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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES:
Hate
Crimes, Common Crimes and Political Legitimacy
in a Bifurcated Economy
by
Chaos and Complexity Theory offers some interesting insights into non-linear Patterns of crime in contemporary American Society.
In this mini-lecture, I want to make three points:
A. The USA is in a very complex economic stage today. In prior cycles of ups and downs, the entire population felt the effects of economic recession and depressions.
Today, there is an economic bifurcation in which many people are doing better than ever before; many firms are thriving and most economic indicators promise a happy future:
1. The stock market is at an all time high. Most sociologists; most academics are in the stock market via pension plans, IRAs, Keogh Plans and other investments. For us, things go very well indeed.
2. Dis-employment rates are at a 30 year low. Most people who want jobs can find them. Jobs pay $5.50 an hour at Burger King, $7.00 an hour at Meijer and $10.00 on construction. Yet such wages mean an annual income of $12,000 to $20,000...before taxes...and there are a lot of taxes on the poor.
3. Inflation rates are low even while retail prices, banking fees, stock prices and communications costs pay high profits.
4. Crime rates have fallen steadily for the past 10 years even as the Criminal Justice Systems explodes...it is now the largest in the world...absent the Soviet Union to compete.
5. Housing starts are at an 15 year high even as homeless people clutter up the middle class pathways to opera, restaurants, malls and theater.
6. The USA has been at peace since the end of WWII even though the military is the largest in the world and it is capable of fighting a half-dozen minor wars around the world...and does. The USA is policeman around the world to business and commerce.
All these curious and contentious facts do not fit within the logics of Keynesian theory nor into the old model of Kondratieff cycles.
But if we image that, instead of one economic cycle with one and only one outcome basin at one and the same time, we can begin to understand all this complexity.
Suppose the Kondratieff cycle bifurcated. Instead of having one pattern of ups and downs, we might have 2, 4, 8 or more patterns in which the facts above fit better.
Fig. 1 Two views of the
March to Uncertainty
In the diagram above, you can see a region, Region C, in which there are simple ups and downs in an economic cycle. In Region D, you can see a 'Butterfly Attractor' in which there are two patterns of ups and downs...one for the rich and one for the poor...they are linked; they are driven by the same macro-economic variables but they embody very different fates.
It well may be that the globalization process itself has produced a bifurcated political economy in which economic dynamics behave one way on the national level and another way on the global level...in which those firms and workers tied to the global economy do fairly well while those competing with 3rd world workers and third world capitalists do considerably less well.
The research capacity does not exist in American Sociology with which to test for non-linear patterns...hidden attractors as they are called. The capacity exists in physics, biology, physiology, psychology but is neither known nor used in American Sociology...with one small exception. Patti Hamilton at TWU has found hidden attractors in a complex data set of birthing among teen age women.
B. Hate Crimes. Chaos theory suggests that hate crimes and rampage murders may be triggered by multiple uncertainties in the life of those who bear most of the social, economic and health costs of a bifurcated political economy.
White working class males live with cascading uncertainties and are particularly prone to such violence. In a declining economy, job uncertainty augments the uncertainties in family, health and housing. Affirmative Action legislation marks minorities and women as the most visible class enemy and hence, falsely, the most appropriate target for masculine rage.
The recent events at day-trading firms offer case in point. The accused shooter was, it appears, caught up in several uncertainties...attempts to beat the uncertainties of the stock market on a day to day basis is impossible...given any set of 1000 day-traders, some small sub-set will certainly do well...and the majority will certainly do badly...but Chaos theory teaches us that it is impossible to know which day-trader will end up in which wing of a butterfly attractor--Region D, in Fig. 1, above.
As firms move productive capacity to cheap labor regions, all workers are subjected to the uncertainties of job, wage, and working conditions. And, oddly enough, women and minority workers have some advantage in the labor market since ancient patterns of discrimination have forced wages down for them. Males see this small advantage as proper target for their pre-theoretical rage.
At home, dis-employed and under-employed males find much upon which to vent their anger and anxiety at these uncertainties. If the women they live with express small moves toward feminist liberation, women become the class enemy. If children, themselves caught up in the great uncertainties of gender, status, class and intimacy, if their children add to the uncertainties of the dominant male, that rage may strike out in any direction.
But most likely, such anxieties and such moments of rage are dampened by alcohol or other drugs; by sports and other diversions; by wars and other political spectacles.
C. Common Crimes and Political Legitimacies. There are many, many ways state functionaries can buy political legitimacy in times of uncertainty. One common tactic is to define political rebellion and resistance as Common Crime. The SSSP passed two resolutions in support of Puerto Rican activists who are regularly arrested for common crimes...trespass, failure to obey a police order, public disorder and such.
The SSSP Resolution says that these people are really political prisoners and should be given unconditional release...
In an earlier lecture on crime, I have listed many of the ways that political crime in the USA is disguised and, thus not recorded in newspapers, television news casts, criminology lectures or FBI statistics. In Lecture 7: State Crime, Hiding Political Crime, I listed three basic tactics a state uses to hide the illegitimate use of force against its citizens:
1. Control the definition of political crime
2. Relabel political crime
3. Locate repression in the private [civil] sector.
One can get chapter and verse about how these tactics are used in the original lecture but for this mini-lecture, I want to emphasize that these three points should be read together...that it well may be that crime, in the complexities of a globalized economy may well exhibit non-linear dynamics and that any effort to make simple, stable, direct correlations between crime and social variables may do much mischief.
More about this on the next mini-lecture on Sex, Crime, Abortion and Sociology.
TR Young, Director
The Red Feather Institute