Thursday, September 13, 2012
The territorial logic of the capitalist state posted by Richard Seymour
The movements from Tahrir to Liberty Square have in different ways posed the question of space and political authority.
But perhaps there has been a bias toward approaching this question mainly on the level of international or transnational action, whether it be in the form of ‘globalization’ or imperialism. Somehow, and I know this bothers you as much as it does me, New Labour’s Regional Spatial Strategies were just not as interesting as the Bush administration’s ‘Green Zone’ strategy in Iraq.
It is natural enough that the ‘spatial turn’ of social theory was linked particularly to the question of imperialism in the last decade. This is not only because the US army corps of engineers could be found building Xanadu compounds, permanent military bases and separation walls in Iraq, which just is an inherently interesting type of spatial activity. It is because when a state projects political authority outside of its sovereign, bounded territory, and begins the task of organising the political space of another nation, the seeming naturalness and obviousness of the relationship between space and political power is necessarily problematized. Territorial authority looks very clearly like what it is: an artifice, a production, multi-tiered effort of coercion, culture war, political organization, economic strategy, material incentives, symbolic organization, the construction, reconstruction and moving of internal frontiers, and so on. Suddenly, the means by which we ourselves are dominated become visible. Suddenly we get to see how it is all constructed: it isn’t called ‘state-building’ for nothing. We can learn a lot from the cities defiled by empire, as Derek Gregory has shown us.
And, to be fair, things aren’t quite as one-sided as I am painting them. It is true that the organization of cities, metropolitan boroughs, counties, and regions, was much more of a going concern during the ‘urbanisation’ boom of the Sixties and Seventies. Henri Lefebvre and his student Manuel Castells were took the lead as social theorists throwing into question the embedded assumptions of Chicago School ‘urban theory’, partially in response to the jacqueries of 1968, and the French state’s urban rationalisation project. Each understood in different ways – Lefebvre as a marxist-humanist, Castells as an althusserian - that the ideology of ‘urbanism’ was symptomatic, coming just as the urban-rural divide was really dying, the city in its old form as a sort of isolated hive of commerce and culture finished. This ideology adverted to certain real long-term trends, intimately connected with the state and its functions in allocating production facilities, and ensuring the conditions for collective consumption (of housing, health, education, municipal lighting, rubbish collection, etc.) in its extended sense allowing the reproduction of labour power. But the explanation of these issues was obscured by the deployment of an object, the ‘urban’, which lacked rigorous definition. They understood the ‘urban’ to refer to a set of social predicaments, political antagonisms, and so on, among and between definitely social classes and interests, which required a more sophisticated socio-spatial analysis to cope with scalar reorganization that was global and affected not just the metropolitan area, but also the status of national states as the strategic basis for production. This type of analysis, sometimes leavened by poststructuralist additives, has been sustained through the years by the likes of Neil Brenner, David Harvey, Ira Katznelson and Mike Davis. Arguably, such work has become more important in recent years. For example, Harvey’s Right to the City, though simply following up on his long-term research agenda, seems very Zeitgeisty in the wake of Occupy.
Still, there’s a logic to focusing on the axis of imperialism, since the emphasis on interstate relations and antagonisms forces one to consider the national territory not as a spatial given but as a social relationship. What I want to do in this, another of my exceptionally long, finger-wagging, listen-up-and-do-as-you’re-told posts, is try to explain something about the capitalist state and its spatial logics. I start at the inter-state level, by traversing some of the issues thrown up by imperialism, and then drill down to national states and their ordering of space. Let me start with the ‘new imperialism’.
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Theories positing a 'new imperialism' pivot on the intersection of two logics of power, conceptually separate though inextricable in practise. According to David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi, these logics are: the capitalist logic and the territorial logic. (I’m aware that Alex Callinicos also aligns with this tendency, but I see his dichotomy as being slightly different, focused on the relative autonomy of the geopolitical from the economic logic). Harvey assigns a distinct type of spatial organisation to each of these logics of power. Thus, the territorial logic is that of states, whose power is based in command of a determinate territory and "the capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources". The capitalist logic of power produces capillary flows of capital accumulation which flow "across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities".
Lefebvre looms large in much of this thinking, especially for Harvey. For Lefebvre, the relationship between the state and space has to be constituted along several axes. First, there is the production of a national space itself, a national territory that bears the marks of human generations, classes, political forces, etc. Of course, the capitalist state by no means coincides with the nation – but as we will see, this is beside the point. Capitalist states organise territory as national space. Second, the state constitutes within the territory a matrix of institutional spaces appropriate for a social division of labour, and the imperatives of political dominance. Each of these spaces, from the borough to the post office to the police station, condenses a system of social expectations and responses, which become so 'natural' and 'obvious' that they are never articulated. Third, the state composes a 'mental' or imaginary space, a set of representations through which people live their relationship to the people-nation, the state and the territory.
According to Lefebvre, the spatiality of the state constantly comes into conflict with "the pre-existent economic space that it encounters", "spontaneous poles of growth, historic towns, commercialized fragments of space that are sold in 'lots'":
"In the chaos of relations among individuals, groups, class fractions, and classes, the state tends to impose a rationality, its own, which has space as its privileged instrument. The economy is thus recast in spatial terms - flows (of energy, raw materials, labor power, finished goods, trade patterns, etc.) and stocks (of gold and capital, investments, machines, technologies, stable clusters of various jobs, etc.). The state tends to control flows and stocks by ensuring their coordination. In the course of a threefold process (growth - i.e., expansion of the productive forces - urbanization, or the formation of massive units of production and consumption; and spatialization), a qualitative leap occurs: the emergence of the state mode of production (SMP) (mode de production etatique). The articulation between the SMP and space is thus crucial. It differs from that between previous modes of production (including capitalism) and their manner of occupying natural space (including modifying it through social practice). Something new appears in civil society and in political society, in production and in state institutions. This must be given a name and conceptualized. We suggest that this rationalization and socialization of society has assumed a specific form, which can be termed: politicization, statism." (See Lefebvre, 'Space and State', in Neil Brenner and Bob Jessop, State-Space: A Reader, Blackwell, 2002)
I dare say the concept of the 'state mode of production' is theoretically extravagant, stretching the concept of the mode of production beyond breaking point, but the thrust of this is clear: there are two spatial logics of power, one spontaneous, random, commercial and capitalist, coming 'from below'; the other planned, ordered, rationalised, non-capitalist, coming 'from above'.
Equally, some of the inspiration for this distinction may have to do with the work of the geographer G William Skinner, who certainly influenced Arrighi, and the sociologist Charles Tilly, who extrapolated from Skinner's conclusions. In an important book, Coercion, Capital and European States 900 - 1900, Tilly wrote:
"G. William Skinner portrays the social geography of late imperial China as the intersection of two sets of central-place hierarchies ... The first, constructed largely from the bottom up, emerged from exchange; its overlapping units consisted of larger and larger market areas centered on towns and cities of increasing size. The second, imposed mainly from the top down, resulted from imperial control; its nested units comprised a hierarchy of administrative jurisdictions. Down to the level of the hsien, or county, every city had a place in both the commercial and the administrative hierarchy. Below that level, even the mighty Chinese Empire ruled indirectly via its gentry. In the top-down system, we find the spatial logic of coercion. In the bottom-up system, the spatial logic of capital. We have seen two similar hierarchies at work repeatedly in the unequal encounter between European states and cities."
Again, it seems that the spatial logic of capital is identical with the spatial logic of commerce, a spontaneous system of flows, coming from below, 'bottom-up'; while the spatial logic of the state is rationalising, ordering, coercive, 'top-down'. Two spatial logics, two types of power, each so distinct that, for Lefebvre at least, the state's type of power even rises to the level of being a mode of production.
This has, superficially at least, a topographical similarity to the Deleuze and Guattari couplet, territorialization-deterritorialization. You have on the one hand the oedipalized territorialities such as the nation, the church, the family etc., imposing themselves hierarchically, top-down. These are dominant in the feudal era. And on the other, the "deterritorialized" flows of capital, obeying a logic much like that of free-flowing desire, destroying the Oedipal territorialities. The capitalist logic arises from the intersection of two developments, two decoded flows - those of labour, in the form of the free worker, and those of production in the form of money-capital. And so these twin logics of territorializing political authority and deterritorializing capital, though carnally enmeshed*, tug at and militate against one another. This is a common image in social theory.
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My reservation about 'new imperialism' theory was at first an inchoate and very slightly philistine feeling that I simply didn't 'get' the seemingly exaggerated emphasis on space. Bob Jessop pointed out a decade ago that the turn toward 'globalization' as the master-concept of social theory produced a pronounced 'spatial' turn that was long overdue for reconsideration if not revision. More specifically, I didn't get the emphasis on the territorial as a drive logically distinct from capitalist power. It seemed to me that territorial space was just one aspect or moment in the development of concrete social formations in which the mode of production took root, just one of the aspects that the mode of production organised. Could it really constitute a logic of power distinct from, but equivalent to, capitalist power?
Robert Brenner's critique of Harvey's 'new imperialism' theory zones in on this problem. The capitalist logic of power, says Brenner, is clear. There are a set of imperatives (production for profit, reducing costs, etc.), and a set of mechanisms (intra-capitalist competition, pricing, etc.) by which those imperatives are enforced. Moreover, there is a strong empirical basis for its existence. But the territorial logic of power, the state logic, is not at all clear. There appears to be only a vague set of determinations behind this logic, no obvious imperatives or raison d'etre driving it, and little in the way of an empirical basis. Insofar as the state planners have an interest in defending a territory, expanding their extra-territorial dominion, etc., it is not clear that this is distinct from capitalist interests. In explaining this, Brenner sticks closely to a 'homeostatic' model of the capitalist state. The state’s functioning and wealth being derived from capitalist growth, its managers will tend to act in accord with capitalist imperatives. And he suggests that, independently of his conceptual framework, that is actually Harvey's approach in his explanations of concrete imperialist actions.
Despite my misgivings about the 'new imperialism' theories, I can't assent unreservedly to this critique. Though Brenner pinpoints what I see as a real problem with the 'new imperialism' theories, his critique is bound up with a set of assumptions I don't share. Brenner argues that there is 'rational core' to Harvey's theory in that it seeks to explain the apparent disjuncture between what might be in the interests of the capitalist class, and the actions undertaken by the state (wars, etc.). In place of ‘two logics’, Brenner fulcrums his explanation for this gap on the dysfunctional relationship between a state form (the national state) and capitalist imperatives (which continually transgress national boundaries). For Brenner, the world system being compose of many sovereign states is an historical fact which emerged in the context of feudalism, not capitalism; its survival is not essential to capitalism. Capitalism transformed extant territorial states into capitalist states without actually altering the multi-state character of the world system. This argument is given considerable historical depth and detail in Benno Teschke's The Myth of 1648 A world-state, Brenner argues, would be far more functional for capitalist growth than the national state, since as capital internationalizes, national states cannot implement strategies to resolve international deadlocks in production or make adjustments to overcome global imbalances, with the necessary degree of coordination. The problem here is that while this might explain the general tendency toward irrational conflict between states, and their failure to coordinate rational policy responses to capitalist crisis, this doesn't actually explain why a capitalist state under a particular management might pursue policies that are seemingly at odds with any attempt at a national level to overcome such imbalances, resolve crises of production and so on.
I think it would be better to start answering that question with the fact just as there are many states, that there is no single or general capitalist interest, but rather many capitals, nationally constituted and constitutively divided into fractions with a hierarchy of power between them. The hegemonic fraction is that which leads the others, and dominates the state at any given moment. And even then, there is no absolute agreement on interests or strategy within a given fraction - hedge funds, for example, may differ from investment banks as to the best way to raid social security. The more determinations you add, the more complex the divisions become, and their resolution is contingent on political and ideological leadership. Rather than assuming a homeostatic model of state action, according to which capitalist interests exert a long-range regulatory effect on state power, this approach places the issue firmly back on the terrain of political praxis, with all its implied dysfunctions. And, in fact, Brenner's explanation for the causes of the Iraq war points to this Gramscian problematic.
I have other issues. I think the account of why capitalist states are determined by capitalist and not territorial logic, implies an inadequate mechanistic model of causality. This is a criticism that applies to other political marxists such as Teschke and Lacher, and also in my opinion to theorists such as Fred Block who also deploy a homeostatic model of the state-capital relationship. Intriguingly, the same conclusion regarding the contingent nature of the state system has been reached by those deploying an expressive model of causality. The critical theoretical impulse of the state-derivation school, beginning in West Germany but taking off in the Anglophone left through the work of John Holloway, Werner Bonefeld and others, was to treat the state as a fetishised form of the capital-relation. Influenced by Evgeny Pashukanis, they thought that just as he derived the legal form from the commodity form, so they could homologously derive the state form from the capital form. This being so, the most important thing about the state form was the way in which it condensed at a general level the capital-relation, becoming in a sense the ideal capitalist, in order to remedy the deficiencies and dysfunctions in the circuits of production and exchange. The capitalist mode of production being world-wide in scale, there was no necessary reason why the states system should take the form of national states. Thus, Claudia von Braunmühl’s essay on the nation-state in Holloway and Picciotto’s seminal State and Capital argues that this pre-structuration of the state system by feudal relations has been imposed on capitalism. Capitalism’s systemic opportunism allowed it to take hold of the international states system and transform it, but otherwise it is not essential to the system. There are some extremely interesting aspects of this approach, which I’ll come back to, and the state-derivation approach has produced some rich, suggestive analyses. But, to paraphrase Bernard Shaw, it is in this respect like a library: excellent to borrow from but otherwise to be avoided at all costs.
I am not convinced that the existence of many states under the dominance of the capitalist mode of production is merely an historical legacy contingent to capitalism, which could in principle be superseded. This is not, I insist, to lapse into that tacit functionalism according to which what exists under capitalism must exist for the good of capitalism. I can well see that sovereign, territorial states pre-dated capitalism and imposed a structuring effect on the emerging capitalist world order. I simply do not see that capitalism could provide the material basis for anything other than a multi-state system. And it seems to me that to say the multi-state system is an historical legacy and nothing more is to explain away rather than explain the problem of the relationship between the multiple scalar and spatial levels of political organisation and the capitalist mode of production. The development of capitalism seems to entail a particular type of territorialisation of political power, and it's worth trying to understand why. I think neither the mechanistic nor expressive models of causality can serve us well in explaining this, and I will later indicate the relevance of Althusser’s notion of structural causality.
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What does the territorialisation of political power consist of? Territoriality in its simplest sense is the disposal of a particular bounded space as a base for achieving a particular social outcome. A church, a police station, a school... all are, among other things, bounded spaces within which a certain type of social organisation is performed; containers for certain sets of social relations. Territorialising political power, then, is nothing other than a process of binding political authority to a determinate space in which the goals of the politically dominant class, the ruling class, can be achieved.
What is distinctive about capitalist state territoriality? We can start with the problem of sovereignty. In the international system, the modern state is a sovereign power to the extent that it not only exercises a monopoly of legitimate violence and political authority within its bounded territory, but also demands recognition by other states of its exclusive right within that territory. In exchange, it recognises the same exclusive right of other states. This notion of sovereignty seems to have origins in feudal property relations, in absolutist states organised on the basis of kingship, patrilineal descent and personal rule. The concept of sovereignty described the absolute right of kings and princes to dispose of their population and territory, to instruct them in their faith, and command them as they saw fit. However, sovereignty takes a particular form under capitalism that is quite distinct from that of feudal states: it is the sovereignty of the people-nation rather than the king as god-incarnate.
This redirects the discussion from inter-state relations to social relations in general; the capitalist state is not just a territorial state, but a national territorial state. It is a national space that the modern state organises, maps, and attempts to bring under a grid of intelligibility. But as I have also said, the state does not strictly coincide with the nation. Many states, like the UK, are multinational; and many nationalities have no state. Nor, obviously enough, are the state's powers simply contained within the boundaries over which it exercises sovereignty: one effect of the internationalization of capital is the internationalization of capitalist states. Nonetheless, the capitalist state specifically identifies itself as a national state, and cannot be indifferent to nations. In some cases, it suppresses them. In some cases, it organises them in a multinational territory, reproducing national spaces through its distribution and scalar organization of sites of power as part of the logic of political domination, while elaborating a superordinate nationality as part of its symbolic organisation of the territory it rules. So, nationality cannot escape the logic of statehood, and the territory of the state is always national.
One strategy for explaining the relationship between nation-state and capital is to relate the development of the national state to the requirements of a unified market. As Fernand Braudel put it:
“A national economy is a political space, transformed by the state as a result of the necessities and innovations of economic life, into a coherent, unified economic space whose combined activities may tend in the same direction. Only England managed this exploit at an early date. In reference to England the term revolution recurs: agricultural, political, financial and industrial revolutions. To this list must be added- giving it whatever name you choose - the revolution that created England's national market.” (Afterthoughts on material civilization and capitalism, 1977)
This would seem at first glance to explain the relationship between the spread of capitalism and the shift from fragmented polities of various scales and types with nebulous boundaries - city-states, principalities, communes, sprawling patchwork empires etc. - to rationalised, imperfectly homogenised national-states. Capitalism’s need for a unified space within which production and exchange can be organised gives rise to various ways of organising space – the growth of towns and cities connected by transport and communications (in a single dominant language), unified by a common currency, protected by military installations, within a territory delimited by borders and protected by a sovereign authority. But returning to Braunmühl’s argument, cited above, we are reminded of a methodological principle derived from Lukacs – the primacy of the totality over individual instances. It is insufficient to take the nation-state itself as the starting point, the self-sufficient unit from whose aggregation a world-system arises: “An international system is not the sum of many states, but on the contrary the international system consists of many nation states. The world market is not constituted by many national economies concentrated together, rather the world market is organized in the form of many national economies as its integral components.”
The theoretical basis for this assertion is the typical state-derivationist approach of attempting to derive the state form from something in the general concept of capital. In this case, it is at first the world market itself that is implied in the general concept of capital, as capital has an innate tendency to drive through and beyond national boundaries. Through the mediation of the world market, localised centres of production and accumulation form a totality, and from that arises the material basis for a world state to carry out the tasks of an ideal-capitalist. The fact that there is not one world state but many states is, then, an historical accident; nonetheless, these states have fallen under the dominance of the world capitalist system, have been transformed into political organisations capable of organising the world market in some way, and thus should not be seen as simply a series of nation-states having a relationship of exteriority to one another. They are intrinsically linked through the world market upon which they arise. Clearly, then, if the unification of the market is what is at stake, it is difficult to explain the perpetuation of national states except as a contingent fact.
However, there is no reason to start by inferring or deriving the capitalist state form from commodity circulation. We can certainly concede the methodological primacy of the totality. But we should remember that the capitalism which emerges in Marx’s Capital is a complex totality composed of many determinations. Each new determination, as Callinicos points out in Imperialism and Political Economy, is connected to the previous in a dependent but non-deductive way. So Marx moves from the analysis of the commodity form to the struggle over the eight hour day, or financial markets, or another aspect of capitalist relations. And while each stage of analysis may depend on the foregoing explications, it is not directly implied in them. Capital markets are not implicit in the analysis of the commodity form; there is no reason why the state form should be implied by the general form of capital either. That being the case, the capitalist state form must be seen as part of a complex totality of mutually articulated elements, each exerting a reciprocal effectivity on the others, the organization of the whole determining the effectivity of each element. The capitalist state is overdetermined by the organization of the complex totality of which it forms a part.
However, there is no reason to start by inferring or deriving the capitalist state form from commodity circulation. We can certainly concede the methodological primacy of the totality. But we should remember that the capitalism which emerges in Marx’s Capital is a complex totality composed of many determinations. Each new determination, as Callinicos points out in Imperialism and Political Economy, is connected to the previous in a dependent but non-deductive way. So Marx moves from the analysis of the commodity form to the struggle over the eight hour day, or financial markets, or another aspect of capitalist relations. And while each stage of analysis may depend on the foregoing explications, it is not directly implied in them. Capital markets are not implicit in the analysis of the commodity form; there is no reason why the state form should be implied by the general form of capital either. That being the case, the capitalist state form must be seen as part of a complex totality of mutually articulated elements, each exerting a reciprocal effectivity on the others, the organization of the whole determining the effectivity of each element. The capitalist state is overdetermined by the organization of the complex totality of which it forms a part.
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From this perspective alone can one start to do justice to the relationship between the national state and capitalism. The rational kernel of the state-derivation approach is that capitalism doesn’t merely impose a new organization on territorial entities which otherwise remain essentially the same, but rather take hold of an alter their materiality. This is true of all the spatial units that occur under capitalism. Castells denounced ‘urban theory’ for presuming that the urban retained the same content, the same meaning, through centuries of change, across modes of production and the stages in their development. Urban space meant something quite different in medieval Europe; towns and cities represented a different spatial organisation of the social division of labour.
In Marx’s terms, the social division of labour is distinct from the technical division of labour, in that it arises from social functions related to class. Under capitalism, the social division of labour is organised around personalized bonds between the feudal lord and the peasant or serf. The major form of extraction was directly political – the ruling class took tribute by means of coercion – and this tended to produce both a parcellisation of political authority and disarticulation of space. The rural-urban divide, the patchwork of spaces ranging from estates and small towns to great commercial centres and ports to walled cities, condensed a particular social division of labour. In the countryside, the producer was bound to the soil working for nobles of various rank on estates of varying size with porous frontiers and no clear boundaries. Towns varied greatly in size and function; some were enclaves of relative commercial freedom, particularly port towns connected to world markets; smaller towns were usually abutments to large feudal estates. Their inhabitants did not live off the land and produce tribute, but rather lived off petty commodity manufacture, or various types of trade serving the luxury consumption of the feudal ruling class. (On the rural-urban divide in the middle ages, see Rodney Hilton). The major form of ideological dominance being religious, there were overlapping frameworks of sacred and secular power, the church acting as landlord, tithe collector, and symbolic guarantor of the unity of the state as the body of Christ. This specific articulation of economic, political and ideological power was also the basis for the checkered system of miscellaneous polities, from communes to city-states to empires. So, the territorialization of political power under feudalism, based on bonds to lord and land, was such that spaces tended to be irregular, reversible, turned in on themselves (though bonds to lord and land) yet simultaneously open (through extensive migration across intersecting boundaries).
Where the capitalist mode of production took root, however, producers obtained their famous dual freedom, from both lord (bondage) and land (the means of labour); they were drawn into relations of production mediated through exchange, selling their labour power to capitalists who procured it as just one element in a productive process intended to produce a profit. However, as Poulantzas pointed out, this did not entail deterritorialization; such a schema relied on a naturalist image in which territory was assumed to have a continuous meaning, connotatively linked to ‘rootedness’ in determinate plots of land. Rather, the capitalist division of labour entailed a different type of territorialization. Production, circulation and exchange now demanded a spatial matrix of imperfectly homogenized sites, segments of space each carefully delimited by clear frontier marking insides and outsides and linked to a social division of labour – factories, hubs, supply chains, shopping centres, terraces, conurbations, condominiums, and so on. So while the movements of money, capital and labour would tend to push beyond these spaces, they must cross frontiers in order to do so. This system of boundaries is necessary to organise the labour force, the distribution and storage of goods, communications, transport, consumption, residences, and so on. It is necessary to help regularise an already anarchic system of production and minimise its dysfunctions: for example, they help impose a general sedentarization on the labour force (see James Scott on this) that makes its supply more predictable and its constituents intelligible.
The specific combination of cooperative and competitive relations in the division of labour also has effects on the spatial matrix. Production, distribution and exchange must necessarily take place in a cooperative manner, meaning that capital units are locked in a relation of interdependence. This will produce a tendency toward clustering, as functionally associated capitals reduce their distance from one another: it makes sense, for instance, that large manufacturing enterprises would tend to cluster in industrial estates near large workforces with access to main road; or that commercial enterprises would cluster on high streets in pedestrian and motorist accessible centres where consumption can take place. On the other hand, this cooperative effort is structured by competitive accumulation. Some capitals will succeed better than others, and over the long-term there will be a concentration and centralization of capitals, which themselves attract chains of supporting industries, producing spaces (towns, cities, even countries) which work as privileged centres of productive capital, and by extension other spaces that are underdeveloped and neglected.
Political authority under capitalism, rather than being directly embedded in those sites through a chain of significations linking land to labourer to lord, acquired a formal separation or relative autonomy from them. Indeed, part of its role was to help constitute this new spatial matrix by standing in a formal sense ‘outside’ it, while ‘intervening’ constantly. The scare quotes are necessary, because it is clear that in no real sense does the state have an external relationship to the spheres of production or exchange. This is where the state-derivation approach produces an important insight: breaking with the fetishised notion of the state, with the legal, constitutional image of the state as simply an external guardian of civil society, it treats the state as a social relationship, actively involved in the constitution of the totality of social relationships in part by separating off aspects of them and deeming them ‘political’ as opposed to ‘economic’. This is consistent with Corrigan and Sayer’s important argument that ‘the state’ as such is a fiction, a ‘mythicized abstraction’; it is through the state relation itself that the social categories are produced to give it its seeming legal and institutional determinacy, its “misplaced concreteness”.
Still, despite the above, and despite the spatial metaphor deployed, this ‘standing outside’ adverts to a real political relationship which is the state’s relative autonomy from social classes. As Claus Offe put it, this relative autonomy is necessary to capitalism because only a “fully harmonious economic system that did not trigger self-destructive processes of socialization could tolerate the complete positive subordination of the normative-ideological and political systems to itself." It is the fact that capitalist production is not a self-sufficient system, that it has inherent crisis tendencies, and arguably the fact that is articulated with other systems (ecological, biological, etc.), which makes it so inherently unstable and requires a state with the freedom to provide a spatio-temporal fix. Another relevant feature of capitalist production is the ‘isolation effect’ it produces in social classes. Because it is a system of competitive accumulation among many producers, and because capital is constitutively divided into fractions, the capitalist class finds it impossible to constitute its political dominance over the popular classes without the state, which cannot therefore be an ‘instrument’ or ‘tool’ for the capitalist class as such. So the apparent extrusion of political authority from the organization of the spatial matrices of production, circulation and consumption is actually nothing other than the formal separation of the political from the economic; the state remains deeply involved in and articulated with the processes of capital accumulation, constituting the segments of space through its schools, police, armed forces, councils, parking authorities, free enterprise zones, etc. And through its action it seeks to unify and homogenize those spaces; but how?
In the capitalist mode of production, the dominant form of ideology is no longer religious but political; in normal circumstances, the capitalist state presents itself as a popular, representative state (even if not actually democratic). It does so firstly by binding itself to a nation, an ‘imagined community’, usually with a shared language. But to represent the nation as such, it must dissolve classes at an ideological level into individualised subjects, who are then cemented together through the state; the dominant ideological form this takes is legal; the law produces the ‘free and equal’ subject of the bourgeois nation-state. This is connected to the enclosure of a ‘national’ space, which is obviously by no means a natural space (though of course national expansiveness is necessarily responsive to natural resources, and the spatial matrix of production is warped around them). Just as the segments of space at the level of factories, bureaucratic offices or towns are circumscribed by a clear frontier as part of the logic of organising the social division of labour, so the state constitutes the national space by erecting a frontier around it, a system of exclusion and filtered admission (of labour, goods, etc) which is operated on behalf of the nation.
Not only that, but the state effectively operates a system of internal borders, whereby those who are deemed non-national or anti-national can be confined, brutalised, hyper-exploited, etc. – this can range from detention centres for asylum seekers to concentration camps; from Jim Crow laws restricting movement to secret prisons. This too has a certain relationship to the social division of labour, insofar as the latter is constituted by politics and ideology. Capitalism has always shown a marked tendency to stratify labour forces according to principles of race, nationality, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on, in a way that enhances the political dominance of capital over labour and increases the rate of exploitation of all workers over the long-term. As Roediger and Esch’s accounts of ‘race management’ would demonstrate, this is not something that simply takes place at the level of the state; such strategies are implemented and experimented with directly in productive enterprises. But the state also develops strategies for the control of labour forces, for example by obstructing the mobility of some workers to discourage migration at some points or render migrant workers insecure at others, or implementing material incentives in a gendered way so as to preserve a family structure in which women perform the labour of reproducing labour (ie maintaining a household, raising children, feeding male workers etc). The system of both internal and external frontiers is part of the organization and disciplining of the pyramid.
This directs one’s attention to what the legal concept of the border, as simply an arbitrary political cleavage separating nation from non-nation, obscures: the fact that the frontier is a set of social (economic, political, ideological) relations, mediated through the state, between the contending classes bound by it; between the many capitals based within it and those beyond it; between national oppressed and dominant groups, and those beyond the nation; and between social formations unified by respective national states, whether imperialist or non-imperialist. The transgression of frontiers naturally also represents one moment in a given social relationship, be it oppression (refugee flows), exploitation (labour migration), social resistance and class struggle (breaking out or breaking in), or imperialism (invasion, bombing). The point I’m making here is that the most important fact about national states is not that there are many of them, although logically there must be and this is important; it is the social relations embedded in them, which make them national states.
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So, rather than deriving the appropriate type of territoriality of the capitalist state from one of the general formal elements of the capitalist mode of production, I have suggested multiple levels of determination beginning with the overall social division of labour, proceeding to the organisation of political authority specific to capitalism, the dominant form of ideological domination under capitalism, the type of relation between capitals, and between different groups of workers, and the effects of these determinants on each other. I am not claiming to have been exhaustive, but approaching it in this way gives one a superior perspective on the different orders of scale and space that characterise the capitalist world system and particularly allows one to understand why the key strategic base at which territorial statehood is organised is the nation and is likely to continue to be the nation. Of course, the specific unity between nation and state is a practical unity, not one that is given in the theoretical understanding of capitalism. Nations are not essential to capitalism. However, in any counterfactual scenario of capitalism’s emergence and development, the world system would most likely be constituted by a graduated system of spaces at the strategic centre of which would be something like national states.
And it’s worth thinking about how this hierarchy of oedipal territories, this very tightly controlled grid of social spaces from the main public square to the prison, dense with symbols and ideology as they are, are so important to capitalist political dominance. I don’t claim that actually controlling this or that bit of space is the most important thing about capitalist territoriality – no, it is the social relations embodied in the space that is central. I have said these segmented spaces are ‘containers’ for social relations in which an implied set of social expectations and responses are condensed. Because of this, there is a strategic hierarchy; some spaces are worth more than others, because the social relations they embody are more important than others to reproducing the system.
A certain approach to anticapitalist struggle focuses on taking over spaces, and creating autonomous zones which are simultaneously protest, pedagogy and prefiguration. This has been tried with the Occupy movement, and has demonstrated some real strengths in all three capacities. But it has clearly reached its limits inasmuch as the capitalist state has learned, through trial and error, how to regain control of such spaces. And to the extent that the strategy was bound up with a longer term perspective of, piece-by-piece, liberating space and building communism on a cellular level, it was never going to work. For, if it is worth claiming autonomous spaces, then it has to be asked why those actually claimed outside of actual revolutionary situations (and then only for a short period) have always been strategically negligible, of marginal importance to the reproduction of the system. The answer is most likely that the politically important spaces are always very well organised and manned, while it would be unwise to occupy strategically important productive spaces unless the workers already agree with you, in which case they should be doing it. That leaves public and semi-public spaces, and a few vacated buildings. Not exactly the Paris Commune; not even the parish commune. And since the national state is the privileged level of the political organization of the territory, capturing visible but strategically marginal space is always at best a short-term tactic, doomed as it is to encirclement and shut-down in short order. The only sensible answer is to re-focus on the social relations that are constituted through a particular organization of space, and try to organize the agencies best placed to disrupt their reproduction.
Labels: althusser, capitalism, capitalist state, mode of production, nationalism, political marxism, poulantzas, social division of labour, socialist strategy, space, state, state-derivation, territory
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Thursday, July 19, 2012
Defend the right to murder posted by Richard Seymour
The police officer who killed Ian Tomlinson has been acquitted. This is a real achievement for the police, in defending PC Simon Harwood. They clearly went to the court with the bigger arsenal. The jury was not aware that the police's key witness, the pathologist Freddy Patel, is such a complete and utter disgrace. They were not aware that he has been struck off the Home Office's register of approved pathologists, that he has made serious 'mistakes' in high profile cases, and that many people believe he is a serial liar (replace 'many people' with 'I', and 'serial' with 'fucking'). They were also not told aware that the suspect, the killer, Simon Harwood, is an accomplished psycho with a string of complaints to his name. One has to assume that the police authorities moved heaven and earth, and used all their considerable institutional power, to ensure this verdict. So, it's an achievement for them.
The question is, why did the police go to such extraordinary efforts? The clue is in the final sentence to the Guardian's report on this: "No police officer has been convicted for manslaughter for a crime committed while on duty since 1986." This is crucial.
To be clear, there have been police officers pursued for crimes committed while off-duty, and these are sometimes taken extremely seriously. There was a well-known recent case of a police officer racially abusing a Pakistani shop owner. He was fired. But the main reason he was fired is because he was silly enough to commit his hate crime while off-duty and inebriated. Had he committed a crime while in uniform and on the job, the authorities would have felt compelled to defend him.
The reasoning can only be this: a) if a crime is committed by a police officer on the job, then it's the police force at stake rather than just one individual, and b) if the crime relates to the handling of members of the public, the police would want to protect the officer's right to determine the parameters of a given situation and use maximum discretion in how they deal with individuals. Implicitly, this means they expect these practices - from racist harrassment to lethal violence - to form part of the repertoire of police action.
This is a major victory for the police in defending the right to murder. One had thought that it couldn't be too long before they killed someone during the student protests, and had they gone on for much longer the strong likelihood is that they would have done. SNow we have a heavily militarised Olympics coming up, which the East End hates. And there is plenty of combustible material in this society, plenty to protest about. And I had already thought it would be surprising if they didn't kill someone this summer. Now I find it hard to imagine that the police won't avail themselves of a right they have so vigorously defended.
Labels: british state, capitalist state, metropolitan police, police, police brutality, protest, repression
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Wednesday, July 04, 2012
Marxism 2012 posted by Richard Seymour
Don't forget to come to Marxism 2012, starting tomorrow. There is so much to discuss this year, so many arguments to have, so many people who are wrong about everything, and so much at stake. Greece, austerity, the eurozone, Spain, the coalition, Syria, Egypt, Syriza, Gramsci, Lenin, Althusser, Chinese capitalism, Bolivarianism, the unions, the parties, the bosses, the state, revolution and imperialism. Come. My meeting, you should know, is this Friday at 11.45am, on 'Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in the Liberal Tradition'. I'll be your badchen for an hour or so, then sign books or talk politics if you want.Labels: althusser, american anti-imperialism, capitalist state, class, egypt, feminism, gramsci, greece, imperialism, lenin, liberal imperialism, marx, marxism, marxism 2012, race, revolution, socialism, trade unions
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Monday, April 09, 2012
The state in capitalist crisis (part one) posted by Richard Seymour
In trying to think through the changes that we're going through, that are being imposed on us, we constantly find we have to account for the state's role in managing and mediating the crisis and the forms it takes. For what is happening now, unmistakeably, is the re-organization of the state's presence directly in productive relations; its provision of investment conditions; its socialization of the costs of investment; and its disciplinary apparatuses. In the terms used in a previous essay, it is a process of state re-formation, given the name of 'austerity' because of its implications for popular constituencies historically benefiting from the welfare state. And I wanted to know whether it was possible to say anything general about this subject; that is to say, whether there are principles governing marxist research into the role of capitalist states in specific crises that are distinct from those governing marxist research into capitalist states tout court. This is the first in a series of posts trying to work out what these might be.Before proceeding with this, I want to point out that the return of 'the state' (or a theoretical concern with the state), however tentative at the moment, is the result of two developments: first, the anticapitalist movement and it sequel in the Occupy movement; second, the aggressive assertion of imperialism and thus the re-emergence of anti-imperialist critique during the last decade. This means that the discussion of capitalist state in crisis must be a strategic one, conducted with a view to confronting the state as a factor in our struggles over the social product. But it also means that we cannot begin to discuss the reorganization and fiscal down-sizing of welfare states without situating them in relation to the imperialist chain, and the patterns of exploitation of the dominated societies. To put it simply; the politics of austerity cannot be decoupled from the question of inter-imperialist rivalry between the US, EU and China, and their competitive alliances in the Middle East, and sub-saharan Africa. And since I intend to focus on austerity in the UK, its unique position as an 'Atlanticist' EU member, the once favoured 'link' between the US and Europe, must play a role here. Both of these issues will be raised in more detail in future posts.
***
First, I think it's important to say that while austerity has as its primary justification the imperative of reducing public spending, cutting the deficit and thus maintaining the fiscal 'credibility' of the British state with financial markets, and while suppressing the growth of the state budget is a real institutional commitment, the policies introduced under its rubric are much broader than those which could plausibly be related to cutting spending. Whether it is cuts to the minimum wage, the introduction of private provision in the NHS and schools, or changes in the tax structure to benefit the wealthy, these are policies whose overall thrust is unlikely to increase revenues to the Treasury. In fact, as regards the changes to public services, the involvement of private companies such as Virgin, as well as the wasteful 'markets' imposed on providers, will probably drive up costs and lead to further fiscal crises. No one is suggesting that the state will stop collecting the taxes to fund core services such as pensions, healthcare and education. And even if they are under-funded, and the provision is rationed in ways that favour residents of relatively wealthy, middle class areas, it is highly unlikely that the costs will stop increasing.
This isn't to say that the welfare system isn't being pared down drastically, with lamentable results for millions. But I think it is best, following Claus Offe, to characterise welfare state capitalism as a form of crisis management: or, more accurately, a crisis-ridden form of crisis management. And despite its limitations, capitalism cannot simply wish away this form of intervention. The fact is that, just as in the most controversial reforms being undertaken the state isn't so much withdrawing from the provision of public services as out-sourcing and marketising it, so in general the state isn't so much cutting its costs as shifting them around. No doubt there is an aim to suppress costs, and this commitment is institutionalized in various ways, but I would be surprised if the capitalist state in the UK cost much less in 2022, as a proportion of GDP, than it has over the last two decades. In the period from 1987-2007, during which there was only one recession of medium severity, public spending was generally kept at or below 40% of GDP, a feat last accomplished during the high growth years of the 1950s. In a period of sustained crisis, this becomes extremely difficult because not only is growth depressed and social overheads inflated, but the relative costs of investment are higher, and the capitalist class constantly needs incentives from the state to put its money into circulation. Even once the crisis recedes and a period of relative capitalist dynamism resumes, this particular neoliberal format of capitalist dependency on the state will continue to drive up costs.
Relatedly, it would be mistaken to conclude that what is happening is a de-regulation of capitalism; it is a re-regulation. This is true not only in the sense that even supposedly privatized utilities quickly accumulate a plethora of regulations and government interventions just to prevent the most egregious abuses and keep the system basically functional, but above all in the sense that the state's regulative powers are becoming all the more necessary to capitalism in a period of organic crisis, even as their limits are disclosed. For example, it is a well-known factoid that the number of financial regulations in the neoliberal period, and particularly after the repeal of Glass-Steagall, actually increased dramatically; because the financiers had more freedom did not mean that they were less regulated. The regulatory structure was simply reformed to increase their powers; this only appears to be a contradiction in terms if you assume that real freedom is 'negative freedom'.
So what is happening under the rubric of austerity is neither simply cost-cutting nor de-regulation, nor any kind of withdrawal of the state from 'the economy'. Rather, the combined effect of the measures will be to shift the balance of power between classes, as condensed in the institutional ensemble of the state, in such a way as to fundamentally enhance the advantage of capital, with the rationale being a 'growth model' in which such policies are said to improve the wealth of the whole society through a temporary tightening of the belt. The logic is clear, for example, from Vince Cable's argument for freezing the minimum wage for under 21s: lower wages equals (more profitable investment therefore) more growth and more jobs.
***
One of the arguments we have made against austerity is that the fiscal crisis isn't really real: the debt can be paid off through growth, which won't be assisted by austerity politics. And in a sense, this is true. The idea that the UK is in a situation like Greece, held over a barrel by bankers, the IMF and EU finance ministers, is palpably absurd. The UK's debt situation is far from unmanageable in either historical or comparative terms. Further, the UK ruling class has sufficient clout that were it, through the state, to embark on an alternative growth pact for one reason or another, few international creditors would be seriously alarmed. Actually, given the way speculators and lenders are responding to austerity programmes once they are imposed, a stimulus-based strategy might actually endow them with more of that fabled 'confidence'.
But there is nonetheless a 'rational kernel' in the notion of a fiscal crisis. The capitalist welfare state, even in the neoliberal period, demonstrates a tendency (note, tendency) to exceed in expenditures what it is able to collect in taxation. The reasons for this can be enumerated thus: i) the periodic crises of accumulation, which not only reduce tax receipts in the short-term but result in pressure from business, on pain of investment strike, to reduce taxes on profits and investment; ii) the pressure from popular constituencies for services and provisions, based on expectations raised by the welfare state itself, which acts as a limiting factor on any fiscal cut-backs that state personnel are able to make; iii) the tendency for long-term regulative and growth strategies coordinated through the state (and here I don't mean just the 'Fordist' corporatist strategies deployed in the post-war era) to fail in the context of unplanned, competitive and exploitative production relations. The latter results not just in sectoral imbalances within 'the economy', but more importantly sustained sectional struggles within the capitalist class, and class struggles over the social product which always upset any long-term calculations, and make it impossible for a capitalist state to impose a rational, planned growth strategy even through its considerable leverage as a factor in production.
The attempt to get this tendency under control has been an institutionalised commitment of capitalist states throughout the neoliberal era. In the United Kingdom, this has taken the form of constant class struggles with public sector workers to facilitate down-sizing, as well as the embedding of policies such as 'Compulsory Competitive Tendering' based on the orthodoxy of public choice economics, which holds that bureaucratic budget-maximising is responsible for spending increases. It has also, due to the first factor mentioned above, resulted in a shift of the structure of taxation so that employers pay less, and workers more, toward the 'social overheads' of capital - that is, the reproduction of labour power in its complex forms, as well as of the growing 'reserve army' of labour. With the increase in VAT and various indirect taxes, and the cuts in corporation tax and other taxes on profits, this trend is being amplified.
More broadly, the suppression of public spending, as an element in the austerity formula developed in West Germany, has been institutionalised in the EU since the Treaty of European Union, and certainly since the Stability and Growth Pact in 1997. How well has this gone? Well, the Pact ruled that member states should have a public deficit at no higher than 3% of GDP. Prior to the crisis, this was achieved by most member states, barring 'periphery' economies like Hungary, Greece and Portugal. We have seen that, despite being 'peripheral', such economies can nonetheless can have disproportionate significance, condensing all the weaknesses and instabilities of the system in one 'weak link'. At the moment, however, the problem is far more general: across the Eurozone at the moment, the public deficit is more than twice the permitted level. And the Merkozy axis aims to drive this back down by forcing punitive austerity measures on the weakest economies.
***
But there is another aspect of the transformation we are witnessing, and here we have to return to the commodification of health, education, and social security. The state is not just a political factor in the capitalist mode of production, securing the 'general conditions' for the reproduction of capitalism but otherwise abstaining from direct involvement in 'the economy'. In several respects, even if not in its totality, it acts as a capitalist.
The capitalist state doesn't only reproduce the capital-labour relation externally in relation to its action (infrastructural investment, social outlays), but also internally, through its exploitation of waged labour in nationalized or semi-nationalized industries. Whether it is in the direct ownership of post, banking, or railway companies, or in the heavily subsidised, incentivized and bailed out industries such as cars, energy, armaments and, of course, finance, the state is involved not just in appropriating surplus value through fiat, the better to invest it for the 'general good', nor just in realizing surplus value or redistributing it but, in a number of key instances, extracting surplus value. It is true that, in the neoliberal period, the British capitalist state has taken the lead in withdrawing from the direct or complete ownership of productive industry, but it has still been involved in putting part of the total surplus value back into circulation as capital in various industries. And even where it doesn't directly extract surplus value, it is involved in the realization of surplus value generated by productive labour, just as capital-intensive industries are.
What appears to be happening with the re-commodification of core services is that the government is giving capital-intensive industry sectors that work in the orbit of the national state - those involved in financial and other services particularly - the option of realizing a considerable share of the surplus value produced across the economy. This sort of action can temporarily act as a spur to investment, in a way that benefits the politically powerful sectors of capital, but it also contributes to solving the underlying crisis of profitability to the extent that the spread of 'market conditions', the erosion of 'spaces of resistance' in the welfare state, and the suppression of wages that it allows affects the general balance between capital and labour to the former's benefit.
***
Some general features of austerity, then:
1) the state is not withdrawing from 'the economy' - it is never absent from 'the economy' - but changing its mode of presence in productive relations.
2) the state's cost-cutting commitments are subordinate to its crisis-management commitments, the former tending to be defeated by the latter due to the growing relative costs of investment and the long-term tendency toward crisis.
3) state institutions act within a context of a class struggle between labour and capital, and as such their policymaking must respect the relative strengths of each (hence, the state acts as the material condensation of the balance of class forces), but the state also has a form-determined selectivity in favour of the capitalist class. These factors determine the form that crisis management takes.
4) nonetheless, the state acts not on behalf of capital 'in general', but in the interests of hegemonic fractions of capital, and any charge that state managers are behaving 'ideologically' and 'non-pragmatically' must be understood in those terms.
5) the relationship between the state and the social formation that it regulates and reconstitutes is permanently characterised by dysfunction and disequilibrium. This is not to take the absolutist position that there is in essence no distinction between 'Keynesian' and neoliberal remedies. The fact that 'Keynesian' solutions based on demand management and state investment, cannot resolve the crisis in the long term doesn't mean that they cannot play a role in abating the most egregious features of the crisis. But the fact is that 'Keynesian' welfare and nationalization policies, by raising expectations of the state, and by empowering resistances, can only in the long run deepen the dysfunctions of capitalism. As such, they make most sense in the context of a 'transitional' approach, of which more will be said in future posts.
These are not quite the theoretical principles that I sought at the beginning of the post, but rather theoretically informed descriptions. But in future posts, we can deepen these observations by drawing more on Offe's analysis of the 'contradictions of the welfare state', and the 'crisis of crisis management'.
Labels: austerity, british state, capitalist crisis, capitalist state, class struggle, marxism, neoliberalism, public spending, welfare
2:59:00 pm |
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Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Police racism and brutality: it's the job posted by Richard Seymour
What does it say when a police officer strangles a black man, and racially abuses him in the context of a 'stop and search'? What does it say when on the same evening, his partner batters a fifteen year old boy in the police station later that evening? And what does it say when the CPS declines to pursue charges in both cases?
Just this. We know that the rank and file of the police are racist. This is not a judgment on every single officer, and nor is it simply an institutional analysis. It is a question of their social role. They are bearers of authority and social power delegated to them by the centralised unity of the state, and just as the role of supervisors and managers in the workplace is to secure the subordination of workers in the production process, so the role of the police is to secure the general subordination of workers and subaltern forces, to identify and control 'problem' populations, and thus resolve problems in the reproduction of the system. It is a global supervisory function, but one obviously permeated with the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.
We know that rank and file police officers routinely deploy violence not simply to resolve a bureaucratic impasse (non-cooperation, etc) but often to effect a symbolic reduction of the victim to a status befitting that assigned them in the dominant ideology. This is part of the police's role in the moral regulation of society. In carrying out this role, they exercise a relative autonomy, sufficient to define the situations in which they, as professional law enforcers, must harrass, restrain, beat and detain civilians. And it isn't just their training, as some suggest, that inclines them to do this, to treat civilian populations as an enemy. It is their actual experience of routine conflict in carrying out their mandate, which forms their habitus, that system of skills, dispositions and practices which constitutes the occupational culture of the police. At any rate, this defining role allows them to formulate the information which is then fed back to superiors, the courts and prosecutors, media, politicians, law lords and the solicitor general, and which thus constructs social situations in the language of criminality, abnormality, crisis, etc. As trained professionals, moreover, their word carries far more weight than that of any of their victims.
But there is more to it than that. For this relative autonomy is not a relationship achieved by rank and file police officers through struggle. The police chiefs will always try to rationalise the job, to achieve greater compliance form juniors, and to impose ideas and behaviours consistent with overarching policies. And the state is, as I say, a centralised unity - the executive, or whatever apparatus is dominant at any given moment, can if it wills constrain the behaviour of rank and file officers in various ways. It always does so, in fact. But the limiting factor is that the state desires this relationship of relative autonomy. It wants officers who are sufficiently empowered to act in ways that they see fit in order to effectively reproduce the social order. The result is that there will be antagonisms - officers, for example, can resent having to suppress and contain the social turmoil produced by central state policies - but police chiefs and state executives will tend to protect the autonomy and authority of officers in conducting their role.
Ultimately, moreover, because the police are so central to the state's routine 'intervention' into all aspects of social relations, they will tend to seek concord with officers and maintain their relative material privileges the better to cement their solidarity with the state and, as a corollary, their adversarial relationship with the majority of the population. This is one reason why no police officer is jailed for beating or murdering civilians, and why the CPS would prefer not to charge officers found guilty of criminal conduct. Importantly, when I refer to criminal conduct I am not just talking about repression that appears to go beyond their occupational role. Corruption cases, such as that of Enfield crime squad officers up to their necks in criminal enterprise, disclose a similar pattern. It is not that the police bosses are particularly happy with such corruption being routine, but rather that the premium on guarding the relative independence of officers in such circumstances, on allowing officers to define situations themselves, to act not above the law but in a space in which they themselves define legality, is more important than suppressing corruption.
And this structural relationship is crucial to explaining how and why the police continually 'get away with it', how and why change is so difficult to achieve. Struggle can force the state to adapt its policy, to re-organise its modes of violence, and to lean more heavily on mediating forms (unions, social democracy, 'civil society' groups, and so on) to cope with social antagonisms. But the sheer persistence of institutional brutality and racism in the police over a long period of time (actually, for as long as the police have existed) suggests that deaths in custody, severe beatings, the violent punishment of the mentally ill, the immigrant, the homeless, the poor and the vulnerable, are not supererogatory explosions of individual un-professionalism; rather they are part of what the police do, part of the professional vocation, the repertoire that makes policing what it is.
This is one of the reasons why I disagree with any position, such as that outlined by the activist Ellie Mae O'Hagan here, which argues for support for a Police Federation strike. We know that the Tory cuts to the police budget, alongside the range of institutional reforms planned by the government, are unpopular with the rank and file. Under both parties, the police have been used to generous budgets, higher than average pay and rising recruitment. They have been culturally and politically safeguarded. But the Tories are committed to the systematic down-sizing of the state, and are evidently convinced that the key repressive functions carried out by the police can be protected within a streamlined force. As far as crime prevention goes, the Home Office has always known that more officers makes no difference to the rate of crime whatever. So, there is tension. The Police Federation are unhappy with the government's cuts, and particularly angry about the complacent way in which they have detonated social antagonisms and then simply shoved the blame onto the police when the conflagration duly occurred. So yes, there is an antagonism. It is even, dare we say it, a class antagonism: between the governing party of the ruling class and a force of middle class professionals who see their role as being downgraded. Not that they always see it this way exactly: many officers will insist "we're public sector workers too". Would it be too glib to reply that you rarely see an NHS worker or a teacher giving brain damage to a protester, punching children in the face, or charging at large groups of people on steeds while hurling baton blows?
But even if the Police Federation were genuine in threatening to go on strike, and I beg leave to doubt it, the question is: what purpose would achieving their goals actually fulfil for striking workers, for protesting students, for women struggingly against rape and domestic violence, for black and Asian communities fighting oppression? If the Police Federation did actually strike, did receive support from the Left, and did actually achieve pay increases, job protection and end to the cuts in the force, who would this serve? It seems obvious to me that it would simply strengthen the police in their repressive role by protecting their numbers; that, far from strategically splitting the force, it would cement them behind the government by conserving their material privileges and morale; that it would strengthen their position within society as a whole by giving them unwarranted prestige in the left and labour movement; and that in the not-very-long-run it would redouble their ability to crush movements like Climate Camp, or like UK Uncut, to batter and prosecute protesters like Alfie Meadows, to corral striking workers within steel walls on the basis of 'total policing', to batter and murder young black men. In a word, they would be empowered to disorganise the social forces now being organised with great difficulty to resist austerity. I think this mistaken judgement, hoping to benefit strategically from a police strike, arises from supposing that the rank and file are just the hired muscle of the ruling class, rather than relatively autonomous bearers of social power in themselves. It is not that one forecloses the concrete analysis of concrete situations, ruling any tactical manouevre in relation to the police a priori out of bounds. One can imagine situations of such severity that there is the real prospect of splitting and disorganising the police force, and the careful handling of such situations might reap dividends. But since such a situation remains incredibly remote, the strategic question of how the Left ought to relate to that doesn't even arise today. Not only is it unlikely that there will be a strike, but the police aren't even asking for the support of the Left, much less bargaining over the conditions of such support. There is the question of how we ought to relate to cuts in policing. To this, some say that if we oppose cuts, then we oppose cuts, end of. I say that's a complete misunderstanding. Just as when pundits say, "surely you can't oppose every cut - even if they were to cut Trident, or arms spending, or even if they cut waste and inefficiency?" The answer is that we oppose cuts in the aggregate; but we want the money to be spent better on things that benefit ordinary people. Hospitals, schools, pensions and infrastructure, not more police and weapons. And you can be damned sure that any increase in spending on police in these circumstances would come at the expense of one of the vital public services. So, no, don't 'support' the Police Federation. And don't think that brutality and racism are in some sense accidental or incidental to policing. It's the job.
Labels: british state, capitalist ideology, capitalist state, metropolitan police, police brutality, racism, repression
2:09:00 pm |
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Saturday, March 24, 2012
Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching posted by Richard Seymour
What is lynching? In its prevalent forms in American history, it appears as the administration of racial formations through terror. The mutilation, shaming and degrading of black bodies, and also the corpses being retrieved and displayed as trophies, was intended to maintain the symbolic subjection of black people to, in bell hooks' formulation, "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy". I stress the symbolic as a material element in racial oppression, because the problem of etiquette, of racial manners, was invariably central to such violence. Night-riders and lynch mobs were the enforcers of this etiquette. We know it's a peculiar problem in Jim Crow, the thousand and one rules and codes that crowded the field of sociality, exchange, transport, production and so on.
As Howard Winant explains, black people were expected to "remove their hats in the presence of whites, to step off the sidewalk (where one existed) into the muddy street at the passage of a white, and to wait in such shops as would serve blacks until all whites had been served, no matter who had arrived first". One finds this everywhere. Not just in the segregated public accomodations, but in the sites of production, the factories, the textile mills, where black labour was menial and expected to be deferential. If there is a white woman walking down a corridor, you step out of it until she passes. You don't speak to a white person unless they address you. If you need the toilet, you walk out of the building and several hundred yards to the facility marked "colored". So much, we all know. And what does it tell us about the social order? The South's theologians, ideologists and apologists hailed the region as a sort of classical, Athenian structure, a gentle, stable and aristocratic community. Yet the first infringement of one of the region's rituals could result in an explosion of violence, as if the antagonisms pervading the whole formation were suddenly displaced onto one symbolic crux.
But this doesn't capture the whole problem. For the organization of political violence in American history is unusual in some respects, in that the whole history of countersubversive (anti-radical, anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-black) violence is one in which the state's monopoly on legitimate violence is deputised to sections of the citizenry. The invocation of the 'right to bear arms' has almost always been made in this sort of context, as during the trials of Klansmen in the Reconstruction period. And it is in this sort of area of political violence, where citizens were de facto deputised by states according to illicit hierarchies and instructions, whether it was Klan, minute men, FBI mobs, or Pinkertons, that parapolitics has a peculiar role in American history and politics. Occasionally, the logic has been subverted, as when Black Panthers invoked this right to defend themselves against police criminality - one of the few such invocations of the 'right to bear arms' where the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of force has genuinely been challenged. But this violence was precisely not legitimized, whereas lynchings, employer violence, the 'disappearing' of militants, and so on, often has been legitimized. In the shift from Jim Crow to the penal administration of race, which required that the black criminality be identified through increasingly sophisticated classifications, codes and statutes, the 'right to bear arms' has most often been raised in the context of white self-defence. Citizens have often been allowed to wield punitive or capital violence when certain social norms or classifications were tested and defied; their violence has been legitimized because at the very least they have not been sanctioned.
But there is one other facet of this, which is the spatial re-ordering of American cities and towns. The racial aspect of this is familiar enough that I don't need to rehearse it here: the construction of 'the ghetto', 'white flight', the displacement of segregation from county to neighbourhood level. But of course this spatial re-organization is also way of structuring class power, as well as of preserving certain (patriarchal, conservative) social forms. The emergence of 'private towns' signals another twist in the delegation of state power sanctioned by the doctrine of property rights. In a previous post, I mentioned 'Leisure World' of Arizona, where constitutional protections are seemingly suspended, where the board of directors censors published material at will, precisely as one might in one's own household, or one's own company. In these zones, Mexicans and other people of colour may work, but in total silence. If they say anything to the whites who live there, they're out. The so-called 'gated community' is a related phenomenon, not quite as extreme in the internal controls available to its owners, but obviously protected with civilian violence - security guards, neighbourhood watch, armed citizen vigilantes, all do their share. It is in the context of territorial property rights, concerning households especially, but certainly gated communities and private towns, that stand-your-ground laws allowing for killing in 'self-defence' have been most available to legitimize this kind of violence.
Trayvon Martin was murdered while walking through a gated community in Miami known as Twin Lakes. His killer, George Zimmerman, has not been arrested. In fact, judging from witness statements, the police have taken quite extraordinary steps to avoid arresting him. Zimmerman had a long-standing relationship with local police, inasmuch as he was constantly in contact with them to report disturbances, suspicious sightings, windows left open and so on. It seems likely that they knew who he was, and what a vigilant citizen he was. Indeed, it seems probable that they shared many of his concerns, as their officers were known to have worries about black vagrancy and criminality. Neighbourhood Watch knew Zimmerman well, knew that he was always alert to the possibility of young black men who may be outsiders coming into the gated community. The security guards who defend local properties have displayed similar concerns, in one case shooting a black man while he was in his vehicle. They cited self-defence, claiming that he was driving toward them and about to run them over, although autopsy reports show that he was shot in the back. The judge threw out the case for lack of evidence. Of course, we have abundant examples, of which the execution of Troy Davis is just one, of just how racialised the question of evidence is.
But the point to make here is that while Zimmerman acted alone, he did not act in isolation, at odds with the expectations of police, or with the social norms current in the gated community. He saw a young black man walking around the gated community. To him, as to any officer, or security guard, or citizen vigilante, this was 'suspicious'. His presence was not in keeping with racial etiquette. His behaviour, walking slowly and looking at the houses of the well-off in the rain, suggested a deranged, drugged mind - because it is not done. Not in this neighbourhood, not in this community, and not in this town. Zimmerman acted expeditiously to suppress this symbolic infringement. Perhaps he spoke to Trayvon Martin, perhaps he challenged him about his behaviour, queried his motive for being there, instructed him to move along with more haste. But, whether because cooperation was not forthcoming, or because it was too late for the infringement to be remedied, he resolved the problem finally by putting an end to Martin's life, blasting his chest open.
Geraldo Rivera thinks the murder happened because Trayvon Martin was wearing a hoodie, and thus sending out a signal that he was a gangster. However morally cretinous this suggestion is, give Rivera credit for having some intuition about the politics of racial symbolism. He means that the murder victim is partly to blame for his death, because this symbolic action, wearing a hoodie, identifies one as someone who should be killed. He cannot help partially sharing the point of view of the killer, understanding the anxiety and horror that such sassing, such brazen boldness, such reckless wearing, walking and looking, provokes. He partially shares the point of view of the killer and that's why gets it: hey, if you don't want to get shot, don't go out looking like a punk. If you don't want to get shot, don't loiter, stand up straight, dress properly, show some manners. For there are points in the administration of America's increasingly jittery racial class system, where it seems that everything rides on this symbolic order and its maintenance.
Labels: capitalist state, class, kkk, lynching, racial formation, racism, terror, trayvon martin, united states, vigilantism, violence
1:22:00 pm |
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Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Free speech martyr posted by Richard Seymour
Azhar Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to re-define racism as "anything that could conceivably offend white people". Ahmed is being prosecuted by police over a statement he made on Facebook. The police say it is a "racially aggravated public order offence".
Look at the statement. There is not a hint of racism in it. To make it racist, one would have to assume that the troops were not just exclusively white, but somehow the bearer of whiteness in its essence. Maybe they are in this day and age; maybe it is through imperialist action and its effects both domestically and internationally that whiteness is produced. But the second assumption one would have to make is that white people are the victims of racist oppression by black people, Muslims and so on. We'll come back to this.
A spokesperson for Yorkshire police said: "He didn't make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother." So, the penalty for not making a point "very well" is prosecution and potentially a sentence of up to six months in prison. The suggestion, though, is that aside from being "racially aggravated" this statement constitutes an incitement to disorder. Of course, it is considerably more even tempered than some sentiments I have expressed myself in the past, though I won't suffer arrest or prosecution for it. In addition, the internet - and Facebook in particular - contains an abundance of pages that really do exist to incite violence. Yet a Muslim sassing our brave boys is too much for the state. Either this suggests that Muslims are an excitable brown rabble, apt to start cutting white people up at the merest hint of block capitals and exclamation marks, or it implies that it is the feelings of offended white people that must be protected, lest they be the ones who are incited. Unsurprisingly the EDL and Casuals United dirt (may I say that, or is it "racially aggravated"?) are delighted. Muslims won't be allowed to sass our brave boys now that the bizzies are 'on our side'. Hurrah for the filth! (Is that okay, or...?)
What is really at stake here? Why are the police behaving like this? The blog of the Index on Censorship website suggests that suspicion of Muslims voicing opposition to the troops is rooted in fear and suspicion resulting from 7/7. To be honest, I think this is lame. The police and the Crown Prosecution Service are not acting out of paranoia. But the blog also makes another suggestion which gets close to the truth in my opinion: "Unconditional support for soldiers is now expected, even as we become increasingly unsure of what they’re doing out there. From the most ardent supporter of the war to the most strident critic, everyone claims to be acting in the interest of Our Brave Boys. This is now not a matter of politics, but loyalty ... the “racially aggravated” charge doesn’t stick, unless one is willing to buy into the notion that Afghanistan is part of an ethno-religious war between “Islam” and “the West”."
This suggests that it is the state, through its action, which is racializing this issue. We know that the state is involved in more than simply the bureaucratic and repressive organization of society. Fundamentally what it does is a kind of moral regulation, ordering the symbolic world, constituting norms and social classifications. Obviously the law, and the criminal justice system which executes the law, is critical to this constitutive action. The state's re-classification of racist crime in such a way as to efface the axis of oppression, to make it such that "racism cuts both ways", was an important precondition for this sort of action. But what is at stake now is an attempt to re-organize the social body behind a resurgent militarism. We have seen the PR efforts aimed at cementing a new consensus that can support war indirectly, or at least neutralise opposition, on the basis of pro-troops sentiment. I think the pukeworthy Military Wives, whatever the producers thought they were doing, was a masterpiece in this sort of propaganda. But consent does not exist in separation from coercion. Violence and, literally, terror is central to how consent is secured. How the police act in producing consent has been dealt with here.
So we could see this prosecution as aberrant, the criminal justice system over-reacting, over-playing its hand, being too fastidious with incitement laws, or whatever. No doubt some will attribute it to nanny-state authoritarianism, and the usual bores will say that the liberals who support anti-racist legislation caused this to happen. I think it would make more sense to see it as a speculative manouevre in the application of an emerging discourse of treason. For that is really the logic of this prosecution. One has to see this question of 'incitement' in connection with the repressive and racialized response to the riots last Summer, and the generalized unease of the British state about the combustibility of the social order. Those police actions extended the repertoire of repressive tactics already formed in relation to the student protests, G20, UK Uncut, the climate camp and so on. As importantly, I think, it has to be seen in the context of the new doctrine of 'total policing', which is essentially about giving the police more of a free hand to intervene in aggressive ways to solve problems of social order, coded as problems of crime prevention. A premium is being placed on preemptive action, literally - I repeat, literally - on terror. In this case, it is disloyalty that is being punished, in a racialized way. The action of the police and courts is about constituting a new field of punishable conduct. And when disloyalty is punished, there really isn't much that can't be included under its canopy.
So we could see this prosecution as aberrant, the criminal justice system over-reacting, over-playing its hand, being too fastidious with incitement laws, or whatever. No doubt some will attribute it to nanny-state authoritarianism, and the usual bores will say that the liberals who support anti-racist legislation caused this to happen. I think it would make more sense to see it as a speculative manouevre in the application of an emerging discourse of treason. For that is really the logic of this prosecution. One has to see this question of 'incitement' in connection with the repressive and racialized response to the riots last Summer, and the generalized unease of the British state about the combustibility of the social order. Those police actions extended the repertoire of repressive tactics already formed in relation to the student protests, G20, UK Uncut, the climate camp and so on. As importantly, I think, it has to be seen in the context of the new doctrine of 'total policing', which is essentially about giving the police more of a free hand to intervene in aggressive ways to solve problems of social order, coded as problems of crime prevention. A premium is being placed on preemptive action, literally - I repeat, literally - on terror. In this case, it is disloyalty that is being punished, in a racialized way. The action of the police and courts is about constituting a new field of punishable conduct. And when disloyalty is punished, there really isn't much that can't be included under its canopy.
Labels: 'reverse racism', capitalist state, imperial ideology, imperialism, islamophobia, police, racism, troops
2:19:00 pm |
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