As I get ready to head to New Orleans for a conference, I came across this article by David Dennis in The Guardian – Why isn’t New Orleans Mother’s Day parade shooting a ‘national tragedy’?

That was a question that had certainly been on my mind when I contrasted the response to this mass shooting to other mass shootings in more recent memory. Where was the outrage? Where was the massive media coverage? Where were the heightened conversations on gun control?

In December 2012, I was part of a small group of organizers that met with activists in Hong Kong and South China.  For the next few weeks, I will be posting reflections on the trip.

HONG KONG

During the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, my mom cried.  It was the feeling, she later explained to me, that a mother has when her child finally returns home.  I found it to be a curious sentiment, since my mother's family had lived on Taiwan for 5 generations, and her husband's family fled to there from Nanjing in 1949.  For an immigrant, though, the feeling that things are returning to their rightful place was a precious one.

An historic wrong was being undone, but within Hong Kong itself residents debated their prospects as part of the People's Republic.  It is likely that, leading up to the handover, a majority favored continuing colonial rule, although an organized movement had developed which supported Hong Kong's return along with civil, social, and political rights. 

Feelings of anticolonial nationalism may have prevailed in the diaspora, but for Beijing, Hong Kong had and retains tremendous strategic importance. Along with New York and London, Hong Kong is a key regional center for financial capital.  The oft-mentioned 'rise of China' is constrained by the US dollar's privileged role as a means of international economic exchange, and the renminbi will not be a rival currency as long as the state maintains strict control over the exit from and entry into China of renminbi.  The probable plan is for the Chinese government to gradually float its currency through Hong Kong, and thereby have access to some of the fiscal prerogatives the US currently enjoys.

More immediately, the city also borders Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone whose explosive growth in the 1990s based on export factories changed the direction of the Chinese economy.  Not only does Hong Kong's transportation and shipping sector connect Shenzhen to retailers and distributors around the world, but the city's proximity means that political and social unrest in Hong Kong may influence the very heart of the Pearl River Delta's political economy. 

The FBI’s announcement that it was adding Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorist List and doubling the bounty for her to $2 million is cause for alarm for the peace and justice movement as a whole. Though Assata has been living in exile in Cuba since 1984, the ramifications of Washington’s recent move are far-reaching and dangerous. Here are some of my thoughts as to the whys in no particular order:

1. This is an attempt to rewrite the history of Black liberation and freedom movements and discourage those who organize today. The 1960s and 70s were rich with struggles against racism and injustice. It’s no secret that the FBI put Black liberation movements like the Black Panther Party in their crosshairs, literally. Local police joined forces and COINTELPRO expanded, also targeting movements in other communities of color – the Chican@ movement, Puerto Rican Independentistas, the American Indian movement, Asian American militants, anti-war and civil rights activists and leaders.

A society cannibalizing itself: symphony musicians kicked to the curb, school closings hitting Black and brown communities in Philadelphia (23 schools) and Chicago (54 schools), the overthrow of democratic governance in Detroit, attacks on civil servants in nearly every state.  I had promised an explanation of why these scenes may be symptoms of imperial decay.  Here it is.[1]

PREDATOR CAPITALISM

If you think the people running this economy don't care about you, you're right.  If capitalism is typified by the accumulation of profit derived from the exploitation wage labor, then the working class has an ambivalent relationship to the system.  On the one hand, it is exploitative, as well as unstable; on the other hand, being exploited as a wage laborer is how you pay the bills.  Furthermore, capitalism's compulsion to accumulate and expand generates more wealth, albeit concentrated in few hands. 

But what if this is not the only, or primary way, that capitalists generate profit?  In The Predator State, James Galbraith tracks the emergence of a class of oligarchs predisposed to generating as much wealth as quickly as possible, while on the

look out for a higher paying executive position.  At the same time, globalization weakened organizations that had typically served as a counterbalance to corporate greed -- unions first and foremost.  Galbraith argues that, without countervailing forces, the new oligarchs have every reason to resort to simple looting - what he terms predation - rather than engage in the tedious business of capital accumulation by standard means. 

In David Harvey's book, the New Imperialism, he describes a similar phenomenon but from a different angle.  He argues that "predation, fraud, and violence" are in fact central to the functioning of capitalism today (144). The name he gives to this phenomenon is “accumulation by dispossession.”  

Harvey, of course, is not the first to make this claim. He is actually just renaming Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” in order to emphasize the fact that those particular forms of accumulation are ongoing. In this regard, he follows the likes of Maria Mies, Arundhati Roy, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt. Harvey is quite fond of quoting Arendt, and she does provide a wonderful description of how this all works:  

[The bourgeoisie realized] for the first time that the original sin of robbery, which centuries ago had made possible ‘the original accumulation of capital’ (Marx) and had started all further accumulation, had eventually to be repeated lest the motor of accumulation suddenly die down.’  

“We can be going about our lives - good and decent people. And this is the nature of terrorism. We don’t do anything to provoke them. They simply hate us for who we are and our way of life.”  — Nicolle Wallace, political commentator speaking on the Katie Couric Show, April 17, 2013

The Boston Marathon bombing was a horrific event that has touched people’s lives well beyond that city. The families of Martin Richard, Lu Lingzi, Krystle Campbell and Sean Collier, as well as the dozens of wounded, have been deeply affected and will never be the same. The outpouring of sympathy and human solidarity across this country and the world is inspiring.

As for the motives of the alleged perpetrators, that’s still to be determined. Perhaps we’ll ultimately learn what drove these young men to carry out such a heinous attack. What we can be pretty certain of is that if they had been white and Christian, the response would have been different. If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was Christian, there is next to zero likelihood of an immediate call, as many Congressional Republicans are making, for him to be tried as an enemy combatant.

In the context of recent events, however, people who make statements like the one above seem oblivious to the overwhelming evidence that points to why we, the good and decent people of this country, might not be universally loved.