it cuts the head off or it doesn't, and unlike hanging, there's no downside to being too thorough. If you hang someone from too high up, their head pops off and it's gruesome and weird and everyone freaks. Plus there's all sorts of complications that can happen, and frankly, a noose is just a fucked up way to kill a person. But the only two options for a guillotine are "it cut the head off" and "it didn't cut the head off", and frankly most human necks take about the same amount of force to sever, and it's an amount pretty easy to build a guillotine to deliver. All you have to do is make the blade half again as heavy as it needs to be and you've got a guaranteed quick and painless death.

Again, I agree with a great deal of the article, I just think maybe the author missed a couple perspectives that add a bit of nuance as to WHY the guillotine is popular. I mean we're anarchists, we aren't exactly stoked about the idea of any one group holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. And that's part of what the guillotine represents to me. It's a loud and aggressive assertion that we do not respect the state monopoly on violence, up to and including execution. It's effectively just chest thumping, but it's visually and emotionally evocative chest thumping. Erecting a guillotine at a protest is just another way to remind the Ruling Class that we have options.

TL;DR Totally get why guillotines come with...problematic imagery and associations, but for some of us the guillotine is most valuable for the message it sends to those in power. "You are not untouchable. We have killed Kings."

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