At one time, American workplaces were pretty secure. This changed in 1983, when a postal worker named Perry Smith used a shotgun to settle his grievances with his employer, inciting a string of postal massacres. The phenomenon spread to the private sector when, in 1989, a heavily-armed Joseph Wesbecker killed 8 people and wounded 12 before taking his own life at a printing press in Louisville, Kentucky. After that, no American workplace was safe. In 2003 alone, there were 45 recorded workplace massacres that left 69 dead and 46wounded. The carnage in the workplace is now being echoed in America’s schools. Several dozen lethal attacks have been perpetrated by students in schools around America since the 1980s, the most infamous occurring in Columbine High School in 1999.

In Going Postal (Soft Skull Press, 2005), Mark Ames suggests that these attacks are forms of class warfare carried out by people who are only half-conscious of the political content of their actions.

Revolutionaries are always nuts

People tend to think that rebellions against unjust social orders are carried out by rational people in order to achieve reasonable goals. “Yet most of the time,” Ames writes, “revolutions are ‘led’ by people we would call nutcases and who indeed were considered nutcases during their time (and in all likelihood were nutcases). While time and distance provide a romantic view of revolutions, at the time when they occur, they usually seem bizarre, uncalled-for, frightening, and evil to their contemporaries, which is why they almost always seem snuffed out at their inception.”

Human beings have a remarkable capacity to adapt to grossly unjust circumstances. Ames refers to this capacity as our “inner slave.” Mentally resilient individuals usually have a well-developed inner slave, but some people simply don’t have the emotional wherewithal to continue adapting as their oppression worsens. These are the people who are most likely to rebel violently against the people and institutions that are the cause of their suffering. If there is no ideological context for their rebellion in the larger culture, then their actions are interpreted as expressions of madness or depravity.

Slave rebellions during the American pre-emancipation era provide a good example of this principle. Until well into the 19th century, abolitionism was a very marginal and much-maligned movement, similar to the anti-globalization movement today. Slavery was seen as part of the normal order of things. During the few occasions when slaves rose up and slew their masters, the rebels were invariably portrayed as lunatics or monsters. Given the impossibility of effectively overthrowing their oppressors, any slave who did rebel probably had to be somewhat mentally unbalanced. It wasn’t until abolitionism achieved a critical mass of converts that the blame for slave rebellions was shifted from the slaves to the unjust conditions under which they laboured.

Ames contends that for slavery to work, slave-owners had to use strict discipline to develop unconditional submission; to develop a sense of personal inferiority, raw fear, and abject dependency in their slaves; to make their slaves accept their masters’ standards of conduct as their own; and, most importantly, to convince their slaves that their interests were identical to their masters’. These strategies worked very well. When uprisings happened, other slaves typically protected their masters, either by ratting out the rebels or by taking up arms against them.

Exploitation is rampant

Modern corporate culture uses the same strategies to ensure an obedient workforce. Ames argues that workplace and school massacres are a direct consequence of the increasingly savage exploitation of American workers since the “Reagan revolution.” American workers are being brutalized in ways that would have been unthinkable several decades ago.

Americans work an average of 184 hours more each year than they did in the 1970s. A typical husband-and-wife household worked 500 more hours in 2000 than they did in 1990. Today, Americans work 350 hours more per year than European workers. Nearly 40% of American employees work more than 50 hours a week. Those hours are spent in tighter and tighter confines: the average workspace in the mid-90s was 25 to 50% smaller than it was in the mid-80s. Job insecurity is now a structural feature of the American economy. Temporary and contract workers, who were once almost unknown in American businesses, now comprise between 12 and 20% of a typical corporation’s workforce. The unions that used to protect American workers have either been destroyed or crippled. The percentage of unionized private-sector employees in 2003 was half of what it was 20 years before.

Working longer hours in more precarious jobs isn’t improving American workers’ standards of living. When all the costs of raising a family are considered, the average two-earner family has less discretionary income today than single-income families had a generation ago. Whereas health insurance was almost universal before Reagan came into power, by 2003 only 45% of private-sector employees were covered by employer-sponsored health programs. Between 1981 and 2000, the number of families declaring bankruptcy because of a serious illness rose 2,000%. The rate of home foreclosures tripled between 1973 and 2002. To get by, families are relying heavily on credit. Credit card debt rose 570% between 1981 and 1999.

Middle-class under pressure

Blue-collar workers aren’t the only ones being squeezed. More than 90% of bankruptcies are declared by people in the middle-class. These statistics don’t capture the draconian changes in corporate culture since Reagan took office. Ames uses many case studies to document the vicious authoritarianism that’s become the norm in American workplaces, rewarding bullies and punishing the bullied. In a society without safety nets, employers use the threat of unemployment to terrify their workforce into submitting to the most grievous indignities.

“Stress” is too innocuous a word for the humiliation, fear, and despair many American workers are suffering. Indeed, American corporate culture, reinforced by popular conservatism, has robbed them of the language they need to make sense of their anguish. Victims are constantly blamed for their victimization. Fake smiles and forced optimism are now mandatory in the workplace; those who fail to comply are ostracized and scapegoated, ruining their chances of promotion and jeopardizing their employment.

Meanwhile, wealthy Americans are flourishing. The richest 1% of Americans captured 70% of all earnings growth since the mid-1970s. Between 1979 and 1998, the wealth of the top 5% of income-earners grew by 38%, while the bottom fifth saw their real income drop by 5%. In 1978, CEOs earned a little less than 30 times more than their average worker; by 1995, they were making 115 times more.

Same thing in schools

These class dynamics are recreated in America’s educational system. High school culture has always been cruelly stratified by wealth, beauty, and strength, but this stratification has become far more hellish as corporate values have restructured the educational environment. Schools, after all, socialize children into the wider social order, even if that order is psychopathic. Andy Williams, a freshman student who, in 2000, killed 2 students and wounded 13 people at Santana High in Santee, California, had, in the weeks before his killing spree, been ridiculed incessantly, beaten with a towel until he had welts, regularly burned on the neck with cigarette lighters, and sprayed with hair spray and then lit on fire. Despite this, none of the school’s staff protected him, and after the massacre, the school’s District Superintendent denied that Williams had suffered any significant bullying whatsoever.

Ames argues that these changes in American society provide the environmental context needed to make sense of workplace and school massacres. He writes that “Neither the FBI nor the Secret Service has been able to create a profile for a rampage murderer—not in the office world, not in the school world. The inability to profile these rage murderers is important because it strongly suggests that external factors, that is, environmental factors, create the rampage murderer, rather than internal psychological disorders of the rampage attacker.” Every profile that’s been tried has been too general to make any predictions with it. As with the slave rebellions of old, the real cause of the violence lies in the unjust environment in which it occurs.

They understand

This is, perhaps, the only way to explain why those who commit workplace and school murders often receive sympathy from people in the wider community, and even from people who survive their attacks. The Columbine killers have a very large fan base, and Ames recounts numerous examples of survivors of workplace massacres who say they fully understand the reasons for their murderous colleagues’ behaviour.

Going Postal is a dangerous book. By giving a political context to these massacres, it could act as a catalyst for a wider and far bloodier insurrection. Even if Ames’ book doesn’t catch on, the ideas in it will almost certainly take on a life of their own. If we’re lucky, American powerbrokers will realize just what’s at stake, and reverse Reagan’s revolution before the counter-revolution begins in earnest.