Let's remember an obvious fact. Violence is not only physical. There is violence when the use of force aims to reduce the exercise of individual or collective will, limiting freedom, in some of its fundamental aspects, and suppressing the action that could come from it. There is, as such, an explicit violence, when physical force is used against individual bodies or collective institutions and there is, also, another violence, which Passerin d'Entrèves described as “mitigated”, when the use of force finds forms outside of physical violence, to limit and pressure freedoms and the exercise of legitimate political action.
Politics understood as a form of war and facing the "mitigated" violence as an expression of force
You don't need to have read Foucault, where he inverts Clausewitz' famous maxim, to know that politics is the continuation of war by other means. We are, therefore, facing politics understood as a type of war and facing "mitigated" violence as an expression of force.
For the last two weeks, in a very special way, and up to the ostentatious police deployment yesterday, 20th September 2017, we've witnessed, many of us with genuine astonishment, a repressive escalation from the Spanish state which has progressively left a series of fundamental rights and liberties suspended: the freedom of expression and of information, the freedom of expression of advertising and the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of private correspondence, the freedom of enterprise, etc. Through different courts and machinery of the Spanish state (the Constitutional Court, Attorney General, security forces and bodies, judges and courts), following the dictates and explicit orders of the Spanish government, a repressive and coercive machinery has been set in motion with the declared intention of avoiding the 1st October referendum, called by the legitimate Catalan government and protected by the law for the Referendum approved by the legitimate Parliament of Catalonia.
This “mitigated” violence has been deployed against institutions (Parliament, government), against individuals (members of the government, members of the Parliament's Board, mayors, elected officials, etc), against government buildings, against political parties and their headquarters, against citizens' associations, against public and private media, against private companies and, it culminated, yesterday, 20th September, for now, with the arrest of members of the government by the Civil Guard, accused of taking part in the organisation of the democratic exercise of 1st October.
A conception of power based in violence and coercion
We have to remember, however, that this "mitigated" violence from the Spanish state, directed and ordered by a government that some time ago revoked the separation of powers that's necessary and fundamental in any state under the rule of law, responds to a concept of power according to which "power consists of making others act as I choose" (Voltaire) and according to which power is present for people when they have the possibility to "realise their own will... even against the resistance of others" (Max Weber). A concept of power based on violence and coercion: "an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will" (Clausewitz). Or, to say it, citing yet another classic, Bertrand de Jouvenel: "to command and to be obeyed: without that, there is no Power - with it no other attribute is needed for it to be".
The result of this use of force, based on a use of power through violence has left, now, a provisional result which includes the arrests of members of the government, the confiscation of government materials and the political seizure of voting slips and the notifications telling people they've been chosen to work in polling stations, as well as all kinds of posters, magazines and informative and advertising documentation. From his bubble in the Moncloa palace, his official residence, the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, was boasting just yesterday of having deactivated the referendum ("this referendum now can't take place") and having made it unworkable ("now it's nothing more than an impossible pipe-dream").
But nothing is further from reality, with a little analysis of what happened yesterday.
The use of violence doesn't show the strength of power, rather exactly its impotence
It's worth remembering that Hannah Arendt, the most important political thinker of the second half of the 20th century, showed that "Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent". The use of violence, according to her, doesn't show the strength of power, rather precisely the opposite, its impotence. Power which is expressed through violence and coercion is the negation of politics, as it's inseparable from the use of the word and from the respect for plurality.
Just as it remains to be seen if yesterday's police operations will be able to prevent the referendum, it could be said that Rajoy's statements yesterday might not be, as they could appear at first blush, the recognition of the victory of the power of the state, rather, actually, the opposite, the verification of its impotence and its failure.
Because, in reality, the occupation of streets and squares yesterday, in the whole of Catalonia, reminds us once again that the will to carry out the referendum on 1st October isn't, as Rajoy said yesterday, "the absurdity of a few", but rather a political will based on the large-scale mobilisation of the public, on its parliamentary representation and on the government institutions faithful to their mandate from the ballot boxes.
Yesterday, violence without power, was in actions of the police and the justice systems following the political directives of the Spanish government, whilst the power, without violence, exercised through peaceful, and even festive, action, was in the streets and squares of Catalonia.
Let nobody be mistaken. In theory (and we can save ourselves the references to contemporary political thought, of Foucault in Negri), there's no more power in the ministerial and judicial offices or in the arms of the security forces of the state than in the citizenry in the streets. In practice (Arendt), where violence is exercised, however "mitigated" it may be, power has already vanished, leaving us with only force.
It will continue