Necroeconomy
Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about the looking glass house. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass --- that’s just the same as our drawing-room, only things go the other way. … the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way.
- Through the Looking – Glass, by Lewis Carroll
As Gaza goes, we all go. And it’s really critical that we stand up because Gazans are the canary in the mine shaft. And what happens in Gaza can happen and will happen anywhere.
- Dr. Jill Stein, X, formerly Twitter, April 25, 2024
By Gregg Wall (4-27-2024)
The word really put the hook into me. I first heard it on Sabby Sabs podcast, when she had on special guest, Max Blumenthal, author, investigative journalist, with specialization on the State of Israel (who offers insights and candor, you will not find among America’s talking head, foreign policy ‘experts’ within the MSM). If you have an hour, this podcast might be the most enlightening hour in your life, especially in regards the ongoing crises in America, Gaza, and Israel.
The word, of course, is ‘necroeconomy’ or death economy. Immediately, I thought of America’s empire, colonialism, our outlaw foreign policy, and the mass death that surrounds the U.S. foreign policy establishment and what I’ve recently come to call America’s thugocracy. But like Alice and her kitty, upon further research, I found myself crawling through the looking-glass, from a living economy into an economy of death & ultra-violence on the other side of the mirror. JM Hamilton, of course, has been exploring the failings and hypocrisy surrounding the U.S. economy and government since 2010… the greed; the bailouts for banks, billionaires, & multinationals; the billionaire entitlement or welfare state; the monopoly economy & associated price gouging; the financialization of the economy; and gross wage & wealth inequalities. But finally, here’s the netherworld economy that pulls it all together that encapsulates how absolutely vile the U.S. economy truly is. So, abandon all hope ye who enter, you’ve been warned, the ride is about to get choppy from here.
To cut to the chase, it’s as ugly as it sounds. The necroeconomy turns death into a commodity. And the cornerstone of this death economy is racism, treating groups within society, and outside a society, as subhuman to be exploited, to be treated with contempt and death (as a matter of economic, public, political, and societal engineering policies). Disenfranchised groups and individuals treated as profit centers in controlling their bodies & lives. The racialization of entire societies, members treated as excess, disposable, whose value is determined in subjugation and ultimately elimination. Which brings us to necropolitics, which has been called by some the theory of the walking dead, and the state’s right to kill & murder (and overt or tacit acceptance by the public of the state’s right to murder). As with the necroeconomy, necropolitics meets at the street corner of Racism & Murder, where disenfranchised groups are caught in half life, halfway between Alice’s economic mirror, between the living and the dead economies, living and dead politics. Necropolitics and the necroeconomy – the puppet masters, who pull the strings - prey upon the lack of autonomy one may have over one’s body and life, and this may further result in any combination of economic, gender, physical, political, social, and yes, spiritual death.
Under these models, paradigms, & public policies, the concept of economic violence - or necroviolence - is used in furtherance of the death economy and the state. Economic violence or necroviolence is structural violence in which members of society, or groups, are systematically deprived of economic resources (applied by corporations & governments to exert power and control over disenfranchised groups and society as a whole, be they broken down by race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation). Necroviolence maybe carried out by the state, paramilitary organizations, police, and military (perhaps seemingly more innocent, at the stroke of a legislative pen or by judicial fiat)… but the private sector is also perfectly capable of putting the squeeze on individuals and groups, simply by denying them a job. This latter point is not to be underestimated and underplayed in our dangerous & deadly concentrated, monopoly economy, where extraordinary & often unaccountable power has been placed into the hands of capital, boardrooms, CEOs, greed, and oligarchy. The surveillance state and the marriage between Western corporations, government, and tech means the information loop on the individual and the public is complete.
Necroviolence has been compared to Marx’s accumulation of wealth by dispossession, or the transfer of wealth, via: privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crisis or crises, state redistribution to the wealthy, and mass incarceration. Labor is forced into compliance by economic coercion and violent force.
Before you dismiss me and this write-up as the paranoid ravings of a madman… please, take a look around, we are surrounded by death & division: an entirely deadly & lethal economy; endemic misogyny, poverty, and racism (see also gender & sexual orientation violence); the absolute atomization of society; American and Western governments that, despite the ‘democracy’ label, are increasingly authoritarian and unresponsive to the needs of the citizens they allegedly serve; and a predatory elite/oligarchy with far too much power, time on their hands, and wealth at their disposal. Here, we would all do well to remember Warren Buffet’s comments on class warfare. Indeed, their side, the oligarchy’s side, presently, is winning.
Examples of the necroeconomy (or characteristics within), literally, the mining of humanity, the rationing of life & death: Genocide in Gaza and the colonization, exploitation, & subjugation of Africa; war profiteering, the privatization of the military and the U.S. police state, the military industrial complex; the moral hazard surrounding a US congress trading defense stocks with an itchy trigger finger, as a reason to run up the national debt, and always go to war & treat death, war, & violence as a profit center; the moral hazard of a US congress owned by AIPAC and the State of Israel. The racialization of Arabs, Muslims, and brown and black skinned individuals and peoples around the globe, as opposed to a color-blind world and looking at humanity through one common/universal lens. And as of late, with AI and job killing technologies on the rise, even whites are increasingly finding themselves on the receiving end of the necroeconomy. Further examples include: genocidal warfare, ethnic cleansing. There’s a lot that goes on in the world, 24/7/365, that many Americans & Canadians can’t imagine, so caught up are many in the race for survival. The necroeconomy preys on labor, commodifies labor, looks to crush and treat labor as disposable. Union busting as a matter of corporate policy & public policy… placing government’s hand on the judicial scales in favor of corporations & utilities, giving capital & corporations every advantage inside government & courtrooms – against consumers, labor, & the public. All of these are just some of the aspects and characteristics of the necroeconomy.
Examples of necropolitics: Apartheid, the separation of society by race, more specifically, economic, political, and social segregation. Stripping public services to pay for tax cuts and welfare for the rich or to pay for war; the response or lack of response to climate disasters and natural disasters, as means to divorce citizens from their property and their lives; global poverty achieved by indenturing citizens and nation-states to catastrophic debt (and the subsequent response by IMF and World Bank for endless austerity and the privatization of entire countries); declining birth rates as a direct result of the necroeconomy, the neoliberal economy’s failure to pay a living wage… and the stripping of public services & support; nation-state polices concerning colonialism, genocide, and war. The absolute failure & mirage that is identity politics as a substitute to actually addressing the systemic economic, political, and social violence directed at disenfranchised groups in society. Residential schooling and the destruction of indigenous culture and languages. The lack of strong, well-funded public education and affordable, well-funded public universities. The response to the pandemic (COVID), and politicians literally telling people to go back to work to die for their fascist-death economy. The management - or lack of management by elites in gov and the private sector – concerning a never-ending litany of crises, some of them planned in advance (like false flag conflict & wars). The national debt and the debt service load and the endless cuts to social programs and services that debt commands, along with the taxes to service this debt (see central bank management and policies). These are some of the public or necro policies that dovetail & merge with the necroeconomy.
Examples of necroviolence: Divide and conquer politics; the mass incarceration state; police state violence directed at fear, coercion of labor, the public, and students… attacking the rights of humanity, and feeding the mass incarceration state. The moral hazard surrounding the for-profit prison industrial complex, and the slavery often permitted w/in these institutions, public & privately run. Running an economy devoid of a living wage, without a minimum wage suitable to sustaining life, and further devoid of public services necessary to sustain life. Privatized healthcare and the resulting debt. Debt and rent seeking behavior throughout the economy, as a means to coerce and subjugate families, labor the economically disenfranchised. Monopoly and monopsony totalitarian power over: government, the judiciary, the canon of Western law, nation-states, the regulatory state, prices, wages, and life, itself. Prisons, again, as a means to gatekeep who lives and who dies in America’s funhouse of mirrors. SYSTEMIC MISOGYNY, RACISM, GENDER AND RACIAL VIOLENCE, AND RAMPANT HOMOPHOBIA. Social media personalities and MSM that pander to & idolize corporatism, division, fascism, hate & white supremacy. Advertising that rubs in our face daily, explicitly, what it means to be a ‘success’ in the economy of the living and the dead. It’s all there, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Allowing corporations to lie with impunity about air pollution, toxicity of products and services, w/ little or no consequence for their actions… with health & life threatening consequences for the public. These are some of examples and tools of necroviolence.
Admittedly & as we would expect, some of the items inside necroeconomics and necropolitics blur into one another, ditto necroviolence.
And I’ve just scratched the surface. I think what is most shocking about all this is how timely the topic, and how the death economy is so entirely infused and intertwined with the ‘living economy.’ Neoliberalism, necroeconomy? … ‘tomato, tomatoe’? … as practiced in America, they are one in the same. (Alice’s drawing-room has no looking-glass, no funhouse mirror… what is up is down, what is living is also the dead economy, both exist in reality, all in one room. And Alice’s dream, an economic & societal nightmare we are all living in?) What’s entirely frightening is that this economy of domination, murder, subjugation, and violence envelopes and surrounds all of us, and yet, many of us are entirely oblivious to it. (Particularly, if one is fortunate enough to be born within a privileged caste. Many whites are not only born privileged, but there’s a whole range of necropower, necropolitics at play to keep whites - and genders & minorities that ‘play ball’ - on top. Call it a ‘necro-meritocracy.’) The entertainment industry, television, prescription drugs, street drugs, sports, video games, the internet -- the lack of education -- have made many entirely oblivious to the death economy. Add in constant fear, engineered precarity & scarcity into the neoliberal & necro economies… the engineered fear of failure and financial ruin that motivates so many of us… or engineered systemic racism and expropriation, as a matter of economic & public policy & social control. And we are all walking through Death’s Twilight Kingdom, a matrix, a social experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong, w/ psychopaths running the asylum. All in the name of perpetuating the myth that predatory capital, crony-capitalism, death, and oligarchy (and the associated tyranny) are eminently preferable to a far more moderate & responsible economy and government (look at POTUS Biden touting the benefits of America’s death economy as a job creator); all in the name of perpetuating the myth that colonization, greed, systemic racism, and war are preferable to a commitment to equality and a mixed economy with strong social services (a commitment to education, equality, and the end of militarized conflict).
The most galling hypocrisy of all, America now is essentially a totalitarian state, a proto-Marxist state, a militarized police & mass incarceration state (despite all the propaganda about America being a capitalist Xanadu), where the means of production have been transferred into the hands of a small cadre of billionaires, monopolies, oligarchs, and private utilities. Except American communism (perhaps not entirely different from the former Soviet Union), and the death economy, operates to the exclusive benefit of the political class and the obscenely wealthy.
Notes:
For a deeper dive on Necropolitics and the Necroeconomy, read Cameroonian philosopher, Achille Mbembe.
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Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2024
