The Normal Violence of Capitalism

[Joanne98]

Americans believe that the normal state of things is not-violence, and that is why they are shocked and appalled they see violent acts. The health care debate has revealed that violence is normal. Look at our own Mary and Ron McCurrin: forced into an unnecessary divorce to survive financially. Look at this study (.pdf), which tells us that being uninsured dramatically increases the risk of death, primarily from lack of treatment for chronic diseases. This isn’t an abstraction: recently a young woman died because, lacking insurance, she refused to go to the doctor when she had swine flu and pneumonia. This kind of systemic violence is normal in our system; it is killing people, and no one is accountable.

The financial crash reveals another side of normal capitalist violence. Millions of Americans lost jobs and millions more lost their savings either through direct theft or through the collapse of the stock market, and no one is held accountable.

Health care and the financial system are closer than they may seem. I recently went to the sentencing hearing for a man convicted of stealing millions from retirement plans. One by one the victims came to the podium to tell the Judge how they were affected by the loss. “I worked 35 years on the factory floor, and that was my retirement. I don’t know when I can retire, and I’m tired.” These people have lost years of their lives, just like many of our sick people.

Somehow we perceive this as shocking, not as the normal state of things. In fact, these examples are the direct consequences of the way we organize our society. Statutes and rules, court decisions, executive branch decisions, all interlock to create a system, and the outcomes are predictable results of the rational operation of that system. Slavoj Zizek discusses this in his book Violence. We think of the real economy as the system in which real people make real things for sale, and we think of financial speculation as a non-real abstraction, a parasite on the real system. In fact, the inexorable logic of speculation drives the productive sector. It is not an abstraction. It has rules, logic, and money, and people to operate with them, and it has real world impact. When the financial system fails, the productive sector suffers.

Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous

Continued>>.
http://firedoglake.com/2009/09/27/the-normal-violence-of-capitalism/

[IndianaGreen]

1. W.E.B. DuBois said about capitalism that nothing good can come out of a system based on greed.

In a speech Du Bois gave in 1953 at the California Peace Crusade, he begins by saying that American thought is distorted. At a time when economics should be studied, he said, it is not. What interests Americans is the accumulation of money without understanding the economics of it all:

“What has gone wrong? It is clear the workers don't understand the meaning of work.

”Work is service not gain. The object of work is life not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private property. We should measure the prosperity of the nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty; the prevalence of health; the efficiency of the public schools; and the number of people who can, do read worthwhile books.

”Toward all this we do strive but instead of marching breast forward, we stagger and wander thinking that food is raised not to eat but to sell at good profit; houses are not to shelter the masses but to make real estate agents rich; and solemnly declaring that without private profit there can be no food or homes. All of this is ridiculous. It has been disproven centuries ago.

”The greatest thinkers of every age have inveighed against concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and against the poverty, and disease and ignorance in the masses of men.

”We have tried every method of reform. A favorite effort has been force ­ by war. But the loot stolen by murder went to the generals and not to the soldiers. We tried through religion to lead men to sacrifice and right treatment of their fellow men, but the priests too often stole the fruits of sacrifice and concealed the truth.

”In the 17th century, of our modern European era we sought leadership in science and dreamed that justice might rule through natural law but we misinterpreted that law to mean that most men were slaves and white Europeans were the right masters of the world.

”In the 18th century, we turned toward the ballot in the hands of the worker to force a just division of the fruits of labor among the toilers. But the capitalists, happening on black slavery and land monopoly and on private monopoly of capital, forced the modern worker into a new slavery which built a new civilization of the world with colored slaves at the bottom, with white serfs between, and the power still in the hands of the rich.

http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/Another+Look+at+W.E.B.+DuBois,+Heather+Gray,+Counterpunch

[Demeter]

2. K&R for YOUR Post!

thanks for the eloquent quotation.

[tnlefty]

3. K & R for the firedoglake team!

I've been hanging around there a LOT the past few months.