Confessions of a former bastard cop - An essay by a former police officer on why police are like this

In my framework, capitalism does push marginalized people towards gangs through their attempts to provide for themselves and their families. By denying them access to the wage and traditional forms of employment, they must find resources elsewhere, gangs being one of these forms of organization existing outside the system (engaging in illegal or criminal acts).

For this to be the work of capitalism specifically, we would have expected these issues to not exist in pre-capitalist or modern non-capitalist societies. But that's not really the case. In pre-capitalist societies it's fairly obvious, though the power-disparity between the state and gangs is usually not so high so the gangs can easily end up being warlords or local power brokers. In non-capitalist societies it's also not unheard of. Cuba has street gangs, China does, even the Soviet Union did.

What capitalism demonstrates to our society, and to our children, is that some should dominate and others should be the dominated (some should own and others should work); it encourages people, who, in a non-capitalist system, would not seek to have power over others, to seek it out, and encourages the oppressed, who, in a non-capitalist system, would consider themselves equal to others, to believe themselves inferior because of the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, their gender, etc. or to otherwise accept being dominated as the natural order of things.

This again is laying at the feet of capitalism forms of domination and interaction that existed long before capitalism, or even general commercialization, existed. This whole strain of Marxist thought that highlights capitalism as the root of all evil seems reductive and poorly considered to me. Most of the stuff you're complaining about seem like basic shortcomings of the human condition. It sounds like we're putting all the underlying problems that our economic system tries (and fails) to solve into a cognitive bucket called "capitalism" without thinking too deeply about how to solve those things instead. Capitalism may do a poor job of addressing them, but at the end of the day it's just an economic system. It's not a moral framework, it's not an ethical system, it's not cultural norms and mores. Economic systems are descriptions of how society makes decisions about the allocation of scarce resources to determine what to make, how much, and for whom. All that other stuff is determined along different processes that all interrelate but are still mostly independent.

I harp on this because when you erroneously lay all the problems at the feet of "capitalism" then you're diagnosing a problem in a way that doesn't lead to a solution. You're just kind of eliding the important question of what a better world would look like instead. Suppose you abolish capitalism one day (whatever that might look like), does the problem of scarcity go away? Does mankind's innately tribalistic nature? Does people's desire to accrue honor and esteem according to whatever cultural mores prescribe (and not just material goods) diminish in any way? I don't think they do. And I don't think just saying that we should be nicer to each other and engage with each other as human beings is a workable alternative.

Also, the idea that capitalism teaches an ideology of dominance and deference to natural hierarchy is basically wrong. Capitalism, insofar as it is a coherent ideology, is all about the wisdom of crowds and faith in the vast intricacies of market dynamics to average out power dynamics between people. Dominance along personality traits is much more of a pre-capitalist thing. In a purely capitalist mindset, money talks and literally everything else walks. Race, religion, sexual orientation, or anything else don't matter as long as your money spends. If anything, capitalism has helped society make great strides in undoing the logic of social class and dominance.

In fact, why do you think the Republican Party was originally a union of Whigs and abolitionists? It's because the factory bosses in the North resented having to compete with free slave labor in the South. They were ideologically committed to the idea of "free" labor paid for in wages. They believed pricing labor by unit instead of as chattel would naturally allocate it to its most valued uses.