Why is violence increasing today across America and the world? The explosion of violence is a complex phenomenon, with many interacting forces at play. The capitalist ruling class blames individuals, but, in truth, violence in our communities reflects the social decay brought on by a society in transition. We are valued not as human beings, but only for our ability to produce profit for the capitalist class.
Violence is emanating from the dissolution of society built on industrial capitalism. The rise of digital-based electronic technology is transforming human society as robots and computer-driven production replace unskilled and semi-skilled labor, both in production and management. Many of these workers will never work again.
Electronic production erodes the very basis of capitalist exploitation. The way people work, the very nature of the job, the relation of boss to worker, and all the institutions built on this basis are changing.
Classes are drawn into struggle for control of this technology. The foundations of a new world are being laid down today. In this historic transition, the capitalist class uses the most extreme violence with callous indifference to human life, as it fights to maintain global control.
Under capitalism, the value of a human being is related to our value as a productive unit. The value of an individual’s labor power is the value of the necessities of life to maintain and reproduce the worker, that is, the value of food, clothing, housing, education, health care, and other necessities for a worker to make a living and raise a family.
The very basis of value under capitalism is the amount of labor time a worker puts into a given product. To the extent that electronics replaces human labor, the value of the products necessary to keep a worker alive become cheaper every day. Thus, the value of that labor power and the value of human life tends towards zero. The worker, employed or unemployed, has decreasing value to capitalist class.
Increasing millions of people worldwide are being forced out of capitalist relations of production and are becoming external to the system. The capitalist class requires a dramatic increase in organized violence to police this new class of people, who are fighting against being driven into misery.
Social Contract Being Destroyed
When capitalism was organized primarily around industrial production, society provided a basic level of maintenance for the labor force needed by the capitalists. Under the social contract of that era, workers could find housing and health care; water was provided to the public by the government; education was available and oriented to train workers; welfare and unemployment were provided to cover periods of no income.
Now these “rights” are being withdrawn. The safety net is being jerked out from under families. These are government policies, not acts of God, and they result in increasingly desperate people, some of whom turn to violence. In a thousand ways, the message is sent that human beings and life itself no longer have value, teaching the working class to attack itself.
In the polarizing new world order, the biggest threat to the capitalist class is that this new class of people will become conscious that they do not have to depend on the capitalist class. Thus, all the weapons of social violence are being directed toward preventing political polarization from following economic polarization.
One of the key tactics of warfare, including class war, is to divide and conquer, to get the enemy fighting against himself. Thus, the US has worked overtime in Iraq to define people as “Sunni” or “Shiite,” but not Iraqi. The government, media, and educational institutions bombard US workers with propaganda that they are primarily African-American, white, or Latino, anything but workers. Workers are called middle class or poor, or identified as consumers, homemakers, and shoppers, anything but working class. Youth are divided into Bloods and Crips, Nortenos and Surenos, anything but young workers.
To counter this thinking, the great South African revolutionary, Steve Biko, wrote, “The greatest weapon in the hands of the enemy is your mind”. This suggests that the way forward is to fight with ideas to wrench this weapon from capitalism.
Toxic Waste of Decaying System
Capitalism uses organized violence to engineer its vision of post-industrial society. Since the future depends on which class controls the means of production, the capitalist class is preparing to implement open class warfare to guarantee its class goals.
Thus, capitalism is encouraging the development of violence in increasingly malignant directions. Violent pornography is legal and flourishes in the US. The media, in virtually every form, constantly features stories of violence. Movies glorify violence on a previously unimaginable scale. Now that torture is an official policy of our government, we actually hear an official morality of violence even as capitalism tries to turn legitimate disgust towards violence to a fascist solution. Violence – and the resultant fear of violence – is a weapon of social control.
Now that entire sections of the working class find themselves unemployable at anything but the most degrading and low-paying jobs, drugs are directly and openly flooded into their communities. Combined with easy access to guns, these social policies keep communities fighting themselves. The “War on Drugs” has resulted in the “Land of the Free” having the world’s largest incarceration rate and the largest incarcerated population.
Corporate-run prisons jail children of undocumented workers for a profit. Prisoners are exploited more and more directly and earn pennies a day for their labor. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids are routine and accustoming Americans to storm-trooper style violence as part of daily life. The police are always presented as the answer to every social problem, and there are open calls to use the army for domestic control.
The capitalist class has promised America that we will see war for our lifetimes. War for empire has always profited the ruling class, even as it demands that the working class supply the troops. War abroad always requires violence at home. We are seeing once again that the terrible degradation of civilians by U.S. soldiers in war leaves horrible scars on the human spirit as well as the body. Post Traumatic Stress syndrome is becoming part of daily life in America.
The only people that have the potential power to halt this massive war machine are Americans. The capitalist class clearly recognizes this historic role. Thus, the people of the U.S. are the real targets and the ultimate victims of the so-called War Against Terror. Hence, the tremendous growth of the State with the Homeland Security Agency and new repressive legislation to limit civil rights.
Owners Reap the Benefits
Electronic production makes true abundance possible for every person on the planet. If controlled by the public, new technology will guarantee the age-old dream of an end to want, and a sustainable planet.
The social energy to transform the situation is latent within the new class of people in the millions who are expelled from capitalist relations of production. These people have no choice but to demand economic rights for all: access to housing, food, education, health care, culture and a decent and productive life.
Today the achievement of any one of these rights completely defies the right of private corporate property to determine how society works and what human social relationships should be. Sooner or later humanity will have to take the next step: it’s either private control of the things we use and need in common, including technology, or it’s public and communal ownership. There’s no in between.
As always, social transformation begins with the battle for hearts and minds. The decisive step is to join the battle for ideas that is breaking out in America today. We can publicize a vision of a communal world and take the offensive with ideas to dismantle the moral justifications for an exploitive system that cannot exist without violence.
May.2008.Vol18.Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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