There is a correlation between economic crises and the rise of reaction.
Marx discovered the tendency of the rate of profit to fall a century-and-a-half ago. Crises have unfolded more or less every ten years ever since. Each cycle, the crisis becomes deeper and more prolonged. Capital, however, won’t simply forgo its profits. Capital will squeeze its profits from wage deflation, privatization, division and plunder.
This is what has happened with housing. The Canadian government began to wean people off of publicly funded social housing in the nineteen-seventies to open up new markets for private investors. Homelessness wasn’t much of an issue in Canada until the nineteen-eighties. Now there are hundreds of thousands of homeless people in Canada.
This country is a very cold place.
Reactionary ideology thrives under these conditions. It serves the interests of exploitation by providing cover for the machine-like pursuit of profit at any cost. Chauvinism is normalized and promoted. Racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and other kinds of hate hide in plain sight.
When hate-motivated crime is carried out, the perpetrator can be isolated, freeing the system from any serious public scrutiny. No connection is made in the news to the discriminatory policies that elide people’s human rights in the name of shareholder earnings. The victim is blamed for their high-risk lifestyle.
During the pandemic, a serial killer in Winnipeg preyed on Indigenous women in shelters. This is how Rebecca Contois, Marcedes Myron, Morgan Harris and an unidentified woman given the name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (Buffalo Woman) by Indigenous elders, became the victims of brutal, misogynist and racist violence.
Another serial killer picked up women in his truck on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver a couple of decades ago. Dozens of women were murdered on a compound where the Hell’s Angels partied together with cops and elected officials.
The capitalist system has its own logic. People with no empathy for others are well suited to it. The most vile acts of a sociopathic CEO are rewarded. But even those with big hearts can end up a participant in inhumane processes that they seemingly have little-to-no agency over.
It is capitalism that is heartless.
Heartless is the first single from the upcoming album from robcrooks Music People due out in January on Saskatoon Folk Rap Records.