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Where All Those "Beggars and Bums" Come From
By Paul Street at Aug 22, 2007 |
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During a recent and ongoing stay in Chicago, one thing that I've been noticing is an especially large number of people begging on the streets of the downtown (what is called “the Loop”). There's always a lot of panhandling in the city but this summer it seems especially intense and ubiquitous. Desperately poor people are all over the place it looks like.
Many such people are sitting next to signs saying things like one I saw yesterday at State and Madison: “Broke, Sick, Homeless, and Alone: Please Help However you Can.”I had a guy follow me all the way up to the cash register at a Dunkin Donuts and ask for the change… he got it.
There's even more folks who just look lost and defeated; they're not begging or holding signs. They're just staring and sitting on street corners and the sides of buildings and the like.
Some of them look mentally ill and physically decrepit. But many don't.
When I end up giving a quarter or dollar to those who don't appear to be just gone mentally, I not uncommonly end up talking about what's going on and the answer is generally “I want to work but nobody will hire me.” Often there's a felony record involved.
Walking out of the donut shop, I heard a nice middle-aged white lady express her disgust and dismay at all the “bums and beggars” on the street. “Where do they come from?” she said, adding that she didn't understand “why the city lets them roam about. Surely there must be somewhere to put them,” she said. .Well…I actually started to say this…where they come from is capitalism (institutional classism) and also (most, though hardly all, of them are black ) to a significant degree from institutional racism. ZNet readers don't need to be lectured on the standard combination of forces (e.g. deindustrialization, corporate globalization, and gentrification) and policies (e.g NAFTA, welfare elimination, public housing dismantlement, racially disparate mass incarceration and felony marking, labor market discrimination, mental health-de-funding numerous zoning measures and plethora of other parts of the urban racist corporate neoliberal agenda…you could write a whole book about it if you were crazy enough to) that come together to produce a large class of marginal people without money, shelter and hope – folks who hold no profit value to the dominant business class and “market democracy” either as employees (producers of capitalist surplus value) or as buyers/renters (of condos, stoves, cutting edge refrigerators, granite counter tops, eco-cidal SUVs etc.). These people are socially produced and are a direct reflection of the oppressive hierarchical class-race-gender-empire system that reigns at home and abroad.
But let me be elaborate a bit more about what I mean when I say it's about capitalism (and most things are often very much about capitalism --- well state corporation capitalism – in the U.S.).
I have a further theory about why the “bums and beggars” are left out on the streets. It is not especially original and it is directly influenced by Marx's theory of the “reserve army of the unemployed.”
I think they're out on public display to scare the Hell out of us more “regular” working and middle class folks. I think they are out there to suggest a constant and ubiquitous cautionary tale to the dizzy and exhausted working and consuming mass:
“Remember proletarians: this is how the rest of you could end up if you don't play by the rules! This is the fate that awaits you unless you keep plugging away at your 60-70-80 hour a week desk job ye sorry wage and salary slaves. Do not forget, you are only one bad job review – one snotty comment to your sadistic boss or one signed union card or one departure from dominant workplace/ideological doctrine – away from the precipice of disaster. You are only two or three paychecks away from losing your home, your vehicle, your plasma tv, and your family. You are only one (purely) personal financial failure (self-caused of course) away from the flophouse. You could be a bum too so you better watch what you do and say and think and feel. Obey your masters, salary/wage slaves. Let's not hear any crap out of you about how the top 1 percent owns half the nation's wealth and how the system generates and profits from sexism and/or racism and/or imperialism and how the people are losing their rights and the rest of that crap. Do you want to be one of these desperate outcasts? If not, keep your mouth shut, watch your sit-coms, take your pills, collect your paychecks, buy a lot of stuff and play along. There but for the grace of your socieconomic overlords go you! ” We have our own form of economic sanctions in the imperial homeland.
No, I can't prove any intentionality at the elite level in regard to this in Chicago or anywhere else. It's not likely that I ever could. Nobody in power who actually consciously thinks this way (if such people exist) is going to be stupid enough to articulate it in a way that people like me can pick up and broadcast. Just like nobody high in the corporate communications cartel would be caught dead admitting that dominant U.S. media content is deliberately calibrated to encourage mass idiocy in accord with the economic elite's ambition to take the last risks out of democracy. Or like how nobody in the Pentagon would ever admit that innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilian casualties of U.S. bomb and missile attacks are viewed pretty much on par with small ants that get killed when you bounce a basketball on a sidewalk.
Still, you don't have to be rocket scientist to make some elementary connections. This is the harsh social reality of how having “beggars and bums” on the street works out in capitalist America. It has a functional utility for the wealthy few. The bums get swept away when profit imperatives call for it: big downtown celebrations; major party political conventions; visiting dignitaries (including Olympic site search committees); etc. But in the normal course of daily life, the desperate surplus people help keep the working majority in check.
I am convinced that some rich and powerful people know and like this at some level (maybe even half-consciously) and that this is part of why such people don't use their influence to adequately feed and clothe the city's downtown homeless and destitute – something that could be easily achieved at the fraction of the cost of a bomber or fighter jet made by global Chicago's proud "defense" firm The Boeing Corporation.
(b) - reminds me of
By Kissenger, Clark at Sep 17, 2007 15:25 PM
(b) - reminds me of Achilles and Patroclus in Book 16 Iliad J
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race race race race
By Cryofan, Cryofan at Sep 13, 2007 00:50 AM
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yer slippin'! Where is the linkage to race, Paul?
By Cryofan, Cryofan at Sep 12, 2007 14:43 PM
go to: http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2197
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re Frederic to capitalist anusman
By Kissenger, Clark at Sep 09, 2007 12:04 PM
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Rightwing talking points as proof
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 25, 2007 08:08 AM
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Of course, the form of
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 25, 2007 03:22 AM
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re phd in english
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 25, 2007 00:38 AM
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"Check your head straight,
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 24, 2007 20:27 PM
"Check your head straight, nobody there u must be homeless"
And you must have a Ph.D. in English.
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true"
-Nietzsche
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Profiting, financially or
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 24, 2007 20:22 PM
Profiting, financially or otherwise, from you're own creativity or hard work has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism is a theory that has never been applied and never will be...True capitalism is Lockheed Martin suckling the Department of Defense's tit to waste taxpayer's money and redistribute it to the SuperRich. That's capitalsim.
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true"
-Nietzsche
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non sense
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 24, 2007 19:45 PM
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Response to Suyi E
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 24, 2007 19:32 PM
Excellent Suyi E. I hope you are not worried that I will become a labor-exploiting member of the bourgeoisie with the (small) royalty I will so selfishly (and hypocritically) garner from your purchase of my latest book.
But seriously, Steinberg is a major influence on my approach and I will be happy to read and perhaps review his book. I learned an enormous amount about race/class issues in part by reading his books The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America and Turning Back: The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy. Very sharp guy. His argument (and I agree) is that the term "race relations" is too neutral; it distracts us from the harsh realities of entrenched racism/racial oppression in the "post-Civil Rights era."
It's more honest and accurate to talk about sexism than "gender relations." Same for capitalist class oppression v. "class relations" and imperialism v. "foreign relations."
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crazies
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 24, 2007 19:06 PM
I like that you quote non-biased sources there cyrano. Why is it you come to this site troll? Don't you have anything better to do in betwen the periods when you're surfing for porn?
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true"
-Nietzsche
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You're right Troll
By Slentallymoe, Je at Aug 24, 2007 18:37 PM
You're right. Take Cuba for instance. They have a homeless population of Zero. Whoops, actually most socialists country save pseudo-communist states like North Korea, China, and Vietnam (which can hardly be considered Communist anymore).
Look troll arguing that "non-capitalist" nations have homelessness is a red herring and a transparent one at that. If you study governments objectively, corporate statist economies create pervasive homelessness.
Actually an inability for government to provide for the common welfare of it's citizens (a basic tenet of the constitution) is an indictment of market fundamentalism and capitalism.
I'm reminded of a great quote here, "a liberal sees a homeless person on the street and exclaims 'the system isn't working.' A radical see the same homeless person and says 'the system is working.'
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:^)
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 24, 2007 14:36 PM
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Dwain Walter is an idiot
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 24, 2007 10:12 AM
I also like how you quote Marx. if the bums are a creation of capitalism (which shows your profound ignorance of human suffering - like there were no poor prior to capitalism) This gave rise as to whether homelessness could be compared between capitalist and socialist society. I choose non-leftist media to illustrate the latter..
China's homelss rate is growing
New Regulations Issued to Help China's Urban Homeless
In Vietnam
US soldier Homeless because of war in Vietnam
Property in Cuba
To be homeless in Cuba
Cuba women and housing
I would agree with the theory , there are armies of bum are created by capitalism
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Sorry
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 23, 2007 22:38 PM
The Soviet Union was the direct legacy of Marx. The roots of socialism are anti-semitism. Leftists are hypocrites by nature. I'm a capitalist because I linked my book (yes, please help me advance my private ownership of the means of production by buying my book). I am hiding something by using the label Leftist. On and on with one ignorant and insulting comment piled on top of another... And I'm supposed to respond as if this all merited serious consideration. Sorry, but no. Whatever - vent on: it's the Internet, after all.
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Of course you have no sense
By Tbarnich, Tb at Aug 23, 2007 20:47 PM
Of course you have no sense of guilt or hyporcrisy - you're a leftist, it comes with the territory. While you're "selling" out your ideals by engaging in captalism, it's for the better good of society right? You're "tearing down" society from the inside. You hate capitalism yet are willing to benefit from it. Nice.
So let me get this straight, Marx's desire to get rid of Jews should be written off as a youthful indiscretion? The fact that he never renounced his belief that eliminating Jews will result in eliminating capitalism should be overlooked? The fact that the direct legacy of Marx, the Soviet Union, oppressed Jews for its entire existence should be overlooked? Paul, you are making the fatal mistake of ignoring the roots of what you believe.
BTW, what is a "leftist?" Do you use that euphemism because it doesn't reveal what you truely stand, unlike using the term socialist?
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re : marx and anti-semitism
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 23, 2007 19:26 PM
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Oh boy
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 22, 2007 18:51 PM
I have no guilt or sense of Leftist hypocrisy about linking my book – none. Of course I want to supplement income with (modest) book royalties. I burned the midnight oil on that book (especially that one) and I really hope a lot of people buy it and and you try to recoup what you can after you finish working on a great book like that.
I love it when reactionaries go off about how capitalism and the (growing and savage) division between rich and poor is a reflection of human nature. Right, just like Love is Hate and War is Peace, etc.
It might be Dwayne's definition of human nature; it's not Z-Net's or mine or any leftist's. Among other things, that whole childish line tells people on the Left that they're not human. It also disqualifies as human much of, well, human history and civilization.
And of course it's a very convenient method for helping privileged elites avoid responsbility for key transgressions: “Hey, sorry we abrogated your union contracts, stole your pensions, exported your jobs, slashed your wages, cut your benefits, took away your safety protections, etc. ...but hey look you need to get with the program. We were just acting on our human nature.” Right.
The “On the Jewish Question” thing is bizarre. This is now apparently a standard right wing thing for a while now because this has to be the fifth time I've gotten this. You mention Marx and you get that essay (written when he was what 23 or something like that?) denounced on your blog and there is this strong suggestion that anti-capitalism is anti-Semitism. Right, and a bird is a dog.
Yes, many of the bums are alcoholics – a great discovery.
As for Anonymous, you know this is just a blog, not a book and an exhaustive treatment of capitalism's failures is a book. Jewish Question Man wrote one, but it's little dated. Anonymous can't imagine a better system; I can't imagine a worse one. ZNet founder Mike Albert is doing more than just imagining.
My own efforts to document societal failures related to capitalist power in the U.S. are all over the place…a good place to start is my “Mirror, Mirror” chapter in my first (please buy multiple copies) book.
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Scare the hell out of us.
By Kissenger, Clark at Aug 22, 2007 17:44 PM
"I think they're out on public display to scare the Hell out of us more “regular” working and middle class folks. I think they are out there to suggest a constant and ubiquitous cautionary tale to the dizzy and exhausted working and consuming mass:"
Paul - I had the same observation and made that exact same comment to several family members this last week.
The more we petition Government the more government claims its the problem, and we need to look to the private sector. Regan was dead wrong- only more governmnet can fix what less government has created. No one wants to pay taxes in A-Mare-ika because we all believe that we get nothing in return. Fact is if we don't change, their will be no A-Mare-ika. We need to raise taxes to fix what is wrong and those at the top need to pony up, big time.
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Paul, Way to go man, I
By Tbarnich, Tb at Aug 22, 2007 17:22 PM
Paul,
Way to go man, I like how you slipped that little marketing plug into your rant. That's so, shall I dare say, capitalist of you?
You know why you're never going to prove your conspiracy about the poor? Because it doesn't exist! It, as you leftists like to say, is a social construct. All ships don't float. What don't you understand about human nature? But then again, leftists have a history of attempting to retool societies in blatant disregard to human nature.
I also like how you quote Marx. if the bums are a creation of capitalism (which shows your profound ignorance of human suffering - like there were no poor prior to capitalism), perhaps you are in agreement with what Marx wrote in one of his first books, "the Jewish Question." Get rid of Jews and you get rid of capitalism and you get rid of the world's problems. Follow your Marxian logic and you solve two of the world's ills, no Jews and no bums!
You are a fool for believing all those bums want to work but no one will hire them. Give the money and watch how fast they run to the liquor store.
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What about non "capitalist" societies?
By Anonymous, Anonymous at Aug 22, 2007 14:25 PM
So are you saying that non-capitalist societies do not have homeless people or citizens that are one mistake away from being homeless or close to it? What societies are these, please show me the better system. Without flaws? sure, we need to strive to correct them.
I live in NYC (I have lived and been all over, from Manhattan to Queens to Brooklyn), and I can tell you that the homeless population is far below that of the 1980s. A combination of better city financial management, improved local economy, and charities and shelters assisting the homeless are all reasons for the sharp decline in NYC.
One last thing, you may be right about the failures of capitalism, but I also don't think that homeless counts are a good proxy to measure this failure. It sounds good and may provide for good headlines, but anectodal accounts of homeless people in one city is not much evidence.
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