Left Turn Ahead

Addresses current events from a contrarian, Marxist, and feminist perspective, as well offering musings on any other range of topics deemed by the author as worthy of attention.

[alexmalecki]

Here’s the kind of picture a person shares who is unfamiliar with how social media works. It’s a concrete wall near where I parked my care last weekend at Nerdapocalypse. Yay me? (at Baltimore Inner Harbor - Light Street) https://www.instagram.com/dispositionguise/p/BwODbSzgEUh/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1kindtt2p2d0i

[alexmalecki]

at North East, Maryland https://www.instagram.com/p/BrasX63ASCb/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1t0bntym1usgf

[alexmalecki]

Rachel Dolezal and the Problem of Race

The case of Rachel Dolezal is both amusing and frustrating. Frankly, something about this case feels like a set up. It's emergence onto the national stage at a time when substantive discussions about race, police brutality, systems of oppression, etc. are finally being engaged is suspicious. Almost as thought some reactionary right winger had this card up his sleeve and was only waiting for the right moment to play it. The fact that the life story of the director of the Spokane, Washington office of the NAACP, an unpaid position for Christ's sake, would become the top national news story in the country would have seemed preposterous a week ago. Regardless, I do not think that this story is entirely a distraction.

While I am sympathetic to the position that whites have appropriated cultural inventions of the African American community there is an underlying philosophy behind these critiques that is troublesome. The reaction of Identity Politics liberals to this case highlights the methodological inconsistency and cul de sac like quality of Identity Politics.  The very people criticizing the likes of Rachel Dolezal are avowed defenders of transgendered people. They argue that gender is a social construction. Thus the gender identifications of trans people, being as they are, in opposition to the socially constructed conceptions of gender identity associated with one's sexual organs, should be supported. Put simply, because gender is not based in any biological reality there is no reason that a person born with male sex organs cannot gender identify as female. They also argue that race is a social construction with no basis in biology; invented to excuse the oppression of one group by another. But because it is somehow a special kind of social construction. and therefore somehow not equivalent to gender, these advocates of Identity Politics claim that Dolezal should be condemned for attempting to appropriate the black experience, misrepresent her identity, deceive her friends, colleagues, students, etc.

These claims are usually derived from the presupposition that the view transgendered people have of their identity is genuine while Dolezal's is not because she was forced to go to such extreme lengths to distort her true identity in order to deceive everyone around her into believing she was black. She fashioned her hair like your stereotypical black woman, darkened her skin, changed the way she spoke, lied about her parentage, and so on. How can they claim that race is not a biological reality while also arguing Dolezal is white? They seem so invested in an idea they themselves admit is only real in the sense that human beings have been forced to fabricate it! But because so many people are so greatly invested in this notion of race, because they so fervently and genuinely believe in it's existence, it is transformed, via a kind of racial prestidigitation, into a concrete reality that is also social construction. Dolezal's critics are not the only ones committed to this conception of race. She seems equally invested in maintaining it, all the while devoting her life to championing equality based on a shared humanity that stands in opposition to claims that race is biological.

Liberal and progressive critics of Dolezal are not the only ones who make the case for some special category for race in America. This has been one of the most important issues for conservatives and right wingers. One can hear it even today in arguments in defense of Southern heritage, and criticism of the welfare state supposedly disproportionately benefiting minorities, with the implicit understanding being that they are inferior to whites and thus undeserving of the social contract; among a multitude of other arguments! So, not only have these so called liberals and progressives adopted such an intellectually ridiculous approach to these issues, they have made common cause with reactionaries! The very same people who must be fought tooth and nail for every inch of social progress. We must reject these conceptions once and for all. There is no legitimate basis for these arguments. These categories are merely the expression of class power by those who rule against those who are ruled. That is all race and gender have ever been, an ideological means to justify the location of a designated group of people within a particular exploitative social relationship. Listening to the critique of Dolezal from the left is very reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin's complaints that German immigrants not being white enough.

[alexmalecki]

Emma Sulkowicz, Cenk Uygur, and Rape Culture

Emma Sulkowicz is the recent Columbia University graduate who carried a mattress everywhere she went around the university campus, as part of a senior thesis art project, after she brought sexual assault allegations against one of her fellow classmates that resulted in his being found "not responsible" by the University. She is one of six alleged victims of sexual violence allegedly perpetrated by Paul Nungesser, whose name we now know due to its publication by Emma Bolger in The Columbia Spectator after they received an anonymous tip about flyers posted around campus containing the names of four people the anonymous author or authors accused of sexual assault. Sulkowicz decided to file charges with the University after encountering two other alleged victims of Nungesser who in the wake of Sulkowicz's action also filed charges. The results were the same however, in all three instances Nungesser being found "not responsible". Prior to this Nungesser was accused by another woman who initially won her case against him. She moved on, graduated college, started her career and when he filed an appeal the woman initially carried on with the case against him. However, after becoming frustrated with the university's "incompetence", as demonstrated by routine calls in the middle of the day to her place of work to discuss the details of her sexual assault, and not wanting to lose her job by having to take time off to travel back to the university to testify in an appeal of a conviction on which she was already victorious she withdrew from the process. Without her testimony Nungesser's conviction in the university system was overturned. Recently, the fifth victim came forward, a man. And again, Nungesser was found "not responsible". The man is only known by a pseudonym, "Adam". Apparently the two were discussing relationship problems "Adam" was having with his then girlfriend "Natalie" when Nungesser allegedly molested him. "Natalie" would also go on to file charges against Nungesser.

Now Sulkowicz has released another art project. The piece is entitled “Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol” or in English “This Is Not A Rape”. The piece consists of three parts. First, a page with a trigger warning explaining that the following video depicts consensual acts, and though it is not a reenactment it does makes allusions to rape, but is not a rape. Following the warning is an explanation of the project: <blockquote>Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol is not about one night in August, 2012. It's about your decisions, starting now. It's only a reenactment if you disregard my words. It's about you, not him. Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable. You might be wondering why I've made myself this vulnerable. Look—I want to change the world, and that begins with you, seeing yourself. If you watch this video without my consent, then I hope you reflect on your reasons for objectifying me and participating in my rape, for, in that case, you were the one who couldn't resist the urge to make Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol about what you wanted to make it about: rape. Please, don't participate in my rape. Watch kindly</blockquote> Following the explanation are a series of questions for reflection:"Are you searching for proof? Proof of what? Are you searching for ways to either hurt or help me? What are you looking for? Do you desire pleasure? Do you desire revulsion? Is this to counteract your unconscious enjoyment? What do you want from this experience? How well do you think you know me? Have we ever met? Do you think I'm the perfect victim or the world's worst victim? Do you refuse to see me as either a human being or a victim? If so, why? Is it to deny me agency and thus further victimize me? If so, what do you think of the fact that you owe your ability to do so to me, since I'm the one who took a risk and made myself vulnerable in the first place? Do you hate me? If so, how does it feel to hate me?"

After the video is a section for the audience to provide comments. As of this writing there are 3547 comments. Few of them are thoughtful considerations of the artist's work. Even when excluding the numerous comments devoted to describing how the author used the video to masturbate most of the comments seem to take the form of a disgruntled  dog owner berating his pet. The credibility of her claims are repeatedly called into question. She is accused of being a woman scorned on a path of vengeance via crying false rape allegations. She is told that her rape was not real, that she is deranged, a drama queen, an attention seeker who has had her fifteen minutes of fame so she should just shut up already. It does not seem to occur to many of them that the true purpose of the project is not about her or her alleged sexual assault. They fail to realized that their reaction, whatever that reaction is, whether it is sympathetic or derisive and scornful of Emma Sulkowicz, is the purpose. It is a means to eliciting the vulgarity and destructiveness of our society's reactions to sexual abuse. How we respond, how we interact with the project reveals something about us.

I did not watch the video. I did not watch it because one is not supposed to watch it without Sulkowicz's consent.  And because I did not want to continue to participate in the further sexualization of a crime as perpetuated by the media outlets who drew me to the website with their spurious analysis of her art project. One can easily find vivid descriptions of the content online. Though I did not read those either. It is sufficient to know that the play performed in the video begins as consensual and suddenly turns violent once the woman withdraws consent. In many of the news articles I read concerning this project there is very little discussion of the text that precedes the video, which does not surprise me. Most articles only discuss the video, playing up the sexual sensationalism of a famous, young, female, artist who accused a classmate of sexual abuse and has now created and released a video of a sexual assault as an art project. When reading those articles I found myself disturbed by the content of the project. But once I went to the actual webpage and discovered the seemingly forgotten text the purpose of the project became clear, and though I was still conflicted about the nature of the project I at least understood it's purpose. Again, it is not surprising that the text was ignored in the press. Few seemed to care about Sulkowicz as a person with agency when the sexual assault charges made it into the national media. It is unlikely that the press would care much about presenting this project in the manner originally intended by the artist. But this did not only apply to outlets from whom one would expect this kind of behavior.

The Young Turks, a daily online broadcast of news and commentary also fell into this trap. A panel of four people discuss the project in the video, available on Youtube. At the outset of the discussion two quotes from the actual webpage of Sulkowicz's project are provided, but they are provided out of context. The quotes come from the first  and third paragraphs on the actual webpage. Hannah Cranston, who reads the quotes, fails to mention that the first quote is from a "trigger warning" provided to alert sexual abuse survivors of the potential problems the video may cause for them. She also fails to provide the text surrounding the second quote that explains the entire purpose of the project as I did earlier in this article. Nor does she, or anyone else on the panel, explain that without Sulkowicz's consent to watch the video one is not supposed to watch the video. But, however, if one persists in viewing it one is supposed to reflect on the questions she provides. After the initially description of the project the discussion follows. Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz and Cara Santa Maria constitute the rest of the panel. The two women, unsurprisingly, are the most sympathetic to Sulkowicz, though Mankiewicz hardly says anything; when he does he speaks solely to reinforce Cenk Uygur's point concerning the negative impact this art project has, and may have, on the credibility of Sulkowicz's claims of sexual abuse, and the credibility of claims of sexual abuse by women everywhere.

The main problem here is Cenk Uygur. Throughout the video he argues that this project cements in his mind the idea that Sulkowicz is merely seeking attention. Apparently, he already had doubts as to the veracity of her claims when she began carrying the mattress around campus, and because of the manner in which she came to understand what happened to her as an instance of sexual abuse after discussing the encounter with two other women who shared similar stories about their sexual interactions with Paul Nungesser. He argues that he now believes her claims are "bullshit", and that because of her behavior and her art projects men around the country are now going to be even more skeptical of claims by women of sexual assault. What seems to escape Uygur's understanding is how he is one of those men he appears to be criticizing. For him, the reality of what happened between Nungesser and Sulkowicz was adjudicated within the university system and because Nungesser was found "not responsible" Sulkowicz should leave the entire issue alone. For Uygur, Nungesser is the victim in this story because he was outed as a rapist by Sulkowicz (Though I have not been able to find any evidence of his claims it would not shock me to discover that Sulkowicz was behind the anonymous fliers posed on campus listing Nungesser as one of the four rapists on campus). I suppose the fact that he has been accused of sexual abuse six times, in each case ultimately being found "not responsible", is not evidence of a flawed university system, but is, instead, evidence of…of what exactly? His innocence? A conspiracy to punish a man his false victims believe has escaped punishment? Cenk Uygur does not tell us.

Uygur's arguments are the products of a rape culture he has taken countless hours on his media platform condemning.  No sexual abuse survivor owes anyone anything. They do not owe anyone a certain standard of behavior to ensure the credibility of their claims. They do not owe anyone a report to the police of their abuse, nor do they owe anyone their suffering through the meat grinder that is the American justice system to hope against hope that this one predator might somehow, someway, maybe, possibly, end up in prison, and thus be prevented from preying on another innocent person ever again. Perhaps the argument is different in the case of a sexual abuse victim who becomes an activist against sexual assault. Emma Sulkowicz is not, however, a traditional activist. She is an artist. And in either case I would still argue that they she is not, nor is anyone else, responsible for conforming to some imaginary "perfect victim" standard conjured in the minds of the Cenk Uygur's of the world in order for them to find it easier to believe their claims of abuse. Blaming Emma Sulkowicz for the beliefs of men around the country, who after seeing her latest project, are now less likely to believe the claims of the abused is a most pernicious example of rape culture. Blaming alleged victims of sexual abuse, regardless of whether one believes their claims, for something over which they have absolutely no control is despicable. We might as well blame prejudice against blacks, or gays, or Jews, or Muslims when their beliefs or behavior fail to conform to the desired preferences of bigots because by failing to live up to those standards they are providing ammunition for discrediting the very claims of discrimination and hatred they are attempting to dislodge from society. So, I say this: Fuck you, Cenk Uygur. In this case YOU are part of the problem.

While I have no special insight into your psychology, your highly defensive reaction to this art project seems an indication of an underlying reactionary character that very rarely finds expression in your work. This does not surprise me. Even the best among us have this tendency. The culture in which we have been socialized is highly racist, sexist, otherwise bigoted, prejudiced and patriarchal. To grow up within it and not be in some way affected, particularly on an unconscious level wherein we have less active control, is impossible. However, those of us invested in the progressive improvement of our society must search inside ourselves for our reactionary tendencies and find a means of expelling them so that they do not cloud our judgement about important issues. In some cases this is easy, in others it may be more difficult. From where your reactionary tendency with regard to this issue emanates I can only speculate. Of course, given your repeated references to your past life as a man largely ignored by women, incapable of earning their sexual trust and consent, one can only imagine that your unconscious, and thus unresolved, conflicts regarding this self-conception is the most likely explanation. I have little reason to expect that you will re-evaluate your perspective on this issue. However, if you do I will be elated to admit my error.

Sources: 1. http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5a4wtscImc 3. http://columbiaspectator.com/news/2014/05/16/frustrated-columbias-inaction-student-reports-sexual-assault-police 4. http://columbiaspectator.com/spectrum/2015/05/21/paul-nungesser-found-not-responsible-alleged-sexual-assault-male-student

[alexmalecki]

Izabel Laxaman and the Usefulness of Shame

Izabel Laxaman was a thirteen year old girl from Tacoma, Washington who recently died by suicide. A video of what appears to be Izabel responding to her father's questions subsequent to his cutting off much of her hair was speculated by many media outlets to be directly related to her death. Apparently, the action was meant to punish Izabel for sending an inappropriate photo of herself to a young boy, something it seems logical to deduce from the available evidence, she was repeatedly told not to do; though we cannot be certain. In the video a seemingly despondent Izabel is addressed by a man off-screen after first filming a pile of long, black hair on the floor: "The consequences of getting messed up, man: you lost all your beautiful hair. Was it worth it?". Izabel replies with a perfunctory "No", to which the man responds, "How many times did I warn you?". "A lot", replies Izabel. Initially, it was reported that her father had posted the video online in an attempt to publicly shame, and thus supposedly rehabilitate his daughter. Only that turned out not to be true. According to the most recent reports, the father made the video for Izabel to hold onto herself, only it was acquired by a third party and posted online. Police say Izabel shared it with her friends though they did not say who put it online. Several suicide notes were left behind on an iPod she gave to a classmate in the hours immediately preceding her death. In the notes she tells her family that she did some things that she thought would be embarrassing and feared doing harm to the family name. She also assured her family that they were not to blame. Friends of Izabel have told the local news channel in Tacoma that she was also coping with bullying and not being permitted to participate in student government due to lacking her family's permission. The school claims they provided Izabel with counseling after they became aware of the video's existence and made a report to Child Protective Services. They also claim that they were unaware of any student to student harassment.  

The nature of the immediate outrage over the method of punishment allegedly used by the father, and its potential causal relationship to her death, as well as how the press and the police corrected the record relative to the relationship between the video and the girl's death is strange. The press and the police seem eager to exculpate the father, specifically, and the family, more generally, of any wrongdoing. Especially since we now know that the video was posted, not by the father, but by an unknown third party who police seem to implying acquired it from Izabel. It seems like both an attempt to calm the outrage festering online throughout the world as well as an attempt to shift blame from the father to the young girl. In comments to the New York Daily News the police are quoted criticizing Izabel as "a 13-year-old that made some poor choices, meaning that she didn't have to kill herself". Certainly, any mental health expert will responsibly and reasonably argue that determining cause and effect in the case of a suicide is difficult. Many potential factors exist, such as mental illness, drug use, brain damage, cultural, social, and family values, as well as genetics, and socioeconomic issues like unemployment, homelessness, or discrimination.

What ultimately caused Izabel Laxaman to die by suicide is unknown. In some sense it seems as though the responsible choice would be to take her notes at face value. Respecting her agency as a person it would be legitimate to accept the reasons she offered, whatever they might be, and not blame her father or her family. However, one cannot ignore what we do know of the content of her suicide notes in which she says that she did some things that were embarrassing and feared damaging her family name. Regardless of whether or not the video itself was a trigger shame seems to be an integral part of Izabel's psychology. In the final analysis, whatever role the video played in her death the true relevance this story has to the broader public is the role that public shaming plays in how people attempt to change other people's future behavior.

Publicly shaming or otherwise abusing someone is a common form of punishment at all levels of society, not just at the level of parenting. Even judges have taken to shaming convicted criminals by making them wear signs stating their intolerant bullies or are violent felons. Last year, on her third day at a new high school, a young girl named Miranda Larkin was forced to wear an enormous neon yellow t-shirt with red shorts. Text was emblazoned on the shirt reading, "Dress code violation", when the girl wore a black skirt one teacher claimed was too short. Recently, while driving to an appointment, I was listening to a local right wing radio station. The two hosts were discussing a couple news stories, one about the torture of Majid Khan, and an ACLU lawsuit against Baltimore's jails. The hosts argued that the attempted drowning go Khan in a bathtub filled with ice water was akin to a football player soaking in an ice bath after a game, thus making the case that he was not actually tortured. Then they argued that the squalor in which the prisoners of Baltimore's jails were forced to live was a useful means of rehabilitating them. Make prison so horrible that no convicted criminal would ever want to return. Arguments such as these call to mind the penalties for what are today considers non-capital offenses like theft that used to result in executions throughout the western world; or the imprisonment, or forced military conscription, or indentured servitude of the poor or indebted.

No amount of abuse will ever inspire a person to behave more decently or otherwise exhibit whatever behavior the abuser wishes to see the abused perform. Abuse only perpetuates trauma and further abuse. Abuse is learned and because it is learned it is passed on from one person to another, from one generation to another.

[alexmalecki]

Bernie Sanders and the Media

Now that Bernie Sanders has officially initiated his presidential campaign for the nomination of the Democratic Party his marginalization by the media is underway. Recently Sanders gave a speech, in which he said,

“If 99 percent of all the new income goes to the top 1 percent, you could triple it, it wouldn't matter much to the average middle class person. The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn't matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can't just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country”.

To anyone with half a brain it is quite clear what he is talking about. He is positing the illusion of choice so many of us experience when we walk into a grocery store, or a pharmacy. Instead of having a real choice as to the economic security of their own lives the 45 million people living in poverty are given innumerable choices in the kind of deodorant, perfume, toothpaste, shoes, shirts, and other consumer goods they can buy; if they can afford to buy them at all. What good is an economy that only provides economic growth to those who are already awash in money? Certainly the absolute standard of living may be increasing due to the incredible amount of total growth and wealth accumulation. In fact, it could theoretically double in size. But when the share of that wealth accessed and controlled by the average working American shrinks, though they might be in an absolute sense increasingly, materially well off, they are also, in a relative sense, increasingly subservient to the ruling class.

The real choice we need is in the economic organization of our society, not just in the distribution of its social surplus, nor in the variety of its consumer goods. But if you are Jim Tankersly of The Washington Post what Bernie Sanders is saying is apparently, “The literal implication of that last sentence is that there some kind of a national trade-off between antiperspirant/Air Jordan variety and food for children. This makes sense if you believe that the government should be allocating the resources in the economy -- in this case, directing fewer of them to personal hygiene and footwear and more to child nutrition”.

Issues such as these are so rarely discussed at a national level that it is not too surprising that someone like Tankersly has no idea what Sanders is saying. And of course to Conservatives it really does sound to them like he is trying to take away your liberty by arguing that we don’t need a thousand different versions of armpit perfume. To them he is a socialist simply for making that argument. Of course, like most anything else with the Beltway media and Conservatives, it does not matter if it is true. They will make the argument anyway.

Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. In one of a dozen European countries he is a social democrat, well within the margins of mainstream political and economic orthodoxy. He believes in expanding the welfare state and reigning in capitalism through the strict regulatory management of monopoly capitalism; breaking big companies down into smaller ones, raising wages, raising taxes on the wealthy, etc. A socialist does not want to regulate or reform capitalism, a socialist wants to overthrow capitalism by giving working people control over the means of production and thus control over the distribution of the social surplus.

For simply expressing ideas that are anything but radical in pretty much every country on the European continent Sanders is not credible to many in the establishment media. Plus, the fact that Sanders is not operating a PAC, nor is he going around the country begging billionaires for cash, cash, cash is evidence of his un-electability. Not to mention his Brooklyn accent and his hair, reminiscent of Ernie from Sesame Street. The one context in which much of the press corp. seems comfortable talking about Sanders is in relation to Hilary Clinton; how his campaign will affect Clinton’s, will it push her further to the left, etc.

An amusing tidbit from the New York Times: “Judging from Mr. Sanders’s trip [to Iowa] last week, there is real support for his message — though some Democrats also simply want to send a warning shot to Mrs. Clinton to get her to visit here more”. Yes, your average Democratic Primary voter in Iowa is interested only in attending a Bernie Sanders rally rather than taking their children to the movies, the park, or in some other way spending enjoyable time with their family, for the sake of sending a message to Hilary Clinton about visiting their town more often. The fact that such text can even appear in a paper as supposedly credible as the NYT is evidence of just how awful journalism is anymore.

In the same NYT article a political science professor named Steffen Schmidt from Iowa State University argues that in the wake of Sanders events in Iowa which drew large crowds, sometimes bubbling over in people that some hundred observers or so were forced to watch a rally from outside a local brewery, Clinton should be worried. She should be worried because Iowa Democrats feel neglected and despise Clinton’s listening tour campaign wherein she offers little in the way of policy prescription, but instead hears voters out. Yes, heaven forbid a political candidate offer people an opportunity to express themselves. Yes, I’m sure they feel neglected because Clinton is not making stump speeches to rally the troops. It likely has little to nothing to do with the economic depression through which tens of millions of Americans are currently suffering. But this is par for the course when it comes to political analysis in modern America.

Sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/26/sorry-bernie-sanders-deodorant-isnt-starving-americas-children/

 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/us/politics/challenging-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-gains-momentum-in-iowa.html?_r=1

[alexmalecki]

Feminism, Patriarchy, and Invisible Violence

In recent years, while attending university, I repeatedly encountered a perception among young people, both men and women, though more men than women, that feminism is no longer a movement with the intended goal to create equality between men and women. Instead I often heard that feminism had changed from a movement about equality into a movement about creating a new inequality, with men unequal to women. This is a common allegation made against any movement that seeks to rectify an inequality. All one has to do is read the speeches of slaveholders and segregationists and one easily finds this fear of being subsumed. It should be clear to any fair-minded person that these claims are absurd on their face. A society is obviously compelled to act in the face of an injustice as despicable as racism and sexism. But we must understand what people are actually saying when they claim that a social justice movement devoted to establishing equality is really trying to reverse an inequality, with the slave now the master, and master slave.

What they are truly saying when they make this claim is that the inequality is not an inequality at all, but the true state of equality. Your attempt to overturn this equality is the real injustice. The inequality has achieved such a state of normalcy that the reality of it is invisible. Within the context of patriarchal violence this applies in such subtle ways that even the most progressive among us can be unable to recognize it. It is not our fault. The culture is teeming with messages justifying this violence, and we are inculcated with it from birth. Heterosexual sex is one area of particular concern. If the violence perpetrated does not meet the narrow definition of violence accepted by the police, or by the society at large, then no violence was perpetrated. Though it is certainly relevant to the conversation I am not talking about the incidents of rape where the victim is not beaten, but still coerced into being raped. You know, I thought long and hard about how to phrase that last sentence. Often, even among feminists and progressive writers, that sentence will usually read: “Though it is certainly relevant to the conversation I am not talking about the incidents of rape where the victim is coerced into having sex”. One cannot have sex with a person who is raping them. Sex is consensual. Rape is not. Obviously the intention of the writer is not to imply that the victim somehow consented to sex while being raped. But patriarchy is so deeply embedded into the very language we use to not only converse with one another about these issues, but to think through them ourselves, that even the best among us often fail to recognize when it is molding our consciousness.

Patriarchy is so embedded in our society that even during consensual sex it makes an appearance. Recently I became aware of just how intimate this violence can be and how the banal, every day nature of it warps the minds of women throughout the world. A quote from Reina Gattuso:

“Recently, I had sex with a man I heard afterward is a rapist… I was sitting with my friend, drunkish, on the green quad lawn when she asked me about the night before. I uttered his name. She made a face and I knew it was bad. She had heard, she said, rumors. For years. Times he did not take no for an answer. Times he finished regardless. Things he said… But through the disgust, and the weird sense of guilt, and the retrospective fear, something clicked: A feeling I’d had through the sexual encounter, a feeling that wasn’t — but that related to — rape… Sometimes there’s a moment when I’m having sex that I think a lot of us have felt. I feel it with particular frequency with straight, cis dudes, but we can feel this across all kinds of gender and sexuality experiences. It’s the fear that, if I asked the person to stop, they wouldn’t. I don’t mean when we say stop and someone keeps going, or uses threats, or pressures us. I mean another, subtler feeling. It’s not necessarily wanting to say no. It’s the fear that, if we were to say no, we wouldn’t be heard. Sometimes, I test this feeling: Slow down. Stop. Not so fast. And mostly, people listen.

But sometimes, when I feel this feeling most strongly, I don’t test it, because I don’t want to know the answer. That’s what happened the other day, with the dude about whom I later heard the rumors. I don’t think that if a sexual experience is not affirmatively consensual, it is definitionally assault. I have had experiences that have not felt consensual in a deep way, but that also did not feel like assault. We live constantly under the violence of patriarchy; a lot of our daily micro-interactions are coercive. These undertones of coercion don’t just disappear when we get into the bedroom (or the living room, or the car). And they create a lot of experiences that are hard to find language for… I mean, what was so weird about that sexual encounter — what made something click in my head, in my heart, when I heard that he had raped — is the way it felt like he didn’t need me to be there. He didn’t need me to have a head. He didn’t need me to have a heart. He didn’t seem to even need me to be awake.

A lot of sex feels like this. Sex where we don’t matter. Where we may as well not be there. Sex where we don’t say no, because we don’t want to say no, sex where we say yes even, where we’re even into it, but where we fear — some little voice in us fears — that if we did say no, if we don’t like the pressure on our necks or the way they touch us, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t count, because we don’t count. This feeling isn’t necessarily assault, but it is certainly on a continuum with it.”

These interactions are common in households where domestic violence takes place. The abused, in order to survive, is forced to submit to a variety of coercions. They live in a constant state of paranoia, sensitive to every subtle bodily and psychological cue of their abuser. This is also the state of mind of many women throughout the world. A state of mind beset by the fear that a man will harm or kill them. We have a society in which women are terrorized on a daily basis by a violence that takes a great variety of forms. Living as a member of the privileged class within this society even I often fail to grasp the depth, and breadth, of this violence, and the seemingly innumerably subtle forms in which is finds expression. Thinking back on those interactions with individuals who claimed that feminism is a movement seeking to establish a matriarchy I am struck by how little of what they had to say is in any way something they independently produced. It reminds me to be aware of such a flaw in myself; for we are all susceptible, some of us more than others.

http://feministing.com/2015/05/26/rape-culture-is-a-contract-we-never-actually-signed/

[alexmalecki]

Discussing the Baltimore Uprising

The dialogue surrounding the uprising in Baltimore over the last few weeks has been unsurprisingly devoid of any historical, political, economic, or social context. As a society we always tend to discuss issues of great import as though they just landed at our feet, fully formed states of being. We pick them up, analyzing them according to our class predispositions, placing emphasis on all the wrong concerns. Woe betides the individual who dares to shake us out of our ignorance. You have probably heard the same arguments that I have over the last few weeks. People despair the destruction of the community by the community. Discussion about the lack of educational and economic opportunities takes center stage. All this discourse concerning the plight of these communities is given an atmosphere of, at worst, self-infliction, at best, a timeless, infinitely permanent, status quo. There is no recognition that these communities are the product of deliberate social, economic, and political development. Choices are made. They just do not always benefit everyone.

Most of the people participating in these conversations are fair-minded people. Looking for understanding they reach out for the most easily accessible answers to explain the degradation they witnessed on television. Unfortunately, what they fail to recognize is that this is just the latest skirmish in a war being waged against the working class in America; in particular, the black working class. And despite their being fair-minded individuals what is implicit in this conversation is a belief in equality of violence between victim and perpetrator; the oppressed and oppressor; the slave and the slaveholder. We see this argument regularly in America, most clearly in discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. While it is admirable to admit that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and it is true that violence for the sake of violence is a counterproductive tactic, we must learn to recognize the context in which these conflicts take place vis-a-vis class position and power.

This argument is also evident in instances of patriarchal violence against women. Every day women abused by their intimate partners face a similar terror experienced by the black community in their relationship with the police. Segregated from the rest of society there is no means for the abused to escape their confinement. Which is one of the reasons they so often take their own lives. We have institutionalized the power of white, male supremacy in our laws, politics, religion, education, and culture. To treat victims of this power imbalance as equivalently deviant when they react self-defensively to this asymmetry is the apex of moral failure. The history of the United States is a history of affirmative action for white people, particularly white men, and it has been the social, political, and economic policies of the government in the United States throughout its history to reinforce this reality.

Here’s a link for further reading: http://newsreel.org/guides/race/whiteadv.htm

[alexmalecki]

Living While Black

Baltimore City is in turmoil in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray. Apparently upon seeing the police officers in his neighborhood Gray ran away.  Police claim that the neighborhood is a high crime area and thus when an individual runs away from police this gives them reasonable suspicion to pursue and detain. Police also claim that Gray was carrying an illegal knife which is why they arrested him. Video from the incident shows Gray folded up, with the heels of his feet nearly touching the small of his back, crying out in agony, with two police officers using their weight to immobilize him on the cement. Then the cops pick Gray off the ground, his legs dangling, as he is dragged to the police van. Gray died a week later as a result of the injuries sustained in his encounter with the police. Reports say that his spinal vertebrae was nearly severed and his voice box crushed.

As with nearly all cases of police abuse there is precedent. In Baltimore it is called a “Rough Ride”. The police take a suspect, load him into the police van, and drive back to the precinct well over the speed limit, taking sharp corners, braking violently, in order to throw a handcuffed suspect not wearing a seatbelt around the steel covered box that is the police van. In 2005 five a man, Dondi Johnson, arrested for public urination, was paralyzed by police and earned a seven million dollar settlement, that was eventually reduced to some two hundred thousand dollars because the state limits the amount of money that can be paid out, after being taken on a “Rough Ride”. He died two weeks later. 

One year earlier Jeffrey Alston, also paralyzed, won nearly forty million dollars, actually awarded six million. Christine Abbot is currently suing the police department claiming she was also taken on such a ride. Apparently the cops “were braking really short so that I would slam against the wall, and they were taking really wide, fast turns. I couldn't brace myself. I was terrified." In 1980 a 58 year old man was paralyzed while being taken to a precinct. Police claimed that the driver swerved to avoid an oncoming car, and that the man was injured because the vans did not have seat belts at the time. He was granted twenty thousand dollars after a judge decided the driver was not negligent in his conduct.  

“University of South Carolina professor Geoffrey Alpert, an expert in police force, said rough rides are also known as ‘screen tests’. When police cars or vans had screens between the front and back seats, drivers would stop short — ‘to avoid a dog’ — sending a handcuffed prisoner flying face-first into the screen, he said. Cops used to laugh about it. That was big in the 1980s and 1990s,’ Alpert said. "It was obviously against policy and illegal. I remember in some trainings that police chiefs would say, 'You'd better bring the damn dog you were trying to avoid if you come in with a prisoner with such an injury”.

The police have routinely claimed that this neighborhood is a high crime area in order to justify that their treatment of Gray was justified. The neighborhood is actually a “broken windows” neighborhood. “Broken windows” is a policy in which the police crack down on every small crime imaginable in order to maintain an atmosphere of law and order. People in the neighborhood are routinely harassed for doing things as mundane as sitting on their porches. The police have made this neighborhood a high crime area by harassing and arresting residents at every theoretically available opportunity. Thus the circular logic behind the police claim that they were justified in pursuing and arresting Gray because he saw them in his neighborhood and then ran. Seems the police strategy is quite clear: target a community for persecution, instigating reactions against the police, making the initial persecution, and every reaction against it, a justification for the criminalization of an entire neighborhood. Quite a self-licking ice cream cone. 

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-gray-rough-rides-20150423-story.html#page=2

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-gray-video-moore-20150423-story.html

[alexmalecki]

Purvi Patel, Women, and Male Supremacy

An Indiana woman named Purvi Patel was recently sentenced to over two decades in prison after being convicted on charges of feticide, or the unlawful termination of a fetus, and neglect of a dependent. How can those two charges co-exist in a criminal case in a country where abortion is legal you might ask. In July of 2013 Patel went to the emergency room because of sustained vaginal bleeding as a result of a miscarriage of a stillborn fetus. Not knowing what to do Patel told the medical staff at the hospital that she disposed of the stillborn fetus, though the prosecution claimed that the fetus was born alive, in a dumpster and came to the E.R. once realizing that she could not put an end to the bleeding. The police discovered text messages exchanged between Patel and a friend of hers in which Patel claimed to have attempted to purchase abortion-inducing pills from Hong Kong. Under Indiana law it is illegal to purchase these legal drugs online.

The pathologist who examined the evidence and testified for the defense argued that the fetus was approximately 23-24 weeks old and so its lungs were too underdeveloped to survive outside the womb. The pathologist testifying for the prosecution argued that the fetus was actually 25-30 weeks old and was born alive, using the “lung float test” –whereupon one places the lungs in a tub of water and if they float they supposedly have air in them and that air was supposedly acquired through breathing- to make this determination. However, this methodology, going back some three hundred years, and has not been considered scientifically valid for a century, given the variety of ways that air can enter the human body; even the pathologist who posited the theory to the jury as evidence of a live birth admitted that the lung float test is, in and of itself, unreliable. Frankly, it is disturbingly reminiscent of the Trial by Ordeal methods used to determine whether a woman was a witch by throwing her in a body of water to see if she would float or sink.

The prosecution’s pathologist claims there was other evidence indicative of a live birth such as the “weight of the lungs and the other organs, the inflation of the lungs and the air sacs, the presence of blood in the lung vessels and the ‘relative maturity’ of the lungs…along with a lack of blood in the baby’s body”. To the defense’s pathologist this same evidence was inconclusive. Also, the government’s own toxicologist could find no evidence of the abortion pills they claimed Patel took to induce her miscarriage. So, there was no actual direct evidence that supported the charges made by the state, and yet a woman will likely spend the next two decades behind bars.

Then there are the violations of her civil and legal rights. She was interrogated by police after being anesthetized, after losing a substantial amount of blood with the volume percentage of red blood cells present in her body at 22.1%, never having been read her Miranda rights and the judge permitting her illegally and unethically acquired statements to police to be entered into evidence at trial. All this fails to include that a politically active anti-choice OBGYN was permitted to testify in court that the fetus was 30 weeks old despite the fact that OBGYN’s “are not experts in assigning gestational age at birth”.

If one were attempting to scientifically determine the age of the fetus, which was “male and was 12.2 inches (30.99 cm) long and weighed 1.46 pounds (662 g). The body had exsanguinated so we should add about 100 ml/kg of blood, or 70.17 g (the weight of 66.2 ml of blood) to achieve a birth weight of 732.17 grams. Using average fetal growth curves for a male fetus (these are well known) the length is equivalent to 23 weeks gestation and 1 or 2 days and weight of 24 weeks and 3 or 4 days gestation”. Therefore if had experienced her miscarriage in the hospital instead of in her home she would not be in jail now because “at 23-24 weeks a woman is allowed to decline resuscitation” for extremely prematurely delivered fetuses whose viability outside the womb is highly unlikely.

This is not the only case in the United States where people have been arrested, charged, prosecuted, and convicted in the wake of the miscarriage of their pregnancy. Here are seven other cases:

“1. A critically ill, 27-year-old Washington D.C. woman was 26 weeks pregnant when a judge ordered her to have a Cesarean section. He did so with the understanding that the procedure would very likely kill her. It did. The baby died as well.

2. A pregnant woman in Iowa fell down a flight of stairs and went to the hospital. The hospital reported her to the police who arrested her for “attempted fetal homicide.

3. A Utah woman gave birth to twins, one of which was stillborn. Her doctors blamed the death on her decision to delay a C-section. She was arrested for fetal homicide.

4. A Louisiana woman checked in to a hospital due to vaginal bleeding. She was locked up for a year on charges of “second-degree murder before medical records revealed she had suffered a miscarriage at 11 to 15 weeks of pregnancy.”

5. A Florida woman “was held prisoner at a hospital to prevent her from going home while she appeared to be experiencing a miscarriage. She was forced to undergo a Cesarean.” She still lost the baby, and her two small children at home were left without her while she was held. A state court ruled that this detention was wrong, although it would have been fine if she were further along in her pregnancy.

6. Another Florida woman who went into labor at home was picked up by a sheriff, driven to the hospital and forced to have a Cesarean against her will. She filed suit, and the court concluded that the woman’s personal constitutional rights “clearly did not outweigh the interests of the State of Florida in preserving the life of the unborn child.”

7. A severely depressed, pregnant 22-year-old woman in South Carolina tried to commit suicide. She was jailed for child abuse.”

It is unlikely that this trend will stop of its own accord. Since the anti-choice misogynists are unable to outright criminalize abortion they have taken to targeting pregnant people and their abortion rights in less direct ways by passing feticide laws, medically unnecessary clinic regulations, created delays between appointments and procedures, etc., etc., etc. Ultimately this issue is about self-determination and autonomy. But this is not the only issue where beliefs about women and self-determination intersect. Frankly, any conversation about women, but particularly about female sexuality, is littered with ideas intended to restrain a woman’s autonomy. Examine any conversation and it becomes strikingly obvious that value judgments are routinely made to restrain, restrict, or justify a particular legal or moral consideration about women and how they manage their bodies and their lives. Whether it is about contraceptives, consensual sexual activity, number of sexual partners, sexual assault, abortion, clothing, employment, family, and on, and on.

Recently a new phrase entered the American lexicon, the “War on Women”. This phrase, and its emergence in American culture, is both laudable and frustrating. Calling these activities a “War on Women” belies the reality that this is the status quo throughout the world. The “War on Women” did not begin with the election of the Republican Party to the majority position in nearly two-dozen states and the national Congress, and it will not end if Hilary Clinton is elected President in a few years. The banal regularity of patriarchy is precisely what makes it so destructive, and yet so difficult to combat. It must be challenged every day, in every venue, and the people most needed in this fight are men. We are the problem. Certainly there are women who perpetuate this antagonism, but regardless of their behavior the structural inequality between men and women remains. It is real, concrete, and institutionalized; protected by law, politics, religion, education, the police, the courts, and the broader culture. While progress has been made in important ways there is no conceivable reason any fair minded person could believe there has been enough.

Sources:

1. http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/03/30/purvi-patel-sentenced-41-years-feticide-neglect-dependent/

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/magazine/purvi-patel-could-be-just-the-beginning.html?_r=1

3. https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/if-purvi-patel-had-delivered-in-hospital-she-could-have-declined-neonatal-resuscitation-but-she-delivered-at-home-so-she-might-go-to-jail/

4. http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/arrested-having-miscarriage-7-appalling-instances-where-pregnant-women-were

[alexmalecki]

Rand Paul and the Truth About Libertarianism

Now that Rand Paul has declared his intention to campaign for the office of the presidency it seems important to consider his ideological perspective. Paul considers himself a Libertarian. In the wake of the Great Recession Libertarianism has experienced a mild resurgence with ideas originating from this school of thought permeating right wing, some mainstream, and even liberal, discussions about how society should be structured. Simply put, Libertarianism is the most extreme form of capitalist ruling class ideology. It is an ideology founded on the belief that mavericks, or rugged individuals, make history rather than the masses, or the "herd". This perspective is deeply ingrained in both the conscious, and unconscious, of American culture. In fact, it is the basis of the modern American Dream, becoming fabulously rich as a result of your own hard work, without relying on a single other soul. Which is precisely why Libertarians loathe taxation, redistribution, and public services. Any attempt by the State to intervene on behalf of people instead of property is considered "tyranny". The Tea Party is one of the more recent socio-political movements that express these ideas, and Rand Paul has been a vocal proponent.

 Filled with people who firmly believe in the supremacy of the rugged individualist, this movement regularly conflates fascism and socialism; as well as labeling even the most modest attempts at building social democracy and the welfare state as dreaded collectivism. For these people the State is the enemy, which is why they see fascism and socialism as two sides to a single, collectivist, coin. Regardless of which direction a particular State takes, implementing either fascist or socialist totalitarianism, the end result is Big Government dictating every aspect of each individual's life, destroying their autonomy, and stifling the free market system of capitalism, causing economic crises. What is ironic about this point of view -beyond the fact that Rand Paul is an adherent and is a fucking Senator, an official of the big bad government- is that this perspective is completely ahistorical, and no successful capitalist can implement these ideas in the running of their business because capitalism cannot function without the labor theory of value and the intervention of the State.

 Just examine the practices of one of the most successful capitalist enterprises in the world today: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart understands, perhaps only on the level of the unconscious, the laws of capitalism discovered by Marx, which is why they take any and every opportunity to exploit their workforce and get the State to pick up the tab for the social costs incurred by paying people subsistence wages. Over half of the Wal-Mart workforce is receiving aid from government programs like Food Stamps, Medicaid, welfare, etc. This does not even take into account the construction and maintenance of the physical and cultural infrastructure built by the State over the last several centuries to advance the interests of commerce. Wal-Mart, and capitalism generally, could not exist without roads, bridges, the criminal justice system, and the myriad number of other forms of pro-capitalist intervention in the market system fostered by the State. Without the State to enforce the rule of the capitalist system why would anyone choose to starve, live in poverty, go without health care, or work for meager wages at a company run by billionaires? If the State is so anti-capitalist then why does it come to its rescue during each crisis, panic, recession, and depression? Why does it bail out banks, loan them money for next to nothing, subsidize investment, protect monopolies, etc., etc., etc.? How else is the capitalist to get the masses to create all the value from which they derive their profit if there is no mechanism in place to deprive them of that which they need to survive? The truth of the matter is that any class society is dependent on the State for the construction and maintenance of the ruling class' hegemony.

 However, in order to distract, diverge, and displace popular anger the capitalist ruling class must still propagate asinine theories about the functioning of the state and the economy like Libertarianism. What is most useful about these ideas is that they are utopian, and will never be subject to any kind of praxis. They will never materialize in the real world and can never be proven false; Libertarianism cannot fail, it can only be failed. If only we instituted a more perfect capitalism the system would function without failure and would meet the needs of every individual. Ideas like this perpetuate the system while forming the basis of political movements such as the Tea Party, or Conservatism more broadly, by convincing the masses to organize on behalf of a mode of production predicated on their own exploitation. In the utopianism of the Libertarian, the rugged individualist as such exists in order to hide the simple fact that without the exploitation of the masses there would be no one to farm the fields, work in the factories, or teach the children. For the truth of the matter is that the masses do not need the capitalists, it is the capitalists who need the masses.

[alexmalecki]

Declining Profitability Warnings

Marxist economist Michael Roberts recently noticed a startling development within theAmerican economy; "The final estimate of US GDP in the fourth quarter of 2014 came out today. US real GDP growth was left unrevised at 2.2% year-on-year in the final three months of the year, and the figure for the whole of 2014 was unrevised at 2.4%. Mainstream economists were keen to suggest that the current quarter in 2015 ending this week could show a pick-up. But none mentioned the really important development – that corporate profits fell... $30.4 billion in the fourth quarter, in contrast to an increase of $64.5 billion in the third... This [means] that corporate profits are lower by 0.2% from this time last year and are down 0.8% in 2014 compared to 2013". This is the first decline in year-on-year corporate profits since 2008, and it is a signal of an increasing risk of a slump in investment approximately six months to one year from now, according to Roberts' predictions. For it is profits that drives investment, and investment that produces real GDP growth in capitalist economies; the result being another recession in approximately a year.

This method of analysis is known as The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, and what it seeks to explain is that despite the many, varied, initial triggers of any given economic crisis under capitalism, such as the decline in the housing market that triggered the financial crisis in 2008, the underlying cause of all crises is a lack of profitability. The long-term tendency for the declining rate of profit is a result of an inherent contradiction within the capitalist system. Individual capitalists compete with one another for control of total profits, and profits relative to the capital invested. To achieve these aims the capitalist must develop a means of increasing the productivity of labor, something often achieved through technological development. However, as the capitalist invests in new methods and equipment the accumulated cost of those investments begins to rise, and the accumulated cost of labor declines. The size of the labor force grows, but the cost of the labor force declines, as more and more people lose their jobs to technological innovation, putting them in increased competition with one another for employment, ultimately driving down wages. Increased exploitation of the labor force provides the capitalist with a greater share of value created.

 However, only labor creates value, and the surplus value from which profit is derived. Surplus value is the difference between what Labor is paid in wages and the actual value they produce. Simply put, they are not equivalently compensated for the value their labor creates. Inevitably, technological developments initiated by individual capitalists to outcompete one another for control over the total profit expropriated, and the profit relative to capital invested, results in declines in value generated by the investment of the capitalist. As efficiency and output increase for the more developed capitalists they appropriate the share of the surplus value created by the less well developed capitalist, increasing their individual rate of profit, but shrinking the rate of profit of the less well-developed capitalists, and the economy as a whole. If the less well developed begin to modernize in an effort to catch up to his or her more well developed competitors the rate of profit will decline consistently, causing declines in the total profit produced by everyone. As a result the capitalists pull back on investment, causing a crisis. Only through crisis can profitability be restored, through destructive events like unemployment, bankruptcies, banking collapses, etc.

One might now be wondering how this framework accounts for the periods of economic growth experienced over the last few decades. Long-term decline can be overcome in the short term. For example, the tens of trillions of dollars in debt accumulated since the 1980’s by public and private institutions and people like the United States government, consumer debt through credit cards, college loans, mortgages, and corporate debt, can stimulate periods of growth as experienced in the 1980’s, 1990’s and the first decade of the 2000’s. The growth we have seen in corporate profitability since the Great Recession Roberts’ attributes to bankruptcies and large amount of debt written off by the remaining global capitalists. Ultimately, to further try and restore profitability another crisis will be necessary. Since the recovery in the economy began in 2009 we have seen a historic increases in the stock market, with companies being overvalued well beyond their real value. Therefore it seems possible that the trigger of the next crisis will emerge out of the financial sector in the form of a stock market crash.

The political implications of Marx’s law can be seen quite easily over the last forty years or so. In order to restore profitability the neo-liberals began privatizing public services, financialization, targeting unions, driving down wages, and deindustrializing the well developed economies to take advantage of cheap labor in the newly developing economies. The neo-liberal era has been an era of the global capitalist ruling class intensifying their economic warfare on the rest of us by trying to roll back the achievements made by working people in the second half of the 20th Century. They call it Globalization. The period of national capitalist economies protected by domestic governments from the national capitalist economies of other countries has become a global capitalist economy wherein wealth is being redistributed from labor to capital. Domestic governments initiated a race to the bottom wherein any governmental policy that deterred investment, such as labor laws, environmental regulation, and taxation to pay for public services had to be targeted. Hence the rise in for profit colleges, rises in tuition for public universities, cuts to programs fighting poverty, road, bridge, and highway maintenance and reconstruction, cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, etc. Now it is even mainstream in the Republican Party to speak of privatizing parts of Medicare and Social Security. Wealth is distributed from Capital to Labor by re-appropriating the value that capital steals from labor, for only labor is capable of creating, through taxation and policies that increase wages, protect collective bargaining, provide education, housing, health care, safe working conditions, etc.

The effects of these changes can be seen in other ways. Capitalist crisis and class war increase the pressures felt by every sector of the working population. Social cohesion disintegrates and crime escalates, as was seen in the historic rise in violent crime in America from the late 1960’s to the 1990’s. More Americans are imprisoned than ever before, largely for nonviolent crimes. America has more prisoners per capita than any country on Earth. A society needs prisons if it is not longer going to be building not for profit entities such as schools and hospitals. Such as it is we have seen increases in for profit versions of each of these institutions, as well as for profit prisons. In the end there is no way out of this crisis without a reorganization of society, an economy under democratic control by the masses.

Source: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/profit-warning/