(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Preventing Political Violence: Structural Violence, Part One [1] ['View Profile', 'Back Of Bourke'] Date: 2026-04-19 Note: I am filling in for NY brit expat on short notice, so this will have to be quick and dirty after a week of writing another piece on a hard deadline. Further note: This is more than quick and dirty; it is more a series of notes wrapped around a barely there thesis. And the new site’s formatting inside diaries makes little sense to me, including how to preview before posting, arggh. After this goes live, I am going rewrite it before I write Part Two. This piece only addresses the first half of the article I am outlining. Just over two months ago, I began a Zoom course titled “Preventing Political Violence” hosted by Dr. Bandy Lee, the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President and The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew. While both books are bestsellers, even some of the most aware people I know do not remember Dr. Lee. I have been following her work since the first Dangerous Case appeared in 2017. The course is made of of four modules of one month each. The Individual Context of Political Violence The Social Context of Political Violence Structural and Existential Violence Course IV: Solutions to Political Violence There are two instructors besides Dr. Lee, Dr. James Gilligan who is also a psychiatrist who has worked on violence beginning with his work in some of the most difficult prisons in America (where Dr. Lee has joined him at points) and Dr. James Vrettos, a sociologist. All three of them are or have been working professors. There are also guest presenters during many of our sessions. This month, 2 of our weekly sessions have concentrated on Dr. Gillian’s entry in Violence in America: An Encyclopedia, NY: Charles Scribners, Sons, 1999, Vol. 3, pp. 229-233. I would like to summarize Dr. Gilligan’s entry and throw in a couple of questions or assertions. Dr. Gilligan has done extraordinary work illustrating that shame is at the core of violence perpetrated by murders he worked with in prison. But what most struck me about this encyclopedia entry of Dr. Gilligan’s was the data concerning the costs of structural violence. Previously, I had not understood that hard data was available on the deaths due to structural violence and the costs of eliminating it. But first, I would like to bring up what most people, including me, need to chew on. Defining structural violence seems easy enough, but I find the concept comes in and out of focus even for me. Even though I have been intuitively aware of structural violence at least since I have been a teenager, the lack of an ongoing discourse around structural violence in our country makes defining and redefining it necessary to before a wider discourse can emerge. Of course, this is not surprising given the fact that the term itself inherently represents a critique of capitalism. Even its presumed opposite, behavioral violence, presents some definitional problems, for example, Dr. Gilligan believes suicide is behavioral violence. I can see that some suicides, maybe even most, are behavioral violence, but I do not believe all suicide is behavioral violence. Gilligan begins his article with, It should be obvious that violence committed directly by individuals against other individuals is what we have been trained to perceive as violence, i.e. behavioral violence. Our news, local, state and national news, discusses violence purely from the point of view of direct violence. This obsession in our news media completely obscures the fact that direct violence kills fewer people than structural violence by a difference of orders of magnitude. Structural violence is collective violence; that is, collective violence is the result of decisions made by people who inflict that violence at a distance under the authority of law and custom, e.g. denying medical care or attacking women’s rights. The National Murder Rate in America Our national murder rate has never risen above 10 or 11 per 100,000. And this rate has been proclaimed a national emergency in our public discourse and increasingly so over my long lifetime, yet the death rate from structural violence among Blacks has been around 300 per 100,000, making structural violence deaths in the African American community 30 times larger than the deaths from behavioral violence. The distorted picture of the true nature, location and dimensions of violence in this country is founded on the intense focus on what I will call (Gillian doesn’t) the notion of criminal violence from the Old Testament and the idea of personal sin. In most ways, we seem to still think of behavioral violence as a moral failure. All of psychological science still takes a back seat to this ancient notion of behavioral violence as a moral failure. But modern science has begun to explain the roots of behavioral violence in everything from chemical imbalances in the brain to trauma experienced in inside the family. Trauma experienced inside the family includes a good dose of structural violence. Even though these explanations may be clear to people like you and I, people who read and write and who are trained in the scientific method; we have the advantage of reading books whereas the majority of Americans few to no books after they leave high school. Among that majority, behavioral violence is fixated in their minds as the result of some basic character flaw like alcoholism or lust or any number of beliefs rooted in ancient religions or folk beliefs. The former spouse of one of my best friends was murdered on Halloween night this past year. A single punch leveled this man causing brain damage upon first impact and even more brain damage once his head hit the sidewalk. He never regained consciousness. The legal system has defined this death as, at least in part, a hate crime because the victim was brown and gay. But more interestingly, I find my friend who worked for some years with psychiatric patients defaulting to the notion that the murderer is just a man who needs punishment. She is enmeshed in her understandable anger. Understanding the social and cultural forces that lead to this brief encounter on the sidewalk and how those forces brought two men together in an explosion of behavioral violence is very far from the victim’s family’s thoughts. The ancient notion of bad character and sin come into play automatically in this instance even for otherwise non-religious people. Structural Violence and Race in America The poverty race among Blacks in America is three times as high as among whites. Black babies die at two to three times the rate of white babies. Black mothers die at three to five times the rate of white mothers. Age-adjusted death rates for Blacks as a whole exceed rates for white by 300 per 100,000 per year. Death rates between the ages of 5 and 65 were higher in Harlem than Bangladesh, especially for men which is considerably higher than the number of deaths in places the U.S. government designated as natural disaster areas. Using high blood pressure as a variable, we recognize that while high blood pressure is common among American, West Indian and urbanized Black Africans, it is infrequent among rural Africans, those least exposed to the social and economic structure of colonialism, slavery, inferior class and caste status and White domination, i.e. excess deaths from hypertension in the Black American community are a response to a lifetime of being treated as inferior rather than the result of faulty heredity. Blacks are disproportionately relegated to more hazardous industrial jobs and higher risk military assignments. Are the inferences we can make from the above list accurate? Can we reasonably assert that relative poverty causes causes death? Instead, could Blacks cause the the excess deaths in their communities as a result of their own behavior or racial biological differences between Blacks and Whites ? Evidence suggests that the answer to the second set of questions is no. Two thirds of the excess mortality among Blacks from 35 to 54 years of age could only be accounted for understanding the direct and indirect effects of low socio-economic status, i.e. relative deprivation such as low family income, unequal access to health care and the lethal psychophysiological stresses caused by lower class and caste status. One race theorist I heard speak at a conference reversed his work on the social construction of race to pose a question concerning the biological effects of race on Black Americans. The increased deaths from heart disease among Blacks could be thought of as the physical manifestation of race in America. The question was meant to provoke the audience, who, of course, knew there was no such thing as biological race. Race has entered the bodies of Black Americans through structural violence. Might structural violence over time generate biological difference? That is an extremely provocative notion. Structural Violence versus Behavioral Violence Outside the USA In 1980, a study using Sweden as one example of a nation that had come closest to eliminating structural violence, i.e. Sweden had the least inequity in living standards, the lowest discrepancies in mortality between the extreme ends of the socio-economic spectrum and the highest overall life-expectancy. Comparing life expectancies everywhere else in the world with Sweden’s, the study found that 18 million deaths a year could be attributed to structural violence globally. They also compared the actual life expectancies of the different nations on earth as of 1965 and calculated there were 14 million deaths a year due to structural violence. As they put it, “wealth cannot only buy a higher standard of living, it also buys life itself.” Estimates of between 14 to 18 million deaths a year from structural violence represents something like hundred times the deaths resulting from behavioral violence per year globally. Comparing the deaths from WWII (49 million total deaths) and even hypothetical deaths from a nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million) made it clear that even the most deadly military violence humans have experienced or might estimate to experience exceeds the 14-18 million deaths already happening from structural violence, year after year with no end in sight. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. The United Nations Human Development Report 1998 points out that it would only cost about $40 billion a year, beyond what is already being spent (emphasis mine), to provide universal access to basic education and health care and adequate food, safe water and sanitation for everyone in the world, and reproductive health care for all women. This would represent the virtual removal of structural violence all over the world because education, health care, food, water and sanitation would lift all boats and reduce the impact of structural violence everywhere. This amount represents less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest individuals in the world, whose combined net worth is over $1 trillion. Tax the rich to end structural violence needs to be a slogan. This last set of numbers stopped me dead in my tracks. Structural violence is capitalism. More later. . . [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/19/800021518/community/y/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/