Civil society makes state repression livable yet also feeds resistance to it

Evidence

Civility as historical process accordingly is not the purging – ending – of violence but its veiling (the iron hand in the velvet glove), the positioning of socially sanctioned violence out of sight – behind walls (e.g., execution, torture, harassment, sweat shops) or “over there” (colonization, foreign wars, desperately cheap factories, in occupied territories), placing curtains between public and private violence, between publics and violence in their name. Civility, in short, becomes a – the – mode for monopolizing the means of public violence while expressing disinterest in it. As such, it is a principal (and sometimes nominally principled) process for establishing and sustaining modern state domination in the Weberian sense of monopolizing the forms and conditions of expression of legitimate(d) violence and force. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 250 (#complicates, via linked claim)

All Giolitti, who had become Prime Minister again in June, had to do was to restrain the more hotheaded employers who would have liked the troops sent in — an action which might have provoked precisely the immense mass reaction which alone could have escalated the confrontation to a struggle for state power — and to wait until the workers had fully realised that their leaders’ revolutionary words were empty rhetoric. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 105 (#complicates, via linked claim)

In short, civil society and its attendant modes of civility are the spaces of accommodation to existing relations of social domination and order, racially inscribed. Civil society, to riff on an oft-cited line about race and class, is the modality in and through which social order is lived, acted upon, acted out. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 231 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State repression of dissent solidifies community solidarity and legitimates even lethal internal enforcement — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 539; Repression fails to suppress mobilization and can even accelerate it — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 578; Repression threatening challenger survival produces resistance, not demobilization. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 662 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Civility veils rather than ends sanctioned state violence #complicates (0.79) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 250
• A state can defuse revolt by denying radicals the repression that mobilizes masses. #complicates (0.78) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 105
• Civil society is a racially inscribed accommodation to social domination #complicates (0.77) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 231