The memes themselves perpetuate the machine’s logic. Even the mere “image of the guillotine is propaganda for the kind of authoritarian organization that can avail itself of that particular tool.” Whether sung by The Coup, memed by the AFL-CIO or built in papier-mâché for protests, the guillotine’s image “fetishiz[es] the violence of the state.” Indeed, it is both aspirational and propositional, according to the Crimethinc. essay: “Those who take their own powerlessness for granted assume that they can promote gruesome revenge fantasies without consequences. But if we are serious about changing the world, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that our proposals are not equally gruesome.”

“Burn the guillotine in your heads,” as it were.

We do need an abolitionist, anti-authoritarian rejection of actual guillotines and the state violence they embody. We need, too, to commit to radically imagining freedom. We can always dream more wildly. But the Crimethinc. essay misreads the figurative guillotines currently looming over our discursive commons. It is true that the guillotine cannot be an “instrument of liberation.” But where are the actual guillotines?

What the Crimethinc. essay overlooks is that the guillotine has emerged as a symbolic figure for the militancy of the moment. This means that we need to interpret how the guillotine operates in discourse, what cultural work it performs for the people who speak it or hear it. This is the guillotine’s cultural afterlife — the way its idea or image “lives on” in the popular imagination. The distance between a historical subject and that subject’s cultural memory can be both vast and circuitous.

When we share, talk or write about figures like Sojourner Truth, Frida Kahlo or Martin Luther King, Jr., we seldom deal with the nuanced realities of their lives and more often traffic in their status as symbols — that is, their cultural afterlives. Never mind that Truth only became a representative figure for black feminism a century after her death, partly on the basis of words that she likely never spoke: “Ain’t I a woman?” Nor that Kahlo was a Communist; we commemorate her in wall calendars and children’s books as a liberal, multicultural feminist icon rather than as a revolutionary.

And, until recently, we had revised King’s radicalism — dangerous enough to provoke the FBI — into a sanitary and unobjectionable protest. These all represent afterlives: living, changing understandings of a subject. Changing, of course, because we constantly contest their meaning and truthfulness.

Although not a human subject, the guillotine, too, has its cultural afterlife. Perhaps we can say this because of its long “life” that ended with its “death” in ’77; everything since its disuse has been remembrance. Or maybe we have lived with its memory since the French Revolutionary Terror, from Dickens’s Carton to the Paris Communards. Regardless, in critiquing the new guillotine discourse as inherently authoritarian, the Crimethinc. essay neglects the weird, sometimes uncomfortable ways that culture works. The essay thus proceeds ahistorically and anachronistically. It collapses the lived reality of the guillotine’s violence with what its memory actually does in our present.

The question, though, is whose memory? Critiquing guillotine memes for reinscribing the real machine’s logic takes for granted that the idea of the guillotine is consistent over time and space — that it is the same in the US as in France as in the rest of the world. But how could this be the case when the guillotine has no extensive history in the United States or even so-called North America? Maybe that cultural distance enables US radicals to so easily meme such a bloody machine. We can find that gross, of course. But to grapple with the recent crop of guillotine images, we have to work in the realm of culture and memory. Whatever the political reality of the historical guillotine, it has come to mean something different now, in the US.

But critiques of the new guillotine imagery elide something more important. In skipping over the realms of culture and memory, the Crimethinc. essay also skips over the difference between discourse and action. To be sure, words not only matter but actually shape our social world. Anytime we decry language for being ableist or transantagonist, for example, we are recognizing language’s power to make and remake social realities. Antifascists know this. For decades antifascist activists have organized to stop fascists from spreading their ideas in the form of speeches, Nazi punk shows, marches and now memes. Unopposed fascist discourse makes their movement that much stronger.

Activists understand that language matters, but in offering a straightforward, superficial reading of the new guillotine discourse, the Crimethinc. essay equates words with works. Liberals make the same mistake when glorifying “speaking truth to power,” “making your voice heard” or signing the next online petition. All of these things, including choppy boi memes, might matter in various ways, but they are not the same thing as taking action. They are not guillotines.

Despite its radically anti-authoritarian appearance, the Crimethinc. essay ultimately spirals back into a liberal logic in which there is no difference between what we say and what we do. Dubbing memes, bad jokes or chants as “proposals” only conflates talking about it with being about it. Such critiques reduce very different types of language into a single genre that somehow gives an unobstructed view into someone’s politics. But sometimes people do not mean exactly what they say.

I mean, you are not really going to eat the rich, are you?

Speculative Militancy

This is a way of saying that words are seldom enough, but they can be something. Writing about black antislavery activists, historian Kellie Carter Jackson argues that, following the failure of antislavery’s non-violent campaign, “violence became a way of communicating and provoking political and social change.” Physical rebellion against the slavery regime took the form of fugitive slaves’ armed self-defense, for example, or, eventually, John Brown’s guerrilla tactics. Unlike the state violence that brutally enforces social hierarchy, this liberatory violence “from below” instead sought to defend black lives and overturn an oppressive order.

In whatever form it took, the use of force by abolitionists made possible increasingly radical ideas about freedom. Over the course of the nineteenth century, challenges to chattel slavery had been rendered literally unspeakable. Black and white abolitionists were mobbed and murdered for their activism, while at various times a pro-slavery bloc in Congress enforced a gag rule barring any legislative debate over slavery. Slowly, abolitionism’s dangerous ideas became more thinkable and sayable as “the enslaved and black leaders used force to engage and expand a political agenda.”

For Jackson, militant struggle could be discursive. She writes that “violence became a political language for African American abolitionists.” To Jackson’s argument we can add a corollary: that, like militant acts, militant discourse helped advance and expand the abolitionist movement’s fight against slavery. The radical freedom dreams represented by John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, or enslaved people’s general strike from Southern plantations, or the North’s black liberation army all resulted from years of a rebellious and primarily black discourse that could no longer be controlled.

But militant abolitionist slogans like “Death to Kidnappers” did not produce reactionary, authoritarian violence, even when the Reconstruction government occupied the former Confederacy and momentarily elevated black people and Radical Republicans to significant state power. Rather such militant language made possible the revolutionary overthrow of chattel slavery, racial capitalism’s paradigmatic institution.

We can say, then, that the militant language of liberatory social movements, from antislavery to the present, is speculative. This represents something more than just making proposals, as when the Crimethinc. essay asserts that a choppy boi meme is nothing but a plan for specific action. Rather, to consider guillotine memes as “speculative” is to recognize their power to expand the horizons of what could be. It is to see militant discourse as imaginative and perhaps even utopian.

This, I argue, is what the guillotine means now.

For all the edgy jokes, memes and, yes, the machine’s authoritarian history, the emergent guillotine discourse hints at new possibilities for popular social justice movements in the US. There is nothing preordaining about the symbols that radicals use, and there is no reason to read in guillotine memes an augur of authoritarian violence. On the contrary, turning to the revolutionary past in the US reveals that militant discourse can help radicals imagine and enact emancipatory forms of violence that overthrow rather than enforce oppressive regimes. We have needed such forms before.

For some, the guillotine’s speculative power might come as a revelation, either frightening or freeing. For others, this might confirm that what they have long understood has finally become publicly sayable and legible: that those caging and killing the world deserve none of our civility or patience — that they deserve nothing other than to be stopped. More important than figuring popular discontent, the current guillotine discourse, and others like it, might expand what is actually sayable, doable, possible while we struggle for freedom. I hope it will.

To cut off this discourse and the feelings that inspire it would risk cutting off an organic way for social justice movements to grow and radicalize. It would foreclose the militant speculation that has already begun, thereby benefiting the oppressive systems that currently have us trapped. Instead of prescriptively denouncing how struggling people figure the world and their place in it, why not nurture the speculative and utopian impulses that motivate them to speak, chant, meme? Why not hear what they really mean in their own words and on their own terms?

We need to work with people as they are, with their feelings that may be just despite being routed through received ideas or cultural symbols that are not. People do not always have a precise language for what they mean, so they make do with what they have at hand. We can learn to speak new languages together. But we must not delay by dismissing this new militancy. It is already late, and we have let new borders, new commodities, new rules and new forest fires be made from the stuff of black and brown and red death. We need a rhetoric for the hour.

Chop chop.