Capitalism
the access of homeless people to social services, undermines their employability, and cements their social position, in a process more expensive than housing them but foundational to capitalist exploitation. And, as Vitale notices, even if criminalization were successful or cost-effective, it would still be unethical. In America, at least forty-one states have overtly anti-homeless laws. Seattle, for example, has a civil violation approach, in which, after a $1000 fine or 90 days in a jail cell for sleeping in public, the homeless can be banned from a major portion of the city. 20 Some efforts to remove homeless are clearly linked to economic development initiatives. The U.S.A. was built via settler colonialism, so clearing the land to develop properties has been one of its capitalist tactics since the attempted genocide of millions of indigenous people, with the remaining natives forced to live on reservations. In the U.K., the Vagrancy Act of 1824 is still in force. When invoked, it can ban people from entire areas, with no support offered, and with the threat of arrest and a £1000 fine. 21 This unequivocally demonstrates that your rights are recognized only if you have economic value. If you do not, you are treated as a nuisance, a pest to be cleared away, treated as less than human. Our humanity, therefore, rests on our contribution to the system. The homeless are those who have been failed by capitalism. But for capitalists to assist homeless individuals with their mental and physical health would invalidate the threat that incentivizes economic contribution: the survival of the system is more important than the survival of its people. The idea of a social security net built on charity is a conservative myth, the success of which relies on the same capitalist individualism that belittles social equality movements – by appealing to the social anxieties of individual morality so that charity is not questioned as the only legitimate mechanism to tackle social insecurity. In Capitalist Realism , Mark Fisher dissects how the attitude that there is no viable alternative economic system to capitalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, what he calls ‘capitalist realism’ . 22 This naturalization of an ideology (an idea analysed in the next paragraph) amounts to a tacit world view, creating – particularly in youth – a feeling of helplessness that manifests itself as negative thought-cycles and a negative self-image. Furthermore, the extent to which capitalism is embedded in our psyche as a natural fact in alignment with our ‘human nature’ automatically shifts any manifestations of social agitation to an individual fault in functio ning. Subsequently, these ‘mental health issues’ are isolated and treated as such; ‘capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact,’ when it is in fact ‘a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates.’ In privat izing these capitalist-created issues as chemical imbalances in the brain or as related to family background, not only is a new market created, but any notion of social causation is ruled out. Considering depression as an individual issue, often attributed to a chemical imbalance, reinforces capital’s drive to atomistic individual ization. The fact that depression is the condition most treated by the NHS requires a social explanation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the radical theories of Foucault, Deleuze, Laing and others, coalesced around schizophrenia, arguing that ‘madness’ is not a natural occurrence, but a political category. Fisher argues that a politicization of more common disorders (depression) is now necessary. There is an undeniable link between increased rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practised in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. The question is: how has it become acceptable to us that so many people feel this way? The answer is because capitalism creates these issues and is naturalized and internalized to the point where the individual is blamed (sometimes vilified), classified, and sold drugs
20 Vitale 2017. 21 Everything You Need to Know About the Vagrancy Act [n.d.]. 22 I am indebted to Fisher 2009 for much of the analysis here.
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