"Why did we let Ronald Reagan die calmly in his sleep, at age ninety-three, almost a quarter century after he destroyed everything decent in America? This book is an attempt to dig up Reagan's remains, hang them upside down from the nearest palm tree, and subject him, at last, to a proper trial." - Mark Ames, Going Postal - Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond
I don't know whether it's possible for someone to hate Ronald Reagan too much, but if it is, Mark Ames may be the only person to have figured out how. In 2005, Mark Ames published Going Postal: one of many books attempting to understand American mass shootings, but one of much fewer attempting to form any kind of economic perspective of the shootings. Contrary to the media narratives dismissing these shootings as completely random, insane, or simply “evil” - Mark actually fairly convincingly defends his claim that in the vast majority of these cases, the perpetrators do target people directly and significantly responsible for making their lives as fucking miserable as possible, while standing behind the argument that the workplaces and school environments were still more responsible for the shootings than any particular individual. There are of course still innocent victims and clear evidence of insanity in action as well, but we will return to that topic later. What Ames is driving toward is a Marxist analysis of American school and workplace violence, he just doesn't seem to want to stay on the road that he built. Most of his analysis is limited to only a subset of the conditions of capitalism: the "corporate culture," and the changes to that culture which began with Ronald Reagan. Reagan's administration certainly marked a turn for the worse in multiple, measurable ways. But Ames pays a bit too much attention to Reagan at the expense of the systems that made him possible. Mark Ames does talk about capitalism, and colonialism and slavery, but in a very half-assed white man kind of way. What follows is a more whole-assed attempt at the thesis Ames was trying to draw out. What exactly will it take for America to experience the joy of finally putting the gun(s) down?
The Conditions of CapitalismLets begin with one of Ames' most lucid attempts at defining the problem: "If you accept that schools and offices, as compressed microcosms of the larger culture, create massacres, just as poverty and racism create their own crimes or as slavery created occasional revolts, then you have to accept that on some level the school and office shootings are logical outcomes and perhaps even justified responses to intolerable conditions that we can't yet put our fingers on." Putting aside for a moment the fuckery of placing the blame on "culture," the claim that schools and offices produce these shootings because they are microcosms of larger systems is still dead on (as is the mention of “intolerable conditions that we can't yet put our fingers on”). There are certainly particular conditions at different schools and workplaces that make them more or less likely to produce deadly violence, but not one of these institutions exists independently of the soul-crushing forces of capitalism.
Just how much explanatory power is Mark Ames missing out on by leaving a more rigorous analysis of capitalism to someone else (me) and choosing to point vaguely at "corporate culture" instead? Quite a bit. If we ignore the part where this use of the word culture should probably be left to describing very distinct groups of people, even a more abstract definition of culture is still a system which will tend to select for different outcomes and behaviors in multiple (or all) aspects of human life. No matter how much pressure a culture puts on people to behave and live in particular ways, there will still always be outliers - people who break with tradition and nonetheless still belong to the culture. More importantly, some of those who break with a tradition may even be able to force the culture itself to change over time. The problem with Ames' "culture" handwaving is that there are social dynamics under capitalism which cannot be changed without destroying capitalism outright - and those social dynamics begin with alienated labor.
In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx articulates not one but four forms of alienation we experience within the capitalist mode of production. First, our labor, and the product of that labor, is separated from us. We spend a massive part of our lives producing something that cannot belong to us, which is always already someone else's before we are even done with it. And for all of the time that we work, our labor is not the satisfaction of something we need as a living, breathing, social organism. No, during the hours we labor, our bodies are acting only as means to an end for satisfying someone else's imagined need (the "need" for profit), and as means to an end for us to hopefully be able to afford to keep existing (so that we may labor again). We are estranged not only from what we produce but from ourselves.
Marx goes on to assert that we are additionally estranged from something which is particular to us as humans: man's species-being, our near-infinitely adaptable habit of creating (producing) new things from what we find in our environment. This includes the ancient human art of making shit up, including (and especially) when we have no particular need to do so. This means that even our capacity for bullshitting is turned against us to sustain a global system of ecocide and genocide. Finally, because each of us is estranged from ourselves and from the qualities that make us us, we are also estranged from humanity as a whole, from each other. We spend roughly a third of our life sleeping, another third estranged from ourselves, our peers, and humanity as a whole, and have to devote much of the remaining third to ensuring our most basic needs are met. How could capitalism possibly lead to anything other than an absolute clusterfuck of mental health outcomes as diverse as we are? And we haven't even touched on Das Kapital yet. Of all the concepts Marx develops there which seem most likely to cause incredible human suffering, we only have space for the sparknotes: the division of labor into increasingly mindless and repetitive tasks, the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (and the corresponding falling value of our labor), and the ever-repeating cycle of economic crises (which are not "extenuating circumstances" of capitalism but a fundamental part of how it operates).
Capitalism as a Technology of ColonialismA half-assed material analysis isn't the only problem with Mark Ames' book, however. His understanding of colonialism and of resistance to it is also a bit dogshit, to put it lightly. If capitalism is a system which requires a ready supply of people to be dehumanized and exploited, then colonialism is the other side of this coin: that socially organized labor and force which dehumanizes and kills people for material benefit and control. And it is important to understand: colonialism is primary to capitalism - capitalism would never have been possible if not for the (continuous) primitive accumulation of colonial violence.
To see just how blind Mark Ames is on this topic, we can return to his fixation with Ronald Reagan. When Reagan beat out the incumbent governor of California by almost a million votes in 1966, it wasn't just because of his celebrity status, it was because he promised to "send the welfare bums back to work" and repress anti-war/anti-establishment protestors at Berkeley. As governor, he instituted gun control for the specific purpose of crushing Black peoples’ dissent to a capitalist-colonialist country. Reagan would have never made it close to the Oval Office if not for the majority of voters who WANTED violence, repression, and death. For about 20 of the 25 years preceding Ronald Reagan's presidency, nearly any man with a truly unshakeable desire to kill something could sign up to go to Vietnam (if he wasn't drafted already), where he may literally have been given a quota of how many people he was expected to kill. But this still isn't tracing the problem nearly far back enough.
Genocide, rape, murder, and enslavement are not simply things that have happened in America every now and again, they were and continue to be motor forces that have driven America's development from a backwater set of colonies (which would have starved to death if not for the generosity of Indigenous peoples), to the largest and most prolific killing machine in the history of the planet. A collective desire to inflict these grievous bodily harms on a racially-marked Other, along with the enjoyment derived from seeing and imagining them being carried out, have played a far greater role in actively shaping the history of this country than any genuine concern for the rights of man. All their talk of all men being created equal was just that, TALK, to soothe alcoholic genocidaires into believing they weren’t the most recent incarnation of the fucking devil.
"Why do we need to celebrate, with a kind of malicious pride, our worsening condition? What the hell is wrong with us?...Why is it that in those rare, exceptional cases when Americans take up arms against the malice that Ronald Reagan bequeathed to us we only turn on each other, in our workplaces, our post offices, and schools, rather than turning on the real villains in this tale?” Colonialism is a machine that produces madness, because quickly or slowly, it IS the destruction of man. So intolerable are the conditions of colonialism that without considerable community support it can drive us to lateral violence, lashing out even at those who play no real part in our suffering. The biggest blind spot in Ames’ analysis was that colonialism affects white people too. His fascination with Reagan was only because it was one of the most notable periods where white people sank a little lower from the ruling class (and perhaps because Ames was 15 when Reagan’s first presidential term began). But this historical process of colonialism devouring and disfiguring white people has been ongoing since before the United States was even established (since before they even decided to call themselves white). This country will never be capable of putting the guns down for good until white people are capable of seeing the effects of colonialism on themselves, until whiteness as a tool for organizing violence has been shattered, and “white people” become something else.
So what is the joy of finally putting the gun down? Certainly some part of that joy will derive from consciously entering a more peaceful era of humanity and life on earth.But what about the joy of confronting the systems bearing down on us, which are boiling the planet and making it harder to breathe? The joy of grabbing hold of the murderous collective desire that this country runs on, and redirecting that energy into annihilating the very systems that have long depended on it? The joy of breaking down barriers and abolishing what for so long has been holding us back and disfiguring us. Of reclaiming the full extent of our species-being - our near infinite creative capacity, and organizing it around valorizing life, the land, and this planet, not capital. What about the joy of smashing the forces of colonialism and capital so thoroughly that the work of dismantling them can be finished with our bare hands. I don’t think we can even imagine the joy of putting the gun down, until we can hold all of this in mind.
None of us are free until all of us are free. End the Occupation. Heal our Bodies. Heal our Planet.
For those interested in reading more of Going Postal I do not recommend actually buying a copy. Mark Ames does not deserve your money.