Newtown Rampage Fueled by Capitalist Ideas

Obama, Clinton, Bushes Killed Millions More

We join the grief felt by the parents of the 20 children murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, and by the families of the six school workers. It’s unfortunate, however, that grief under capitalism is selectively expressed. Far less sympathy can be found for the families of children, overwhelmingly black and Latino, who are fatally shot routinely by the rulers’ cops in cities across the United States. 

Capitalist influences led to Adam Lanza’s rampage. His “me-against-the-world” outlook was an extreme but revealing reflection of the profit system’s inherent individualism and cutthroat competition. Capitalism is based on reaping profits at the expense of rival capitalists and on the backs of the losers’ laid-off workers. When workers are confronted by the lethal problems caused by this system, the rulers tell them, “You have to look out for yourself.”  The bosses’ greatest fear is that workers will discover the real solution: Uniting with our class sisters and brothers to collectively fight our oppressors.

When we, the working class, run society, collectivity will stamp out much of the anti-social pathology that periodically explodes in individuals like Adam Lanza. When communist ideas were prevalent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, collectivity was taught almost from birth. Babies were given blocks too big and heavy for one of them to move or manipulate by themselves; block-stacking required a group of babies to work together. In school, marks were given not to individuals but to the class as a whole. As a result, more advanced students were induced to help their classmates improve.

During capitalism’s Great Depression of the 1930s, tens of millions of workers were tossed onto the unemployment rolls because they were no longer useful in creating profits for their exploiters. But during the same period, the Soviet Union maintained full employment. Everyone was needed to help build a society to benefit the entire working class. Communists believe that everyone has the potential to contribute to society. A communist society will treat and overcome anti-social behavior through reeducation and any necessary treatment. 

Adam Lanza was a creature of capitalism, from its rotten health care system to the war culture created by U.S. imperialists. In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, well-meaning people are clamoring for reforms in mental health services and gun control. But capitalism cannot be pacified or disarmed. It depends on fascist violence for its very existence. (For an explanation of fascist violence, see letter on page 6.)

U.S. Presidents: Murderers-in-Chief

The same system that depicts Lanza as a monster makes heroes out of far deadlier mass murderers, including every U.S. president from Harry Truman to the Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Each of them is responsible for killing millions of civilians, from the genocidal use of atomic weapons in Japan to the imperialist “surge” in Afghanistan and the “collateral” civilian victims of drone killings in Pakistan. In between, the U.S. rulers have slaughtered millions of innocents through their interventions in Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam (more than two million civilians there alone).

Many more were murdered as a direct result of the U.S. rulers’ installation of the fascist Shah in Iran, the CIA assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and the U.S. backing of South African apartheid, a fascist system that led to the deaths of fifty percent of the children before they reached the age of five. The U.S. bosses helped murder a million people by supplying Saddam Hussein with weapons and intelligence in his war with Iran, and caused another million deaths in Iraq from two wars and eight years of Clinton sanctions that cut off food and medical supplies. 

Within U.S. borders, racist cops execute scores of youth, majority black and Latino, who bear the brunt of this intensifying fascism. In 2010 alone, there were 91 unjustified cop shootings that killed the victim (CATO Institute report in NY Daily News, 12/30). 

Where the guilty U.S. rulers and their henchmen are concerned, there are no consequences for their lethal brutality. And it’s no surprise that none of these mass slaughters have drawn any public displays of sympathy from the White House.

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1970s, U.S. officials initiated the wholesale elimination of mental health facilities. That’s when U.S. imperialists’ defeat in Vietnam and sharpening foreign economic competition first threatened the top-dog status that they’d enjoyed since World War II. Over the same period, Pentagon spending (in today’s dollars) has doubled. The state psychiatric hospital in Lanza’s Newtown, which once served up to 4,000 patients, was closed in 1995 as the imperialists tightened the workers’ belts.

Lanza was diagnosed with autism, a disorder affecting the brain’s development of social and communicative skills. The great majority of autistic people never hurt anyone. But Lanza’s case showed that even the children of affluent families are denied adequate mental health care in a society whose rulers have other priorities.

Factional Fight Over Militarizing the U.S.

Different factions of U.S. capitalists have pounced on the murders in Newtown to push their competing views for militarizing the nation. Politicians and TV pundits, careful not to offend their ruling-class patrons, never denounce the alienating, dehumanizing, death-dealing profit system. Instead, they attack the scheme of one capitalist gang or another to mobilize the U.S. populace for war. The conservative, mainly Republican, National Rifle Association (NRA) blasted the liberal, mainly Democratic media for distributing the shoot-’em-up video games played by Lanza. The NRA then called for uniformed armed guards at the door of every school in the land, along with concealed guns for teachers and principals. 

Liberals fired back with both barrels, ridiculing NRA mouthpiece Wayne LaPierre. The NRA’s plan to put state-sponsored gunmen even in wealthy suburban schools is outrageous to the liberals, even though armed cops and metal detectors already “greet” working-class students each day in liberal-run cities like New York and Chicago. The liberals want their cannon fodder to be willing, not intimidated. This policy split recalls the divergent methods among the Nazis, who used both blunt terror (the Gestapo’s ruthless fascist police) and calculated indoctrination (the Hitler Youth) to consolidate their hold on the German population.  

The New York Times heaped hypocrisy on hypocrisy by attacking NRA-boosting gun manufacturers’ ties to video games, where the gun-makers get generous product placement. “These troubling relationships expose the NRA’s disingenuous [deceitful] strategy of blaming the media” (NYT, 12/27/12). But in defending the video media, the Times failed to disclose the industry’s direct link to imperialist war-makers far bigger than Bushmaster or Colt.

‘Call of Duty’ Unites Bosses

Big Oil, the gun and video game industries, and the arms manufacturers are all inter-connected. “Call of Duty,” reportedly Lanza’s favorite interactive video game, comes from French conglomerate Vivendi’s wholly owned U.S. subsidiary Activision. One Vivendi board member, Christophe de Margerie, serves as chairman of oil giant Total, whose billionaire shareholders profit mightily by his partnering with the U.S. killing machine. Total, which originally sided with Saddam Hussein, now controls oil fields throughout Iraq as a payoff for French troop contributions to the U.S.-led Afghan slaughter. Late last month, Vivendi’s CEO, Jean-Bernard Lévy, became chairman of arms maker Thalès, tenth on the Pentagon’s list of death merchant contractors.

The liberal Times speaks for a U.S. faction planning for ultimate all-out global war. It sees violent video games as a means for recruiting “middle-class” youth who aren’t yet reached by today’s economic draft. The latest installment of “Call of Duty,” so beloved by both Lanza and the Times, envisions a World War III against Russia a decade away and features a “USS Obama” aircraft carrier.

It’s not such a big leap from games like “Call of Duty” to the real-life massacres planned by U.S. rulers. GE boasts that its “IPS5100 [weapons/vision system] can be used in armored vehicles to give troops 360° situational awareness with the help of panoramic imagery that can be manipulated by touch screen, joystick and game-style controller” (Business Insider, 3/13/12). The video games’ usefulness in pre-training potential U.S. soldiers underlies the Times’ “don’t-blame-the-games” stance. 

Communists + Class Struggle = Revolution Against Capitalism

Overthrowing the intensifying fascism of the capitalists who enabled Newtown will require a supreme collective effort by a communist-led working class. The seeds of this struggle can be seen in the growing class struggles worldwide. Masses of women (and men) are marching against fascist anti-women violence in India. Garment workers are staging militant protests against profiteering murderers in Bangladesh. Anti-austerity demonstrators are on the march in Pakistan, France, Haiti, Spain, Egypt and Portugal. Miners are armed for class war in South Africa. In the U.S., battles continue to rage against racist cop killings in New York City and Los Angeles and union-busting in Wisconsin and Ohio.

As the Progressive Labor Party’s influence and leadership grows in the two dozen countries where communist clubs have been established, our ideas will win masses of workers to understand that this vicious capitalist system can’t be reformed. Destroying it and building a new society — run by and for our class, which produces everything of value — must become the order of the day. Join PLP!