Book Review:Violence in Capitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibilityby James A. Tyner

Abstract

James A. Tyner Violence in Capitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 2016, 255 pp: 9780803253384, US $55.00 (cloth) Evil masterminds poisoning a city's water supply have long been a staple of popular culture, especially comic books, and growing fears of terrorism in Europe and the United States have led to greater security measures for municipal water systems. However, when an appointed city manager, in the name of saving money, forces poisoned water upon a city, this is not immediately described as an act of violence, despite the outcome being indistinguishable from terrorist schemes. Such distinctions prompt geographer James A. Tyner, in Violence in Capitalism, to ask, '[W]hat if we move beyond an individually oriented and biologically premised understanding of violence to consider how certain policies, practices, and programs may have the same consequences for human survivability?' (4). Tyner's broad argument is that violence is an abstraction based upon the dominant modes of production. In other words, violence is not an ontological category; rather, acts described as violent 'are historically and geographically contingent and dialectically related to the society from which they emerge' (31). Drawing heavily from the works of Marx, Tyner illustrates how the emergence of private ownership and the process of enclosure transform social relations: 'Thus denied access to the means of production, those dispossessed inhabitants, to simply survive, must conform to the dictates of the dominant class' (44). These relations eventually acquire the appearance of free choice, the ostensible ability of workers to sell their labor to whomever they please, thus obscuring the violence that made possible this primitive accumulation--and the operation of the current market system. The privatization of land was not only a shift in the modes of production but also produced new abstractions of crime and violence, with traditional acts such as gleaning now being redefined as theft. Of course, these general propositions are nothing new. In fact, Tyner's book is part of a growing body of scholarly work on the violence inherent in capitalism. Adam Jones, for example, has offered reason to consider global poverty under the heading of genocide, while Garry Leech has gone further and dubbed capitalism a genocide. In a related vein, Patrick Wolfe has done fantastic work linking market relations with racial formation--and the violence then allowed by people ascribed specific racial identities--across the world. However, what consumes the bulk of Tyner's book is a much more specific proposition--namely, that 'under capitalism, violence is abstracted according to a particular assemblage of market logics, a specific valuation of--and indifference to--life' (79). This, he calls, the 'market logics of letting die,' the deliberate abandonment of lives deemed non-productive through decisions political, economic, and social, as with the cost-cutting measures forced upon Flint, Michigan, which have since poisoned an entire population's water. Tyner devotes significant space to exploring the ostensible differences between actively killing and 'passively' letting die, between positive rights and negative rights, to showcase how these divisions are abstracted from the capitalist logic; the systemic and structural violence 'built into the very foundation of capitalist relations ... is founded on the contradiction that workers are both producers and consumers' and that any denial of access 'to the means of production is also to be denied access to the means of subsistence' (110, 111). Moreover, this system produces a moralizing stance that privileges heteronormativity and monogamy, those relations best equipped to reproduce the next generation of workers, and thus makes the criminalization of 'deviant' populations all the more acceptable, as exemplified by President Bill Clinton's 'welfare reform' bill, which blamed poverty upon 'one presumed category of persons: sexually irresponsible women' (126). …