A Way Out: Jackie Wang’s "Carceral Capitalism" and The Coming Austerity
Jackie Wang | Carceral Capitalism | Semiotext(e) | 2018 | 360 Pages
“We have to rethink the way in which we turn every social problem into a problem for the police to solve. We use criminalization as an alternative to having a decent social welfare system, a social safety net, and economic opportunities for people that are distributed more evenly.” -Alex S. Vitale, ‘We Must Defund the Police Now’ 2020
When the coronavirus pandemic began, history stopped. More accurately, it was suspended. A few weeks later, at the end of May, history returned as thousands took to the streets in one of the largest protests in America’s history. These protests were a direct response to murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin. Chauvin, a member of the Minneapolis Police Department, knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, killing him. The protests that followed on from this murder were built on the back of at least half a decade of activism, loosely stretching as far back as the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
What links the pandemic and these protests? The scale of these protests is unprecedented. Yet it seems like the timing is wrong. There appears to be a disconnect between the politics of the pandemic and the politics driving these protests. The question of racist police brutality is not unimportant, but does it address the deep recession we’re already in the midst of, the coming austerity at the hands of neoliberal ideas that have dominated policy making since the 1980s, or even the continuing and worsening environmental crisis we are facing? Are we not treating a symptom instead of the disease?
The most likely scenario for a post-pandemic world is one in which the austerity that has been the norm since 2008 is continued and expanded. As of July 9th, the US has set aside an estimated 3 trillion dollars in fiscal stimulus. Of this just over half is exclusively concerned with keeping businesses afloat, including half a trillion specifically set aside to help bailout corporations. The last major bailout, during the 2008 fiscal crisis, saw wealth transfer to the top 1% at the expense of the 99%. Already there are signs that a similar wealth transfer is happening now as millions of Americans are facing foreclosure and eviction in the coming months while companies like Google and Amazon are reporting record-breaking profits.
This logic we have seen before, of austerity as wealth extraction. Maurizio Lazzarato, in his 2011 book The Making of Indebted Man, writes: “The enormous sums that States have handed over to banks, insurance companies, and institutional investors must now be "reimbursed" by the taxpayers (and not by the shareholders and purchasers of stock). The highest costs will be borne by wage-earners, beneficiaries of public programs, and the poorest of the population.”
There is every reason to think that the vast spending and borrowing the US Government has engaged in means the post-pandemic economy will simply entail more and worse austerity. Yet those who took to the streets were not protesting austerity, current or foretold. In this sense it is possible to say there is a disconnect between the politics of the protests and the politics of the pandemic.
Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism is a powerful corrective to this kind of seemingly false choice. Her uneven collection of essays is disunified in style, but its content presents a persistent and powerful thesis. Wang effectively demonstrates that over-policing and police brutality, debt and austerity, and racism and mass incarceration are at the core of the political economy of the modern US. In doing so she shows that to struggle against the police is to struggle against austerity.
To elaborate on this point and get at the importance of Wang’s book, let us return to Lazzarato. For Lazzarato, writing after the 2008 fiscal crisis and concerned with the growing debt of private citizens as social services disappeared under austerity, debt is a power that controls by creating subjects. He writes:
The series of financial crises has violently revealed a subjective figure that, while already present, now occupies the entirety of public space: the "indebted man." The subjective achievements neoliberalism had promised (‘everyone a shareholder, everyone an owner, everyone an entrepreneur’) have plunged us into the existential condition of the indebted man, at once responsible and guilty for his particular fate.
Towards the end of his book, he elaborates:
Unlike what happens on financial markets, the beneficiary as ‘debtor’ is not expected to reimburse in actual money but rather in conduct, attitudes, ways of behaving, plans, subjective commitments, the time devoted to finding a job, the time used for conforming oneself to the criteria dictated by the market and business, etc. Debt directly entails life discipline and a way of life that requires ‘work on the self,’ a permanent negotiation with oneself, a specific form of subjectivity: that of the indebted man.
Lazzarato’s analysis is powerful and compelling. Yet in the end his subjectivist analysis leads him to a pessimism of the intellect. There is no clear way out of the mire. He briefly suggests at the end of The Making of Indebted Man that an escape from austerity and debt requires collective action. In his 2013 book Governing by Debt, he talks about the refusal of work as a way out of the politics of debt: “We need ‘time’, but a time of rupture, a time that arrests the ‘general mobilization’, a time that suspends apparatuses of exploitation and domination – an ‘idle time.’” Lazzarato’s abstract proposals – the creation of a new time, wherein he really just promotes idleness – reflect to some extent the abstract nature of his work. There is a lacuna in his books on debt: because debt exercises control by creating sunjectivities, enforcement drops out of Lazzarato’s picture. The creation of the subjectivity of Indebted Man is its own enforcement, its own mechanism of power. There is no doubt that violence is there, lurking in the background of the analysis, the violence of being crushed by debt, of losing one’s home, of being barred from certain jobs because of one’s credit score and so on. However, these concerns are secondary effects of the making of the indebted man. Lazzarato’s observations about the subjectivity of indebtedness, about how it controls our future and our time are all true. But they are incomplete.
Wang, who starts from a much more focused question about policing and incarceration in the US, unsurprisingly ends up identifying a much more concrete site of struggle. This emerges most clearly in Wang’s second chapter, ‘Policing as Plunder’ in which she brings together the threads of austerity, debt and racialized policing. Wang’s argument is as follows: since the 1970s, when financial mangers first began taking over cities’ budgets, municipalities have had to turn to income streams that are not based on tax revenue. The most obvious form of income here is a system of fines and fees. As Wang explains:
‘Policing and Profit’ describes three ways that residents are used to generate revenue: 1) through usage fees imposed by criminal courts 2) through private probation supervision and 3) through civil forfeiture (the seizure of someone’s property)…Debt is imposed on residents through criminal proceedings. Private companies contracted by municipalities to provide probation ‘services’ also have the power to impose more fees and fines. Thus, a situation has emerged where government is essentially creating a captive market for companies providing probation supervision.
The Police, and over-policing, is then itself a direct tool of austerity, allowing cities to raise revenue without threatening corporate profits through taxation. The swelling of police budgets over the past several years is not simply part of the fact they are the last social service the rich also need – insofar as their main goal, in Michael Parenti’s memorable phrase, is “social control and protection of property” – but that they actively allow for the continuation of austerity politics by filling city coffers by expropriating wealth from those cities’ most vulnerable and poor.
The logic of policing, plunder, expropriation is itself tied to the question of police brutality. In 2014, Ferguson, Missouri become the site of major protests against police brutality after the killing of Michael Brown. Yet Ferguson was being run on the policing-as-plunder model, as Wang makes clear: “In Ferguson, the excessive use of fines and fees to generate revenue had an overwhelmingly negative impact on the quality of life of the city’s black residents – creating an atmosphere of fear, disrupting the lives of resident, ensnaring people in a cycle of financial and legal misery and limiting people’s mobility.”
If the goal of policing is extraction, then the killing of black folks by police seems irrational. Wang is cautious concerning the nuances of this topic, on what is essentially a debate between “those who use racial capitalism as an analytic and those who use an afro-pessimist lens, which is partly centered on gratuitous violence as a defining feature of anti-black racism.” Wang’s solution is to choose both, to see a “logic of disposability and a logic of exploitability” as what defines the logic of policing and incarceration in the US. This position concedes too much the idea that capitalism is at the very least rational by its own standards. The history of extraction is also always the history of violence: the colonial populations who built the wealth of the West were also, as individuals, disposable. Precisely in order to become a site of extraction, one must also become disposable. Later in the book Wang is less equivocal. Citing the work of Michael C. Dawson, she makes this point explicitly: “racial legacies that have marked black residents as lootable are intimately tied to police officer’s treatment of black people as killable.” In other words, to be exploitable is also to be disposable. The point for Wang is that the extractive logic cannot be separated from the logic that makes black lives disposable, that in order to bring an end to police brutality, we must bring an end to the austerity they seek to enforce. To struggle against the police is to struggle against austerity.
It might seem that here we have returned to Lazzarato. What is at stake in Wang’s discussion is the question of the creation of a subject, a racialized subject both exploitable and disposable. It is true that at heart of this discussion is a question of subjects, of who is marked as disposable and exploitable. What Lazzarato is missing is a concrete treatment of this question that would allow him to address the unity between questions of austerity and policing. Lazzarato is focused on the creation of subjects, and this creation is linked to Michel’s Foucault’s concept of bio-power: power focused on controlling life, on controlling entire populations. In Lazzarato’s analysis enforcement and the inherent violence of enforcement are secondary to the question of the creation of subject, of controlling life. Yet if we return to the end of the first volume of Foucault’s The History of SexualityI, we find that the power over life, bio-power, remains linked to death and violence: “If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.” The power over life is also what, for Foucault, enables mass death. Lazzarato leans too heavily on the power over life aspects of bio-power and ignores the very kind of violence bio-power sets out to comprehend.
Lazzarato’s approach has the benefit of being general, and thesis his intention. He sets out to explore debt and austerity not just in the US, but in the UK and Europe as well. Yet it is, paradoxically, Wang’s much more concrete and “suggestive” (her term) approach that reveals more to us about the structure of contemporary austerity. Scattered throughout Wang’s book is the idea that what is deployed against America’s poor and black populations will come to be standard procedure against all citizens: “the existence of poor whites who have fallen out of the middle class or have been affected by the opiate crisis at the present juncture represents not racial progress for black Americans, but the generalization of expropriability as a condition in the face of an accumulation crisis. In other words, immiseration for all.”
In a rather harrowing passage at the beginning of the book, Wang argues that the advent of mass incarceration of the black population is linked to unemployment:
What will happen when new surplus populations are created and humans are no longer needed for production or consumption? As the U.S. deindustrialized and the welfare state was gutted (a process that started in the 1970s), the solution to the problem of what to do with the unemployed people who had migrated to cities to become industrial workers – as well as the mentally ill people housed in hospitals that were shutting down en masse – was racialized mass incarceration.
It follows immediately on from a passage in which she quotes Jerry Kaplan, who argues that in the next decade, the wealthiest 5% could generate 50% of all spending in the United States. The techniques of control and imprisonment meant for a disposable poor and black population could easily be expanded to the entirety of the surplus population.
In this very direct sense, the police are the handmaidens of the coming austerity crisis. It is they who will fine, imprison and kill us in the coming post-pandemic world. That the police are racist in an everyday sense - that they lower their batons on white bodies with less force than they do on black bodies – does not prevent the logic the governs them as an institution from expanding. The value of Wang’s book, two years after its initial publication and at least seven years after she first published ‘Against Innocence’ – which now serves as the penultimate chapter of Carceral Capitalism – is to see clearly the current stakes of the American policing system and its links to the political economy of the most incarcerated population in the world. Reading Wang’s book while Minneapolis burned, her words and analysis felt prophetic, and they will remain so until we succeed in overcoming austerity politics. Carceral Capitalism reveals to us one crucial link upon which we should begin our work. To struggle against the police is to struggle against austerity and to struggle against austerity is to struggle against the police.
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