Capital Wants Us Dead: Rage Against the Democide Machine - Jeff Shantz

How would you act if someone was right in front of you, was armed, had expressed unwavering intent to kill you, and was acting on that intent? Would you ask them to reconsider, try to shame them into changing their mind, make an argument about morality, chant at them, lecture them about the evil of their ways? Would you ask them to hold on and wait while you built up your capacity to fight them? Or would you do everything in your power to stop them in their tracks? By any means necessary—with the prime consideration being your very survival.

The answer seems obvious when considered on a personal level. Yet, for a variety of reasons this rather straightforward response becomes confused, obscured, oblivious when it comes to the very open murder (mass murder, genocidal murder) by capital and its states.

Capital Murder
For two years we have been confronted with the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli state (and its imperialist supporters)—documented hourly in the most horrific detail. We see our disabled, unhoused, and sick neighbors being actively killed through murderous policies and state actions, police gunning people down in the streets, migrants murdered by border regimes.

Yet, the movements in North America continue to be fixed repetitiously in a futile politics of moral appeal, condemnation, symbolic action, or shaming those who have no shame. This is a politics of submission unto death. It holds nothing of fight for survival that being confronted by an active murderous threat calls for—indeed demands.

We see instances of capitalist democide all around us in the so-called liberal democracies. Street sweeps and decampments of unhoused people, the removal of social supports for disabled people and their replacement by assisted death programs, criminalization of drug users and the dismantling of harm reduction and safe consumption spaces and resources that keep people alive, the rounding up of migrants and their imprisonment in “detention centers” where people are disappeared into death, the enclosure of Indigenous territories by and for extractives industries (that also kill the land that sustains life).

All of these are active programs of murder by capital and its states. The aims and intention are death. This is democide—the killing off of “domestic” populations by the states that occupy and control the territory on which the targeted populations live. This can take many forms, from active mass murder by government to withholding of necessities or neglect such that civilians are killed. It can be genocidal.

Deaths in these cases are not externalities or collateral damage or unfortunate byproducts, or unintended outcomes of these policies and practices. They are the intended and, it must be said, desired outcomes for states driven by a capitalist class that no longer has willingness to see any profit lost to maintain elements of the working class it deems unnecessary for production or consumption and/or which is physically getting in the way of circulation or production. Death is the point.

Given this, we need to rethink and reorient our actions to the very basis of survival—at all costs, by any means necessary. There is no appealing to the conscience of unconscionable killers or reason or self-respect or guilt of a democidal state. No educating it about the harms being done. Those harms are the point and the democidal state knows exactly what it is doing and precisely why it is doing it.

There is only one option for us, only one consideration—stopping it in its tracks. The state is coming to kill—what will you do?

Rage Against the Death Machine
Masses of people have their own answers—but are still frozen by the implications. Still, we see emerging expressions of desperate rage rising up. When it happens there is an instinctive recognition of what is at play—a visceral, emotional release that celebrates in recognition. That shows a deep resonance, an instant, direct connection.

And we should recognize this and understand it. And understand how it strikes the ruling class. When the UnitedHealthcare CEO was gunned down, the powers that be were shocked at the levels of public support shown for the assassin—not for the stricken CEO. When Rodney Hinton vindicated his son who had been killed by cops by in turn killing a police officer, the powers that be were again stunned by the mass support shown to the grieving father—openly and unabashedly—not to the stricken cop.

So often there has been an asymmetry when it comes to the killing of the oppressed and exploited versus the killings of exploiters and oppressors. The former are forgotten, overlooked or even blamed for their victimization, while the latter are celebrated as fallen heroes. The shifting context suggests that many exploited people fully recognize that their lives are at risk—in a real, material, and immediate way (not as an eventual outcome).

Resistance must take the sign and realize that the “normal,” everyday, habitual grounds of politics are gone. Assumptions about “reasonable” politics or “civil” disobedience, or “legal” protest no longer apply. Moreover, they no longer hold any meaning in a context of capitalist democide.

Working class struggle organizing must rediscover its more direct weapons, those that can stop this murderous advance in its tracks (rather than seek to delay or negotiate with it). Wildcat strikes, sabotage, blockades, to name a few. Syndicalist organizing is more pressing than ever too. Rapid response units on a basis of militant attack (like flying squads, community defense units).

And this must occur on an expansive recognition of the working-class, including the most precarious and those excluded from labor markets entirely. A return to the original sense of the proletariat as the dispossessed, the excluded. The disabled, unemployed, unhoused are literally in the crosshairs of capital. No longer for holding in a miserable state of existence but, increasingly, for elimination.

It must also mean alliances with Indigenous people’s who are facing further dispossession and removal from their own lands—the source of their sustenance and existence as peoples. We learn important examples, strategies, and tactics in Indigenous blockades, land reclamations, and militant direct actions such as the “Shut Down Canada” movements targeting critical infrastructures and logistical sites to stop cold the building of pipelines.

How do you act, what do you do if someone is in front of you, was armed, had expressed unwavering intent to kill you, and was acting on that intent?