Working Class Answer to School Shootings
Working Class Answer to School Shootings
The shooting of children tugs at our heartstrings and reflexively we try to solve the crisis of alienation and “psycho” gun massacres with legislative solutions that the NRA will never allow. The youth cry out #NeverAgain to their parents in hope to unseat all politicians funded by the NRA; and promise to do so themselves when they get to vote. In the current state of affairs they believe that means electing liberal/progressive Democrats. Like #MeToo’s meteoric rise following every exposure of prominent abusers, the #NeverAgain groundswell will be reinvigorated by every mass shooting between now and November. And if history is any predictor, we expect thousands of deaths by gun and a handful of mass shootings before the next election. Confirming the inability of the bosses state to moderate on this issue, Trump appeared to “step up to the plate” but then balked when called into the club house by the NRA and his handlers.
Combine gun culture with the alienation of labor inherent in capitalist production and you have a formula for reactive violence. Figures peripheral to and even parasitic on the producers of surplus value have committed mass murders again and again, and we trace their behaviors to the common features of their existence: where liberals and a clueless left see the villain as the assault rifle, we see the totality of the alienation of and from productive labor and its effects. This gestalt pervades the entire capitalist society and is integrated across it in real and fanciful historical cultural expressions. “Bad men” are celebrated in old songs and new TV series and these have been soaking into the popular consciousness for generations. At the same time we see the promotion of fascism just below the surface of some promotion of gun culture as a fixed “value” in a world of changes unwanted by the ruined petty bourgeoisie. Every one of these phenomena are causally tied to the alienation of labor in the capitalist mode of production.
The workers lose power during the process of production, this is a social relationship in which capital grows as workers’ lives are diminished. The class of labor is alienated/separated from control of the work process, from the product of their labor the very use-values of the commodities they produced. Like the commodities they produce and which are sold for their exchange value on the market, the workers own life force is sold as labor power–as a living commodity–profiting capital at the workers’ expense. For its own survival, capital must pay for that labor power, on average–its exchange value–the minimal amount needed for workers’ families to reproduce, re-energize, and send their labor power back to work another day. In nearly every workplace, power and powerlessness confront each other on every assembly line in a struggle between the capitalists’ work pace required to accumulate profit and the worker’s inherent need to preserve their life energy. This life draining process, its resultant individual isolation and sense of powerlessness comes from the lack of control the worker has over their daily life and the product of their activity. Such exploitative social relations at work creates for labor a malaise of resignations sitting on top of a generally self tempered simmering anger and frustration. This is the oppression of capitalist social relations internalized. This internalized poisoned consciousness effects all social classes, castes and sectors of society. The violent act against others (the innocent) is the displaced rage of the powerless lashing out at what appears to be the cause. But because the worker’s labor power is sold as a commodity for the cost of its reproduction, the source of the capitalist profit, hidden in the length of the work day, is masking the actual exploitative social relationship between labor and capital. This alienation explains the fascist psychology of ‘authoritarianism’ where powerless individuals get off on ganging up on the scapegoats targeted by their leaders. Only working class struggle escalating class and socialist consciousness can overcome the misdirected anger of the powerless and use it to eliminate the real cause.
These killings occur like clockwork because hundreds of thousands of the alienated and depressed, many driven to despair by the gross inequalities of capitalism, need forms of social intervention and help to deal with the individual manifestations of our collective social dis-ease but the state refuses to help them. Capitalism depends for both its consent and private profit on the nuclear family, and these are so often dysfunctional as to be an epidemic that germinates and breeds sociopathic psychoses. The capitalist state cannot protect the population; it cannot undo what it itself creates. Its sole purpose is to protect the profiteers and among them the gun manufacturers linked by ten thousand ties to the military industrial complex. The political “fixers”, the kept players at the top, in both capitalist political parties will do everything they can to assuage #NeverAgain while at all times sustaining their benefactors’ interests, even as they modify appearances day to day.
The Marxists and advocates of a workers government know that the social dis-ease that results in violent outbursts everyday (not just mass shootings) cannot be overcome with any of the proposals that abound. Robust background checks, limits on the gun purchasing ‘rights’ of various categories of dangerous persons will not resolve the crisis. Age of rifle purchasers is an artificial and anti-democratic insertion by reformism, and the racist maniac landlord in the White House is glad to seize on it for a few days. Faith in the cops has been shattered both because the FBI ignored the students’ warnings and because the punk-ass donut eater “on the job” at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High refused to engage and stood by for 4 minutes while hearing semi-automatic gunfire.
The moderates converge with Trump and call for limits on guns purchasing rights for mentally disturbed persons (which appears to be a rational response) and the more radical #MeToo activists may try to add to the list—those with known tendency toward rape and domestic violence. Will the #BLM and #Antifa chime in and ask the capitalist state to disarm individuals associated to racist hate groups like the Klan and neo-fascists? Serious observers will be left asking who exactly, what social class, what media group, decides on the vetting process for gun ownership?
We must consider how the ruling class choice for CEO of US Imperialism places the blame for violence and harm committed against our children on the mentally disturbed a category so wide that writing in the New Yorker Masha Gessen quotes “Philip Zimbardo, who is best known for his Stanford Prison Experiment, and his co-author, Rosemary Sword, [who ed.] propose that Trump is an ‘extreme present hedonist.’ He may also be a sociopath, a malignant narcissist, borderline, on the bipolar spectrum, a hypomanic, suffering from delusional disorder, or cognitively impaired.” Trump calls the kettle black! He needs an analyst and can afford it. He needs jail too, but we’ll gladly pay for that until workers abolish those. We do not ascribe his palpable lust for bonapartist powers to a particular mental condition, however.
It is not only the literati or the psychologists that are aware of the mutability of the psychological industries’ diagnostic assessments of conditions over time; what today is accepted as innate though unusual may 10, 20, or 50 years ago have been considered cause for treatments of the most barbaric type. Luckily for Trump, many of the disorders professional observers notice in his public behaviour may in time be treatable or even considered to be less of a condition than they currently appear to be. All kidding aside, it is one thing when psychologists look at powerful politicians and elites and apply their method to their observation. It is quite something else when politicians and heads of state decide what and who is “off base” and use their professional assessment to make laws and put policy in place. In the epoch of capitalist decay state after state has used its prisons and psych wards to apply the repression of the state on those deemed psychologically unfit for “freedom”.
We are expected to listen to the official line after every shooting that this is a sick individual, this is unique, this is the cost of our freedom! But abhorrent violent and harmful behaviour is not far from our cultural norm. Drone pilots are prepared to take life from 12,000 miles away as simply as if they are drinking a cup of water or killing zombies on their X-Box. Try as you may to shield your children from violence, most see tens of thousands of bloody killings in entertainment or the news while their brain is in its most formative years.
But neither the politicians nor the mainstream capitalist-owned media want to explore the cultural norm that wires the brains of youth then sets them out into material conditions of atomization, isolation, competition, economic and environmental uncertainty. All this is the soup that capitalism breeds its youth in. Add into that the chemical and pharmacological pollution of your foods and the side effects of combinations of doctor-prescribed drugs. Millions of youth are put on anti-depressants and ping-ponged by professionals from one drug regime to another, rarely making progress and often turning from “professional” medicating to self-medicating and you have to admit the system itself is “off base”.
If we all agree the fascists must be stopped, what about the calls to suppress so called “black identity extremists” (by the liberals’ beloved FBI,) and the “organized violence” of Anti-Fa decried by pacifists as well as rightists, and all the socialists and anarchists, then right on down the line to dear ol’ aunt Sadie who keeps a loaded Glock 19 and extra magazines under her pillow at night? We remember the MOVE bombing by the Philadelphia police and we notice that school shootings invariably result in increased police surveillance of the oppressed and even a change in the news cycle subject, shifting the spotlight away from police summary executions of “suspects.”
The far left doesn’t put the pieces of this dialectic together, compartmentalizing the school shooting case and then they puff out their chests as if they are the true adherents to the 2nd amendment, as if there is some adequate guarantee of personal liberty therein. Some self-proclaimed leftists, like the moribund Socialist Workers Party, even embraced the Bundy family’s seizure of public land in disregard of the public’s historical Commons. So is there a choice other than NRA “open carry for all” advocacy and the liberal dream of “effective gun control” enforced by the capitalist state? We have it! It is an essential piece of the historical program of the working class.
Indeed Marxism and advocates of a workers government have a program to stop school shooting. We know that actuating our program is the only way the USA will be able to protect its children and vulnerable people from wanton violence. Even though we see NRA sponsors like the Bank of Omaha and Enterprise Car Rental running for cover from the #NeverAgain movement, the 300,000,000 plus guns in America have owners who will not give them up without door to door searches and confiscations. American capitalist “democracy” has a violent history tied to gun ownership originally required to suppress the First People, the enslaved and indentured. Because of the legacy inequality sustained for 500 years, real and fabricated fear of unstable individuals and social unrest has historically justified gun culture. And, because of increasing inequality, individual breakdowns and social uprisings threatening the status quo, the ruling class may act to limit your access to arms but not its own. Gun culture and its consequences is not reformable in this epoch of imperialist decay.
Some will point to Norway or Canada or Australia and say civil peace in capitalist “democracies” is possible. We counter that those countries are not the dominant imperialist power in the period of its decay, rather they are outliers enjoying the largess of a declining Pax Americana which—for a time—affords its historic protectorate (allies) relative social peace. As students of history we know the capitalist class requires “gun freedom” to secure its counter-revolutionary base–its fascist hordes in waiting–we know no amount of heart-wrenching, tear-jerking tragedy will persuade the political lackeys to fully and unequivocally back away from NRA funding and the obligations that come with it. The #NeverAgain movement will do its best to expose all the legislative recipients of NRA largess and some brand name companies may run for cover, but big capital knows its power can only be sustained by the threat and power of the baton and the bullet. Big capital more openly requires the threat of fascist gun thugs today as augmentation to increasingly militarized police forces for repression purposes. Still there persists a delusion that regulations will solve this dilemma, and capitalist politicians are especially happy to indulge in congressional election year blather, with a host of new and female candidates ready to fill the seats of 20-30 who have announced they are retiring.
Only the working class’ historic program negates this legislative juggernaut. Our program demands the expropriation and socialization of all arms and ammunition manufacturers’ factories and assets without indemnification to the big shareholders by the workers organizations which will control and run these industries under working class self management. Today that means the unions, but in the development of the struggle that will result in the fulfillment of this goal, the working class will create new local rank and file representative organizations such as factory/shop/office/school, neighborhood & farm workers’ committees. Committees which will feed representatives to district, regional and national councils of workers deputies. These industries will then be run and their product distributed in a rational manner by the workers councils. The production will be determined by the economic plan of the workers government. (No capitalist government would allow this!) The production of arms will be a line item of the workers budget. One may ask, “Who will control these arsenals of armaments?” We say not the capitalists, their cops, or their military. Our program calls for the formation of the workers militia under control of democratic workers councils which maintain the armory.
Because only the working class’ historic program of socialism eliminates the crisis of capitalism and its social diseases including: social isolation, racial and gender oppression, alienation, psychotic breakdowns, violent outbursts, and domestic violence; it is only the working class and its democratic councils that can secure the safety of the population from gun violence. Our minimal demand is socialization of the armaments industry. Our transitional demands include taking all armaments industries and their product and placing them under the control of the workers organizations. This invariably includes the socialization of the commanding heights of industry under workers self management, enforced by the workers militia that answer to the workers councils. This is the form the agency of the working class and the oppressed must take to eliminate the capitalist perpetuation of gun violence.
All those who direct you into the next round of Democratic & Republican primaries take you further from liberation of the working class and the specially oppressed peoples. They preserve the appropriation of private profits from the sale of military-style weapons without regard to their ultimate use, the elimination of your neighbors’ kids via target practice! They do not have and cannot find any fix for this social phenomenon. Any actual fix is subversive of the class dictatorship of Capital.
-
3/4/2018
