capitalism and discontent in mexico´s drug war

7/28/2019 capitalism and discontent in Mexico´s drug war

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How to cite: Pavón-Cuéllar, D. & Orozco-Guzmán, M. (2013). Capitalism and discontent in Mexico’s drug war . InA. Marvakis et al (Eds), Doing Psychology under New Conditions (pp. 157 – 165). Concord, Canada: CaptusUniversity Publications.

Chapter 18

Capitalism and Discontent in Mexico’s Drug War

David Pavón-Cuéllar & Mario Orozco-GuzmánUniversidad Michoacana, Mexico

SUMMARY

Capitalism is conceived as a cultural formation that involves, essentially, a specific form of discontent.This conception finds inspiration in both Lacan’s reduction of capitalism to a symbolic system thatconstitutes culture, and Freud’s proposal that culture is not only based on discontent, but actually

produces it. One way of generating discontent is to create needs whose satisfaction can never be trulyfulfilling. One example of such a need is drug-dependency, which, at least today, can only be un-satisfied through a drug war that entails an additional discontent. This latter discontent is analysed herein the context of the subculture that has developed in Mexico to meet the demand for drugs in theUnited States. It is argued that this need, and the demand it generates, cannot be explained if we fail toconsider the global context of capitalist culture and local drug-dealing and trafficking subcultures.

DRUGS, CAPITALISM AND PSYCHOLOGY

Demand for illicit drugs in the U.S. and the supply routes that traverse Mexico operatein the context of a capitalist system, a situation that, clearly, has psychological effects

on all those involved. Drug users despair over the price of the substances they crave,dealers think of narcotics only as a source of profit, while large-scale traffickerscompete ruthlessly for market share. Some are distressed by prices, others by profit-seeking, still others by distribution or circulation in the markets where drugs circulate,and everybody by the money associated with drugs.

The fact that drugs have become a market commodity has psychological effects on people, as does the economic logic upon which purchasing, dealing and traffickingdrugs rests. Through its internal logic, the capitalist system exerts effects on the psyche.These psychological consequences are not caused primarily by any phenomenon of agenuinely psychological nature, for their origin is economic, political and historical,what we may call “meta- psychological”, since they transcend the psychological spheresof action, motivation, experience, cognition and consciousness.

We conceive capitalism as a meta-psychological system. This means that it not onlytranscends the psychological sphere, but embraces it and is intimately related to itthrough the effects it generates. For instance, the money connected with drugs may giverise to certain thoughts, feelings and behaviours in dealers. Then all these psychological phenomena should be explainable through the metapsychology of capitalism.

But how are we to conceive the capitalist system in order to explain what occurs inthe psychological sphere? Of course, if it is to be convincing, this explanation must be based upon some patent connection between the explanandum and the explanans(Hempel & Oppenheim, 1948). Now, in order to make it possible to perceive this

connection between the psychological sphere that is to be explained and the explicative



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capitalist system, how are we to conceive this system? Our answer is to turn to the Lacanian conception of capitalism as a symbolic system, i.e., a signifying structure, alanguage that may circumstantially constitute the meta-psychological exteriority of theunconscious and determine what happens in the psychological sphere of consciousness.

This conception can be pieced together from various conceptual junctures in Lacan’stheory: first, his definition of “money” as “a signifier” with the idea that “economy” and“capitalist society” are dependent on “the signifier” (Lacan, 1999, p. 37; 1991, p. 105);second, a reading of Marx that understands “capitalism” as consisting in “signifyingrelations” and obeying a “signifying dialectic” (1958-1959); third, the idea that Marxwas a “structuralist” who “uncover ed” that which is “latent” in “capitalism”, that is, the“structure”, the “Other’s field” of “discourse” (2006, pp. 16-19); and, finally, therepresentation of “capitalism” as a “language”, an “unconscious knowledge” that“causes” and “exploits” consciousness (2006, pp. 34-65, 208-209; 2001b, pp. 424-434).

In describing capitalism as “a language”, Lacan portrays it as a “meta- psychological” system, a “symbolic system” of “the unconscious” that “commands” the

“imaginary realm” of “consciousness”, which is the sphere of “psychology” (Lacan,1998, pp. 224-259; 2001a, pp. 61-77). In this conceptualization, the psychologicalsphere is subordinated to the capitalist meta-psychological system, such that capitalismgoverns psychology. This is why, according to Lacan (1964-1965), psychology can onlyindicate “the way a human being can behave within the capitalist structure”.

Lacan regards the structure of capitalism as a signifying structure, capital as asignifier, and capitalism as language. Hence he also regards capitalism as culture, since“culture”, in Lacanian terms, is nothing more than “language” (Lacan, 1976-1977). Thesignifiers of language are the constituent elements of culture, and every “culture” has a“signifying constitution” (Lacan, 1961-1962). Our culture, for example, has thesignifying constitution of capitalism, which is a cultural formation. The symbolicsystem of culture embraces the capitalist system.

CULTURE, DISCONTENT AND WORK

If capitalism is culture, then we may apply the Freudian analysis of culture tocapitalism. Like culture – according to Freud – capitalism would involve something thatwe can describe as discontent (Unbehagen in German, which also means pain,discomfort, uneasiness or annoyance). Discontent would be not only an incidental problem or a contingent epiphenomenon of capitalism but, rather, the very structuralfoundation of the capitalist system, just as it is the basis of culture in Freud.

In the Freudian perspective, “culture is built upon drive renunciation” and “ based onnon-satisfaction” (Freud, 1996b, p. 96). Culture rests on its discontent. From a Lacanian point of view, we would say that every “system” of culture, as a “field of discourse”, depends on the fact that we renounce “the real” of “enjoyment” ( jouissance), whichmust be “excluded” from “the symbolic” (Lacan, 2006, pp. 17-19, 327).

The “renunciation of enjoyment” defines precisely the concept of “work” or “labour” (travail ) found in Lacan (2006, p. 17). In a certain sense, what distinguisheslabour from leisure activities is a cost , a renunciation of enjoyment, a recognizablediscontent that appears as a laborious or arduous aspect, i.e., trouble or effort,discomfort, or even a kind of pain or suffering, which accounts for the fact that one isusually paid, remunerated, or compensated for one’s labour. We may then understand

that the French word for work or labour, travail , derives from the Latin tripalium, an



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instrument of torture. In some way, we must be tortured, or renounce the enjoyment of life, in order for our life to be used as a labour power.

When “exploitation” of the use value of our life as a labour power occurs, there isalso “discontent” (Lacan, 2006, pp. 364-369), because we renounce the “enjoyment” of

“life” that Lacan reduces to an “undead drive” (Žižek, 2009, p. 121). In this view, theFreudian assertion that “culture is built upon drive renunciation” (Freud, 1996b, p. 96)is equivalent to another Freudian statement: the one which affirms that “every culturerests on a compulsion to work” (1996a, p. 7). Obligatory work is compulsory driverenunciation. Instead of enjoying a drive, we must make work of culture, of language,of the unconscious (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2010). This work of the symbolic system is a labour of symbolization, de-realization, renunciation of the real enjoyment of the drive and,therefore, of life itself (Lacan, 2006). Without this renunciation, neither symbolizationnor a symbolic system of culture can exist. This is the reason why culture entailsdiscontent, and why capitalism, as a culture, entails a specific form of discontent.

CONSUMING DRUGS

Discontent is inherent to capitalism, just as it is to every other cultural formation. By thesame token, culture offers what Freud (1996b) calls “sedatives”, such as “intoxicatingsubstances, which make us insensitive” to discontent (p. 75). But drugs also enable us to“break away” from the “outer world” of culture, and it is “this property” that“constitutes the danger and injuriousness of intoxicating substances” ( p. 78).

According to Freud, drugs are harmful because they free us from culture. Yet thiseffect of escaping from culture is inseparable from that of escaping from the discontentthat is inherent to culture. When we cease to renounce the real of enjoyment, we must

renounce the symbolic system of culture: we have to abandon this system for it holds no place for the enjoyment provided by drugs.To live the experience of the real of drugs, we must leave the symbolic of culture,

which excludes the real. But “it is impossible to leave” the “symbolic order”, becausethis system is a “universe”, and there is nothing “outside” it (Lacan, 2001a, pp. 47-48).When we attempt to leave it, we are not really leaving it at all. We always remain in thatsame system from which the drugs are removing us.

Perhaps drugs are considered so harmful because they make possible that whichremains impossible. They offer us an “impossible” real of “enjoyment” that “confinesus”, inevitably, “to suffering” (Lacan, 2009, p. 108). Enjoyment can only be suffered; itcan never be accomplished. It can only be sought time and time again. It becomes

addictive, turning into an eternal need whose satisfaction can never be truly satisfying.Drugs cannot truly satisfy the deeper desire to escape from culture and its discontent.

So satisfying the need for drugs, through which we intend to satisfy this desire, cannot be truly satisfying. The unsatisfying satisfaction of the need for drugs still pertains tothe discontent inherent to culture. Instead of escaping, drug addicts sink ever deeper intoculture and its discontent. In reality, the need for drugs is a cultural need, just as its un-satisfaction is a cultural discontent. For instance, in capitalist culture, the need for drugsis retroactively determined by a demand for drugs articulated by the symbolic system.

The un-satisfaction of the need for drugs may be compared to the un-satisfaction of the need for other commodities, such as films or videogames, which also plunge usdeeper into capitalist culture while apparently taking us out of it. But it is this culture

and its discontent that reflexively create the need for such commodities. Therefore this




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is a need of the very symbolic system of capitalist culture. The system logically needsthese effective resources in order to keep us within it, and so impose itself upon us, allthe while safely un-satisfying our dangerous desire to escape from it.

In a Lacanian perspective, our desire to escape from the symbolic system is caused

by the real that is expelled by the system, the real of renounced enjoyment, which is therejected object that Lacan identifies as the objet petit a. This object of desire is whatdrugs promise us and, ultimately, what addicts yearn for. Lacan (2006) describes it as areal “surplus-enjoyment” ( plus-de-jouir ) that is “ produced” negatively through itsexclusion from the symbolic system of culture (pp. 17-19).

The system can only include a surplus-value, a surplus of symbolic value, byexcluding the real surplus-enjoyment, the recovery of which will then be offered in theform of intoxicating substances. But these substances cannot recover that which isexpelled by the system. Indeed, far from achieving that, drugs function as chemicaldevices of a symbolic system that can only enrich itself at the expense of the real. Thus,in the Marxian perspective, the symbolic world of money, that today is also the world of

cocaine, can only “enrich” itself by “impoverishing” our real world (Marx, 1968, pp.45-46); the “vampire of capital”, like that of heroin, can only survive by absorbing our “life blood” (1985, pp. 179-195). And capitalism, which governs the methamphetaminemarket, can only create “capital” by losing our “life” (1968, pp. 282-286). Likewise, inLacan´s vision, the system can only create the symbolic by losing the real, can only perform work by producing a renunciation of enjoyment, and can only use our labour power by impeding us from enjoying our life (Lacan, 1991, 2001b, 2006). This lifecannot be enjoyed by us as life, as drive, because it has to be employed as labour force,as workforce, by a system whose workplaces are not just mines and factories, but alsonightclubs and the fantastic spaces of dreams, films, videogames and altered states of consciousness induced by drugs.

Like capitalism, all other “symbolic systems of culture” can only do their work –“thework of the unconscious”– by “exploiting the use value of our life as the labour force of the system” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2010, pp. 161-210). This exploitation permits the production of surplus-value that may take the form of the value of money, but also thatof any other symbolic value in culture, including the one we find in altered statesinduced by drugs. Though we may say that these states are induced by drugs, the truth isthat drugs are but their raw material, and their surplus of symbolic value for us can only be produced through our exploitation as the workforce of the system. But thisexploitation may be concealed by our identification with the system. After all, we are the system. I is an Other , and the Other’s discourse appears as my own. But it is not

mine. Even when I hallucinate it with the help of hallucinogenic drugs, I only express it,for it is articulated by the Other. It is the work of the unconscious.

I am simply the workforce of the unconscious, the labour power of the system, but Ican hardly become aware of this because of my identification with a “master -signifier” that represents the system as a whole (Lacan, 1991). In capitalism, for instance, I losesight of my exploitation at the moment that I identify with capitalism, with the capitalistclass, with the First World, with being a successful consumer in consumer society.Here, in malls and boutiques, among the healthy, wealthy people so well-identified withthe exploiting system, it is difficult indeed to become aware of being exploited by thesystem. To gain such awareness, it is better to move to the other side of the salescounter, to workplaces or places of suffering like factories and hospitals, and approach




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working people, sufferers, “the lame” or “the sick”, those who uncovered the truth of exploitation for both Freud and Marx (Lacan, 2009, p. 164).

Indeed, the truth of the Marxian proletarian, exploited by the capitalist system, wasalso the truth of Freud’s hysterics and neurotics, those exploited by the symbolic system

of culture, which embraces the capitalist system. Similarly, today, the truth of theexploited drug addict is the truth of the exploited drug producer.

What then do neurotics, hysterics, proletarians, drug-providers and drug addicts allhave in common? The answer is that they all encounter difficulties in achievingidentification with the system. Hence they suffer what they rightly perceive asalienation within that system. As long as they feel alienated within the system, they canlive the experience of their exploitation by the system; they can know “the truth” of their “proletarian” condition in the system (Lacan, 2006, pp. 172-173). This knowledgeof the truth corresponds, in Freud, to the experience of the work of the unconscious, asin symptoms or dreams, slips, parapraxis, or bungled actions. In all these situations, wecome to realize that we are just the enunciating workforce that expresses that which is

never consciously articulated by us. In the same way, Marxian proletarians know thatthey are just the workforce that does the work of the system, which openly decides whatthey are to do and how they are to go about doing it. This holds true as well for neurotics, hysterics or drug addicts, all of whom are aware of their powerlessness in theface of their own behaviour, addictions, symptoms and other manifestations of the work of the unconscious, of language, of the system.

PROVIDING DRUGS

The trans-individual system that exploits drug providers is the same one that exploits

drug consumers. Thus we may hope that the situation of consumers could beilluminated through an analysis of the experience of their providers. In Mexico, thisexperience is generally framed in a “command of violence” (Hernández, 2010, p. 17),which seems to be related to a violent “superego” that supports culture while pointing tothe most “skinned”, sensitive and vulnerable cultural sites (Freud, 1996b, p. 137). Thiscan be seen in the “codes of loyalty” among drug providers that “must be respected tothe letter” (Reyna, 2011, p. 54), though in reality they are constantly betrayed inillustrations of the phenomenon that McIntosh (1975) calls “thieves’ honour”, anddefines as “a set of highly volatile expectations, pressures and treachery” (pp. 48-49).

We know that a kind of thieves’ honour prevails everywhere in the capitalist system,which today also embraces the experience of drug providers as a particular experience

of capitalism, for it must be stressed that capitalism also conforms and governs the drugmarket. In Mexico, for instance, the drug trade produces an estimated annual profit of 25 billion dollars, money that contaminates some 78% of the country economy (Turati,2011, p. 33). There is, indeed, a free market of illicit drugs, characterized by capitalistforms of monopolization, accumulation and unfettered competition.

In the drug market, like everywhere else in the system, surplus-value is produced byexploiting a labour force whose “use value” is much greater than its “exchange value”,which corresponds to the minimum necessary to procure the “means of sustenance” of the “labour force” (Marx, 1985, p. 133). Let us examine the case of workers who package drugs in Monterrey, or that of peasants who cultivate opium in Guerrero(Turati, 2011, pp. 119-285). These people work hard to earn their living. In so doing,

they produce billions of dollars, but they remain poor. No concept of workers’ rights




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exists there, only persecution by the police, and the ever-present threat of being killed by rival groups or even by one’s own boss. Workers’ lives, disposable, throw-awaylives, have no value beyond their use value as a labour force within a capitalist systemthat exploits them thoroughly. Thus, they are obliged to renounce all enjoyment of life,

also thoroughly. This is how they experience capitalist culture and its discontent.The first beneficiaries of the exploitation of drug-workers are the so-called “drug

lords” whose identification with the capitalist symbolic system, through the master-signifier of ever-accumulating capital, is clearly demonstrated by the categoricalimperative that compels them to always obtain all the capital they possibly can, even at the expense of their neighbour . This new manifestation of the “super -ego” as the psychological expression of “culture” (Freud, 1996b, pp. 136-139) leads us to assumethat there can never be enough money to fill the real “emptiness” of the symbolicsystem (Lacan, 1986, pp. 153-165). And since all this money must be obtained even at the expense of one’s neighbour , we may also assume that the drug lords’ rivals will become their worst enemies. The drug market, like any other neo-liberal sphere of

exchange, thus becomes a battlefield in which competitors struggle for territories that permit their enrichment at the expense of their neighbours.

In the territorial struggle, some drug lords have been amazingly successful; for example, El Chapo Guzmán, one of the richest men in the world and number one on theFBI’s most-wanted list, a ruthless drug lord who has already eliminated most of hisenemies, both in Mexico and beyond its borders (Henley, 2011). Today, according tomost experts, the Mexican government protects him and actually helps him eliminatehis competitors (Ravelo, 2009). This subordination of the government’s will to El Chapo’s financial power confirms the Marxian postulate of the subordination of theconscious political State to unconscious economic forces (Marx, 1982), while alsocorroborating, in our Lacanian perspective, the subordination of the psychologicalimaginary sphere of deliberate decisions to the meta-psychological sphere of thecapitalist symbolic system (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2010).

El Chapo’s multinational organization not only provides 25% of all the drugsimported into the United States, but it also has its hands in many other economicactivities: the white slave trade, money laundering, smuggling, and illegal weaponstrafficking, all this in 47 countries, even Afghanistan, where it sells weapons fromEastern Europe to buy heroin for distribution in Western Europe (Peña, 2010; Gómora,2011). With his personal fortune estimated at more than one billion dollars, and his goalof accumulating more and more money in order to symbolically fill the real void, El Chapo is a perfect capitalist, a faultless incarnation of Capital, that “vampire of capital”

that can only stay alive, like the vampire of heroin, by absorbing our “living blood”(Marx, 1985, p. 179). This blood pertains not only to the 100,000 drug addicts killed byheroin each year (McBride, 2010), but also to the half-million Mexican drug workers(Turati, 2011, p. 33), or the 40,000 people who have been killed in Mexico’s drug war in the last five years (Kraus, 2011).

THE WAR ON DRUGS

When we analyse the death industry in Mexico’s drug war , we find, once again, that weare dealing with the logic of capitalism. People are being paid not only to kill, but alsoto bury the victims or otherwise get rid of their bodies. We could mention the case of

Santiago Meza, who was paid $2,400 dollars per month to dissolve bodies – 5 per week –




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in containers filled with acid and caustic soda (Turati, 2011, pp. 27, 192-193), a mixturethat transformed hundreds of bodies into the cold hard cash generated by thedisappearance of those human corpses. Just like any other machine of the capitalistsystem – or any other symbolic system – those dissolving vats may be conceived as

symbolizing machines that require the real in order to produce a symbolic surplus-valuethat may take the form of money. In this case, each human cadaver dissolved producedthe amount of $120 USD.

Turning to the hitmen who work for narco-enterprises, we learn that they earn from$400 to $4,000 USD per month, or around $40 dollars per victim (Turati, 2011, p. 119).A young killer was recently asked if he felt anything while performing his work; hisanswer : “we don’t see any people fall; all we see is money falling” (p. 110). As iscustomary in the capitalist system, the symbolic value of money takes the place of real people. The real “thing” is “killed” by the “symbol” (Lacan, 1999, p. 317). The symbolof $40 dollars is nothing but the symbolic representative of the real body. However, atthe end of symbolization, the dead body is nothing but the embodiment of its

representative. The body is “the signifier” of the $40 dollars that it “represents for thesignifier” of the killer, such that the relationship between the killer and his victim is notan “inter-subjective” one, but only an “inter -signifying” connection (Lacan, 2009, p.10). Likewise, the killer is represented before the boss by two different signifiers, or symbolic values, namely, the exchange value and the use value of his particular labour force. If the exchange value corresponds to his weekly wage of $100 dollars, then theuse value may be, for instance, the dead body it produces every week, or the $1,000dollars that El Chapo’s enterprise pays to the boss for each dead body.

Unlike money, the lives sacrificed for money cannot be counted or calculated.However, in capitalism, life becomes equivalent to dollars, quantitative like money.This quantitative symbolization, which imposes the arithmetical functioning of moneyon life, can be illustrated by the ejecutómetro (“execution-meter”), which on dailytelevision dutifully reports the number of people executed in Mexico’s drug war (Turati, 2011, pp. 30-31). Following this logic, one drug enterprise decided to kill 135 people to pay for the confiscation of 135 tons of marihuana (p. 30).

In the capitalist system, life becomes something entirely quantifiable, calculable,reducible to money or other quantitative values, such as economic data, sociological or psychological statistics, and so on. But the fact remains that there is always somethingreal in life, something irreducible to these symbolic values. And we know that manydrug consumers are looking for that. They use drugs in order to recover the same realthing that is destroyed by the acids and other means used to provide them with their

drugs. But drugs can be as destructive of the real as acid and similar substances.Just like the caustic soda, gunpowder and other fuels that supply the means of

production in the capitalist symbolic system, drugs make it possible to symbolizequalitative real life and transform it into the quantitative symbolic value of money. Inthe end, as in the milieu of the greedy Midas, there is nothing more than large quantitiesof gold, capital, money. This reminds us of the film Pecados de mi padre by NicolásEntel (2009), in which the son of Escobar, leader of the Medellin drug cartel, recountshow they were surrounded by money, but ravaged by hunger. In other words, their surroundings were full of the symbolic system of capitalism, but also full of itsdiscontent, full of the emptiness of the real. Is this not exactly that which theenvironment is becoming under the destructive power of capitalism? Capitalist culture

is destroying the natural environment and transforming everything into the countless




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symbolic forms of capital that contaminate a world where there is no more place for realfood. Where yesterday we found food, today we find bio-fuels and drugs.

CONCLUSION: FLATTERING THE SYSTEM

As a commodity, drugs are just another form of capital, and they entail a discontentinherent in the capitalist culture. They cannot remedy discontent without producing it.This discontent is suffered by both consumers and providers, for both do the work of renouncing the real enjoyment of their drives, of their lives, which must be transformedinto the labour force of the symbolic system. This is the only way in which the systemcan ensure the supply of – and demand for – illicit drugs, which in turn allows the systemto maintain us within it, while safely un-satisfying our desire to escape from it, either byconsuming drugs, or by participating in the clandestine activities of drug-trafficking.

By creating the illusion that we are escaping from the system, the illicit character of drugs constitutes a clever way of impeding us from really escaping from the system,

from challenging it, even subverting it. These threats to the system can be warded off bya daydream of revolt and liberation from within the system itself. Such a chimera mayenable the adaptation of those perceived as hopeless cases, those radically refractory tothe system. Dangerous marginal people may become drug-providers or consumers, andthus adapt to the capitalist system of consumerism and production. This adaptation permits the exploitation of people who seemed to be un-exploitable.

The need for drugs thus attaches drug consumers to the capitalist system. Their demand for drugs is their contribution to the functioning of the system. Their discontentis the evidence of their work for the system. So we need to analyse the system in order to explain the demand and the need for drugs, as well as the underlying discontent.

Here we do indeed assume that the psychological experiences of drug consumers canonly be explained in the global meta-psychological context of capitalist culture and inrelation to local subcultures of drug-dealing and trafficking. The discontent involved inthese subcultures might even be advantageously used by psychologists to elucidate thediscontent related to the need for drugs. This need must not be individualised, psychologised, naturalised, or abstracted from the capitalist symbolic system. There is adeep and close connection between the violent devices of the system that allow the provisioning of drugs, and the reflexive need to escape from this system, that urge us toconsume drugs. After all, as noted above, this need would also push us to becomeinvolved in clandestine activities, such as the work of drug-dealing, which create theillusion of being outside the system when we still are inside it and working for it.

The outlaw still works for the system. This is what Jacques Mesrine, a Frenchcriminal who escaped from prison three times, learned from the communist CharlieBauer. In the film by Jean-François Richet (2008), Mesrine intends to “explode thesystem”, but Bauer rightly accuses him of “flattering the system”. This is the kind of intervention that we would recommend to psychologists who work in prisons andrehabilitation centres, with drug users and providers. Both addicts and traffickers mustcome to understand that they are actually working for the system though they believethat their activities are challenging it. Their challenging impulse should be really used tochallenge the system and its functioning through addiction and trafficking.

A profound psychological intervention against addiction and trafficking must takethe form of a political intervention against the capitalist system that induces both

addiction and trafficking. This is not only the correct intervention for us, but it might




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also objectively be the most successful way of doing psychology in the conditionsexplained above. Under concealed exploitation, we must support addicts and traffickersto uncover how the system exploits their addiction and their trafficking.

Addicts and traffickers must realize that even if, like Mesrine, they escape from

prison or the rehabilitation centre, they remain in the system, though only on itsmargins, where the system still needs people working to preserve it. Here we also findexploited workers, such as addicts, dealers and other criminals, as well as prostitutes,vagrants, the sick, neurotics and hysterics, lumpenproletarians and even proletarianswhose exploitation is inseparable from an evident marginalization.

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capitalism and discontent in mexico´s drug war

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