Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 23:39:30 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: M-I: Containment and Pacification (was Identities, the State, and


Doug wrote:

"Yes, but is it all about capital?...How much can capital explain the
American penchant for jailing so many people?...Is this use of force a
symptom of a failing of internalized control, a symptom that capital has
failed to socialize us fully? Does the incarceration help produce the
extraordinary level of violence in America? Does that combination of
violence and incarceration serve capital?"

I think it does, though not without contradictions. Those who are out of
work and out of school (as well as outside of the patriarchal family) do
escape a good deal of the physical and ideological control exercized by
those institutions. So it makes sense for capital to come up with a way to
contain them directly. Massive incarceration of a large number of
working-class people--especially people of color--has added benefits of
disciplining, in many ways, not only those who are in prison but also those
who are *not* (yet) within the prison walls. Incarceration, as a tactic in
a "war on crime," is of course a huge "failure," but nothing succeeds like
this particular failure in terms of making a large number of people fearful
and submissive. Fear of crime makes people ready and willing to relinquish
their rights and liberties, thus enhancing the repressive power of the
state against the working class. The dominant ideological representation of
crime, as I said in another post, also makes people focus on individual
guilt and innocence and disregard the structural conditions that produce
the activities defined as criminal. Since a disproportionately high number
of those who are incarcerated are people of color, this social fact can be
and has been used to abet racism, thus further dividing workers along
racial lines--an excellent outcome for capitalists. Criminalization of
poverty and public assistance, through narratives of welfare "frauds,
cheats, freeloaders", instills "work ethics" (aka internalized labor
discipline), thus facilitating a higher rate of exploitation by way of
increased productivity and timid wage demands (even when the unemployment
rate is low).

So I don't quite agree with Dennis when he says:

"...how does this facilitate accumulation--well, obviously it doesn't.
Which is why Japan and Europe effectively own the mortgage on our
industrial base. American capitalism is fundamentally uncompetitive with
its trading rivals...."

It has facilitated accumulation in America, and it will continue to do so
for a while. But I do think that it has created certain divergences in
strategies of accumulation between America and the rest of the core
industrialized nations. This difference will probably diminish in time, as
Europe and Japan discard the search for social democratic peace bought by
"lifetime employment" in the primary labor market, the welfare state, etc.

I just saw *Alien Resurrection*, and in this 3rd sequel to *Alien*, the
plot has the US military clone and cross-breed aliens and humans, creating
new monsters to be used as superbiological weapons for "urban
pacification." An intriguing and disturbing example of mass culture
registering and reworking capitalist contradictions....

Yoshie





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