Harry Targ
We are mourning again. Violent deaths continue:
African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Gays and Lesbians, Women, Youth, Jews, and
the list goes on. And the media pontificate about root causes: guns, a divided
society, hate speech, the internet, and politicians. Analysts usually lock onto
one explanation and deduce one or two cures. But there are other analysts, for
example “realists’ and religious fundamentalists, who say there will always be
violence. There are no solutions.
The reality that undergirds the killing of masses of
people on a regular basis is not easily discovered. That is, there are “deep
structures” that have created a brutal and violent world. And movements to
transform these deep structures, although complicated, can have some
substantial success.
First, and I write this at the risk of being dismissed
as an ideologue, the contemporary state of the capitalist economic system must
be examined in rigorous detail. What might be called “late capitalism” is an
economic system of growing inequality of wealth and poverty, joblessness,
declining access to basic needs-food, health care, housing, education,
transportation. The increasing accumulation of wealth determines the
ever-expanding appropriation of political power. In the era of late capitalism,
economic concentration resides in a handful of banks, hedge funds, medical
conglomerates, real estate developers, technology and insurance companies, and
media monopolies.
Second, late capitalism continues to marginalize
workers of all kinds. Agricultural and manufacturing work, the staple of two
hundred years of economic development, is disappearing. Highly skilled
electronic workers and others with twenty-first century skills are employed as
needed by corporations, with little or no job security. Once secure workers who
have lost their jobs live in communities with declining access to food, growing
environmental devastation, and limited connection to information and the
ability to communicate with others. And, of course, conditions are worse for
workers of color, women, the young, and the old. A new working class has emerged, the
“precariat,” with skilled but insecure jobs; the service sector, workers in
health care, home care, fast food and other low paid and overworked occupations;
and workers in the “informal sector,” desperate people who take short-term jobs
or are forced to sell drugs, peddle products on the street, engage in
prostitution, or engage in other activities so they and their families can survive.
In addition, the most marginalized are homeless and hungry. Late capitalism has
increased the marginalization of majorities of working people, in core
capitalist states and the Global South.
Third, the history of capitalist development has
paralleled the development of white supremacy and patriarchy. If capital
accumulation requires the expropriation of the wealth produced by workers, what
better way to increase profits can be found than marginalizing sectors of the
working population and setting them into competition and conflict with each
other by creating categories of difference. Racism, sexism, homophobia, the
demonization of immigrants, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Muslim hysteria all serve,
in the end, profit and the accumulation of wealth and power.
Fourth, systems of concentrated wealth and power
require the development of political institutions, institutions that enhance
the control of the behavior of workers. From monarchies, to constitutional
democracies, to institutionalized systems of law and custom, such as
segregation, voter suppression in our own day, the behavior of the citizenry is
routinized and controlled. In most political systems electoral processes create
some possibilities for modest, but necessary, policy changes. However, as Nancy
MacLean points out in Democracy in Chains,
economic and political elites use their resources to restrict and limit the
influence of democratic majorities.
Fifth, this economic and political edifice requires an
ideology, a consciousness, a way in which the citizenry can be taught to accept
the system as it is. This ideology has many branches but one root, the
maintenance and enhancement of the capitalist economic system. The elements of
the dominant political ideology include: privileging individualism over
community; conceptualizing society as a brutal state of nature controlled only
by countervailing force; acceptance of the idea that humans are at base greedy;
and, finally, the belief that the avariciousness of human nature requires
police force and laws at home and armies overseas.
Sixth, a prevalent component of the political ideology
is the idea that violence is ubiquitous, violence is justified, and violence is
to be applauded. The trope of living in a violent world pervades our education
system, our toys, our television and movies, our sporting activities, and our
political discourse. Violence is tragic (we pray for the victims) but it is presented
in popular culture as liberating and justifiable. And to survive in this world
of evil and strife, everyone needs to be
armed.
These are the backdrops, the “deep structures,” that frame
the contemporary context. And this context includes a politics of economic
super-exploitation-destroying unions, fighting demands for economic justice,
shifting wealth even more to the super-rich, and taking away basic rights and
guarantees, such as healthcare, education, water, and even the air we breathe.
And to justify the growing immiseration of everyone, the Trump Administration,
most of the Republicans and some of the Democrats justify their policies by a
racism, sexism, homophobia, and virulent rightwing nationalism not seen since
the days of racial segregation in the South. And Anti-Semitism, long a staple
of political ideology in Europe, reached its most virulent form in the United
States in the 1930s, when Father Coughlin’s nationwide Anti-Semitic broadcasts
found their way into many households. As late as the 1950s, property deeds
included “restrictive covenants” forbidding the sale of homes in specific
neighborhoods to Jews or people of color. Local political initiatives led to
whole communities excluding African Americans from living there (“sundown
towns”) and racial segregation exists today in virtually every United States
city.
Given these deep structures is it any surprise that
brutal violence flairs up against sectors of the population? Is it any surprise
that targeted groups feel intimidated, threatened, and angry? Is it any
surprise that volatile and life-threatening cycles of economic insecurity
facing most people create fears leading some of them to follow false prophets?
Is it any surprise that the economic and political institutions in which we
were born and raised, justified by powerful ideologies about the “realities” of
life develop in us a propensity to be taken in by arrogant, racist, classist,
sexist, and ignorant politicians? In addition to national politics, people at
the state level and in their local communities accept unquestioning leadership
in economic, political, and cultural institutions that in subtler ways promote
the agenda of the rich and white.
The problem is historical, structural, political and
cultural. Identifying the “deep structures”- economic, political, ideological,
and cultural-masses of people can begin to mobilize around change. Social
movements may begin by addressing political ideology, or addressing public
policy concerns, or participating in the electoral arena. Each is of vital
importance. However, progressives need to recognize that the violence and
poverty today, the racial hatred, the environmental crises are connected to the
deep structures. They must work today on what is possible to change right away.
In addition, progressives must organize, over the long run to radically
restructure society, challenging the capitalist system and the political
institutions that maintain it.
