Deploying Guns to Expendable Communities

Guns in the Service of Capital

We live in a world that is plagued by inhumanity—the effects of the treachery of a capitalist system that promises the virtues of democracy, including freedom and equal opportunity, but instead delivers war, hatred, and greed (McLaren, 2012). Karl Marx prophesized that capitalism would extend its looming darkness over not only our economy but also our cultural ways of being and doing, that it would encroach on our psyche to such an extent that we would come to revere its logic of consumption, competition, and greed (Fischer, 1996). A world structured by class relations in which an elite capitalist class owns the means of production—the labor power of a mass of workers—and continually seeks to extract the greatest surplus value from their labor for the purposes of their own capital accumulation can only be sustained through multiple ideologies that create hate, distrust, and destruction between workers themselves (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2007).

Today, we see this totalizing effect on America’s structural unconscious as we live out our lives through the whims of the market, seeking happiness in an ever increasing consumption of things we feel we need and justifying our superficial existence as the “successful” outcome of our “hard work.” We have stopped questioning, perhaps even caring, as a society why some people are more deserving than others of the basic necessities of life—food, health, and dignity—and simply accepted the myth that some people do not work hard enough to get ahead and that individual social ascendance based on presumed merits and motivation are just and right—that our existence alone is not sufficient to deserve basic human needs and that these must be “earned.” Likewise, we have stopped questioning who benefits from the chaos that exists in particular communities and have accepted that the natural world has been antiseptically cleaved into binary oppositions—wealthy/poor, White/of color—and that it is the providential role of the United States to “democratize” by means of our mighty arsenal of weapons those populations who threaten our economic interests and geopolitical advantage. We operate of course by divine mandate that mere mortals must simply accept—that accepting our role as the global policeman is “God’s will” and as “good” for us as it is for the rest of the world.

Regardless of rhetoric, guns are mass-produced to kill and they are man-made (sexist language intentional) not a divine invention. They are deployed nationally and internationally to coerce and to presumably protect from being coerced. In the United States, guns are manufactured for two main markets: the military and civilian consumers. As such, guns form part of the broader military industrial complex that encompasses our military, the prison system, the police academy, the border patrol industry, weapons manufacturing corporations, marketing strategists, training schools, and gun safety and crime prevention programs. The United States produces more guns than any other nation, and we have virtually the only legal market for personal use (Morra, 2012). This is no surprise because a market economy and the insatiable demand for capital accumulation necessitate the constant search for new markets within which to sell its products (Hill, 2012).

As in other sectors of the U.S. economy, the profit margin or the bottom line is what is at stake. Shareholders who watch the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ fluctuate seldom see the living expression of gun violence, except to cry out in horror as yet another shooting occurs in a middle-class neighborhood, crowded shopping mall, movie theater, or elementary school. They fail to realize gun violence exists on a daily basis and with the same rapidity as the fluctuation of their share prices. It exists across the liminal horizon and in abandoned neighborhoods and housing projects as well as middle-class neighborhoods, in Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Miami and on the streets of Torreon, Monterrey, Morelia, and, lest we forget, Medelln.

We see the interests of the elite capitalist class too clearly in the failure to restrict guns even after such atrocious events as the recent massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, that took the lives of 20 first-grade children and six school employees. The attacker was in possession of several guns, including the semi-automatic rifle used in the attack, which allowed this bloodbath to occur in less than 5 min. With little remorse, however, the National Rifle Association (NRA) once again waged a multimillion-dollar campaign that stopped a bill from passing the Senate that would have required background checks prior to purchasing guns. Although some restrictions have been put in place in certain states, a greater number of state legislative actions in the past year have expanded gun rights. It is believed unlikely that the gun-control movement will be an effective match against the power and money of the NRA (McVeigh, 2013).

The credo of the NRA is “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed upon.” Read another way, the right to remain in power will be forever a privilege of wealthy and White property owners. Although the NRA is a non-profit organization, its membership consists of corporations whose combined contributions of millions of dollars has ensured that the NRA watches over their vital interests by making sure that dark money finds its way into political campaigns (Stone, 2013). The NRA also lobbies aggressively for support from its primarily White, middle-class, male clientele who defend gun rights primarily on ideological grounds surrounding the second amendment and their God-given right to protect themselves (Karlin, 2013b). Indeed, White Americans turn a blind eye to violations of constitutional rights when these are sold to us as strategies of protection against the “terrorist” Other or the “minority” Other. Whether from outside or within our own borders, the Other is often viewed as a threat from whom we must protect our “democracy,” our English language, and our Euro-American way of life. The proliferation of closed circuit television, cell tower dumps, state-sanctioned wire taps, and access to your cell phone by providers such as Verizon and AT&T are part of what Michel Foucault (1978) refers to as disciplinary devices designed to exercise state power over the will and the interests of the people. The mass media create horrific spectacles of isolated acts such as the 9/11 bombings and the Sandy Hook massacre through continuous live feed of events and images of pain and suffering that are used to keep us in fear and to sell us more guns. Yet, every year, the death toll from gun violence exceeds by far the number of deaths that resulted from 9/11 (Cohen, 2013).

Astonishingly, after such tragedies, Americans flock by the tens of thousands to gun shops and sporting goods stores to protect themselves and feel in control, meanwhile the Vampire-like gun capitalists laugh all the way to the bank. In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, gun-manufacturing companies have found a new market for protective gear for children among fearful parents.

Racism and Expendable Communities

A heated debate exists among the left with respect to the relationship between class and race (Cole, 2009). Some of our colleagues argue that racism is independent of class and a more salient oppression in the lives of people of color (Taylor, Gillborn, & Ladson-Billings, 2009), whereas others argue that racism and other antagonisms are conceived within capitalism to keep workers ideologically and materially divided and unable to band together against the interests of the capitalist class (Darder & Torres, 2004). We take this latter Marxist perspective that class and race are dialectically related. That is, they are mutually constituted but class relations—ownership of the labor power of a mass of workers by an elite few—create relations among workers that sustain a divided workforce in the service of capital accumulation. Ebert and Zavarzadeh (2007) argue that capitalism did not just begin with the industrial revolution but rather evolved out of previous historical economic formations that also constituted relations between owners and workers. For example, feudalism involved the holding of land in exchange for labor. These social and economic relations also created divisions among workers to maintain a system of wealth and power for the few.

Racism is created through a complex system of ideologies and material conditions that remain historically entangled. The idea that racism is independent of class stems from a view of class as an identity parallel to racism and patriarchy rather than as a system of interlocked relations and forces of production that creates dependent hierarchies that keep workers divided (McLaren & Jaramillo, 2006). Joel Kovel (2002) explains why class is a very special category. We quote him extensively:

This discussion may help clarify a vexing issue on the left as to the priority of different categories of what might be called “dominative splitting”—chiefly, those of gender, class, race, ethnic and national exclusion, and, with the ecological crisis, species. Here we must ask, priority in relation to what? If we intend prior in time, then gender holds the laurel—and, considering how history always adds to the past rather than replacing it, would appear as at least a trace in all further dominations. If we intend prior in existential significance, then that would apply to whichever of the categories was put forward by immediate historical forces as these are lived by masses of people: thus to a Jew living in Germany in the 1930s, anti-Semitism would have been searingly prior, just as anti-Arab racism would be to a Palestinian living under Israeli domination today, or a ruthless, aggravated sexism would be to women living in, say, Afghanistan. As to which is politically prior, in the sense of being that which whose transformation is practically more urgent, that depends upon the preceding, but also upon the deployment of all the forces active in a concrete situation . . . If, however, we ask the question of efficacy, that is, which split sets the others into motion, then priority would have to be given to class, for the plain reason that class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of “classism” to go along with “sexism” and “racism,” and “species-ism”). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender-distinction—although we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable—indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species’ time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because “class” signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state. Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of woman’s labour. Class society continually generates gender, racial, ethnic oppressions and the like, which take on a life of their own, as well as profoundly affecting the concrete relations of class itself. It follows that class politics must be fought out in terms of all the active forms of social splitting. It is the management of these divisions that keeps state society functional. Thus though each person in a class society is reduced from what s/he can become, the varied reductions can be combined into the great stratified regimes of history—this one becoming a fierce warrior, that one a routine-loving clerk, another a submissive seamstress, and so on, until we reach today’s personifications of capital and captains of industry. Yet no matter how functional a class society, the profundity of its ecological violence ensures a basic antagonism which drives history onward. History is the history of class society—because no matter how modified, so powerful a schism is bound to work itself through to the surface, provoke resistance (“class struggle”), and lead to the succession of powers. (pp. 123-124)

From a Marxist perspective, racism is so ideologically entrenched in capitalist society that it cannot be undone overnight even when a different political economy replaces capitalism, as in Cuba, for example, where racism continues to be a major problem under their state socialist regime (which appears now to be inching toward market socialism). Furthermore, racism is unlikely to diminish under the current system of transnational capitalism. Racism is highly implicated in the sustenance of the gun industry, the prison industrial complex, and the broader military industrial complex.

In the United States, guns kill predominantly Black and Latinx youth in urban “killing grounds” (Karlin, 2013c)—impoverished communities forgotten by a society too intent on a superficial consumerism that is supposed to help us feel better and forget the injustices not far from our secluded White-gated communities. The daily destruction of our urban communities that previously produced White flight has intensified as schools cannot ameliorate the underclass conditions of their students and jobs for youth of color become increasingly non-existent. As Mark Karlin (2013c) plainly states in Truthout,

There’s always violence in destitute areas that provide only two job opportunities of any significance: selling drugs and being a police officer patrolling the economic wastelands like an occupying military force. (para. 6)

Guns are then made readily available to these youths of color who fall prey to their promise of power as they evidence the lack thereof in their own racialized existence and develop a silent cry for justice in the desolate shrillness of their lost worlds. Although poverty and racism may lead youth of color to succumb to gang and other types of violence, it is also evident that Black and Latinx youth are heavily and mercilessly targeted for criminalization to support a prison industrial complex through a racially discriminatory justice system, with harsher penalization, greater incarceration, and police brutality.

The guns that kill these youths are often purchased through a thriving black market that further sets them up for criminalization. Although their White counterparts are easily able to purchase guns “for their own protection,” youth of color are rarely granted gun permits although they live in communities where protection is said to be more necessary. In their own interests and under the horrendous and painful history of slavery and other inhumanities toward Black, Indigenous, and Chicanx communities, guns were legally restricted from the poor and people of color to prevent armed dissent (Tahmassebi, 1991). Although the protection of gun rights may have ideological roots for some people, the reality is that they destroy Black and Latinx communities through death, criminalization, and imprisonment in what is increasingly recognized as 21st century slavery and the new Jim Crow (Alexander, 2010).

Outrage over gun violence seemingly occurs only when White children are involved. Where are the heartstrings of America when yet another Black or Latinx youth is gunned down because of a perceived threat by the White dominant group? Ideologies of fear, spawned by the unquestionable browning of America, are constructed to secure a growing and unfettered market for guns and other weapons of destruction. Racism incites hate, anger, fear, and distrust, and these emotions coupled with guns are lethal as is evident from the recent string of killings of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and 13-year-old Andy Lopez, and 18-year-old Michael Brown – unarmed teens of color misperceived as violent threats because of the color of their skin.

Mexican immigrants and other Latinxs are positioned through anti-immigrant and nativist spectacles created to mark them as a deficit and criminal Other that belies their historical roots in once Mexican and indigenous lands. Under the auspices of saving our jobs for Americans, undocumented immigrants are hunted down and humiliated, imprisoned, deported, and torn from their families. They are described as the “dangerous and dirty Mexicans” who come to the United States to have welfare babies and steal our resources. In some cases, they may be perceived as the progenitors of “anchor babies” who will be programmed to insinuate themselves into U.S. culture only to inflect terror against White people years later under instructions from terrorists outside the country. This character assault is often exercised by those who would never consider taking or perhaps even withstand the backbreaking work that undocumented immigrants do for miserly wages and substandard working conditions—slave labor that increases the profit margins for businesses and corporations.

The racism and exploitative conditions that Mexican immigrants experience in the United States have a deep impact on Latinx immigrant communities who in the past few decades have seen anti-immigrant legislation introduced and sometimes passed across the country that attempts to curtail their use of Spanish and their access to resources, including schools, and that criminalizes undocumented status. For example, laws banning or limiting the use of bilingual instruction have been introduced in numerous states and have passed into law in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts. More recently, legislation in Arizona (SB 1070) has passed requiring police to determine legal status when there is suspicion that someone is not in the United States legally, which is likely to lead to police profiling as the ones who will be investigated are likely to look Latinx. An action that previously fell under border patrol jurisdiction now serves to effectively criminalize undocumented status. To date, copycat legislations have passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah. In Alabama (H.B. 56), this copycat legislation extends beyond putting police on the hunt for undocumented workers but attempts to drive out entire families by requiring schools to document the legal status of their students and prohibiting landlords from renting apartments to undocumented workers. This is hatred deployed against a hardworking people and their children in an attempt to retain a monolithic White America that has only been but a myth (Rodriguez & McLaren, in press).

Many Americans have little understanding of how the United States, NAFTA (North Amerian Free Trade Agreement), and global capitalism are implicated in Mexican immigration to the United States. NAFTA, with its provisions of security measures for corporations, lax implementation of worker’s rights, and expropriations of ejidos (lands that were constitutionally granted collective ownership to the Mexican people for agricultural production in rural Mexico on which many indigenous communities relied) to be opened up for sale to corporations have resulted in extremely exploitative wages and working conditions for Mexican people. Many Mexican families from rural towns have been pushed out of their communities, and, desperate for work, they have left for the cities, driving Mexican wages further down in the maquila industry. Add to this the terror and devastation that the war on drugs has created and it is easy to understand why Mexicans will move north in search of the American dream that the United States incessantly dangles before the world’s poor and destitute only to snatch it away when they enter our borders.

Mexican Bloodshed

The border between the United States and Mexico is a heavily guarded panopticon of surveillance devices designed to control illegal Mexican immigration. Yet, it is evident in the failure to stop undocumented Mexicans from entering the United States, that even after billions of dollars have been poured into militarizing the border, people will stop at almost nothing to feed themselves and their families. Without an ounce of compassion, federal and state agents torture and sometimes gun down undocumented Mexicans as they attempt to enter the United States, and in some cases, they shoot first and investigate later. Murder is made acceptable under the guise of the federally funded war on drugs and war on terror.

It is also evident, however, that the attempt to curb Mexican immigration, even with all the funding that has gone into the narco-terror border patrol industry, is merely a symbolic gesture. Only a third of the 2000-mile border dividing Mexico and the United States has an actual fence that obstructs passage. Mexicans endure a host of possible deadly scenarios while crossing the border into the United States in the hope of a better life, including being shot, physically abused and tortured, and even raped at the hands of coyotes who promise safe passage for exorbitant fees. Many also must endure dehydration in the dessert heat or dash perilously across the freeway between speeding cars, their families in tow.

Interestingly, although the border patrol became part of the Department of Homeland Security, not one terrorist up to this point in time has been apprehended, nor has any terrorist activity been evidenced, at the U.S.-Mexican border.The militarization of the border patrol is a billion dollar hoax from which numerous national and transnational corporations hugely profit. Karlin (2013a) recounts how both government agencies and private corporations are introducing new surveillance equipment, weapons, and other products to enhance the effectiveness of the U.S. border agents at keeping terrorists out of the United States and winning a war on drugs that U.S. involvement has only intensified, particularly as suppliers of the guns used in this murderous rampage against predominantly Mexican people.

Indeed Dawn Paley (2014) chronicles the functions of a drug war capitalism that strategically aims to terrorize the entire region of Latin America in both rural areas and cities in order to secure the capital interests of transnational corporate interests, especially those of extractive industries. Where squatters’ rights as well as the right to own property were once protected in Mexico, entire communities might be razed in a day as narco soldiers identify areas needing tighter control and then fiercely descend on them, armed with U.S. guns. Those who do not want to die either leave or pay for protection.

According to McDougal, Shirk, Muggah, and Patterson (2013), the illegal trafficking of guns to Mexico suggests a conservative count of 253,000 guns on average that are taken across the border to Mexico each year, and increasingly, these include military-style semi-automatic weapons. We quote Parakilas (2013) in full:

Of primary interest to drug traffickers are the so-called assault weapons. These rifles are effectively identical to the standard arms of infantry soldiers the world over, lacking only the provision for automatic or burst fire. Most modern assault weapons fire intermediate cartridges with effective ranges of 300 yards or more, and can be equipped with magazines holding between 30 and 100 rounds, allowing extended fire without reloading—a massive tactical advantage.

Other favoured weapons for Mexican drug trafficking organizations include large-calibre sniper rifles and anti-materiel rifles, particularly the .50 caliber Barrett models, which are reputed capable of destroying a car’s engine block with a single shot from a mile away. Semi-automatic personal defense weapons (the civilian versions of submachine guns such as the Heckler and Koch UMP and FN P90) are also frequently recovered by Mexican security forces, along with a wide range of shotguns and semi-automatic pistols. The cost of acquiring such weapons are negligible for trafficking groups whose profits are estimated in the billions of dollars: variants of the AR-15 rifle (the civilian version of the U.S. military’s M-16) can be bought brand new for a little over $1000, pistols and shotguns for a few hundred dollars, and the hugely powerful Barrett M82 for about $10,000. Even factoring in the labor cost of the straw purchaser (an individual with a clean criminal record who legally purchases the weapons at an American firearms dealer), the cost of procuring ammunition and the cost of moving the weapons across the border, for traffickers the cost is still incredibly worth it.

Combined with the benefits of being able to bulk-purchase weapons in brand-new condition, it is easy to see why buying American is so popular amongst Mexican drug trafficking groups. An exact estimate is difficult to come by, but the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) found in 2011 that 20,504 of 29,984 firearms (68%) recovered in Mexico from 2009-2010 were either manufactured in or imported into the United States before being moved into Mexico. (The Weapons of Choice, paras. 1-5)

McDougal et al. (2013) suggest that revenues of legitimate gun sales in the United States would be significantly reduced without this Mexican market. Further corroborating this evidence is the fact that on average, there are more than three licensed gun dealers for every mile along the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, the most popular guns used among the drug cartels in Mexico are both manufactured and bought in the United States. It is virtually impossible for the Mexican citizenry to purchase guns in Mexico, and they have only one store that sells guns operated by the Defense Secretariat in Mexico City that serves the military. It bears emphasizing that Mexican citizens are strictly monitored in terms of gun ownership. Mexican gun laws prohibit the possession of weapons that can fire military-caliber ammunition. Legally, Mexican citizens are restricted to small-caliber handguns, hunting rifles, and shotguns.

Although attempts to keep Mexican migrants out of the United States intensifies, little seems to be done to squelch the straw sales that create this iron river gun trade to Mexico. In a system in which capital accumulation takes priority, the Mexican people become merely collateral damage and expendable. We cite Parakilas (2013) again:

The results of this trade are nothing less than horrific. While these arms may be marginally less effective than purpose-built military equipment on account of their lack of selective-fire capability, they are infinitely more dangerous than the small-calibre revolvers and bolt-action rifles available on Mexico’s civilian market. Semi-automatic weapons with high magazine capacity allow for much more indiscriminate fire, and the military-calibre ammunition fired by such weapons are more than capable of penetrating cover and causing casualties unseen or unintended by the shooter. These capabilities increase violence at both the high and low ends of the market: professional sicarios (hit men) become emboldened by their ability to take on police and military forces, while the many who are not are far more dangerous for both their targets and anyone else nearby.

This is important because violence in Mexico is not simply an internecine war between drug traffickers. Targeted victims of the conflict have included police officers, journalist, peace activists, and migrant workers. The dead have also included civilians who were either misidentified or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In all of these cases, the scope and lethality of these attacks are vastly enhanced by easy access to military-grade small arms. (The Weapons of Choice, paras. 6, 7)

Sting operations described as “Gunwalking” or “letting guns walk” were part of the tactics of the Arizona Field Office of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which ran some of these operations out of the Tucson and Phoenix area where the ATF purposely allowed licensed firearm dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers whom they hoped to track inside Mexico to cartel leaders. However, during Operation Fast and Furious, the largest of the “gunwalking” probes, the ATF monitored the sale of about 2,000 weapons and recovered only 710 of them. And many of the guns tracked by the ATF have been found at crime scenes on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border and at scenes of mass murder inside Mexico.

The war on drugs, spawned at the urging and financial backing of the United States has resulted in more than 50,000 mostly civilian deaths, more than 10,000 persons missing, and more than 180,000 people displaced from their homes. This tsunami of pain and destruction can be considered a lucrative business for the United States because it provides the means for expanding military presence, training, and other measures to enable the United States to keep vigilance over an often volatile political arena in Latin America and in this way ensure the “national interests” of the U.S. transnational corporations. That is, securing political stability and power in the hands of U.S. friendly governments ensures open markets and flexible regulations for U.S. corporations. Furthermore, the war on drugs also aids in keeping a citizenry in fear and more willing to acquiesce to authority. Indeed, in some cases, U.S. government officials have aligned themselves and even assisted the drug cartels when it has served the interests of the United States—defined in truth as the interests of the transnational capitalist class.

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

A revolutionary critical educational project recognizes that neither guns, poverty, racism, nor other socially devastating antagonisms can be obliterated within the current capitalist system. The possibility for overthrowing a system that thrives on the destruction of humanity—on war, murder, famine, racism, and hatred—lies in the ability of people to join together against the transnational capitalist class. Marx prophesized that our historical reality would lead us toward a socialist alternative and that the history of humankind was the history of class struggle, a struggle to reach our full potential as human beings through the creation of a society no longer dependent on value production.

Revolutionary critical pedagogy is an educational agenda for creating a mobilized mass of critically educated people in schools and university classrooms, in labor union meetings, among church groups and factory workers, and in any formulation where people can come together to explore their particular social conditions and human potential, where clarity can be developed and action that leads to greater clarity can be taken for the sake of critically confronting our existing capitalist reality (Freire, 1970). With an increased understanding of our combined knowledges and resources and our stolen humanity, we can learn to imagine our true potential, to labor creatively beyond necessity, and to seek changes, small and large, toward this transformation.

To expel the culture of gun violence to the outer darkness means defying outright customary duties and affiliations associated with this domain, and this means more than desacralizing the role that violence plays in our everyday lives or radically condemning the violence at the heart of the founding of modernity, or proscribing the sale of guns or forcing official culture into a rigid corset of prohibitions against violence. To require the public to abandon guns is not perforce the augury of a peaceful world, because the founding slaughter over our modern civilization needs to be understood critically in order that the violent culture of guns does not repeat itself. To mortally deform, definitively compromise, or leech from within the divine violence associated with the founding genocide of the United States requires an understanding of the role that violence has played in the construction of American identity.

We denounce guns and all destruction of humanity. Yet, we are not naïve enough to imagine that the capitalist class will put down their ideological weapons of death and allow the workers of the world to free themselves and their oppressors without a fight. It is not our task to determine the course of this transformation. We understand the ideological contradiction that we espouse. As critical educators, we work to reach those who will engage with us and to encourage those who are initially reluctant to engage in anti-capitalist struggle and in the forging of a socialist democracy that will free us to be fully human and teach us to love truly and radically.