Capitalism and Coercion: Crisis in the Legitimacy of the U.S. State
Global Research, June 11, 2020
The U.S. state appears to be facing a crisis of its legitimacy amid the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown. The killing of George Floyd,
yet another unarmed black man killed by the police, has erupted into
popular protest. It is quite possible that the disruption to the
routinization of life due to the lockdown to prevent the spread of the
Covid-19 virus may very well have been a factor in creating the
conditions for many to form a collective conscious, which translated in
the outpour of protest against the racial policing policies in the U.S.
and in generating the broad support it is currently receiving.
This crisis in
legitimacy appears to be aided by many conditions. With millions
displaced from work, people may have had a moment in which they did not
blame themselves, their neighbors, or God for their troubles. Instead,
people may have looked at the structure of society, as they did in the
1930s and the 1960s. Their outrage transformed into protest and
rebellion. We should also consider how there is a significant disruption
to the full consumption habits. Furthermore, distractions from the
culture industry of Hollywood (Marcuse 1963; Horkheimer et al. 2002) and
the interruption in spectator sports (as an opium of the masses, Eitzen
et al. 2012) may have possibly played a role in getting people to think
and act more critically about the world in which they live.
The U.S.’
political order is not solely based on coercion, but based on a
multitude of coercive and facilitative measures that seek to co-opt and manufacture consent;
thereby, making rebellion rare (Montes 2009; 2016). There is a crisis
in the legitimacy of authority when large sections of the population
lose trust in the government. The military, police, the courts, the
political system (i.e., government) are all institutions of the U.S.
state, so when people lose trust in the police, they have lost
confidence in the U.S. state’s ability to govern.
The police are
similar to the military because they are necessary arms of the state;
they protect and maintain the continuation of the political order: a
political order that is rooted in racial, class, and gender hierarchies.
It is vital to understand that when a government, as is currently
occurring in the U.S., can no longer manufacture enough consent to
legitimize its authority, it resorts to increased use of state coercion
(the U.S. state coercion is by no means dormant, not even in
non-rebellious times). Thus, this is why the state has amassed the
militarized-police, National Guard, and the military, as an axillary
force across the United States to suppress the protest of the police
killing of George Floyd. The U.S. state is reliant on physical violence,
and repression has been essential in protecting and maintaining the
continuity of the U.S. capitalist system.
The use of
racism has been fundamental to the so-called “greatness” of the United
States. This “greatness” long preceded the Trump administration and has
been and continues to be hidden and a not so hidden hallmark of its
economic “success.” One can argue that the very inception of the U.S.
has been a nation-state engaged racist state-sponsored policies, as in
the case of the genocidal policies against the indigenous peoples of
North America and the system of slavery, de jure, and post facto racial
segregation. This history also involves the usurpation of Mexican land
in the southwest, the conquest and colonialization of Cuba, the
Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guan, and Alaska, which all have
required physical violence, leaving carnage and trauma in its wake. This
physical violence does not always involve invasions and the suppression
of insurgencies. Still, violence can be seen in the societies and
neighborhoods of the oppressed, with high rates of unemployment,
poverty, police brutality, and incarceration. Often, it is also turned
inward in the form of collective and individual destruction (e.g.,
suicide, high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, et cetera). The above is
but an example of the imperialist side of capitalism. This is what Karl
Marx meant when he said that capitalism comes into the world “dripping
from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx
2017:639).
Coercion and Capitalism and the U.S. State
The U.S.
capitalist-state does not only depend on its military to secure
resources abroad and to expand its markets and influence, but it
simultaneously needs endless pools of disciplined workers that are
desperate enough to work for low wages. Now, maintaining a system where
few benefit from the misery of the many requires a great deal of force
and particular ideologies that can justify such a system. Such a system
has no real commitment to eradicate poverty and racism. According to
Chris Parenti (1999), what lies at the heart of the matter is a
contradiction: capitalism needs the poor (i.e., surplus populations of
laborers) and creates poverty. Yet, capitalism is also directly and
indirectly threatened by the poor. It is the role of police, prisons,
and the criminal justice system to manage this contradiction (Parenti
1999:238).
As the new
crime control policies took hold in the aftermath of a very explosive
period of protest and rebellion in the 1960s, incarceration rates by the
mid-1970s began to peak (Parenti 1999; Wacquant 2005). According to
Glenn Tonry, the architects of the so-called “war on drug” were aware
that this war would be fought mainly in minority areas of U.S. urban
cities, which would result in a disproportionate number of young blacks
and Latinos incarcerated (Wacquant 2005:21). For Wacquant, the ghetto
was were much of the “war on drugs” policies were carried out; it is an
institution based on closure and power, whereby a population is deemed
dishonest and dangerous and is at once secluded and controlled
(1998:143). Pamala Oliver, for example, state repression includes mass
incarceration, because of the role that prisons played as repressive
agents on black males in the U.S. during the Black Power Movement
(2004). The extension of state repression beyond “subversives” suggests
that the most oppressed not only can disrupt the system (e.g., there
were over 300 urban rebellions in the 1960s) but can become
revolutionary (Oliver 2004). Parenti (1999), Oliver (2004), and Wacquant
(2005) suggest that crime control is a form of state repression.
The system of
capitalism is a system based on private ownership and profit, and
competition (read: in most cases, corporate-state monopolies). Wealth
development is not socially owned; it is individually owned, and for
this system to exist, it requires ideologies that can justify why
rewards and prestige are so unequally distributed. Where does wealth
come from? It comes from the exploitation of labor, and the usurpation
of land and resources.
The origins of
policing are said to be in England in 1829 when the British state
concluded that “what was needed was a force that could both maintain
political control and help produce a new economic order of industrial
capitalism” (Vitale 2017:36). Therefore, the police role was to manage
the disorder from capitalism and to protect the “propertied classes from
the rabble” (Vitale 2017:36). This policing was also used to manage the
British colonial occupation of Ireland, seen as an innovative way to
control insurrections, riots, and political uprisings. For Alex S.
Vitale, the police in the U.S. are intimately tied to the management of
inequalities of race and class, suppressing workers and surveilling and
managing black and brown people have always been at the center of
policing (2017). The role of policing in the U.S. is about the
protection of private property, the suppression of rebellions, and
putting down strikes and other industrial actions. It had also aided the
system of slavery, the colonization of the Philippines, the repression
of native populations in Texas, as a means for U.S. state expansion, and
represses and neutralizes protest (Vitale 2017:40-50).
The present
use of policing has maintained its original goal, which is to manage the
surplus populations and contain the poor and racial minority
communities whose labor is considered redundant due to automation,
deindustrialization, and deregulation. As Parenti stated, the “war on
drugs” has been the trojan horse for these policies (1999:10).
The political neutrality of policing or state coercion has always been questioned. Charles Tilly’s research identified a link between coercion and legitimacy.
He wrote that whatever else states do (e.g., the idea of the social
contract), “they organize and, wherever possible, monopolize violence”
(1985:171). For Tilly, state legitimacy is obtained over time because
eventually “the personnel of states purveyed violence on a larger scale,
more effectively, more efficiently, with wider assent from their
subject populations, and with readier collaboration from neighboring
authorities than did the personnel of other organizations” (1985:173).
Consequently, states, in part, maintain power by legitimizing themselves
by creating ideologies, which socializes individuals to the norms and
values of the state. As Tilly makes clear, control over the physical
forces of violence is fundamental to nation-state’s authority, and the
fact that legitimacy depends on the conformity to abstract principles
such as the consent of the governed only helps to rationalize the
monopoly of force (1985:171). After all, for Tilly, it is through the
concentration and accumulation of capital and coercion and successful
inter-state war waging that the present nation-state emerged (1992).
Stephanie Kent
and David Jacobs argue that a society based solely on coercion could
not survive, not even the most authoritarian use coercion by itself, but
is often mixed with other means (2004). Kent and Jacobs’ research
provide examples that illustrate what occurs when police suddenly become
paralyzed (e.g., on strike) and do not respond; the poor tend not to
accept the conditions of inequality and would engage in redistribution
of wealth. Robert Cover provides an excellent example of the state’s
reliance on force by illustrating how “a convicted defendant may walk to
a prolonged confinement, but this seemly voluntary walk is influenced
by the use of force. In other words, if he does not walk on his own, he
will most certainly be dragged or beaten” (in Green and Ward 2004:3). As
pointed out above, coercion a crucial component for the establishment
and continuation of the political order. Stability is problematic even
in the most democratic societies because resource distribution is so
unequal that only a few genuinely benefit and have access to freedom,
rights, and security. It is undeniable that race continues to be a
significant marker of a person’s social, economic status, as well as the
degree in which one is targeted and entangled in the criminal justice
system.
Unequal relations are maintained in the U.S.
by there being over 12 million members of coercive forces -e.g.,
policing and military and billions of tax-payer’s dollars allocated to
this mission. Coercive forces that range from the police, corrections,
national security, to the military. They are conjoined in their various
task in upholding domestic and foreign policies designed to maintain the
status quo in the U.S. and U.S. hegemony around the globe. As a result,
there are approximately 7 million individuals under correctional
supervision in the U.S. alone and many populations around the world that
live in wretched conditions so that the U.S. state can maintain its
global dominance (Montes 2016).
The U.S.
population consists of approximately 12% black and 15% Latino; however,
some reports illustrate that these two groups represent about 60% of
those incarcerated. In 2012, the incarceration rate per 100,000 was
2,841 for blacks, 1,158 for Latinos, and 463 for whites (Carson and
Golinelli 2013). The rate of incarceration by race demonstrates racial
disparity within the criminal justice system. The U.S. incarceration
rate is the highest in the industrial world, but it is even higher when
aggregating for race. Yet, Bruce Western illustrates that mass
incarceration affects the poorest of blacks, which points to the class
element (2006:26). In short, one can argue that mass incarceration
involves the containment of the most marginalized, in which blacks,
brown people, and Native Americans are disproportionately the poorest.
The groups that have the most significant distance from wealth and
privilege are perceived as the greatest threats to the political order.
This theorizing explains racial profiling and how race is a marker for
criminality. As a result, there is more reliance on the policing of the
poor and racial minority communities. However, the type of crime that
should be the focus is the state crimes of omission; this is when
state’s failure to protect the rights and to serve the needs of all
people within the territory of a particular nation-state; thereby,
creating the conditions for non-state crime (Barak 2011: 35-48).
Essentially, when these needs are not met, as mentioned above, they can
create a breakdown in the legitimacy of state authority, which creates
conditions favorable for protest and rebellion.
Crisis in Legitimacy
Image
on the right: George Floyd Mattered graffiti along 38th St in
Minneapolis on Wednesday, after the death of George Floyd on Monday
night in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Source: Flickr)
The explosion
of widespread protest over the killing of George Floyd has become a
flashpoint of anger for all the other unarmed black males killed by the
police in the United States. For many of the protesters, this had been
yet another senseless and unjustified murder. In which the police would
once again not be held accountable. The impunity of law enforcement has
long enraged black, Latino, Native Americans, and poor communities
across the United States.
Just about
every community of color and poor community in the U.S. has a list of
victims of police brutality. This tension and frustration have been
building up for some time, and more recently, with the high media
profile cases of Eric Garder (2014), Michael Brown (2014), and Freddy
Grey (2016). For many, this problem could no longer be dismissed. As a
result of protest and rebellion, ordinary everyday people had to take
notice of the repeated police killing of unarmed black youth and men.
According to tracking by the Washington Post, half of the people shot and killed by police are white. However, blacks are shot at a disproportionate rate.
They account for less than 13% of the U.S. population but are killed by
police at more than twice the rate of whites. Police also kill Latinos
at a disproportionate rate. Overall, the police kill more people at a
higher rate in the U.S. than do police in similar industrial nations.
The circumstances of these killings vary – e.g., from being unarmed to
being armed to being in the commission of a crime to being a suspect and
racially profiled. However, what appears consistent is that law
enforcement is not be trusted to investigate themselves. In many cases,
had it not been civilians using their phone cameras and/or protesters
forcing an investigation, many people would have accepted the official
police and political officials’ narrative. What has been bought to light
by afflicted black and communities of color has been the systemic
nature of police brutality and how it is not restricted to a few police
officers or a few police departments.
The system was
confronted with a crisis in its authority once the U.S. state and the
corporate media could no longer dismiss the protest as just black
protest from marginalized areas. The success of the Black Lives Matter
Movement (BLM) kept the murder of black men and youth at the center of
their organizing efforts. The BLM linked together, the spontaneous
protests and rebellion of black and people of color communities when
they experienced police brutality, propelling these injustices to
national and international levels of attention. The multicultural
outpour of support, which has included celebrities and professional
athletes, has lent their support. One cannot overlook how suddenly
everyone appears now to be antiracist. Nor can one deny how this moment
seems to have opened up the opportunity for political opportunism,
particularly within the duopoly political party system, and the
corporate media. It is at these times that the political elite from both
parties and the corporate media attempts to angle their messages in
such a way as to restore trust in the political order while being
semi-critical of it. When politicians and news anchors of the corporate
media -e.g., verbally condemn the killing of George Floyd, but at the
same time, uphold the status quo. This angling lends itself to
discussions about better training in police procedures, the firing and
convictions of the officers involved, more racial sensitivity trainings,
and pleas to channel the outrage into voting Democrat. Unfortunately,
this negates an understanding of the fundamental role policing plays in
the U.S. state and its task in upholding an unequal society.
Also, the
conflating the outrage of the killing of George Floyd with the
protesters who are not “peaceful,” disobey curfew, and loot and burn is
another way in which the state officials and corporate media presenters
attempt to restore trust in the U.S. state. So, what is absent is a
focus on how the various means of protest, civil disobedience, and the
destruction and defacing of the property of corporations, the U.S. flag,
and the police are symbols of what many perceive is the problem. The
problem is the U.S. state and how it is increasingly not protecting the
freedoms, safety, and economic wellbeing of all its people, but is
protecting its own interests, which includes the interests of
corporations, which are interlocking. And configured in this equation is
policing and the military, ensuring that the particular political order
is maintained.
Discrediting
protesters as thugs, terrorists, or the orchestration of external
forces such as Russia, and/or Antifa is to absolve the U.S. state of any
culpability. Even in the pre-Covid-19 world, there were
millions of people in the U.S. who have long lost trust in the system
and felt alienated from the political process because they believed that
politicians represent their own interests and those interests are
allied with the continuation of the political order. As Emma Goldman, a
famous anarchist, stated, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it
illegal.” As mentioned above, the racialized and exploitative system has
long preceded the Trump administration. In fact, the rise of the Occupy
Movement in 2011 and the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement in
2013 was because they had no confidence in the political establishment.
There is a reason why these movements were grassroots organizations and
struggle to remain as such because the political elite did not act on
their behalf. For example, the Obama administration did not use
executive orders to step in during the many instances of police killings
and protests, such as in Ferguson. Furthermore, these movements had no
interest in being co-opted by the politics of the duopoly political
party system.
This crisis in
legitimacy can also be seen in how both parties supported the bailout
of Wall Street during the Great Recession. Bailouts of corporations are
also occurring currently, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Both parties were
responsible for “tough on crime” legislation, such as the Violent Crime
Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 passed by the Clinton
administration. This act, in part, is responsible for furthering mass
incarceration and for creating more laws that target racial minorities.
Both parties are also responsible for creating more economic insecurity
for the poor and people of color by implementing neoliberal policies.
The Republican Party and Democratic Party both partake in the gutting of
the safety net programs. The Clinton administration – e.g., Welfare
Reform Bill of 1996, the repeal of the Glass Stiegel Act in 1999, and
NAFTA in 1994. Also, the Obama administration supported the bailout of
Wall Street, single-payer health care over universal health care, and
the 2014 Farm Bill (that included cuts to food stamps).
Both are
different wings of the duopoly political parties, maintaining the status
quo of the state. Glen Ford’s astute analysis of what he refers to as
the “racist-capitalist state” has remained intact even when political
officials are no longer white. For Glen Ford, Obama’s legacy can be seen
as protecting corporate power and advancing the imperial agenda, while
promoting the myth of a post-racial society (Hedges 2017). During the
1960s, various state strategies were deployed to diffuse urban
rebellion, one of them was the incorporation of blacks and other people
of color in law enforcement and political office such as mayors to
provide the illusion of reform (Katz 2007). The point made is a very
sociological one. If the U.S. state does not change from being a
capitalist-imperial state and is reliant on coercion to maintain the
political order, then no amount of selective incorporation
or mimetic reforms (Katz 2007) will change the role of policing.
It is safe to
say that this crisis in legitimacy involves the distrust in two wings of
the duopoly system (i.e., the government) because the police are but an
arm of the state. And this can be seen repeatedly with the endless
protest and demonstrations in the streets. A real important indicator of
how deep this crisis will be is if the police themselves, from the top
brass and the rank and file, find it difficult to hide behind the blue
wall of silence. If there is the realization that what separates the
people is not the thin blue line or the military mindset of us vs. them,
but between equality vs. inequality. Many employed in coercive
occupations receive state-sponsored elevated honorific statuses and
stable employment with high salaries during insecure economic times.
Besides being highly bureaucratic organizations that instill particular
self-fulfilling ideologies, the state and other agents of socialization,
such as the corporate media and educational institutions, all extend
great deference to this institution, making them a difficult group to
win over.
*
Note to readers: please click the share
buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists.
Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Vince Montes is a lecturer in sociology. Earned a Ph.D. at the Graduate Faculty of New School for Social Research.
Sources
Barak, Gregg. 2011. “Revisiting Crimes by Capitalist State.” Pp. 35-48 in State Crime, edited by D. L. Rothe & C. W. Mullins. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Carson, E. Ann. and Golinelli, Daniela. 2013. “Prisoners in 2012: Prisoners in 2012 Trends
In Admissions and Releases, 1991–2012.” Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 243920
Eitzen, Stanley D. Maxine Baca Zinn, and Kelley Eitzen Smith. 2012. In Conflict and Order. Boston, MA: Ally & Bacon.
Green, Penny and Tony Ward. 2004. State crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption.
Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.
Hedges, Chris. 2017. “President Obama’s Legacy with Glen Ford.” On Contact. Jan. 22. Video, https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/374680-obama-wars-corporate-interests/
Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W. Adorno, and Gunzelin Noeri. 2002 [1948] Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Katz, Michael. 2007. “Why Aren’t U.S. Cities Burning?” Dissent, Summer.
Kent, Stephanie
and David Jacobs. 2004. “Social Divisions and Coercive Control in
Advanced Societies: Law Enforcement Strength in Eleven Nations from 1975
to 1994.” Social Problems, Vol. 51, No. 3: 343–361.
Loury, Glenn C. 2008. Race, Incarceration, and American Values. Cambridge, MA: Boston Review.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Marx, Karl. 2017 [1867] Capital (Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy). Digireads.com.
Montes, Vince. 2016. “Coercive Occupations as State Facilitation: Understanding U.S. State’s Strategy of Control.” Radical Criminology, Issue 6, fall, 71-129. (http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc/issue/view/6/showToc)
__________. 2009. “The Web Approach to the State Strategy in Puerto Rico.” Pp. 99-118 in Bureaucratic Culture and Escalating Problems: Advancing the Sociological Imagination, edited by D. Knottnerus and B. Phillips. Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers.
Oliver, Pamela. 2008. “Repression and Crime Control.” Mobilization, 13,1: 1-24.
Parenti, Christian. 2008 [1999]. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. New York, NY: Verso.
Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. 1979 [1977]. Poor People’s Movement. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
__________. 1985. “State Making and War Making as Organized Crime.” Peter Evens, Dietrich Ruechemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York, NY: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Wacquant, Loic. 2008. “Race, Incarceration, and American Values.” Glenn C. Loury,
Race, Incarceration, and American Values. Cambridge, MA.: Boston Review.
