Is Mass Murder and Violence that Character of the U.S. Social Structure?

• In Event: 4166 - Section on Marxist Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. What’s Love (and Gender) Got To Do With It? Marxist Anaylses of (In)Humanity and Labor

Abstract

C. Wright Mills had warned about the excessive bureaucratization in the social sciences during his time, but he could not have envisioned the tremendous amount of fragmented analyses that occurs when attempts to understand the structure of U.S. society.2 This fragmentation can be seen in the analyses of mass murder, violence, and other malaise in the U.S. that tend to be either under theorized, psychologized, or analyzed at the micro-level, without adequate macro-level relationship, evading real attempts at root-cause analysis. By using a Millsian approach that is rooted in the classic tradition of sociology, we attempt to understand the individual by understanding the social structure. Within this context we develop a better understanding of the dominant institutions of the U.S. state that we contend that coercion and violence play a prominent role in upholding its global dominance and national stratification system. It is from this perspective that we try to understand mass murder and violence from both a non-state and state-sanctioned perspective. It is in this context that we can understand that conditions in which mass murder and violence are byproducts of the U.S. social structure.

Author

• Vince Montes, San Jose State University