What started as a regular rainy weekday morning commute for millions of New Yorkers turned into a horrifying nightmare as news broke of a mass shooting on the N train in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

The Manhattan-bound N train is one of the many express trains that shuttle millions of workers from working-class neighborhoods to the center of the city for work, and back home at the end of the day. It’s part of daily life for the city’s working class, a mundane extension of the workday visibly reflected on the exhausted faces of the riders.

But as the N train pulled out of the 59th street station at 8:24 on Tuesday morning, the weary expressions on the passengers’ faces turned to terror in an instant as an apparently unassuming passenger in a construction vest suddenly pulled out a gas mask, two smoke canisters, and a 9mm pistol. Utter panic erupted on the moving train as the man—now identified as Frank James—ignited the smoke devices and began shooting at passengers.

The five-minute ride from 59th street to 36th must have felt like a hellish eternity for the commuters on that train, screaming and choking on the smoke, scrambling across the narrow train car in search of any bit of shelter. When the train pulled into the station, the open doors immediately flooded the platform with smoke and blood as injured passengers swarmed out and across the floor.

Moments later, the conductor instructed all uninjured riders to board the adjacent R train, which took them to the next station at 25th street. Camera footage at a nearby station revealed that James had fled the scene by boarding the R train with the rest of the crowd, exiting with the other passengers at 25th street.

The shooter was arrested Wednesday afternoon in the East Village after a call to a police tip line—reportedly from the shooter himself. This detail was passed over by the NYPD commissioner who proudly announced the capture, “We were able to shrink his world quickly. There was nowhere left for him to run.” James has been charged with the federal crime of committing a terrorist act on mass transit.

“There’s violence everywhere”

In total, ten people were shot in the attack, and at least a dozen others suffered injuries from smoke inhalation, panic attacks, and falls during the stampede to escape. Victims interviewed by local news reporters were in a state of shock, many said they may never be able to ride the subway again. Although five victims are in critical condition as of this writing, none of the injuries are expected to be fatal.

Following the incident, all subway lines in the western part of Brooklyn were powered down while police scoured the surrounding Sunset Park neighborhood, a working-class district with many immigrants from across Latin America and China. As commuters searched for other ways to get to work, lines at nearby bus stops stretched around the block. But with millions depending on the subway system, it wasn’t long before authorities concluded their investigation at the station, city workers got the platform cleaned up, and the train lines were up and running again.

The morning after the attack, commuting workers were forced to return to their daily routine, down into the subway tunnel to make their way to work. But the mopped floors of the 36th street station didn’t remove the lingering sense of dread on the platform.

Several workers interviewed by the New York Times described the increased anxiety in the air. “I’m a brave person, but I’m human,” said Reggie Thompson, a 35-year-old postal worker. “I can see the look in everybody’s eyes is concern. Me too. Everybody’s looking at everybody twice right now.”

Juan Vicente, a 33-year-old contractor, felt lucky he had narrowly missed the incident while riding on the same train line the morning before. “We have no choice, we have to do it, we have to work, especially if we have no car,” he said. “It’s dangerous every day.” Paul Simeon, a 52-year-old chef, felt resigned to the circumstances. “It’s pretty normal, there’s violence everywhere.”

More fear, more policing, more terror

The shooting has further spiked the fear and anxiety so many people were already feeling, sentiments the ruling class fosters and knows how to exploit. Without skipping a beat, all the major media outlets linked Tuesday’s incident to the growing rates of crime on New York subways, and to the rising trend of violent crime across the country.

This heightened fear played right into the hands of New York Mayor Eric Adams, a far-right Democrat and former police captain who ran on a “law and order” campaign. The mayor seized the opportunity to reinforce his campaign message in a triumphant televised statement, at a time when many working-class people feared for their safety. “My fellow New Yorkers, we got him! We got him! …We are going to protect the people of this city and apprehend those who believe they can bring terror to everyday New Yorkers.”

In a cynical attack on the BLM movement, Adams, who is Black, used the occasion to argue that the issue of gun violence showed a double standard in the fight against police terror. “Here’s my question that I put out to the city—I thought Black Lives Matter. Where are all those who stated Black Lives Matter? If Black Lives Matter, then the thousands of people I saw on the street when Floyd was murdered should be on the street right now stating that the lives of these Black children that are dying every night matters. We can’t be hypocrites.”

But Adams and the NYPD are no defenders of poor and working-class Black neighborhoods. In his first weeks in office, the mayor restored the notorious plain-clothes “anti-crime” police unit, which had been disbanded in June 2020 in response to the mass protests. The police commissioner at that time, Dermot Shea, acknowledged that the anti-crime unit, known for being the most aggressive in policing the poorest parts of the city, was a holdover of the “stop and frisk” era, which targeted people of color so blatantly it was considered unconstitutional. He called the disbanding of that unit “a seismic shift in the culture of how the NYPD polices this great city . . . It will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect.” It didn’t take long for Adams to reverse that “seismic” shift, or for the Democratic Party to distance itself from the George Floyd movement to embrace a more consistent pro-police message.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s shooting, the city doubled down on its efforts to militarize the subway. Stations were flooded with highly armed police who carried out random backpack checks. The mayor announced that the city was looking into options for installing metal detectors throughout the subway system. These changes will have lasting repercussions, especially for Black and brown commuters, as well as the homeless. Boosted by the heightened public mistrust and fear of random violence, the stage is being set for a new period of heightened police terror and harassment, which has already been on the rise in recent years.

The search for “motives”

In the coming days and weeks, detailed investigations will throw a spotlight on the life and mentality of Frank James, in an attempt to explain what turned this man into a mass shooter. Already, several media outlets have combed through the videos on his (now deactivated) YouTube account, where he posted long rants about events in the news, full of racist and violent commentary about Blacks, whites, Jews, Latinos, and others.

The videos also show a preoccupation with Eric Adams and his policies on crime and homelessness. In one video, James mocks the mayor’s “subway safety plan” to increase police presence, suggesting that he could commit a crime in the subway without getting caught: “With this program in place, with all these police—I’d still get off. I know I could get off because they can’t be everywhere… Those who go on to commit crimes, like shooting? That means you have to have police in every station, and that’s not possible.”

In another video, he refers to the mayor’s plan for deploying police to evict homeless people from the trains, while sending social workers to provide information about the city’s social services. He addresses the mayor by name: “Eric Adams, Eric Adams: What are you doing, brother? What’s happening with this homeless situation? . . . Every car I went to was loaded with homeless people. It was so bad, I couldn’t even stand. I had to keep moving from car to car.”

Referring to the city’s plan to provide social services, James states in a video that he was admitted to a New York Behavioral Health clinic, “Mr. Mayor, I’m a victim of your mental health program . . . These are the people that was supposed to be helping me. They made me worse! . . . They made me more dangerous than anyone could ever fucking imagine. These are the people that Eric Adams wants to send out to help the homeless and whatever the case may be. It ain’t gonna happen.” In the same video he says, “I’m 63 now full of hate, full of anger, and full of bitterness.”

Making sense of senseless violence

Whatever particular form or combination of hatred motivated this attack is beside the point, and fails to explain the broader problem lurking in the foundations of this society. Just a few weeks earlier, nine mass shootings—in which four or more people were shot—were tallied in a single weekend. The fact that a horrifying incident like the one in Brooklyn has become “pretty normal” in the US today is an unmistakable sign of social decomposition that goes deeper than any individual motives.

A more useful question is, what is it about a society that creates such extreme alienation that people decide to try to take the lives of strangers? What kind of conditions give rise to such an anti-human sentiment?

Though such questions are rarely posed in the mainstream coverage of mass shootings and violent crime, a look at past periods of history that experienced a sharp uptick in violence reveals some interesting patterns. For example, in his book American Homicide, the historian Randolph Roth argued that the US experienced extraordinarily high rates of homicide in the decades leading up to revolutionary crises, when trust in government authority was on the decline. He described the 1840s up to the 1870s—from the run up to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath—as one such period.

According to the thesis put forward by Roth: “That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy.”

In other words, periods of heightened polarization and political crisis, periods when the ruling institutions are perceived to be illegitimate or rigged, or when the very structure of society is being questioned, tend to give rise to a higher inclination toward violent lash outs.

To be sure, this is a general trend that reflects the heightened tension and anxiety that permeates society, rather than a trigger or direct cause of a particular incident. It doesn’t fully explain why a mass shooter carries out a particular attack, but it points to the kind of social environment that produces mass shooters. Just as the specific cause of a wildfire is typically a secondary accidental spark, the explanation for a “wildfire season” lies in the broader environmental conditions.

Since 2020, the social cocktail of misery has been intensified by the chaos of the pandemic and the economic fallout, not to mention the many longstanding crises that are coming to a boiling point—in relation to the climate, the opioid epidemic, depression and mental health, housing insecurity, etc. In a system that incessantly puts forward the idea that everyone is an individual responsible for their own lives and conditions, all of these factors are pushing more people to the breaking point.

Uprooting a social sickness

In Reason and Revolt, Alan Woods and Ted Grant point out that the historic impasse of the capitalist system expresses itself in an underlying social disintegration—a sense that “reason has become unreason,” to use Hegel’s expression.

The prevailing sense of disorientation and pessimism finds its reflection in all sorts of ways, not only directly in politics. This all-pervasive irrationality is not an accident . . . We live in the midst of a society in decline. The evidence of decay is present on all sides. Conservative reactionaries bemoan the breakdown of the family and the epidemic of drugs, crime, mindless violence, and the rest. Their only answer is to step up state repression—more police, more prisons, harsher punishments, even genetic investigation of alleged “criminal types.” What they cannot or will not see is that these phenomena are the symptoms of the blind alley of the social system which they represent.

The mouthpieces of the ruling class seize every opportunity to stoke fear and division, to spread the feeling that “we all need to be protected by the state, the more police the better.” Local news headlines constantly focus on crime, fueling a sense that there’s danger around every corner and that “you can’t trust anyone.” The typical media debates fall into the same broken record about gun control, mental illness, background checks, etc. But what these tragedies invariably bring out is the inability of the capitalist state to do anything to counteract random acts of terror.

In a statement on the day of the shooting, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said, “It has to end and it ends now. And we are sick and tired of reading headlines about crime, whether they’re mass shootings or the loss of a teenage girl or a 13 year old. It has to stop. I’m committing the full resources of our state to fight this surge of crime, this insanity that is seizing our city, because we want to get back to normal. It has been a long, hard two years. That’s what we crave—that sense of stability and normalcy.”

But this is the normalcy of capitalism. Until this system is overthrown, and the miserable conditions of life replaced with dignified living standards, there will be no stability. Until there is universal access to quality healthcare, housing, education, culture, decent work and wages—i.e., until there are truly human conditions of life, the social sense of anxiety and “insanity” will not stop. That world is possible. The material conditions for a better life for all exist today. It will require a socialist revolution to realize that potential and lay the basis for ending these horrors.