In defense of peoples’ power

Capitalism profits from guns, war & reaction

By Leslie Feinberg

January 3, 2013

Violence and defense against violence are life-and-death social questions for those who are oppressed and exploited.

The roots of violence in society can’t be separated from the capitalist drive for profits.

There is only one economic class in society that profits from weaponry and war — the capitalist 1%. Bankers and industrialists — actually numerically closer to .001 percent — have their own class interests in relation to violence and guns.

For some 5,000 years, ruling classes — slavocracy, feudal and capitalist — have lived an opulent and idle existence by exploiting labor and the land.

These exploiting classes couldn’t have ruled — domestically or internationally — over a downtrodden and disenfranchised, oppressed and exploited world multitude without a monopoly on violence and high-tech weaponry.

The economic empires and fortunes of the 1% are bloody from the violent class warfare it has waged to profit from stolen labor and land, and the socially built apparatus of production.

The rich don’t run capitalism; the drive for profit runs the capitalists.

Capital is more than money. Capital is magnetically drawn to profits like a compass needle points to the melting polar ice cap.

Capital is the violent economic and social relationship of exploiter to exploited, oppressor to oppressed.

In his monumental three-volume work “Capital,” Karl Marx quoted economist T.J. Dunning: “Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certain will produce eagerness; 50 percent, positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.”

Dunning concluded: “If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.”

More police, more wars and weapons for profit?

The 1% media are moderating the public discussion in the U.S. about guns and violence as if this were a capitalist presidential debate, outside of social, economic and historic context.

Malcolm X wisely warned about big-business media: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

Six capitalist corporations control most of the media in the U.S. (commoncause.org)

“The military-industrial media complex,” states Wikipedia, “is an offshoot of the military-industrial complex.”

Ultimately, such a numerically small class as the .001% can only rule over the vast majority of the exploited and oppressed peoples of the world through an overwhelming force of violence and weapons of mass destruction.

The 1% claims that all of society is safer, as long as its hired guns maintain a monopoly on violence and weapons.

Using the double-speak of “peace,” the ruling class claims that more police, courts, prison and military, with more advanced weapons will bring about an end to violence in capitalist society.

If more police and military might, more guns and high-tech weaponry, could win the peace in the class war under capitalism between exploiters and the exploited, oppressors and the oppressed, the U.S. would be a utopian paradise.

No emperor or king in history has ever commanded such high-tech weaponry, police force or military force as do the barons of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.

In reality, the police, courts, prisons, immigrant detention centers and military are an admission by the 1% that it is unable and unwilling to peacefully end its violent social and economic rule as an exploiting and oppressing class.

In fact, the social and economic antagonisms under capitalism are sharpening.

Rise in racist lynchings, massacres

Capitalist “democracy” is the violent class dictatorship of the 1% over the 99% — particularly the oppressed and laboring class.

Wall Street poses behind a façade of “democracy.” But democracy for whom? Greece was a democracy for the slave-owning class. It was a slave state for those who were shackled. Roman emperors ordered the avenue to their capital city lined with crucified enslaved laborers as a threat against rebellion against the slavocracy.

Today, the U.S. has become the capital of the death penalty as a weapon of state terror against the oppressed and impoverished — those who line death rows.

This is what capitalist “democracy” looks like: racist police profiling and “stop and frisk,” apartheid passbook laws and police brutality, gestapo raids by immigration police, tagging workers by skin color, separating families, indefinite detention, round-up and mass deportations of Muslims, rendition — the outsourcing of torture, racist mass incarceration, endless wars for profit.

More capitalist police and private security guards with more powerful weapons do not usher in social peace. Police brutality and police-state occupations of oppressed communities are the predominant force of “legal” terror in the U.S.

Trayvon Martin was one of 120 Black people known to have been extrajudicially executed in the first six months of 2012 — “one person lynched every 36 hours” — by police “and a much smaller number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes.” (mxgm.org)

During the last year, Black residents were gunned down in Tulsa, Okla., the second such massacre in the community’s history. Sikhs were massacred outside Milwaukee, Wis.

When unarmed youths led the first Occupy in the heart of Wall Street, they tried to create a forum for cooperative dialogue and debate in the Capitol of capital. In response, the billionaire mayor unleashed violent assaults by a militarized police force.

In October, after Hurricane Sandy, it was the Occupy activists and organizations of the oppressed that organized to feed the hungry — including hungry Federal Emergency Management Agency officials — not the capitalist government. The billionaire in Gracie Mansion [the official residence of New York City’s mayor] sent armed police to shut down the volunteer network to meet peoples’ needs.

The right to organize to build peoples’ power

The 1% claims to lead in the interests of “the nation.” But the U.S. is not one nation — it is a prison-house for oppressed nationalities.

Capitalist society is also made up of more than one economic class.

The economic and social interests of the world working class and oppressed peoples are diametrically opposed to the imperialist ruling class. It is the laboring classes — disproportionately the oppressed — who have done almost all the dying in wars for profit.

Therefore, oppressed peoples and the working class need their own assemblies to share information about social problems and to organize peoples’ power to solve them.

The working class and oppressed peoples around the world have a right to get together — indoors and outdoors — to discuss social crises of great importance from their own material standpoints in society, including defense and liberation, to organize and to take action together in their own class interests.

The needs of oppressed and working people set the peoples’ agenda: good-paying union wages for short work weeks, free homes and mass transportation, free health care and education, recreation and vacations; an end to white supremacy and jingoism, to imperialist wars and immigrant bashing, to male supremacy and anti-LGBTQ+ oppressions.

The wealth is there; the crisis is ownership

Capitalism can’t solve the life-and-death needs that the profit system has created. It is the oppressed and workers who must organize social solutions.

For example, as adult generations can’t find jobs in a jobless recovery, are homeless or fear losing their home, and can’t afford health care, the suffering of their children is soaring, too.

Newspapers in Syracuse report pre- teenage children are robbing at gunpoint.

More than 40 percent of children are starving and desperate, living below the poverty level, in Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, Utica and Schenectady, according to data from the U.S. Census.

The poverty level is officially defined as an income of $22,300 or less for a family of four.

The wealth is there. It’s just being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

“The rich got richer and the poor got poorer in New York City last year as the poverty rate reached its highest point in more than a decade,” the New York Times admitted in September, “and the income gap in Manhattan, already wider than almost anywhere else in the country, rivaled disparities in sub-Saharan Africa.” (Sept. 20, 2012)

Children are desperately hungry because there’s too much food to be sold at a profit. Capitalist production, hardwired for profit, leads to capitalist overproduction — a crisis of abundance. Millions of workers desperately need goods and services, yet can’t afford to buy them back because they are unemployed or are working for poverty-level wages.

This economic and social rule by the 1% is an ongoing violent armed crime against humanity — which cannot move forward within the confines of the existing capitalist economic and social relations of production and distribution for profit.

In an article headlined, “New movement for people’s power,” reporter Steven Ceci wrote that thousands of people have taken to the streets in Baltimore this year to protest racist police brutality, and lack of jobs and recreation for youth. These actions were organized by the Justice 4 Trayvon Martin/Maryland Local Organizing Committee.

“The movement that began when thousands of people filled Baltimore’s streets on March 26 has taken its next steps by protesting at the site of the proposed youth jail on April 10 and marching to City Hall to continuing organizing for justice,” Ceci explained. (WW, April 18, 2012)

The Rev. Cortly “C.D.” Witherspoon, Baltimore president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said at the April 10 rally: “Trayvon Martin continues to be our North Star and a martyr for the modern-day struggle for freedom.

“What we accomplished on March 26 was much bigger than one protest. For one evening we shut down City Hall and downtown Baltimore, including the convention center and the circus. Through our sheer numbers and determination, we proved what the power of the people can do.

“We do not intend to go back.”

Witherspoon stated: “The political establishments, both local and national, have proven to be bankrupt; they have done virtually nothing to protect or serve the people. It’s time for the people to organize themselves and to build people’s power.”