Two Captives: The Self-Defense Case for Socialism
The right to defend oneself from violence is widely considered to be universal and inalienable, but its application in capitalist society is artificially narrowed for convenient reasons.
Bound and gagged, a young man has been left to starve in the basement of his kidnapper. Though weakened from a lack of food and water, he manages to untie himself, and, arming himself with a nearby plank of wood, he lies in wait. The kidnapper enters the basement and is ambushed, suffering a powerful blow to the head. The victim escapes with his life; paramedics are unable to resuscitate the kidnapper.
Across town lives a second captive of sorts: a homeless and destitute woman. She has thus far been able to survive by visiting soup kitchens and staying in shelters. However, recent economic downturns, combined with the reduction and removal of government safety net programs, has drastically reduced her options. Desperate, she begins to steal food, gradually becoming more comfortable with breaking the law. One night, after a series of failed shoplifting attempts, she sees a rich CEO drive into the neighborhood and begin talking to a prostitute. She accosts the man with a knife, but he fights back briefly and she stabs him before running off with his cash. The rich man does not survive the encounter, but luckily she escapes police detection and the second captive now has enough money to survive for several more months.
Virtually every human society incorporates some form of self-defense exceptions for violence in its law code, but in order to preserve the capitalist order, the delineation is placed at arbitrary points in the US. It should go without saying that most would consider the actions of the first captive self-defense, but few would say the same for the second.
Why is this? If it is considered self-defense to fight back against a kidnapper who is slowly starving an individual in his basement, why is it not self-defense to fight back against a group of kidnappers who are slowly starving an individual on the streets? More than 10% of Americans in 2020 struggled with food insecurity. Is the homeless woman not just as much a victim of the CEO as the hostage was to his kidnapper?
True, the city is larger and more open than the basement, but in either case the alternatives to starvation are non-existent should the government remove what remains of the social safety net. This has happened before: Reagan turned out hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets, then callously rationalized his indifference by arguing that “the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice” and deriding the recipients of government programs as “welfare cheats.” Today, at least 12 million children in the U.S. live below the poverty line; tens of thousands of Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance; millions die due to exposure to pollution; opportunities for living, let alone comfortably, are rapidly evaporating and the likelihood of a political solution in the 2020s is vanishingly small—the putative political alternative to the kidnappers themselves (the Democratic Party) repeatedly show themselves to be just as vicious and uncaring.
Could the captive on the streets instead rely on less violent actions to ameliorate their situation? Self-defense as a rationale for violent force does require all other options to be exhausted first. Could the starving individual have instead relied on the potential largesse of a passing stranger, for example, or resort to a lifetime of thievery? This is an increasingly unrealistic alternative, because private charity is not equal to the task of caring for the downtrodden in the best of times, let alone with an economy teetering on the brink of collapse in the midst of an uncontrolled pandemic, and we would not say that the captive in the basement deserved to starve simply because he was unable to catch a mouse or subsist on the basement's roach population. Nor would we excuse the woman’s death because she was unable to find a winning lottery ticket or move to a more charitable or resource-rich area (mobility, and unclaimed land, being in finite supply). In fact, studies have shown that the richer one is, the less likely they are to share the wealth:
But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness. Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused. Another reason has to do with our attitudes towards greed. Like Gordon Gekko, upper-class people may be more likely to endorse the idea that “greed is good.” Piff and his colleagues found that wealthier people are more likely to agree with statements that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally defensible. These attitudes ended up predicting participants’ likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior.
Given the growing income inequality in the United States, the relationship between wealth and compassion has important implications. Those who hold most of the power in this country, political and otherwise, tend to come from privileged backgrounds. If social class influences how much we care about others, then the most powerful among us may be the least likely to make decisions that help the needy and the poor. They may also be the most likely to engage in unethical behavior. Keltner and Piff recently speculated in the New York Times about how their research helps explain why Goldman Sachs and other high-powered financial corporations are breeding grounds for greedy behavior. Although greed is a universal human emotion, it may have the strongest pull over those of who already have the most.
There is also the issue of self-responsibility. Are the circumstances leading up to a victim’s capture relevant in any way to the question of how much they deserved to suffer? If the kidnapped man had been captured due to his own stupidity or drunkenness, we would not excuse his forced starvation. On the other hand, if the homeless woman had foolishly gambled on the stock market or developed a costly drug habit, proponents of the free market would be quick to point out that her starvation was her own fault—that as a rational actor she ultimately decided to starve. In response, we could suppose that the woman on the street was impoverished through nothing more than bad luck (or something else entirely unrelated to her lack of rationality), or simply ask how this kind of economic rationality is even obtainable, especially for those who are already on the brink of total poverty. It has, for example, been established that food insecurity during the formation of a child’s brain will inhibit their capacity for language and memory, and that exposure to pollution during pregnancy likewise stunts infant brain growth. If the capacity for rational thought is necessary to excuse the starvation of the second captive, but if she lacks access to the same potential cunning and financial savvy as those born to richer parents, then how could she, or anyone else, have freely chosen to starve? Even forgetting the physical and mental damage caused by the experience of poverty, how could a struggling family ever evaluate economic decisions with the luxury and clear-headedness of a financially stable competitor? The playing field is simply not equal—poverty, and the danger of starvation, defeats economic rationality. The rich, on the other hand, have plenty of economic rationality and know that every second they continue to hoard wealth and endanger the lives of others, they are making themselves valid targets. We could therefore argue that because they have perfect economic rationality, the wealthy are aware of the potential for robbery and consent to be harmed as a result of their shortsighted hoarding.
It is clear that the excess resources currently being held by the richest Americans have not been acquired through any kind of fair or rational exchange; at no point in history has resource redistribution been undertaken to ensure a level or fair playing field—those who got rich by enslaving, oppressing, and killing others in past centuries have passed along this wealth in an essentially unbroken line to its current holders (and the lack of income mobility in the U.S. attests to this, as does its ever-increasing inequality). The rich have no claim to this wealth, and their greed carries horrific consequences for the less fortunate in America, let alone throughout the rest of the world.
Indeed, the richest Americans only got richer during the pandemic: “The 400 richest Americans added $4.5tn to their wealth last year, a 40% rise, even as the pandemic shuttered large parts of the US, according to Forbes magazine’s latest tally of the country’s richest people.” More than one million in the US alone lost their lives to COVID-19 because shutting down the economy was deemed too costly, while the ultra-wealthy only added to the coffers. What self-defense rights did those people have? What self-defense rights can possibly exist for someone who is being exposed to a potentially deadly virus just to ensure the health of the stock market?
The imperilment of both captives in these cases is also the consequential result of actions taken by the respective kidnappers. The rich man is perhaps less directly involved in the suffering of the homeless woman, but this is only a difference of degree: all rich capitalists (and indeed, all willing participants in the capitalist system) are directly responsible for everyone else’s lack of access to life-saving resources. We would not excuse the kidnapper by noting that the basement walls also had a hand in the young man’s starvation, nor would we do so if he had several accomplices (or several thousand). Guilt spread is not guilt diffused—we all benefit from the suffering of the captives, and any of us living in relative comfort are ourselves just as valid targets as the richest venture capitalist. That is, of course, assuming that once accosted we refuse to help as the CEO did. If we help directly, then our deaths can be averted and both potential victims can be saved. This is why a political solution which guarantees a right to food, shelter, and healthcare is necessary: avoiding unnecessary violence through cooperation is the only reason human civilization exists in the first place. The free market invalidates even that basic justification and we might as well return to nature.
The question then becomes: if one’s potential starvation justifies violence against all others, why focus on the rich as targets and not other impoverished individuals? The disadvantaged, after all, steal from and kill one another frequently in the US, due to conveniences of geography and proximity. Gang violence is the best example of this outcome, but the difference in aftereffect is important here. Violence against the CEO would allow one to ameliorate his or her circumstances to a much greater extent than violence against a fellow destitute, a fact which has not escaped the attention of the rich, who work to ensure that economic unrest stays within the inner city and among the disadvantaged. On a purely qualitative level, killing one person to keep living for a month is more excusable than killing ten to accomplish the same thing. Yet it is also true that preying on one’s fellow poor is easier than finding a vulnerable, rich CEO carrying cash and salable goods—a successful murder against another victim of capitalism might only net a few dollars, but they are in increasing supply and weaker by the day. In the end, though, this latter action has no impact on the system itself, whereas targeted violence against the rich serves to both alleviate poverty and strain the system which is maintaining it. Violence among the poor lacks a revolutionary character.
To use another timely example, we would not excuse the recent activity of the U.S. military abroad by arguing that some number of its members enlisted to escape poverty; they are engaged in killing their fellow poor in other nations, not the ones most responsible for their financial predicament, who all reside in gated communities within the US. It is important from a revolutionary standpoint to focus on the long-term goal of the establishment of a socialist system so that the need for violence itself is minimized, and asking those with the greatest capacity to act freely to take on a greater responsibility in doing so, as well as a greater accountability to their current victims, is justified under any self-defense principle. After all, the kidnapper has the most control over his victim, and letting him go would not endanger the kidnapper in any way. Similarly, US billionaires could give up an infinitesimal fraction of their wealth to accomplish an amount of good that would practically see them worshipped. Instead, they manipulate the system to hoard as much wealth as possible and give sizeable donations to politicians who work to maintain the system of unthinking brutality.
The homeless woman from our example is in reality as much a captive as the young man held in the basement, in both a figurative and literal sense. The lack of access to common goods and the unavailability of unsettled land presents a barrier less visible yet no less effective at killing than the walls of the kidnapper’s basement. She is morally forgiven for taking the life of the CEO in order to feed herself if the young man is morally forgiven for killing his captor in order to escape. Yet violence begets violence, and the resource holders would surely guard their position with every tool at their disposal should their many victims begin to fight back. We arrive at the distressing conclusion of centuries of capitalist greed: we are all both victims and oppressors, trapped in a system that tarnishes us from birth and offers no real recourse to reformers, save the vicious and unthinkable. Better to end the capitalist system now than to continue making ourselves both monsters and victims by excusing its inherent violence.