Violence in Capitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility

270 Pages·2016·2.709 MB·English

by  James A. Tyner

VIOLENCE IN CAPITALISM

V I O L E N C E I N
C A P I T A L I S M
Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility
JAMES A. TYNER
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLN AND LONDON
© 2016 by the Board of Regents of
the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Tyner, James A., 1966- author.
Title: Violence in capitalism: devaluing
life in an age of responsibility /
James A. Tyner.
Description: Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015033085
ISBN 9780803253384 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN9780803284562 (epub)
ISBN 9780803284579 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Violence. | Violent
crime— Social aspects. |
Crime— Sociological aspects. | Capitalism—
Social aspects. | BISAC: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Violence in Society.
Classification: LCC HM1116 .T963 2016
| DDC 303.6— dc23 LC record available
at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033085
Set in Lyon by M. Scheer.
Designed by N. Putens.
For Belinda

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
1. The Abstraction of Violence 1
2. Materialism and Mode of Production 33
3. The Market Logics of Letting Die 79
4. The Violence of Redundancy 131
5. The Reality of Violence 199
Notes 213
Bibliography 235
Index 251

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When my family asked about my current book project, they were mildly
disappointed. A book on violence? Didn’t you already write a book on
violence? Yes, I must plead guilty. In an earlier book I applied a geographic
perspective to the study of (mostly) direct violence; at the time, I believed
that the geography discipline (as a whole) was largely silent on the subject
of direct, interpersonal violence. In this book I remain concerned with
violence— but violence of a different sort. Here, my concern is on the
meaning and making of violence, for it is my argument that violence
does not exist but rather is abstracted from particular, concrete practices.
Violence, in other words, is very much a product of its time.
So too is this present manuscript. It was written during a time of my
life in which various political and economic debates raged across the
United States: debates over health care and terrorism, unions and voter
representation, marriage rights and school shootings. I was, and remain,
struck by the unevenness of media coverage and general public awareness
of these topics, by the vicissitudes of violence, which seem to defy any
consensus in our comprehension of them. Where I saw violence, others
saw justice, or nothing. It became all too apparent that much violence
was hidden in plain sight and that there was a pervasive indifference to
life in the abstract. Television programs, for example, were often based
on individual pain and suffering; one person’s misfortune was another
ix