Mass Incarceration and Capitalism
Weekend Edition April 4-6, 2014
The Violence of Economic Exploitation
Mass Incarceration and Capitalism
by ROB URIE
With no public acknowledgement of the irony the U.S., the ‘land of the free,’ has both the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest overall prison population. The dominant public perception appears to rest at the local level: the state has the right to prohibit socially destructive acts; people commit socially destructive acts and they are put in prison. Left largely unconsidered is the nature of the democratic capitalist state that claims this right to incarcerate. American history places it squarely in the service of economic interests. The country was founded on genocide and slavery. Western political theory frames these as ‘political’ acts. Genocide against the indigenous population was / is framed as military conflict. Slavery in theory ‘ended’ with the Civil War. But both of these also had profound economic impacts. Much as the enclosure ‘movement’ in Britain produced a ‘criminal’ class of peasants ‘freed’ from formerly collective lands, the American genocide against the indigenous population resulted in imposition of European ‘property’ relations where ‘property’ had never before been conceived. As far back as the philosopher Aristotle slavery was framed as the right of conquerors over the conquered whereas the labor expropriated from slaves in America supported a self-perpetuating plutocracy that today finds the descendents of slaves overwhelmingly populating U.S. prisons and the descendents of slave ‘owners’ as a class immune from prosecution for its own socially destructive acts and in position to profit from the system of mass incarceration.
Likewise, the history of race ‘relations’ in the U.S. doesn’t reduce to singular explanations. But it does tie broadly to Western imperial history, to British, European and American strategies of colonization, subjugation and economic expropriation begun in the seventeenth century that by degree continue today. The kidnapped Africans forced into slavery in the U.S. were used to feed a global system of capitalist trade and they served as human ‘currency’ as chattel property. The self-serving storyline that capitalism ‘replaced’ slavery with ‘free’ economic participation ignores the role expropriated slave labor played in capitalist trade and capital accumulation and it requires an anti-historical notion of ‘free’ economic participation that ignores the strategies of economic coercion that followed the nominal end of slavery. Designated three-fifths a person in the U.S. Constitution to accrue political power to slave ‘owners,’ slaves accrued political power to the institution of slavery as system of labor expropriation as well. A century or more of theoretical argumentation on both left and right notwithstanding, slavery was a capitalist institution that fed nascent global capitalist trade. And its residual in post Civil War strategies of racial repression, suppression and economic exploitation relate by degree to current capitalist imperialism in other former colonies. The racist, classist prison system in the U.S. is fact and reified metaphor for this ‘internal’ history and for the breadth and reach of the capitalist imperial relations behind the concentrated fortunes today so in evidence in the West.
Readers here likely know some or all of this history but most Westerners appear to have little to no knowledge of it. To most the question back is: how can a system of public safety, ‘crime’ suppression, be a strategy of social repression? Part of the disconnect lies within the very idea of crime as it is socially circumscribed through the anti-historical precepts of capitalist democracy. If ‘the West’ is capitalist and democratic then all social acts are ‘freely’ undertaken. Social history and material need are irrelevant because ‘we’ all have the same opportunity to react to existing circumstance in the present. Readers may see the outline of the ‘opportunity society’ of right-wing fantasy here. Within this frame the fact that per capita rates of incarceration in U.S. states are between five and ten times higher for the descendents of slaves than for the descendents of slave ‘owners’ must indicate innate qualitative differences, as must the relations of income and wealth distribution to this same residual of history. But if ‘crime’ were defined as the willful causing of social harm to others how could these overlaps of history: slavery, social repression, economic expropriation, and incarceration, not be crimes? As Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, Kahlil Gibran Muhammad and other great historians of social tragedy before them have noted, the Western narrative of ‘crime’ ties closely in history to strategies of economic expropriation and social repression against nominally ‘freed’ slaves and their descendents following the end of the Civil War. And it ties as well to British social theories of ‘crime’ used to explain the sudden appearance of a large peasant class dispossessed by the enclosure of formerly collective lands.
But this history of race in America is particular as well. It can’t be reduced to Marxian notions of class alone because the social persistence / insistence of race is more than just economic. And to reduce the history of race ‘relations’ to economics within the circular precepts of capitalist democracy is to misrepresent systematic repression as missed ‘opportunities,’ as the otherwise included who only coincidentally share relation with ‘external’ imperial subjects in social outcomes but who nevertheless join the ‘us’ when it comes to paying taxes and fighting and dying in imperial wars. While specific social technologies like race-based drug laws enforced using race-based policing are the mechanism that ‘explains’ the current massively disproportionate incarceration rate for blacks, browns and indigenous peoples, drug laws were used for a century prior in strategies of targeted social repression. The near instantaneous conversion of the U.S. penal population from white to black following the Civil War restored the economic relations of coerced expropriation outside of explicit chattel title. ‘Convict leasing’ was the conversion mechanism that tied ‘the law’ as tool of social repression to the economic expropriation that fed post-war capitalist relations. Capital ‘formation’ in the West included the aggregation of the expropriated labor of slaves, the exploited ‘resources’ that accrued from genocide against the indigenous population and from the place of these in the global system of capitalist trade. Race doesn’t reduce to class but it does find broad analog in Western imperial relations.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/04/mass-incarceration-and-capitalism/