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Violence in Capitalism
Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility
By James A. Tyner UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8456-2
CHAPTER 1
The Abstraction of Violence
Lives are legibly valuable when they are assessed comparatively and relationally within economic, legal, and political contexts and discourses, framed by a culture of punishment according to the market logic of supply and demand.
— Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected
Jessica Kate Williams was murdered on May 23, 2003. Twenty-two years old and homeless, Jessica (an African American woman) had been living in a street camp in Portland, Oregon, with a number of other runaway youths, most of whom came from white, middle-class homes. Jessica, in many ways, was different from the other youths. For one thing, there was her size. At six feet, four inches tall and weighing 230 pounds, Jessica was bigger than most of the other residents of the street camp. For another, Jessica had been determined to have the mental capacity of a twelve-year-old, having been born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Jessica had been adopted by Sam and Rebecca Williams when she was just nine months old. As a child, and later as a young woman, Jessica had desperately wanted to be independent but also to fit in. In 1999 Jessica graduated from high school and learned to ride the bus. Although she continued to live with her parents, Jessica would on occasion run away, sometimes to a friend's house, other times to a homeless shelter downtown. But she would also always phone home, to let her parents know where she was.
Unbeknown to her parents, Jessica began to hang out with a group of street youths in Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland. The youths were led by James Daniel Nelson, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison in February 2003. At some point, Jessica was accused by members of the street camp of spreading lies; because of this accusation, approximately twelve youths, including Nelson, repeatedly beat and stabbed Jessica before spraying her with lighter fluid and setting her on fire.
Mark Price died on November 28, 2010, in a Tucson, Arizona, hospital from complications of leukemia. Gravely ill, Mark was awaiting a bone-marrow transplant that would never come — not because a suitable donor could not be found but because of budget reductions. On October 1 of that year Arizona legislators imposed drastic reductions on state Medicaid services to help balance the budget. According to the Arizona Republic, "Benefit cuts to the 1.3 million adults enrolled in the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) include certain liver, bone marrow, heart, lung and pancreas transplants, as well as annual physicals, podiatry, insulin pumps and emergency dental care." For 2011 savings were projected to be $5.3 million, with an additional $20 million in matching federal funds lost. Spokespersons for the AHCCCS explained that the cuts were calculated to "affect the fewest people or, in the case of transplants, represented the least effective treatment." In other words, the treatments eliminated were the ones not considered cost-effective.
These two examples suggest that violence, although seemingly self-evident, is not always as it appears. The brutal murder of Jessica Williams is readily grasped as a violent act; the death of Mark Price, perhaps less so. The difference, some might argue, lies in the fact that the killing of Williams was intentional; Nelson and his friends deliberately chose to take the life of the young woman. For Price, however, there is no apparent intentionality to his death; he was not singled out but rather was the victim of a tragic set of circumstances.
Or so it would appear, for in the same year Price was denied a life-saving procedure because of budgetary cuts, public officials in Arizona raised more than $23 million to support their political campaigns. In other words, choices were made — by identifiable persons — to determine where monies would be spent. Could not sufficient funds have been found to maintain adequate medical services?
The deaths of Williams and Price provide insight into the vagaries of violence but also, by extension, criminality, for the killing of Williams was criminal, while the death of Price was not. This disparity relates, once more, to the notion that Williams's murder was intentional; it was an action committed by a perpetrator against a victim. Conversely, there was no readily identifiable person directly responsible for the death of Price. Moreover, Price was not killed, strictly speaking, although he was disallowed life through the denial of life-saving medical services. In the following chapters I argue that how violence and crime are constituted is intimately related to how lives are valued in society. The determination of violence, especially criminal violence, is neither neutral nor objective.
Too often, theories and models have fetishized violence, thereby obfuscating the fundamental socio-spatial relations and processes that give violence its meaning. Consider, for example, the definition provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) whereby violence is "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, mal-development or deprivation." As Etienne Krug and his colleagues explain, this definition attempts to be inclusive, to encompass all forms of violence. With that definition of violence, acts such as murder, rape, and physical beatings are readily understood as violent. Statistics, in turn, indicate the prevalence of such actions. Worldwide, approximately 4,400 people die every day because of intentional acts of self-directed, interpersonal, or collective violence. In the year 2000, for example, an estimated 1.6 million people died violent deaths. About one-half of all deaths resulted from suicide, one-fifth were war related, and another third were homicide related.
The death of Jessica Williams would be included in such statistics; the death of Price would not. But what if for the moment we consider violence to be any action (or inaction) that results in injury, maldevelopment, or death? In other words, what if we move beyond an individually oriented and biologically premised understanding of violence to consider how certain policies, practices, and programs may have the same consequences for human survivability? It is undeniable that, standing alongside the 4,400 people who are directly killed, are many millions more who die from other, preventable causes. Each year, for example, an estimated 3.5 million children worldwide under five years of age die from pneumonia and diarrhea. Most (if not all) of these deaths could be prevented if those families affected had better access to clean water, medicine, and health care. In the United States alone (in 2010) an estimated 26,100 people between twenty-five and sixty-four years of age died prematurely due to a lack of health-care coverage; this figure translates to a death toll of 72 people — such as Mark Price — dying per day simply because they had no access to health care. Deaths from breast and cervical cancers, for example, occur disproportionately among women who are uninsured; rates for women of color are especially high. In part, this high death rate exists because many women — especially those living in poverty or nearly so — are unable to obtain mammograms and Pap tests that may detect cancer at an earlier stage. By way of comparison, an estimated 80 people die in the United States each day from gun-related violence. One form of premature death makes the headlines; the other does not.
Why such a gap exists, between the very visible (albeit highly contentious) debates surrounding gun-related deaths and the near silence on other forms of preventable deaths, such as those stemming from lax workplace safety regulations, is complex. In part, however, the explanation lies in the fact that gun-related deaths (and other forms of direct violence) are often very spectacular and very immediate. Furthermore, the promotion of (selected) acts of gun violence plays into the fears and insecurities that are used to eliminate social welfare programs. Contrast this drama to the sometimes agonizingly slow death attributable to hunger or disease that actually stems from the elimination of social programs or safety regulations.
To counter the prevalence of narrowly defined theories of violence that focused exclusively (if not entirely) on direct violence, Johan Galtung in 1969 introduced the concept of "structural" violence. He began by noting six dimensions to violence, provisionally defined as being "present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realization." Galtung has argued that a key distinction among different forms of violence is "whether or not there is a subject (person) who acts." Direct violence is therefore said to occur when there is an identifiable actor who commits an act of violence — defined as any action that reduces human potential; structural violence (also termed "social injustice" by Galtung) occurs when no such actor is identifiable. Galtung elaborates that whereas in the first case (direct violence) these consequences can be traced back to concrete persons or actors, in the second case (structural violence) this act of blaming is no longer meaningful. There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and, consequently, unequal life chances.
Structural violence, in other words, "occurs as inequalities structured into a society so that some have access to social resources that foster individual and community well-being — high quality education and health care, social status, wealth, comfortable and adequate housing, and efficient civic services — while others do not." Consequently, "to understand who is made most vulnerable where and how socially produced harms are naturalized discursively and materially, it is necessary to theorize specific economic, political, and social relations of oppression and domination and how they articulate (or intersect) in particular historical, geographic moments."
Galtung's separation of direct and structural violence is a positive move; it highlights the myriad ways in which harm may occur. It is a mistake, however, to categorize structural violence a priori as either unintentional or as having no identifiable agent. Consider again the harm that may result from a denial of health care. Clearly some decision — made by knowable individuals — is rendered whereby some identifiable people have access while others do not. Is it not a fair assumption that the intentional slashing of health-care items in a budget will result in some level of harm? It is certainly worthwhile to contemplate both the intentionality and agency underlying the implementation of institutional structures that have the potential to cause knowable harm, suffering, injury, and death.
The work of Galtung can, however, be viewed as an ongoing attempt to expand the definition of violence, to move beyond what was viewed as an overly narrow and restrictive understanding of violence that neglected many processes and practices that harmed, injured, or killed people. Indeed, Edwin Sutherland, writing decades before Galtung, forwarded the concept of white-collar criminality, which ultimately led to engagement with what is now known as corporate violence. Newton Garver, likewise, has attempted to broaden the concept of violence. A contemporary of Galtung, Garver has emphasized both the moral and political underpinnings of definitions of violence, observing that "those who deplore violence loudest and most publicly are usually identified with the status quo — school principals, businessmen, politicians, ministers." He has explained, however, that "what they deplore is generally overt attacks on property or against the 'good order of society.' They rarely see violence in defense of the status quo in the same light as violence directed against it." Equating violence more with violation than with force, Garver has argued that it is insufficient to focus exclusively on murder, beatings, and rapes; instead, it is necessary to address other actions whereby a human may be violated.
Galtung, Garver, and other social scientists who have promoted more expansive definitions of violence have been met with stiff resistance — and the debate between those who champion minimalist or restrictive definitions as opposed to those lauding more expansive definitions remains as vibrant today as it was in the 1970s. In an early critique of Garver, for example, Joseph Betz cautions, "If violence is violating a person or a person's rights, then every social wrong is a violent one, every crime against another a violent crime, every sin against one's neighbor an act of violence. If violence is whatever violates a person and his rights of body, dignity, or autonomy, then lying to or about another, embezzling, locking one out of his house, insulting, and gossiping are all violent acts." Betz concludes that "this enlargement of the extension of the term comes at considerable cost, for there is simply no extension left for the term 'nonviolent social wrong.'"
C. A. J. Coady also guards against overly capacious definitions because they may be appropriated politically. Broad terms such as "structural violence," Coady argues, "tend to serve the interests of the political left by including within the extension of the term 'violence' a great range of social injustices and inequalities." This expansion poses a potential danger, Coady warns, because "this not only allows reformers to say that they are working to eliminate violence when they oppose, say, a government measure to redistribute income in favor of the already rich, but allows revolutionaries to offer, in justification of their resort to violence, even where it is terrorist, the claim that they are merely meeting violence with violence." Conversely, "legitimist" (and therefore narrower) definitions — that the word violence must refer only to the illegal or illegitimate use of force — are most often promoted by conservative or neoliberal right-wing groups.
Advocating for a narrow definition predicated on direct, intentional force, Coady concludes (erroneously, I believe) that the "use of the wide definition seems likely to encourage the cosy but ultimately stultifying belief that there is one problem, the problem of (wide) violence, and hence it must be solved as a whole with one set of techniques." Here, Coady misses the point, for the argument in favor of expanded definitions is just the opposite. Galtung, Sutherland, and Garver, in particular, argue that because violence assumes so many forms, it requires a multiplicity of solutions. Policies designed to address rape or murder, for example, will not address famine or lack of access to medical care.
I agree with Coady and other critics, however, in that any definition of violence is necessarily political. Also, I take issue with the fact that most, if not all, definitions seem to take violence as given, as something that exists. Consequently, I eschew both minimalist and expansive definitions of violence, for it is my contention that violence per se does not exist. This statement is not intended to deny the salience of particular concrete actions — and inactions — that result in harm, injury, or loss of life nor is it intended to provide a simplistic argument that violence is discursive. The shooting deaths of more than eighty people per day in the United States are ample testimony to the materiality of what we take as violence, just as the tens of thousands of occupational injuries and fatalities that occur yearly in the United States must be considered incidences of violence.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Violence in Capitalism by James A. Tyner. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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