RESPONSE: Himelgrin
Marea Himelgrin (73663.2124@compuserve.com)
04 Nov 94 11:07:08 EST
RESPONSE - Himelgrin
#3. The statistics, some have argued, show that the crime rate has been
relatively stable over the past 20 years. Yet violent crime has been the
number one public concern this election season. What, in actuality, do you
perceive to be the root cause of this upsurge in fear? Is it really a
factually verifiable increase in the incidence of violent crime, or is it
something else? What can you, as a member of the United States Senate, do to
address what you perceive to be the root cause of this fear? Why is it
the responsibility of the federal government to concern itself with such
issues?
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According to the U.S. Justice Departments National Crime Victimization Survey,
the 1992 murder rate was 9.3 victims per 100,000 people, essentially the same
as in 1973, when they began the survey. In the same survey, the rate of violent
crime victimization was 45 victims per 100,000 just like it was in 1973.
However, a 1994 report released by the Center for Media and Public Affairs
documents a 300 percent increase in TV crime coverage from 1993 to 1994. And
according to the Justice Department, while the violent crime rate remained
static during the 1980s, the incarceration rate skyrocketed. The number of
prisoners climbed from 150 per 100,000 in 1980 to 350 per 100,000 in 1992.
What is behind these phenomena?
I think generating hysteria about the so-called crime-wave serves several
purposes for the rich and the politicians who do their bidding.
First, it acts as a lever in politics to get people to accept the erosion of
the democratic rights of the working class at a time when we are just beginning
to organize strikes and protests against 15 years of downsizing and ruthless
slashing of social programs due to the crisis of the profit system.
The constant media hype about crime is aimed to soften us up to accept the death
penalty and the kinds of restrictions on the right to freedom of assembly,
speech, and bail that are embodied in that anti-working class piece of trash
known as the 1994 Crime Bill.
The conjuring up of a crime wave also serves to divide and weaken the working
class - to give us the impression that certain layers of our class - those of us
who are the worst off, who are unemployed, on welfare and especially those of us
who are young and Black - are inherently criminal.
Anticrime demagogy gets a hearing among many middle-class and working-class
people who are haunted by insecurities of many kinds and do want to see an end
to violence, drug abuse, and other social problems. But allowing democratic
rights to be hacked away only strengthens the real source of violence and crime
in this society - capitalism.
The biggest criminals today are the capitalist exploiters and their governments,
especially in the imperialist countries. They are the biggest mass murderers -
some 100 million people have been killed in imperialist wars for profit in this
century, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Iraq. And they are the biggest thieves -
their billions come from the unpaid labor of workers and farmers.
It is the capitalist class and its system that breeds antisocial attitudes,
including among working people.
Assaults and violence within the working class tend to decrease in times of
growing politicization, organization, and class-struggle action, accompanied by
a growing self-confidence of working people. Periods like the rise of the
industrial unions in the 1930s, the civil rights movement, and revolutions in
many countries illustrate this fact.
The working class needs to reject calls for law and order which strengthen the
bosses hand by taking away hard-won democratic rights.
Human solidarity, which in this epoch means working-class solidarity, building a
movement of fighting workers and their allies to defend themselves from the
social devastation brought on by capitalism, is the only answer to the so-called
crime problem.