More Abuse Seen Where Mortgage Crisis Hit Hardest

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/health/research/more-abuse-seen-where-mortgage-crisis-hit-hardest.html

"Those who are most cowardly, who are least capable of
resistance themselves, become unyielding as soon as they
can exert absolute parental authority. The abuse of that
authority also serves as a cruel substitute for all of the
submissiveness and dependency people in bourgeois
 society acquiesce in, willing or unwillingly"
~ Karl Marx

What strikes me in these emerging reports is not the lumpen behavior of the individual parents (as the quote shows, even Marx was not above occasionally analyzing some phenomenon in these atomistic terms), but rather the dynamics of the social relations that are exposed in the trends. Labor in US capitalism has been socially devalued to the point where fundamental species survival mechanisms are being overridden as frustrated and overwhelmed parents can no longer cope and see no prospect of improving their lot.

I have long, and jokingly, maintained that human babies would not survive infancy if they were not so damned cute. This is a macabre  enactment of that joke in capitalist social relations.

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