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On 12/01/2011 00:08, James Holstun wrote: > Agree with Lou. The reasons why are not immediately ideological, but material: Well, the poor messed up guy does appear to have had ideological purposes, among them hostility to the federal government, to fiat currency, to abortion, and to the 'New World Order'. All of this was bundled together into some sort of paranoid conspiracy theory about government mind control. Such is what has been reported, and this is unmistakeably the stuff of the lunatic far Right. The social and political context of ruling class barbarism, and particularly the deliberate cultivation of punitive resentment and paranoid irrationalism on the Right, shouldn't simply be discounted as a factor here. The context has already, arguably, contributed to more than a few 'isolated incidents': <http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/terror-arizona-just-another-isolated> In my opinion, any position which seeks to foreclose this kind of wider social analysis in favour of reducing it to one man's pathology is paying tribute to the neoliberal cult of "individual responsibility". The gun issue is relevant, but Michael Moore raised a perfectly good point about this in Bowling for Columbine: lots of countries allow widespread gun ownership, but only in the US does this provide fodder for regular massacres. I think he rightly attributes this to a mixture of racism, imperialist culture and the terrible stress that, eg, kids are put through in schools as part of the competitive culture of the US. Mark Ames draws this out more pointedly. If you want to understand someone going postal, don't look for an individual profile, he says: there is none. Look at where he works, or is educated. Socialization is the issue here. Sure, restrict access to guns - I'm all for it. But in all likelihood those who are motivated enough to want guns would still be able to get hold of them. As regards healthcare, this seems to simply medicalize the problem rather than addressing its cause. Yes, perhaps the state could spend more on a good, pro-active mental health system (or, so much the better for the neoliberal state, just lock people up when they show signs of mental distress), and it would sweep up a few of the people who are obviously dangerous. Yet it would require a highly repressive and intrusive system to catch every dangerous person before they do something dangerous. Not everyone who is mentally ill is obviously so, and not everyone who is mentally ill is dangerous. And even if every dangerous person was fully pre-diagnosed and detained, the problem would only have been contained, not addressed. If we want to address the issue properly, we probably have to do some thinking about how right-wing political paranoia and conspiracism works. And here it would help if we didn't relapse into Hofstadter-style psychologisms, wherein such derangement is simply substracted from the political field proper and subsumed into a category of social psychology. A marxist approach, I think, would see the rise of such reactionary ideology as being bound up with neoliberal praxis. The destruction of welfare and trade unionism, the unleashing of market forces, the rise of a penal policy designed to cope with the social fall-out, have all been accompanied by a stress on 'individual responsibility' and a punitive, resentful political culture in which the ills of the wider society are projected onto an Othered minority - welfare queens, gays, uppity women, lazy bums, and so on. The crisis of neoliberal accumulation has now seen the Right escalate this punitive zeal, blaming poor people and African Americans for causing the crisis by borrowing ineptly. They have been demanding (and getting) tyrannical anti-immigrant laws. They have been calling for the 'voluntary' imprisonment of the poor - as when real estate magnate Carl Paladino pledged to put welfare recipients in prison dorms where they would work in state-sponsored jobs and get hygeine lessons. In the context of the 2008 election, they engaged in the most vicious race-baiting and screamed socialism over the most moderate proposals of the Obama campaign. Since then they've been escalating further still - their opponents are like Nazis, totalitarians, the president is a foreign interloper with an agenda of tyranny. And now they've successfully mobilised a movement of petit bourgeois bigots to do the footwork. They've done all this with considerable resources, availed to them by business supporters and by the far right segments of the corporate media. This is all to protect the profits of the rich. Given all this, millions of people are in the position of believing things, and wanting to act on things, that would make armed insurgency seem like a 'debatable' proposition. Unsurprisingly, milieus are springing up where the far right is gaining credibility and momentum. The gun nuts, militia groupies, white supremacists, NWOers, etc., simply form the right-wing pole of a community of ultra-reactionaries. In these milieus, political paranoia is not only normal, but it constitutes the organising principle of their politics. The Republican Right can't be assumed to be ignorant of all this. They've got a long history of mobilising the far right on their behalf, from the anticommunist witch-hunts to the 'southern strategy' and beyond. All the knowingly ignorant statements, the race-baiting, the calls for more violence against America's enemies, the gun porn, the in-jokes, are all calculated. It would not seem inappropriate, except to an ostrich, to situate Jared Lee Loughner in all of that, given that he imbibed and parrotted a lot of ultra-reactionary ideology and selected a Democrat on Palin's 'target' list. Whatever his immediate motivation, and we don't know exactly what caused him to pull the trigger yet, there was more than enough in his environment to prepare a vulnerable deluded young man for this sort of moment. As has been observed more than once, it's surprising this didn't happen before (although it actually did). > It's been worrying to hear all the talk about the necessity for a "culture of > civility," etc. One of the results will be that Sarah Palin's star will fade, > while some more polite and civil pal of the surplus extractors will take her > place. Why should it be worrying if these scumbags have to temper their rhetoric a little bit? Will that do the rest of us any harm, if they're having to look over their shoulder just a little bit? Bear in mind that the Right's purpose here is to prevent even the most modest abridgments of the rights of "surplus extractors", by persuading millions of people that a modest healthcare programme, or a slightly more progressive tax system, or any protection for immigrants, amounts to a Muslim communist totalitarian plot led by a usurper-president. Bear in mind that their rhetoric is fully intended to motivate the most reactionary elements in American society with crazed conspiracy theories, so that they can fill the space vacated by disillusioned Obama supporters. In what sense would it be a bad thing if the Left got organised to defeat this filth, and as a consequence abated some of the right-wing pressures in US society? > Of course, if Loughner had been a crazy-ass Muslim or ex-Muslim, the rhetoric > would be markedly different. We know exactly what the rhetoric would be, as we have precedent. The social and political context would be ignored, and it would be reduced to him and/or his religion. And that would be it - don't mention the war, it's all about dangerous kooks. It would be a shame if this was the step we took with Loughner. -- *Richard Seymour* Writer, blogger and PhD candidate Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book 1: http://www.versobooks.com/books/307-the-liberal-defence-of-murder Book 2: http://www.zero-books.net/obookssite/book/detail/1107/The-Meaning-of-David-Cameron ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
