Proletarian Barbarism

Against Snuff Capitalist “Civilization”

by Jeff Shantz

For those about to be culled, palliative democracy aims to sedate us as we dully and dutifully accept our looming demise. Civilizing processes seek to enculturate us to restrain ourselves within systems of domination (and elimination). Respectable politics, civil disobedience (which is really, simply, obedience), domestication, self-restraint (self-policing), non-violent subjection to violence. We must be integrated within the democidal machinery (Shantz 2026).

Rationalized violence has always underpinned capitalism’s mythologies of markets, choice, and legalism. When the going gets tough for capital the violence breaks through the surface, the invisible hand of the market shows its iron fist. This is perhaps most apparent in the ready turn to fascism, historically and in the present moment.

Threats to the market are posed as threats to civilization itself. And the primary threat remains the “barbarism” of the proletariat. Neoliberal ideologues who otherwise cynically expound the virtues of a “free market” (free from the state) turn rapidly to endorse violence against the barbarian masses. As neoliberal hero Ludwig von Mises infamously promoted Italian fascism as civilization’s defense against working class barbarism. As Pierre Dardot notes, “[t]his established the enduring binary logic between private property (civilization) and social demands (barbarism), a logic resurging today as violence’s justification” (Robles 2025).

Capital still calls us uncivilized when blaming us for a decline in morals and law and order that is, in reality, their making. To hell with their civilization, their civility. Might we, as Lousia Yousfi suggests, launch a defense of proletarian barbarism against snuff capital’s civilization of mass murder? Even more than simply a defense? Can we afford not to?

In opposition to snuff capital’s plans for us we need to cultivate a readiness, even more a desire, to attack and destroy. Proletarians must champion our inner barbarians and assert our refusal to be domesticated. We must reject civilizing programs that would tame us.

The barbarian is not pleasant company, not a well-heeled dinner guest at the slaughter. The barbarian bursts in, speaks over the hosts, breaks the furniture, and stains the rug (Yousfi 2025). We seize the enemy’s weapon and turn it against them.

A Hymn to Hate

We’ve been civilized into being ashamed of, recoiling at, any desire for vengeance. Why do we still accept this? The civilizing state hates and fears the vengeful, brutal Other (the primitive, the barbarian, the criminal).

Capitalism and imperialism create monsters within us and nurture them. Why should we not set the monsters loose against their creators. Give the beasts back to their progenitors. Why hold it in to consume ourselves even further. Let the creatures come home to feed.

Our domestication should fuel hatred. Hatred of the subservient conditions in which we are held. Of the tools we become. Hatred of those who cause this shame in us.

The proletariat used to know well how to hate our exploiters and oppressors, how to express that hate, and to do so fully against the ruling class (not against other proletarians from other lands or against the unemployed and poor). The IWW used to write hymns to hatred of the ruling class. Remember the words of Wobbly bard Harry, Haywire Mac, McClintock:

“For all the wrongs we have suffered from you, and for each of the wrongs we hate,

With a hate that is black as the deepest pit, that is steadfast and sure as fate.
We hate you with hand, and heart, and head, body, and mind, and brain.
We hate at the forge, in the mine and mill, in the field of golden grain.
We curse your name in the market place as the workman talks with his mate,
And when you dine in your gay cafe the waiter spits on your plate.
We hate you! Damn you! hate you! we hate your rotten breed.

We hate your slave religion with submission for its creed.
We hate your judges. We hate your courts, we hate that living lie,
That you call “Justice” and we hate with a hate that shall never die.
We shall keep our hate and cherish our hate and our hate shall ever grow.
We shall spread our hate and scatter our hate ‘till all of the workers know.
And The Day shall come with a red, red dawn; and you in your gilded halls,
Shall taste the wrath and the vengeance of the men in overalls.

For ours are the hands that govern in factory, mine and mill,
And we need only to fold our arms and the whole wide world stands still!
SO GO YE AND STUDY THE BEEHIVE, and do not quite forget,
That we are the WORKERS of the world and we have not spoken - yet.”

We will need to turn again to those in the cursed places of snuff capitalism, where those with proper hate dwell. We must grow our solidarity with those slated to be culled—as we will become them. Those with their own languages and their own codes. Those who are not willing to talk it over, not interested in negotiating our own end.

We must assert a refusal to be intelligible to power. We cannot be interested simply in raising awareness.

We must make a fundamental break with the civilization of death. We must be intransigent. Uncompromising.

We should not apologize for being nasty and awful. Why do we need to justify ourselves to the murderous civilizers of snuff capitalism? Why should we continue to try to prove ourselves to those who intend for us to be dead?

Nothing from the old world will save us, no matter how desperately we cling to its illusion. Its offerings cannot act simultaneously as the disease and the cure.

For Yousfi, “Barbarians are products of this civilization but not reducible to it. Their existence testifies to an unplanned mutation that is not encoded in the civilizing process. One might even say that they are ahead of civilization. They are figures of the future, from the future” (2025, 10). Snuff capital would civilize us into a future of the grave alone.

Civilization has always posed itself against barbarism. Well, if civilization has chosen mass murder, why not be barbarian?

If civilization is the light (of surveillance) we counterpose the shadows, moving in the dark beyond the searchlights of the police. Our light will come from a precinct destroyed by the stopped and frisked.

Bibliography

Robles, Gustavo. 2025. “Pierre Dardot: “We Are Witnessing a Civil War Against Collective Rights.” https://irgac.org/articles/pierre-dardot-we-are-witnessing-a-civil-war-against-collective-rights/

Shantz, Jeff. 2026. “Notes on Palliative Democracy and Snuff Capitalism: The Dead Must Not Disturb the Living.” Death Notes. https://deathn0tes.substack.com/p/notes-on-palliative-democracy-and

Yousfi, Louisa. 2025. In Defence of Barbarism: Non-Whites Against the Empire. London: Verso