Daily Times

The impregnable American capitalism is under the mounting strain of a mass uprising. The dawn of realisation has finally arrived. Democracy and commodity, the tools of capitalistic culture, are insufficient to gratify the needs of the masses. They have failed to maintain the hegemony of the dominant class and are, hence, falling apart. The subalterns living in ghettos are becoming the basis of revolt – if not revolution. Lacking organisation and organic intellectuals, a revolution, for now, may not be the immediate option but the revolutionary upsurge has rocked the capitalistic boat. To stave off the crisis, the ruling class is running from the church to the bunkers, a scene rarely seen in modern times.

Will the subaltern movement be exhausted and crushed or will the balance of forces hold equilibrium giving some respite to the masses groaning under the capitalism’s knee is a question whose answer for now remains enigmatic; however, the impotence and vulnerability of the system lie exposed to the people. The bulwark of its invincibility was a sham; any suppression of the rebellion through massive coercion will not reverse the trend. The 9/11 of crumbling capitalism has struck the narcissistic ego of the bourgeoisie denting its confidence in being an impregnable force. “Once the liberty has exploded in the soul of man,” Sartre says, “the gods can do nothing against him.”

Without acknowledging the anarchic nature of capitalism, certain quarters are terrified by the anarchic character of the movement as they watch the trend of incineration and destruction creeping in the struggle; violence breeds violence, it knows no other language. This is how the oppressed recreate themselves. Those dejected, devastated and destroyed do not pay tribute to their oppressors strangulating them; they raise the barricades and set the guillotines, in the meantime, history takes its course of carrying the old form to its grave.

Capitalism’s knee crushing the neck of humanity needs to be crushed by the collective effort of humanity

Violence is second nature to imperialism and being a hegemonic power, American capitalism has built its foundation on violence. It chooses its enemies within and abroad and inflicts atrocious cruelties upon them. The Cold War had McCarthyism: the detestable tool to annihilate the Marxists, and later the Muslims replaced them but the working class had always been its target.

Externally, the violence inflicted upon the victims of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay bears a similarity with the concentration camps built by the Nazis. Internally, the black community, the most dispossessed – the symbols of labour while whites being the face of capital – has always been at the receiving end. By cleaving the people on colour lines, capitalism distributes the guilt of its inhumanity among the white people, making them accomplices in its crimes, no matter how closely allied they are with their black comrades. However, it has not replaced lynching with discriminating as envisioned by Fanon; to attain its objectives, it mixes them crudely or subtly.

The institutional barbarism in America thrives upon the slogans of “preserving the American way of life” and “making America great again.” Both lacking any content, provide an excuse to the ruling class of maintaining vigilantism. In a surveillance state, people have little choice but to repress their violently aggressive behaviour and destructive tendencies, tendencies triggered by a system of competition and self-preservation; they end up becoming neurotics.

Giving absolute power to the unhappy conscience of police and other law-enforcing forces is offering them a carte blanche opportunity to unleash their primary sadistic instincts upon the vulnerable segments of society like a predator. The Freudian prescription of sublimation of instinct by removing inhibitions upon the erotic component has failed to curb the violent nature of the impulse, a product of the capitalist society. Despite access to convenient catharsis, violent in itself, human remains a beast.

Forgetting the violence perpetrated against the people, the ruling class is clamouring against the violence of the people. Violence does not fall from heavens, it is a social product and certain concrete social conditions reduce or amplify it. Those possessing the means of production are better prepared to unleash the devil of violence but then the devil is no one’s friend, it can change sides, and when it does so, those having the monopoly over it are taken aback.

For the rulers, violence is kosher but if used by the ordinary people it becomes abhorrent and illegal, a sacrilegious act no matter how justified its ends are. The critique of violence must discern the difference between the violence perpetrated by the oppressor and by the oppressed; both have different aims. One is meant to maintain dominance while the other, to seek liberation from it. “By what standard of morality, the violence used by a slave,” Walter Rodney inquired, “to break his chains can be considered the same as the violence of slave-master.”

“Arm of criticism,” Marx said, “cannot replace the criticism of arms; mechanical force needs to be overthrown by mechanical force.”

The dominant class makes violence a precondition for seeking freedom from its oppression.

Like any other capitalist state, gun before butter, the policy of National Socialism, was based on violence that helped it in maintaining its domination through integration and unification. Adorno found a similar pattern in “American culture of mass consumption, movies, Jazz and Radio series as putting into play the same basic psychodynamic principles that formed the basis of fascism: psychological dependency and social conformism.”

However, the guns and butter, the massive production of commodities, the psychological dependency and social conformism have their limits. The anarchy of capitalism has brought it to a blind alley; it lacks further room to develop the productive forces, the state violence is unable to stifle the cry of integral freedom.

The racist thesis supported and validated by imperialism to blur the class struggle is losing its sting. The concept, to begin with, was flawed. Capitalism needs consumers, no matter what the colour, creed, and class of the consumer are. Not only in the US but also most of the advanced western world, the massive uprising against oppression has paralysed the state. Capitalism has lost the power of containment; it may be a temporary phenomenon because capitalism can metamorphose itself into an alternative form of containment but the colossal form of agitation has turned the utopia of freedom into reality. Transforming the world into a more human and pacified place of existence for humankind, once a mere thought has become an existential possibility. Whatever is the immediate outcome of this class war, for once people “have taken the idea of revolution out of a continuum of repression and placed it into its authentic dimension: that of liberation” (Marcuse).

Capitalism’s knee crushing the neck of humanity needs to be crushed by the collective effort of humanity. People need to breathe freely, and that is only possible if they cast aside its yoke throttling their necks consciously and permanently. The battle is long, but the lines are drawn already. In dark times, people, Brecht prophecies, are singing about the dark times.

The writer, an Australian Pakistani has authored books on socialism and history. He blogs at saulatnagi.wordpress.com and can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com