Violence and Cruelty Abound as Society Descends Further into Barbarism
Last June I wrote a post called “Capitalism Requires Indifference to Human Life”. There was plenty of evidence for that opinion in the news this week. Living in the twilight of a system based on exploitation and oppression, where the obscene wealth of a few requires the impoverishment of the many, and which is enforced in the last analysis through violence inevitably breeds more violence and cruelty.
On May 1, a man was publicly lynched on a New York subway train surrounded by onlookers. Daniel Penny, 24, killed Jordan Neely, 30, by choking and strangling him to death for anywhere between three and 15 minutes, while two other men held Neely down. The killing took place on the F train after Neely, who was Black and experiencing homelessness, yelled, “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” Witnesses report he took his jacket and threw it on the ground. Some allege he threw trash at a few passengers, while others maintain Neely threatened and harmed nobody. [Edit: The “throwing garbage” claim appears to originate entirely from cops who were not present at the scene. Penny’s statement does not mention any garbage-throwing. No garbage is visible in the video. Neely had no history of doing this. The entire claim, in other words, seems unlikely. See this thread for details.] Either way, a disturbingly large amount of people will now tell you, he deserved to die.
Neely experienced more than his share of trauma in life. When he was 14 years old, his mother was killed by a man with whom she was in an abusive relationship, her body later found in suitcase by the side of the Henry Hudson Parkway. Neely’s father says he was never the same afterwards, suffering from depression, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Neely was known around New York City as a talented dancer and Michael Jackson impersonator. Unsurprisingly in a society that criminalizes poverty, he had 42 previous arrests, most for minor violations, though some for alleged assault. Neely’s killer, a white former Marine, is now being lionized as a hero by conservatives, fascists, and reactionaries of all stripes.
As disturbing as Neely’s public execution was, the response to it might be even more so. The right’s celebration of his killer comes as no surprise. These are the authoritarians and bootlickers who instinctively defend every act of police violence, and increasingly anyone who murders someone they deem the “other” such as racialized and/or LGBTQ people, leftists, etc. Reactionaries up to and including then president Trump praised right-wing killer Kyle Rittenhouse, later acquitted, for murdering people at a BLM protest in 2020. Of course they’re now defending an ex-Marine who killed a homeless man for making people uncomfortable by openly raging against a system that had abandoned him, just as it has abandoned all poor, working class, and oppressed people.
Every time the right defends these killers, whether police or vigilantes, they need to pour dirt over the victims to justify the murder. So of course we’re now seeing the right-wing noise machine attack Neely’s character and cite his police record, as if any of that justifies his extrajudicial public execution. We saw the same thing with George Floyd. Mockery and open cruelty are par for the course among those who defend this barbaric violence. Possibly the worst example in Neely’s case was the satirical headline at right-wing Onion wannabe, The Babylon Bee: “Hitler Exonerated After Footage Discovered Of Him Moonwalking On Subway”. That’s right, reactionaries equate a homeless man murdered for yelling about being hungry, thirsty, and fed up to history’s most genocidal tyrant. No comparison is too extreme or unhinged when speaking ill of the dead if their deaths illustrate the monstrous inhumanity of the system one defends.
It’s not just open reactionaries. The putatively “liberal” bourgeois media also instinctively smear the victims of capitalism, particularly from racialized and marginalized groups. The New York Times notoriously reported on the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was Black, in Ferguson, Missouri by describing Brown as “no angel”. True to form, in the wake of Neely’s murder, liberal media helped legitimize right-wing bloodlust by portraying support for this man’s public lynching as a perfectly reasonable opinion. NBC News presented reaction to Neely’s murder as sparking a “debate” on “whether the rider who allegedly took him down acted in just defense against disorder or criminally.” The mask is coming off bourgeois respectability, the system’s brutality increasingly plain for all to see.
There’s an old saying: “Scratch a liberal and you’ll find a fascist underneath.” When push comes to shove, even the most “liberal” bourgeois will always side with fascists over socialists, because fascists defend capitalism and private property while socialists threaten it. Jordan Neely didn’t put forward any concrete political arguments. His crime was simply to express his frustration, his desperation, his hunger and thirst. He made people “uncomfortable” by showing the ugly reality of capitalism, a system that is throwing more and more people into the same poverty Neely experienced even in the richest country on earth. A ruling class unable to solve any of society’s problems will increasingly resort to its last line of defence: violence.
“Death solves all problems - no man, no problem,” Soviet Ukrainian writer Anatoly Rybakov wrote in a statement often cited in relation to Stalinism, but which describes equally well the guiding mentality of any murderous repressive system. Liberals will always defend right-wing violence against the oppressed rather than permit any threats to the system, capitalism, that creates oppression.
Neely’s lynching was just the most high-profile murder in a recent spate of killings across the United States that show a violent society tearing itself apart. In terms of gun violence in the last month alone, we’ve seen Ralph Yarl, 16, shot in the head and arm for ringing the wrong doorbell; Kaylin Gillis, 20, shot and killed after the car she was riding in turned into the wrong driveway; a six-year-old girl and her parents shot after their stray basketball rolled into a neighbour’s yard; Payton Washington, 18, shot and seriously injured after she mistakenly tried to enter the wrong car in a parking lot; and Marie Bedford, 21, shot and killed while she was driving in Oakland after a man began firing an assault rifle at passing cars because he was upset about the noise. These are just some of the most notable individual victims of gun violence, to say nothing of the constant mass shootings that have become a routine part of life in the United States.
While it would be easy to present this as a uniquely American phenomenon, the fact is that this kind of violence and cruelty is exploding everywhere. Toronto has seen a major rise in transit violence on the TTC as well as violence in schools, not to mention mass killings like the 2018 van attack. Nor are such acts of mass murder confined to big cities. The deadliest massacre in Canadian history took place in 2020 with the shooting rampage in Nova Scotia. The Saskatchewan mass stabbing of 2022 left 12 dead and 18 injured in James Smith Cree Nation and Weldon.
In a declining capitalist society that treats people as expendable, that values profit over human life; and where police and military forces that violently enforce current property relations are awash in public funds while workers face cuts to wages and services, it’s no surprise an increasingly atomized and angry population would turn on each other as their lives crumble around them. The political parties that defend capitalism couldn’t care less. Video circulated this week of Florida Democrats dancing with Republicans, which as BreakThrough News pointed out, follows “a legislative session that banned abortions, attacked trans people, destroyed immigrants rights, and cut back protections for union members and tenants.” As comedian George Carlin said of the ruling class, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
There are countless examples I could cite of people cast aside by a system that chews them up and spits them out. In London, Ontario this week, an elderly woman was evicted on her 83rd birthday and now has nowhere else to go. The housing crisis and obscene cost of rent make it impossible for her to find another apartment. “I can’t afford $1,800 a month,” Christel Barrett, on the verge of tears, told CTV News. “I live on a fixed income, just like so many other people who live here. I don’t know what to do.” Many who have been made homeless have swelled the populations of the tent cities that are now a fixture of cities across Canada and the United States.
The response of authorities is to violently clear these encampments, destroying the tents and property of people who have nowhere else to go. As with Jordan Neely, rather than doing anything to fix society’s problems, those in power just try to hide the problems, turning a blind eye to suffering and death and brutalizing those who protest. While the New York Police Department let Neely’s killer go free and refused to name him, it harassed, assaulted, and arrested peaceful citizens at a vigil for the murdered man. The state is an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class. Its armed bodies of men defend this system and anyone perceived to threaten it.
When we say that humanity faces a choice between socialism or barbarism, this is what we mean by barbarism. The suffering of people like Jordan Neely, Christel Barrett, and all who are either experiencing or threatened by homelessness could be prevented under a socialist system that bans evictions, expropriates properties to house the homeless, nationalizes the big landlords, takes housing into public hands, launches a massive program of social housing construction, and caps rent at no more than 10% of income. Until the working class takes power and undertakes the socialist transformation of society, our accelerating descent into barbarism will continue.
"Unsurprisingly in a society that criminalizes poverty..."
Key observation. Thanks, Matt.