the only reason why im not a big fan of guillotine jokes is bc one of the first acts of the Paris Commune was to publicly burn all the guillotines and abolish the death penalty all together
the paris commune, famous for having just the right amount of violence necessary to keep the dictatorship of the proletariat protected from capitalist forces
I doubt keeping guillotines would’ve helped them defend themselves
“’The party’ they say ‘which will have overturned the government will take the place of it of course. It will seize upon power and proceed in a revolutionary manner. It will take the measures necessary to secure the success of the insurrection; it will demolish the old institutions; it will organize the defense of the country. As for those who will not recognize its authority, why the guillotine will settle them, whether they belong to the people or the middle-class, if they refuse to obey the orders necessary for the advance of the Revolution — The guillotine still in action!’ See how these budding Robespierres argue, who know nothing of the grand epic of the century but its period of decline, men who have never learned anything about it except from speeches of the hangers-on of the republic.“
-Pyotr Kropotkin. Revolutionary Government. (1892).
I love Kropotkin but he was wrong here. Guillotines are very good
If the aim is Anarchy and the means are Anarchy itself, that is: if we are to be consistent, then the necessity to enact violence will present itself and we must take it. To break the State we must reclaim the violence it has a monopoly on, that much is certain. However, if we are to remain consistent, we must not reproduce the system of punishment that we endured; to break the political power of the few, not to turn it into a parody of itself.
You strip them of their political power and influence and then what exactly are you guillotining?
A bourgeois without capitalism isn’t a bourgeois; a politician without the State isn’t a politician.
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