Resist the Punitive State

Grassroots Struggles Across Welfare, Housing, Education and Prisons

Emily Luise Hart, Joe Greener, Rich Moth

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786805300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Verfassungen

To examine government policy and state practice on housing, welfare, mental health, disability, prisons or immigration is to come face-to-face with the harsh realities of the 'punitive state'. But state violence and corporate harm always meet with resistance. With contributions from a wide range of activists and scholars, Resist the Punitive State highlights and theorises the front line of resistance movements actively opposing the state-corporate nexus. The chapters engage with different strategies of resistance in a variety of movements and campaigns. In doing so the book considers what we can learn from involvement in grassroots struggles, and contributes to contemporary debates around the role and significance of subversive knowledge and engaged scholarship in activism. Aimed at activists and campaigners plus students, researchers and educators in criminology, social policy, sociology, social work and the social sciences more broadly, Resist the Punitive State not only presents critiques of a range of harmful state-corporate policy agendas but situates these in the context of social movement struggles fighting for political transformation and alternative futures.

PART I

CHALLENGING STATE–CORPORATE POWER THEORIES AND STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE

1

Resisting the Punitive State–Corporate Nexus

Activist Strategy and the Integrative Transitional Approach

Joe Greener, Emily Luise Hart and Rich Moth

INTRODUCTION

The case studies that will be presented in this book illustrate the extent to which a ‘punitive turn’ across a number of policy domains is a prominent and pervasive feature of neoliberalism in the UK. However, before the book turns to these examples of policy implementation, this first chapter will outline a broader understanding of this phenomenon and its implications for activist strategy. Consequently, the chapter has two main aims. The first is to locate these punitive tendencies as a feature of the ‘integral’ state under contemporary neoliberalism, which utilises increasingly draconian and divisive means to maintain a degree of legitimacy for this system. These threats to consent-making processes are an effect of neoliberal reconfigurations of the interrelated spheres of production and social reproduction that underpin harmful and detrimental processes, such as work intensification in the former and crises of care provision in the latter. However, neoliberal reforms have also resulted in demographic shifts both within labour markets and across society more widely that are engendering new patterns of contestation and resistance. Our second major aim in the chapter is, therefore, to explore the strategic implications of these shifting contexts and demographics for strategies of resistance and the development of oppositional currents and coalitions. In particular, and building on our analysis of these shifts, we propose a framework for activist strategy which we call the ‘integrative transitional’ approach (ITA). ITA takes account of these wider changes in social conditions by incorporating political demands that span productive and reproductive concerns and in so doing, we argue, has the potential to enhance activist efforts to build and strengthen diverse and broad-based alliances of resistance to punitive state–corporate policy agendas.

CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM AND THE ‘INTEGRAL’ POWER OF THE PUNITIVE STATE

The enactment by the state of an increasingly punitive approach to welfare and criminal justice policy is a core feature across the contributions in this book. In this chapter, we examine the strategic and practical implications of that policy shift for building oppositional currents and political resistance. However, before doing so, it is necessary to delineate the nature of the state and its relationship to the economy. We consider the state and economy (including its constituent capitals) to be structurally interdependent elements within the wider capitalist system (Jessop, 2008; Ashman and Callinicos, 2006). For us then, the state should be regarded as the capitalist state. Moreover, the latter institution, as Gramsci argued, is best understood as the ‘integral state’. This is because power and control in capitalist society is enacted and maintained through two integrated modalities: on the one hand, the deployment of force by institutions such as the police and army (‘political society’); and on the other, securing consent via complex mediating systems including those of education, the media, charities, NGOs and trade unions (‘civil society’). These civil society organisations play a significant formal and informal role through the creation and maintenance of a pervasive ‘common sense’ favourable to ruling social groups (Davies, 2014; Thomas, 2009). However, it is important that consent and coercion are not counterposed or understood in a dualistic way. Rather, these two elements are dialectically related and complementary, and it is by counterbalancing them that the state secures order and maintains the relative legitimacy (or hegemony in Gramscian terms) of the dominant class within capitalist democracies (Thomas, 2009:164).

The Transition from Keynesianism to Neoliberalism

The exact ‘mix’ of consent and force deployed by the integral capitalist state at any particular historical moment is contingent on situational factors. Consequently, in order to understand the current ‘punitive turn’, it is necessary to map the political and economic context that has shaped these policy shifts. In this section, we will therefore provide a brief account of the transition from Keynesian interventionism to neoliberalism, consider its implications for economic and social policy reform, and outline how this provided a basis for the emergence of a more punitive and coercive approach to public policy.

In the post-war period from 1945, the dominant political-economic theory was a Keynesian approach characterised by a mixed economy, nationalisation and state provision of welfare (Ferguson, Lavalette and Mooney, 2002). These policy agendas represented an attempt by the Keynesian state to secure hegemonic power by abrogating class conflict and generating popular consent through welfarism (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Social policies in areas such as education, housing and health care were oriented towards universalism and reduced dependency on markets, while criminal justice policy was characterised by comparatively lower levels of incarceration (Wacquant, 2009). However, this model was destabilised by the economic crises of the 1970s. At this juncture, a shifting balance of forces led to reorganisation of the state along neoliberal lines in an attempt to bolster the structural power of capital while reducing the state’s social protection functions.

The emergence of neoliberalism was marked by significant developments in relation to both the economy and social provision. In relation to the former, neoliberalism instigated the subordination of economic and social policy to markets (Fine, 2012) and capital’s shift away from more productive areas of the economy towards financialisation (Harman, 2009). Recent broader changes in the structure of the economy have also intensified the sense of precarity for workers, with an increased prevalence of mechanisms such as zero-hour contracts and the growth of the ‘gig’ economy reinforcing material and employment insecurity (Doogan, 2009). In terms of social policy, neoliberalism has accelerated retrenchment and market reconfigurations of formal welfare institutions such as the NHS, social care and benefits systems, thereby further privatising ‘care’ tasks either to the private sector or individual households (we will characterise this in terms of social reproduction later in the chapter).¹ Furthermore, social and economic policies have been developed in ways that support the interests of financialised capital, for instance, the reconfiguration of social housing as primarily a market for investors rather than provision to meet social needs and the involvement of large corporations in many aspects of government service delivery from social care to prison expansion.

From Social Protection to Disciplinary Proletarianisation

The process of transition from Keynesian to neoliberal political economy and its consolidation represented an attempt to transform the background conditions of capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018) by increasing the structural power of capital at the expense of labour. A central feature of this transition is a shift from social protection to disciplinary proletarianisation within the arenas of welfare and criminal justice policy. This change is, we contend, central to an analysis of the punitive tendencies foregrounded by the contemporary capitalist state. The neoliberal era has seen an increasing integration (and subsumption) of welfarist agendas for the management of poverty and inequality within the structures of criminal justice policy. This is driven by a significant re-orientation of these policy agendas towards an overarching aim of managing economic insecurity by enforcing participation in deregulated labour markets. This punitive dynamic of coerced labour market engagement spanning welfare and criminal justice policy constitutes what we call disciplinary proletarianisation. This describes a shift in emphasis from consent-based forms of domination to more directly violent and coercive practices in order to manage various crisis tendencies within contemporary capitalism, with the aim of driving down wages, weakening the political position of the working class more generally and creating favourable conditions for financialised accumulation. In order to realize this outcome, both policy domains are increasingly oriented to a ‘behaviourist philosophy relying on deterrence, surveillance, stigma, and graduated sanctions to modify conduct’ (Wacquant, 2009: 288). Accordingly, the rehabilitative goals of welfare and penal policy have been eroded and more punitive orientations have taken centre stage. While the exercise of coercive measures by the state to engender labour market participation is nothing new, the austerity phase of neoliberalism has heralded a concerted effort to enforce such compliance across much wider populations, simultaneously rolling back levels of welfare support to those groups previously regarded as exempt from the labour market (Roulstone, 2015).

Processes of disciplinary proletarianisation are buttressed by the deployment of stigmatisation. Mainstream political narratives under neoliberalism are grounded in a position that emphasises citizens’ obligation to be economically productive and reframes profoundly socially structured experiences, such as poverty and unemployment, as personal and moral failures. This ideology then legitimises the utilisation by politicians and the mainstream media of denigrating frames of reference (for instance, ‘strivers and skivers’ rhetoric) to stigmatise and demonise particular marginalised groups including migrants, benefit claimants, the urban poor, black/minority ethnic youth and disabled people. The ‘weaponisation’ of stigma and social blame in relation to marginalised and excluded groups (Scambler, 2018), who are constructed as the source of social ills (itself an act of institutional violence [Cooper and Whyte, 2017]), is integral to the crafting of ‘technologies of consent’ under neoliberalism (Jensen and Tyler, 2015).

The restructuring of welfare and criminal justice systems to achieve convergence around the principles of disciplinary proletarianisation has intensified in the wake of the Financial Crisis of 2008 and is visible in a range of policy areas. For instance, within the benefits system, enforcement of labour market engagement has intensified since the 2012 Welfare Reform Act through mechanisms such as conditionality, sanctioning and disentitlement, that aim to disincentivise claiming support and thereby engender re-entry into paid employment (Fletcher and Wright, 2018). Another arena of disciplinary proletarianisation is prison expansion, with enlargement of this system utilised as an alternative means for managing rising levels of inequality (Corporate Watch, 2018). There has also been a recent related increase in the use of detention centres for managing migrant populations (Silverman and Griffiths, 2018). Moreover, the expansion of punitive modes for managing marginalised populations across these sectors is transparently geared towards the creation of opportunities for corporate profit maximisation through outsourcing of state provision (Tombs and Whyte, 2015).

The lens of the integral state, introduced above, enables contextualisation of this shift from social protection to disciplinary proletarianisation as an instance of the recalibration of the balance between force and consent. We have highlighted a small number of these strategies through which this is implemented from administrative domination (Davies, 2014: 3222), that is, the deployment of force through an array of coercive techniques to inculcate behavioural compliance (e.g. welfare-to-work reforms) (see Peter Beresford’s Chapter 5, in this volume; also Moth and McKeown, 2016), to the divisive and stigmatising rhetoric deployed in government and media discourses to stoke popular fears and resentments towards marginalised groups (the weaponisation of stigma noted above). These responses represent an attempt to resolve economic crises in favour of capital and shore up weakening systemic legitimacy through repressive policy measures. This lens enables an understanding of the possibilities for flexible implementation by the integral state of different modalities of power along the force/consent continuum as political exigencies demand.

CRISES OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION UNDER NEOLIBERALISM

In the chapter so far, our focus has been the transition from Keynesianism to neoliberalism as a political strategy from above by the integral state to resolve recurrent crises of capitalism since the 1970s. However, core elements of this neoliberal reform agenda, such as the retrenchment of the welfare state, involve not only reconfiguration of the background conditions for capital accumulation but also, by extension, an assault on the very conditions of social reproduction that enable wider human needs to be met. This has significant implications for modes and levels of class struggle because these social, political and economic transformations generate particular crisis tendencies. As Fraser notes, such crises are not simply economic or financial but multidimensional involving a host of harmful social consequences which encompass ‘“non-economic” phenomena [such] as global warming, “care deficits” and the hollowing out of public power’ (Fraser, 2014: 56). Moreover, many of the activist campaigns and social movements that will be described in the subsequent chapters of this book have their genesis in the punitive restructuring of systems of reproduction in areas such as housing, health care, mental distress or disability. We argue, therefore, that crises of social reproduction have become increasingly significant, both as an important driving force for resistance and a terrain of political struggle. This section will therefore begin with an overview of production and social reproduction and an exploration of crises of reproduction and their implications for contemporary political contestation in the current period.

Marx’s Capital rigorously conceptualises the circuits of capitalist production. However, while Marx does note the background conditions vital for the system’s ongoing reproduction, these are relatively underdeveloped in his work. Later theorists, in particular Marxist-feminists, have therefore built upon Marx’s insights in order to expand our understanding of the processes through which the ‘front story’ of exploitation under capitalism (private ownership, free labour markets and accumulation) rests upon a ‘back story of expropriation’ constituted by (mostly) unpaid reproductive labour (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 28–9). These processes of social reproduction² serve three main functions: the maintenance and renewal of the current workforce; the sustenance and regeneration of those outside the labour force such as children, older people, (some) people who are disabled or experiencing mental distress and individuals with health conditions; and the replenishing of populations of workers to replace t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Challenging State–Corporate Power: Theories and Strategies of Resistance
• Part II: Resisting the Punitive Welfare State: Housing, Mental Health, Disability and Immigration
• Part III: Subversive Knowledge and Resistance: Reconceptualising Criminalisation, Penality and Violence
• Notes on Contributors
• Index