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2. The Rise and Present Demise of the Workfare-Carceral State

The Lineages of the United States

Connecting the dots beyond counterterrorism creates a more complicated picture of fusion centers. It reveals that the apparent failure of the fusion centers recognized by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a shortsighted explanation that obscures a deeper history. “The terror attacks of 9/11 have created a kind of amnesia,” Jonathan Simon maintains, “wherein a quarter of a century of fearing crime and securing social spaces has been suddenly recognized, but misidentified as a response to an astounding act of terrorism, rather than a generation-long pattern of political and social change.”¹ Indeed, the National Network of Fusion Centers may be a dysfunctional counterterrorism program, but they are also the most recent development in a four-decade-long trend. The origins of these “fusion centers” can be traced back to the early days of the “wars” on crime and drugs, when the Johnson and Nixon administrations greatly expanded federal involvement in state and local law enforcement. The story begins with federal support to computerize police records and develop interagency databases of law enforcement information. These efforts led to the creation, in 1974, of what could be retroactively called “the first fusion centers”: the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s El Paso Intelligence Center and the Regional Information Sharing System, a networked series of law enforcement databases created by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and anchored by six multistate intelligence centers.²

The late 1960s and early 1970s, of course, was also time of political ferment and economic crisis. Social movements—civil rights, Black Power, second-wave feminism, the New Left and the broader counterculture—challenged the distribution of power in the United States and questioned its place in the world. Simultaneously, the post–World War II economic boom had begun to bust. The grand compromise between labor and capital at the base of the New Deal and Great Society unraveled under the pressure of declining profits, rising unemployment, and runaway inflation. By the 1980s, a new arrangement was taking shape. The reforms that can now be seen as the origins of fusion centers were part of larger changes in the criminal legal system that gave rise to mass incarceration, the excessive use of imprisonment as a strategy “for addressing problems of poverty, inequality, unemployment, racial conflict, citizenship, sexuality, and gender as well as crime.”³ Many of these problems were exacerbated by the new economic order, which empowered capital by removing many of the measures that previously had protected much of the population from the market’s worst ravages. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the United States became a workfare-carceral state.

While most other advanced capitalist states to varying degrees have become workfare states, no other state has built a carceral complex that compares to the United States.⁴ With just one-twentieth of the global population, the United States accounts for a quarter of the world’s prisoners.⁵ The incarceration rate in the United States is seven to ten times higher than the rates of other advanced industrial countries in Europe and East Asia and two to five times higher than high-crime countries like Brazil and South Africa. Even with the declining US prison population since 2008, the 2016 incarceration rate of 660 persons for every 100,000 is still by far the highest in the world.⁶ The rates are even higher for racial minorities: 831 per 100,000 Hispanics and 2,306 per 100,000 blacks.⁷ The fusion centers and the larger post-9/11 security surge, then, are embedded within the larger problem of mass incarceration and police violence in the United States. To fully reckon with fusion centers, they need to be holistically approached within their historical context and understood as components of a vast security apparatus that took generations to build.

In their efforts to understand this new order, however, most scholars focused on only one part of the workfare-carceral state couplet. The literature on welfare states is a distinct thread of conversation that exists within larger academic and public policy debates about the global economic restructuring that began in the 1970s. While not the first to use the term, President Nixon first introduced “workfare” into discussions of social assistance programs. As workfare went “from a programme of reform within the welfare system to a codification of an alternative to this system,” scholars and activists worked to identify the contours—and contradictions—of a new economic order, explaining how it arose from the decaying welfare state and resolved, at least for a few decades, the economic crisis that afflicted advanced capitalist states in the 1970s.⁸ This scholarly conversation on workfare often bleeds into the larger discussion about changes effected by “neoliberalism”: the reorganization of production into flexible global networks, the rise of East Asia as a dynamic center of capital accumulation, the increasing power of finance capital, and widening global inequality.⁹

The scholarship on mass incarceration developed as the story of US prisons clearly diverged from the European experience. By the early 1990s, the United States had over a million people caged. At the time, the incarceration rate (426 per 100,000) could only compare with apartheid South Africa (333 per 100,000) and the Soviet Union (236 per 100,000).¹⁰ By the late 1990s, activists and scholars began to use the term carceral state to understand how the United States’ unprecedented prison boom created a new politics where incarceration and policing managed social problems exacerbated by economic change. This massive expansion of the criminal legal system compounded the problem and destroyed entire communities. Since criminal records “marked” people as unemployable “criminals,” already impoverished communities reached new lows. The black middle class left the “communal” ghettos of the Jim Crow era for segregated suburbs, leaving behind “hyperghettos” doubly segregated on the basis of race and class. As the starkest racial disparity (eight to one), incarceration became the central core of a renewed and reorganized edifice of racial inequality around which disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) revolved.¹¹

At the same time, neither the workfare state scholarship nor the literature on mass incarceration can fully explain the precise nature of the United States’ unprecedented incarceration rates and levels of police violence. The workfare state literature does not consider the question. For example, Bob Jessop’s landmark analysis overlooks the security apparatus altogether: “since [his research agenda] focuses on economic and social policy, there are important aspects of the capitalist state that it ignores. Most notable of these are the military and police apparatuses, their changing forms and functions, the nature of modern warfare, and their overall connections to the broader state system.” The omission of prisons and policing is a particularly arbitrary disconnect, as if they have no bearing on “social policy” and no impact on labor markets.¹² The reformation of the United States into a workfare state may help contextualize mass incarceration and police violence as, in part, expressions of a new, harsher relationship between labor and capital, but it cannot explain these phenomena, especially in comparison to other states, which implemented workfare policies without resorting to mass incarceration.

For their part, scholars of mass incarceration have emphasized the enduring power of racism as their explanation of mass incarceration. Hence, Loïc Wacquant traces the evolution of the United States’ “peculiar institutions” from slavery to mass incarceration and Michelle Alexander documents the legal architecture of the new Jim Crow.¹³ Other scholars, like Naomi Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton, have traced the deeper historical roots of mass incarceration to paternal ideas about racial oppression embedded into the War on Poverty and the larger project of “racial liberalism.”¹⁴ Some, like Bruce Western and Marc Mauer, simply document the stark racial inequities of the system.¹⁵ All these studies have made important contributions. They all provide needed perspective on the specificities of oppression in the United States. They help answer why black and brown people are incarcerated and killed by police at rates that far exceed their proportional share of the population. They also largely fail to explain why the US criminal justice system incarcerates and kills so many of all races. The current white incarceration rate, 380 per 100,000, still compares unfavorably with other countries. A similar dynamic is evident with “police-involved killings,” although the data is incomplete. To the best we know, police in the United States kill between nine hundred and eleven hundred people per year, 40 to 50 percent of whom are white.¹⁶

Here, a one-dimensional conception of subjectivity simplifies the relevant social relations and processes at work. The new Jim Crow thesis, for example, positions mass incarceration as a continuation of racial caste, a system of domination disconnected from political economy. This framing obscures the important differences between Jim Crow, a system that marshaled and mobilized racially devalued labor, and mass incarceration, an arrangement to warehouse superfluous labor. In denying class differences within racial groups, it also simplifies the politics of mass incarceration, erasing both the support the black elite and middle class provided for mass incarceration and the reality that the United States imprisons hundreds of thousands of white people, while police kill hundreds of white people each year.¹⁷ To approach this question, it is necessary to consider the systemic interrelations among race and class. On this point, the literature on workfare states provides an equally one-sided treatment of subjectivity. However, where the mass incarceration scholars simply assume “race” as a self-evident category in a historical narrative, the workfare state literature focuses on a flat and formal class on paper (a class in itself) and pays little attention to the historical formation of particular working classes and their political mobilization as a self-conscious collective subject (a class for itself).¹⁸

While welfare state literature often leans toward a theoretical formalism that emphasizes systemic tendencies in capital accumulation and ignores the concrete histories and conflicts that shape a social formation, the mass incarceration scholarship has the opposite problem. Most of this work simply describes the historical formation of mass incarceration or provides an empirical assessment of its social impacts. The broader sociological processes informing the rise of mass incarceration and animating its current composition are largely undertheorized. As a result, the scholarship on the subject has largely failed to explain—let alone foresee—contemporary developments. At the end of the twentieth century, most activists and scholars viewed mass incarceration as “an entrenched feature of the social landscape of the country and a central pillar of the post-welfare, neoliberal state. Mass imprisonment, it was widely agreed, had no limits to its future.”¹⁹ Indeed, Bruce Western concluded that mass incarceration was “self-sustaining,” and “the penal system will remain as it has become, a significant feature on the new landscape of American poverty and race relations.”²⁰ Yet, as Western wrote those words halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, an important change was becoming clear: decarceration. By the end of that decade, the total US prison population began its ongoing—however modest—decline. More dramatic drops on the state level account for much of the reduction. In nearly half the country, twenty-four states, prison populations are shrinking, including sharp reductions of over a fifth in New York and New Jersey.²¹ While many scholars of mass incarceration welcomed this change, no one anticipated it.

The incommensurable harshness of the US criminal legal system—a complex of issues that includes the institutionalization of intelligence fusion—cannot be fully explained by a focus on one variable, whether race or class, politics or economics. To approach the complexity of the problem of mass incarceration and police violence in the United States, this chapter examines historically unique state-forms: the enduring institutions created from the social struggles among different social forces to shift the power differentials between them and institutionalize a favorable balance of forces. Recalling the discussion of Poulantzas in the previous chapter, these state-forms are neither the privileged site of power nor autonomous actors in their own right. Neither a subject nor an object, the state-form is the institutional condensation of social relations. It develops in interaction with ongoing conflicts both within the institutional apparatus of the state and apart from it. The United States’ excessive use of incarceration, its terrifying levels of police violence, and its expansive security apparatus are best explained in these terms. The most relevant factor is not a single variable but culminating historical processes: the systemic transformation of the United States, as a social formation and state-form, from a herrenvolk-welfare state into a workfare-carceral state.

To understand this historical transformation, this chapter considers the systemic interconnections among processes of labor-formation, racial-formation, pacification, and state-formation. Drawing on the humanist and historical currents within Marxism, it explains basic theoretical assumptions about the accumulation of capital, the formation of labor, and the regulation of the social surplus.²² In these terms, it returns to the critique of security to demonstrate how the threat of revolt from below and the resultant administrative incorporation of the working class has been one of the historical drivers of state-formation. Given the concrete characteristics of the working class in the United States, however, the pacification of labor also entailed its racial differentiation. These intertwined processes of labor-formation, racial-formation, pacification, and state-formation condition the particular ways that the United States has formed and been reformed. The interaction of these processes produced historically specific state-forms: the herrenvolk-welfare state and the workfare-carceral state. Fusion centers are an important part of the workfare-carceral state. Their increasing prominence—and the larger “post-9/11” security surge associated—is reformulation of state strategy. The ambiguous turn toward a punitive, police-intensive form of decarceration and the further expansion of intelligence fusion, I contend, is an outgrowth of and response to contemporary crisis.

In other words, this chapter considers workfare and mass incarceration as complementary state strategies, parts that constitute the larger processes of social regulation that remade the United States during the four decades between 1970 and 2010. Understanding this transformation, in turn, requires historical perspective on the previous struggles that produced contemporary strategies, hence the attention to the earlier herrenvolk-welfare state. This attempted synthesis is not a purely synthetic project. Indeed, Poulantzas’s work informs the discussions on workfare and mass incarceration. In his final works in the late 1970s, Poulantzas presciently concluded that the internationalization of production, the increased power of finance capital, and the resultant global social “insecurities” forced states into a position of permanent crisis management. The resultant “authoritarian statism” necessitated “growing involvement on the part of the State, so that . . . class hegemony [may be] reproduced.” This “growing involvement” required “intensified state control over every sphere of socio-economic life combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘formal’ liberties.” The workfare-carceral state, then, is the form that authoritarian statism takes in the United States.

In this way, I synthesize the subsequent scholarship influenced by Poulantzas, namely the critique of security, Jessop’s analysis of the workfare state, and the efforts of Stuart Hall and his collaborators to map the coercive “law-and-order” politics of the 1970s. While Hall focused on the United Kingdom, his work informed important analyses of mass incarceration, including Ruth Gilmore’s examination of California’s prison boom as a way of managing the social surplus, and Jordan Camp’s investigation into the relationship between political repression and the formation of the carceral state.²³ This chapter builds on these contributions and draws on their organic connections to the humanist and historical currents within Marxism. This theoretical synthesis avoids any entanglement with the prose of pacification, while providing a perspective that can appreciate the systemic implications of the institutionalization of intelligence fusion.

THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL AND THE REGULATION

OF THE SOCIAL SURPLUS

At its core, Marxism asks a deceptively simple question: How is a given social formation reproduced through time? This is not the economic determinism of “orthodox Marxism.” The accumulation of capital concerns the production, valorization, and accretion of surplus value, the excess social product after the capitalist has paid wages and covered other costs.²⁴ The regulation of capitalist societies, however, entails the broader management of the social surplus, which connotes three interrelated social products: (1) the surplus value produced as capital; (2) the surplus populations who are not (fully) incorporated within the circuit of capital; and (3) the needs and desires of the population that cannot be (fully) satisfied within the constraints of capitalist social relations.²⁵ The politics of capitalist societies center on the management of this expanded notion of social surplus. How much capital will be returned to workers as wages? How much will appropriated by the state to fabricate social order? How will excess labor be managed? How will subjectivities—the emotive, aesthetic, and sensuous desires of actually existing populations—be variously articulated, mobilized, fulfilled, and/or repressed? Considering the broader regulation of the social surplus refocuses attention on the expanded notion of social reproduction, which extends beyond the production and circulation of goods in the formal economy.²⁶ The reproduction and regulation of social formation includes diverse processes such as the ways capital accumulation draws on non-waged sources of labor like the usually feminized labor that fulfills many human needs in the “hidden abode” of households or the broader ideological and political projects that fabricate the social order within “civil society.” This latter category includes the discourses and interventions of the administrative state introduced in the preceding chapter as pacification and its prose.

This broader, humanist approach breaks the determinism often associated with Marxism. It reminds us that labor is not just an “abstract” factor of production. It is also “concrete” flesh-and-blood workers: individuals and peoples with “‘political passion[s]’. . . born on the ‘permanent and organic’ terrain of economic life but which transcend . . . it, bringing into play emotions and aspirations in whose incandescent atmosphere even calculations involving the individual human life itself obey different laws from those of individual profit.”²⁷ Capital’s inescapable reliance on labor, and the dogged, irrepressible, and incommensurable humanity of “living labor” means that resistance to exploitation is a structural feature of capitalist civilization. Workers’ autonomy continually presents itself in the everyday “weapons of the weak”—work slowdowns, insubordination, and disrespect for authority, so-called “petty crimes”—and the threat of politics, the dangerous prospect of collective consciousness and mobilization.²⁸ This essential antagonism between labor and capital—in addition to the capitalist’s imperative to accumulate—also contributes to the constant change and dynamism that characterizes capitalism. As capital flees from and attempts to undermine the victories of working classes, the world is continually remade through “creative destruction”: the search for new profitable investments, new technologies to deskill labor and speed up production, new markets to tap, and new behaviors or needs to commodify.

Capital accumulation, then, entails much more than the growth of capital through investment and trade. It also forms and continually reforms the groups and classes that constitute a social formation. In providing the labor power that makes the system move, workers produce their own obsolescence. Put crudely, there is a progressive deskilling: the crafts of artisans and mechanics are transformed from concrete activities of living labor and transmuted into the assembly line, which employs fewer and fewer workers of increasingly less skill until all are replaced by robots and a handful of highly trained technicians. As this process unfolds, the basic needs of the population are increasingly separated from their capacity to provide them. In previous modes of production, basic needs were often met by the primary producers themselves in some kind of subsistence economy. Under capitalism, however, all accoutrements of life—from the basic necessities of survival to the most vulgar and silly consumer thing—are increasingly provisioned to the population through the market (commodity exchange) and the state (social policy).

Noting the deepening spiral of commodification entailed in capital accumulation, Marx argued that capital accumulation necessarily produces “surplus” workers. The creation of ever-expanding wealth or capital also entailed the production of dispossessed workers or proletarians. As capital grew larger and larger and as technology advanced to make labor increasingly efficient, it produced ever larger working classes and, with them, larger surplus populations:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labor-power at its disposal. . . . But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labor-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labor. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism.

While Marx noted that this process was “modified in its working by many circumstances,” it constituted the culmination of his critique of political economy, what he called “the general law of capital accumulation.”²⁹

The emphasis Marx placed on this process is well justified. The polarization of wealth and power is the basic conflict that defines capitalist societies, and “surplus populations” are one of the key actors in this struggle. Historically, they are the “masterless men” uprooted from traditional obligations but without place in the constantly changing economic order. The consolidation of “capitalism entailed the taking of land, the criminalizing of the conditions of survival for those thrown off the land, and the violation of criminal laws by people who had no choice but crime for their livelihood.”³⁰ Crime became most strongly associated with a particular subset of surplus populations, what Marx called the lumpenproletariat. Distinguished morally from the proletariat, this “lowest sediment” of society includes vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes.³¹ While other strata of the surplus populations (the so-called “deserving poor”) were managed with the gentler hand of social policy such as poor aid, the lumpen became the primary responsibility of the police.³² Managing these surplus populations spurred the formation of the administrative capacities of the state, while the threat they pose to social order has given rise to many of the security practices and disciplinary institutions that pacify the seeming disorder produced by immiserated surplus populations. The security apparatus and social policy are the iron hand and velvet glove that pacify class struggle. Together, they enforce the rule of capital and private property, maintain the separation of needs and capacities, and fabricate capitalist forms of order.

PACIFICATION AS THE INCORPORATION AND RACIALIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS

As capitalism developed into an increasingly totalizing world-system, the “strong” states at the core of the world-economy—that is, the regions that accumulated a disproportionate share of global value—politically incorporated and pacified the working class through the extension of the franchise and collective bargaining rights, the creation of police forces, and the amelioration of misery through social policy. Focusing on the New Poor Law in 1834 and the contemporaneous expansion of the vote, Neocleous argues that growing administrative capacities of the state in the United Kingdom politically incorporated the working class and subsumed class struggle through the legal system:

Recognizing the power of the working class, the state assumes a position as the wedge between needs and capacities, but does so through a series of administrative forms. The development of national insurance, as one element of the response to the threat of the working class, signals the formal recognition of need by the state, a process which consolidates the separation of needs and capacities of the working class and yet at the same time locks it in a relationship with capital and the state. In return the working class is granted increased political rights: individual rights of citizenship, such as the right to vote, and the collective rights through the legal immunities granted to trade unions.³³

The political incorporation and legal recognition of the working class—the franchise and collective bargaining—subsumed working-class politics within the state, creating the possibility for peaceful mediation within “civil society.”

This process speaks to the unique role of the state as the “part” of the social formation that, as an expression of the “general interest” and legitimate holder of the monopoly on violence, assumes the role as the universal arbiter of social struggle.³⁴ The state, then, becomes the uneven institutional synthesis of the conflicting demands and competing strategies of different fractions of a social formation.³⁵ The selective repression, accommodation, and incorporation of social struggle within the institutional apparatus defines the scope and boundaries of a given state-form. Hence, the recognition of collective bargaining rights moves the politics of organized labor from the realm of criminality and revolution—what, in the United States, was called “industrial warfare” before the New Deal—into routine administration—what we now call “labor relations.” This is an ambiguous process. On the one hand, labor won real power and used it to the benefit of the working class. By the mid-twentieth century, the labor parties (or parties with unions as a central constituent, like the US Democratic Party) ruled “the West” and built welfare states.³⁶ On the other hand, the incorporation of labor also mollified it. It entailed a selective process of repression and accommodation that purged the radicals and narrowed the political horizons of organized labor. It subsumed labor within politics that did not challenge capital. As these processes played out in different states, the industrial working class that Marx considered to be the vanguard of the revolution became the “labor aristocracy” later identified by Lenin.³⁷ The transformation of the proletariat from an exploited mass with “nothing to lose but their chains” to a politically integrated constituency administered by the state pacified the working class.³⁸

Of course, the incorporation of different working classes reflects the concrete, historical characteristics of a social formation. Thus, in the United States, the working class was incorporated in a racially differentiated manner. Capital does contain the universal and theoretical ambition to create “a world after its own image,” a smooth space where capital can move freely, where all of humanity sells their labor for a wage, and all human activities are organized through the commodity-form and cash nexus.³⁹ However, capital is also a pragmatic and promiscuous producer of difference. Historically, capital organized and subsumed all forms of labor control—slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production, and reciprocity—within a global division of labor.⁴⁰ The global differentiation and territorial spread of these modes of labor control have forever linked processes of labor- and racial-formation. Historically, capital formed non-white populations as marginalized groups through a process of wholesale, collective proletarianization, what Oliver Cromwell Cox understood as the substantive material force behind modern racism as a social structure.⁴¹ The nascent capitalist world-economy of the sixteenth century was also a global racial regime: slavery for blacks, indentured labor for whites, and “coerced cash crop labour” for the indigenous populations of the Americas. Over time, racialized subjectivities are also enforced from below in ways that are “simultaneously politically calming (learning how to adapt and thereby cope) and radicalizing (learning the nature and source of oppressions).”⁴² As Stuart Hall famously put it, “Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced.”⁴³ The interwoven nature of racial- and labor-formation created an interwoven global structure of racial and class oppression, “the problem color line” that marked the boundary between global poles of wealth and poverty, inclusion and exclusion, exaltation and abnegation.⁴⁴

While the color line set the boundary between Europe and the colonialized world, it ran through the United States and shaped the formation and incorporation of the working class. In what would become the United States, the racialization of the working class preceded the extension of the franchise and the recognition of organized labor. During the early colonial period, ruling mercantile elites relied on two sources of bonded labor: African slaves and the indentured servitude of poor Europeans. In 1676, these two groups joined together in Bacon’s Rebellion, a revolt in Virginia spurred by the wretched conditions of bonded laborers, among other issues. After authorities put down the uprising, however, plantation owners and mercantile elites codified racial hierarchy into law, the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, inventing the white race and dividing the working class with the color line.⁴⁵ The racialization of the working class also affected its pacification. A formal, legal system of racial control now mediated the organization of labor and the relations among individuals.

The reformulation of the state as an overtly white supremacist entity, however, was not a direct and simple outgrowth of the racist elites. Instead, this transformation of the state is the condensation of a relationship. In other words, the formalization of racial conflict after Bacon’s Rebellion was a strategic response of the ruling class to an unfavorable relation of forces, the threat of rebellion from bonded labor. It led to reformulation of the law and the institutional apparatus of the state that formalized racial domination, divided the working class, pacified a revolutionary threat, and strengthened elites by disarticulating the working class. In this way, the state is neither a “Thing-instrument . . . which is so completely manipulated by one class or fraction that it is divested of any autonomy whatsoever,” nor a “Subject . . . enjoy[ing] absolute autonomy.” Instead, a particular “state-form” arises from the materiality of social relations. In this conception, the state is “a site and centre of the exercise of power but possesses no power of its own.”⁴⁶ Power is located in the struggles around and within the institutional apparatus of the state. The outcomes of these struggles—the shifting power differentials among groups and their institutionalization—produce a particular state-form, the complex of relations and institutions that organizes capital accumulation and regulates the social surplus. In the United States, the intertwining of racial- and labor-formation means that the state-form is inescapably racialized. Labor, as a whole, did not gain a foothold in the state. Labor racially valued as white did. This racialization pacified the working class, limiting the extent and scope of class struggle. Racial politics constrained working-class politics, conditioned the formation of the state, and colored the prose of pacification that animated it.

THE HERRENVOLK-WELFARE STATE

This racialized incorporation and pacification of the working class had far-reaching consequences. More than just a specific facet of labor-formation, racialization is also an epistemic process of subject formation that infantilizes, animalizes, and criminalizes racialized populations, rather than humanizing them as rational subjects and human lives with value.⁴⁷ In the United States, the intertwined nature of racial- and labor-formation organized life at the most quotidian levels, shaping how people understood themselves, interpreted their world, and interacted with each other. These processes created a fundamentally racialized polity, what some scholars labeled a herrenvolk democracy:⁴⁸

Under this regime, which persisted until the civil rights movement, all whites are political equals while all not-white persons are relegated to an inferior status. The result is a curious mix of democratic government and egalitarian values along with state repression, mob violence, and an ideology, justified by religion and science, of the eternal inequality of humanity.⁴⁹

Herrenvolk democracy pacified social struggles by linking blackness with criminality and creating whiteness as a vessel through which the productive violence of pacification flowed. These arrangements also pacified the working classes in a different way. Race provided an alternative to class identity. The cross-class alliance created by a strongly felt white identity redirected political attention away from capital-labor antagonism and toward contradictions within the working class. As a result, the (white) working class won a weak welfare state within a stark and punitive system of racial order.⁵⁰

While the origins of herrenvolk democracy lie in the sixteenth century, this racialized system of social regulation not only survived the disruptions associated with the Civil War, it structured the rise of industrial capitalism in ways that benefited capital. As W. E. B. DuBois famously argued in Black Reconstruction, white workers chose the “psychological wage” of white supremacy over proletarian solidarity and abolition democracy.⁵¹ Further-more, white workers earned their whiteness, in part, by participating in the subjugation of non-whites. Policing played a critical role. During slavery and Jim Crow—the period of overt, legally codified white supremacy—policing was a vehicle through which whiteness was expanded. European ethnics, particularly the Irish and Germans, solidified their claims to whiteness, in part, through working in and eventually seizing political control over police forces.⁵² More broadly, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period historians call “the nadir of race relations”—was a time of protracted, “low-intensity” racial terror: thousands lynched, anti-Chinese pogroms, the genocidal end to the “Indian Wars,” the imperial incursions in the Caribbean and Pacific. Whiteness solidified in relation to this violence.⁵³

The policing of industrializing cities was particularly important. Urbanization created new social worlds with possibilities for interracial socialization, cultural subversion, and political radicalism. The city became a clear site of class struggle. Between 1889 and 1915, an estimated 57,000 strikes mobilized ten million workers. As with the racial terror of the period, private groups like the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the American Legion were major players in the pacification of labor unrest. The conflicts also spurred the modernization of police forces, leading to the formation of the first police intelligence units, Red Squads.⁵⁴ Fabricating the new industrial order required more than strike breaking, policing also secured the color line. During this period, theories of racism evolved. As Khalil Muhammed shows, “Racial knowledge that had been dominated by anecdotal, hereditation and pseudo-biological theories would be gradually transformed by new social scientific theories of race and society and new tools of analysis, namely racial statistics and social surveys.” Based on “the 1870, 1880, and 1890 census reports,” a new seemingly scientific discourse of “black criminality would emerge, alongside disease and intelligence, as fundamental measure of black inferiority.” In this context, black criminality became “crucial to the making of modern urban America. In nearly every sphere of life it impacted how people defined differences between native whites, immigrants and blacks.”⁵⁵

The intertwining of racial- and labor-formation also shaped class conflict in ways that facilitated the pacification and administrative subsumption of social struggle. Instead of creating a classless utopia or, even, a robust welfare state, the racialized incorporation of the working class produced a split system, a herrenvolk-welfare state. As the United States became an industrial power after the Civil War, it naturally gave rise to waves of labor militancy: an initial upsurge of mostly railroad workers in the late nineteenth century, a second swell of miners and factory workers in the early twentieth century, and the seeming triumph of industrial unionism with the Congress of Industrial Unions in the 1930s, which provided necessary bottom-up pressure to push the New Deal in an increasingly pro-labor direction. At the same time, these waves of working-class militancy were undermined by racism. White workers organized for better wages and working conditions, while also excluding racial monitories from the benefits of the unionized workplace and the welfare state.⁵⁶

Racism mediated the class struggles that produced the New Deal, creating a herrenvolk-welfare state. As the black revolutionary autoworker James Boggs explained, the color line was a “horizontal platform, resting on the backs of blacks and holding them down, while on top white workers have been free to move up the social economic ladder of advancing capitalism.”⁵⁷ Racism undermined the bargaining power of unions, depressed the wages of white and black workers alike, and increased the amounts of surplus value that became capital. These politics limited the New Deal, creating a welfare state that never matched its European counterparts. While measures like recognition of unions, Social Security, unemployment compensation, the minimum wage, and the GI Bill created a white middle class, these policies were implemented in a discriminatory manner. The wealth gap between blacks and whites widened, despite the wartime economic boom that finally ended the Great Depression and decades of prosperity that followed.⁵⁸

While the racialized incorporation of the working class created a weak welfare state, the interaction of herrenvolk democracy and industrial capitalism also produced a unique situation where seemingly contradictory systems of punishment coexisted.⁵⁹ As the United States became a significant economic and political power, it also became an increasingly important cultural and intellectual center. The Northeast, for example, became the crucible of modernist penology: the Auburn (1816), Philadelphia (1829), and Elmira (1876) penitentiaries punctuated two waves of prison reforms that sought to discipline, rehabilitate, and reintegrate “criminals” into an expanding industrial economy.⁶⁰ In the South, in contrast, the convict leasing system was a form of “levying violence” that led “back toward slavery.”⁶¹ These different systems coexisted and helped to distribute and manage social surpluses. Not only did this split system maintain the racial divisions within the working class and allow capital to exploit the particularly vulnerable class of workers, it also channeled political energies. Racial fear and conflict muddled class antagonisms. While racism was an important state strategy to pacify and administer class struggle, white workers also enforced racism from below, continually renewing these arrangements.

The racially devalued segments of the working class also formed a disposable class of labor that helped sustain capital accumulation at a higher rate. These dynamics, Boggs realized, counteracted “the fundamental contradiction between constantly advancing technology and the needs to maintain the value of existing plants . . . by collectively and often forcibly restricting blacks to technologically less advanced industries or to what is known as ‘common labor.’” As whiteness channeled both the productive violence of pacification and the politics of organized labor, it produced unique political arrangements and subjectivities. Instead of a strong welfare state and a self-conscious, politicized working class, the United States became “a unique Land of Opportunity in which whites climb up the social economic ladder on the backs of blacks,” and “the American people have become the most materialistic, the most opportunistic, the most individualistic—in sum, the most politically and socially irresponsible people in the world.”⁶²

This split system and the subjectivities that it engendered provide the necessary historical and theoretical perspective to approach the incomparable incarceration rates and levels of police violence that exist in the United States today. Rather than focusing just on class struggle or racial conflict, examining the systemic interconnections among labor-formation, racial-formation, pacification, and state-formation reveal how seemingly natural groups and institutions—“elites,” “workers,” “Americans,” “black folks,” “the police,” “the prison” or “the state”—are formed and reformed through social struggle. The resolution of these conflicts and their institutional condensation produce the specificity of a given state-form. Hence, the history of imprisonment, policing, and pacification in the United States had diverged from the European experience long before the differences in incarceration rates made this reality plain. Indeed, the split systems of punishment—celebrated institutions of modernist penology in the North and convict leasing in the South—are the outcomes of, on the one hand, the particular ways the US working class has been pacified through racialization and, on the other hand, the strategic failure of the US working class form as a collective subject to meaningfully confront capital and effectively seize power in key crises such as Reconstruction or the upsurge in labor militancy that followed World War I. Instead, the US working class, disarticulated and divided by racial strife, became a junior partner to capital: a labor aristocracy committed to preservation of their privileged position and not a revolutionary force out to remake the world. This history was the immediate context informing the emergence of the workfare-carceral state.

THE WORKFARE-CARCERAL STATE

By the mid-twentieth century, the herrenvolk-welfare state began to disintegrate under the combined pressure of revolt from below and world-scale changes in the organization of capital accumulation. The civil rights and Black Power movements politicized the color line, contested the criminalization of black and brown Americans, and tried to renew and restore the humanity of all the peoples of the United States. These movements joined a growing struggle against the Vietnam War to produce generalized revolt. The once staid labor movement radicalized. Wild cat strikes proliferated. Cities rebelled and “rioted.” Some even took up arms. At moments, it must have felt like a genuine revolutionary situation: a collapse of state authority. Indeed, elsewhere in world—even in places in the advanced capitalist West such as France and in the Socialist Bloc, as in Czechoslovakia—there were no doubts about the scope of the struggle.⁶³ To pacify this mounting rebellion within the United States, the Johnson Administration’s Great Society reforms tried to move beyond New Deal. Instead of a singular focus on economic security, the Great Society brought attention to civil rights, housing, education, and health care. With this broader focus, the Great Society took on systemic racism more directly than any government policy since Radical Reconstruction.⁶⁴

This effort to complete the New Deal, however, came at the moment when the broader political economic arrangements that underpinned welfare states were exhausted. The largest productive expansion in the history of the capitalist world-economy, the post–World War II boom, was petering out. Technological development and increased competition reduced the rate of profit. The compact between labor and capital that had moderated class conflict, managed the boom and busts of business cycles, and formed the core of the welfare state now hindered accumulation. Unemployment and inflation surged, creating the “stagflation” that mired the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Keynesian measures used to manage the world-economy since the 1930s proved inadequate in the face of a new development: the largest financial expansion in the history of the capitalist world-economy. The Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates collapsed in 1971, and exchange rates were allowed to float. States deregulated financial, capital, and currency markets. Deindustrialization swept the core zones of the world-economy. Labor was further deskilled, mechanized, and disaggregated. Increasingly complex supply chains scattered production across the globe. Global capital battered down the remaining “Chinese walls,”⁶⁵ inaugurating a new era of economic deregulation and empowered markets. With the economic opening of China and India and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the utopia of liberal thinkers—the global market society—became reality. We called it “globalization.”⁶⁶

For the advanced economies, these epochal shifts in the world-economy were completed and constituted by transformations of the state-form. A reconfigured compact with labor formed the core of this new workfare state. Where the welfare state valued labor as a source of demand within a national economy, the workfare state reduced labor to a cost of production in an increasingly global economy. With work reconceptualized as an individual responsibility and not a social right, full employment dropped off the policy agenda. Politicians and other elites redefined poverty as a burden imposed by the moral failure of irresponsible individuals and groups. They restricted and conditioned social welfare policies. Stripped of the protections won through collective bargaining and related social struggles, the compacts between labor and capital at the heart of the welfare state either learned to flex or broke. Labor became “precarious”: part-time, temporary, continually re-skilled and retrained, and poorly paid. These changes gradually snaked through labor markets. The workfare state subjected education, health, public services, security, and administration to market discipline, whereas these public goods and services had formerly been more insulated by the state. The increasing commodification of knowledge and services effectively proletarianized the middle class. Salaried, pensioned, protected professionals faded away, and “knowledge workers” took over.⁶⁷

In the United States, capital could not be empowered to such a degree without breaking the structural power of labor, defeating social movements, and transforming the state’s institutional apparatus. This process is the vital linkage between the workfare and carceral state literatures. The “wars” on crime and drugs began, not with Nixon’s law-and-order victory in 1968, but with Johnson and another war of pacification.⁶⁸ In 1965, the year after signing the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration launched the “war on crime” with the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, involving the federal government in law enforcement like never before in US history. Two years later, the administration formed the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which, in its thirteen-year life, funded some eighty thousand crime-control initiatives and doled out $10 billion in grant money.⁶⁹ From the very beginning, the war on crime and the subsequent rise of mass incarceration was a bipartisan project, a state strategy advanced by elites to manage mounting social problems.⁷⁰

These wars of pacification against crime and poverty were animated by shared assumptions. “Across political and ideological lines,” Hinton explains, “federal policymakers shared a set of assumptions about African Americans, poverty and crime that in time became a causal and consensus-building force in the domestic urban policy following civil rights legislation.” Although “their legislative language never evoked race explicitly, policy-makers interpreted black poverty as pathological . . . distort[ing] the aims of the War on Poverty and . . . also shap[ing] . . . the War on Crime.”⁷¹ The new order, “colorblind racism,” was taking shape. Overt racist rhetoric and legal discrimination became taboo, but racialized inequalities endured. Without a structural intervention like an antiracist capstone to the New Deal, the landmark civil rights legislation paradoxically normalized enduring racialized inequalities of material power. With no overtly discriminatory laws, a renewed, post–civil rights faith in liberal meritocracy redefined racial problems as cultural deficiencies of communities, households, and individuals, thereby minimizing the structural bases of racial inequality and erasing the last impact of the herrenvolk-era.⁷² When coupled with the post–civil rights incorporation of the black elite and middle class—what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor criticizes as “black faces in high places”—colorblind racism became even more difficult for antiracists to address. It also encouraged a reaction among whites, who tended to misrecognize their worsening economic positioned as a direct consequence of the new racial order, which tokenized minority elites. Few directed their attention to the real cause, the imposition of workfare.⁷³

The reaction to the Attica Prison rebellion exemplified these new revanchist politics. It produced a new prose of pacification, a law-and-order rhetoric that mobilized simmering white resentment with changing racial hierarchies and middle-class anxieties about growing economic uncertainty into a popular support for increased policing, expanded incarceration, and the rollback of the welfare state. In 1971, a multiracial group of prisoners seized hold of Attica State Prison in Upstate New York in support of demands consonant with the radical movements of the period. Despite the explicit politics of the rebellion, media figures and political elites cast the revolt as an apolitical, spontaneous riot that was rooted in the “anger,” “hostility” and “alienation” of the largely black participants of the rebellion. In the official discourse, Attica was “analogous,” Camp contends, “to the so-called ghetto disturbances of the 1960s . . . chaotic expression of disorder rather than . . . political expression of a multiracial class struggle.” New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller responded with a violent crackdown: a state police raid that left forty-three dead and an emergency allocation of $4 million increase security at Attica.⁷⁴

The immediate response to Attica rolled into a wider attack on both the welfare state and social movements. Reversing his previous commitment to rehabilitative measures, the governor gave his name to the Rockefeller Drug Laws, punitive legislation that required mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. The laws signaled the abandonment of the welfare state’s commitment to managing social reproduction. They mark the shift to an ethos of personal responsibility that animates the workfare state. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann explains:

[The Rockefeller Drug Laws] dramatically revised the subject position of the addict, for not only was their welfare no longer at issue in these policies but they were also being constructed as emphatically outside of “the public.” Since the addict/pusher targeted by these laws was almost universally understood to be a Black or Puerto Rican man, these characterizations had wide political implications at a time when society wrestled over Civil Rights activists’ demands for full, equal citizenship. They positioned addicts as “anti-citizens,” the opposite of right-bearing citizens. In terms of the dominant medical metaphor of addiction, pusher/addicts moved from being considered diseased to being cast as the disease. Politicians constructed them as outside of citizenship, holding addict/pushers responsible not only for their own condition, but also for many of the problems plaguing society, such as crime, deteriorating urban infrastructure, and mass social and economic insecurity. Locating the cause of these problems outside of the nation exonerated American society from culpability and the American state from responsibility to ameliorate these conditions—precisely the opposite arguments advanced by social movement participants who demanded the state redress past and present injustices.⁷⁵

The new politics inaugurated by Attica and the Rockefeller Drug Laws mobilized lingering racial resentments from the herrenvolk era in the new terms of colorblind racism. Non-white populations, reluctantly admitted to the polity under the pressure of massive mobilization, were excluded again, but on the basis of perceived criminality, not overt racism. This new prose of pacification would sustain the construction of the workfare-carceral state as a bipartisan project. New York’s Rockefeller Laws were a first. By 1994, every state had instituted mandatory minimums.⁷⁶

This new pacification war empowered police and prosecutors. Signed into law in 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act created secret “special grand juries,” permitted courts to hear evidence obtained illegally, allowed police agencies to seize criminal assets, and created new categories of crimes.⁷⁷ In practice, the wars on drugs and crime blurred with COINTELPRO, the FBI’s infamous counterintelligence program that sought to “disrupt and discredit” the social movements of the era.⁷⁸ All the while, LEAA provided millions in grants for police agencies to computerize their records and link their databases of law enforcement, the first steps in the institutionalization of intelligence fusion. During the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations, the LEAA distributed $90 million to state and municipal police departments for over one hundred computer-driven command control or data processing systems. In 1968, ten states had automated criminal justice information systems. By 1972, only three states lacked such systems. At the federal level, the FBI created the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) in 1967. By 1974, the NCIC connected all fifty-five FBI field offices with ninety-four other law enforcement agencies. It contained 4.9 million total entries and four hundred thousand criminal histories. It was accessed one hundred twenty thousand times daily.⁷⁹ That same year, the Nixon administration merged two smaller federal antidrug offices into the DEA and, as part of this new agency, created one of the first fusion centers, the aforementioned El-Paso Intelligence Center.

While the direction of US politics remained contested and unclear in the immediate post-Watergate years, the 1980 election and the “Reagan Revolution” finally and decisively resolved the economic and political crises of the 1960s and 1970s in the favor of capital. Although the Carter administration made important moves that helped consolidate the workfare-carceral state (namely the appointment of Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve chairman and the subsequent increase in interest rates to fight inflation, the “Volcker shock”), the Reagan administration made the new political order irreversible in the near term. In 1981, air traffic controllers were striking in support of bold demands, including a thirty-two-hour, four-day work week. Reagan declared the strike a national security risk and ordered air traffic controllers back to work. When the vast majority refused, the president signed an executive order, firing eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers and banning them from federal service.⁸⁰

The dramatic confrontation signaled the beginning of a new compact with labor. In 1980, no union would agree to a contract with pay freezes or cuts. By 1982, it was common practice, included in nearly half of new contracts. In subsequent years, the Reagan administration oversaw the liberalization of labor law (the legalization of homework and authorization of contingent labor within government), cuts to social services (significant reductions to welfare, urban development action grants, education block grants, among other programs), and massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Reagan’s policies further empowered capital, which increasingly left the United States to exploit labor overseas. Between 1980 and 1985, some 2.3 million manufacturing jobs disappeared for good. The army of surplus populations swelled.⁸¹

The Reagan administration’s efforts to crush labor and empower capital were necessarily complemented by an acceleration of the drug war and the real beginnings of mass incarceration as a strategy to warehouse growing numbers of surplus workers.⁸² Passed in 1984 with significant Democratic support, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act was the centerpiece of Reagan’s renewed drug war. The most significant federal crime bill since the Johnson administration, the act created preventative pretrial detention for federal defendants, established mandatory minimum sentences, put in place the US Sentencing Commission to formulate harsh sentencing guidelines for federal courts, reinstated the federal death penalty, eliminated federal parole, and expanded the government’s power to seize assets from convicted or accused drug dealers. Passed at the height of the moral panic with the “crack boom,” the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act created the infamous sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. It created stark racial disparities in incarceration. In 1980, black Americans, just 12 percent of the population, accounted for 23 percent of drug arrests. By 1990, there had been no significant demographic changes but now 40 percent of those arrested on drug charges were black. Critics denounced the policy as “apartheid sentencing.” Although the drug war had clear racial bias, it also devoured people of all races. In 1985, about eight hundred thousand people were arrested on drug charges. By 1989, the annual number of drug arrests rose to 1.4 million. The prison population swelled from approximately five hundred thousand to nearly one million.⁸³

The escalation of the drug war and increasing incarceration rate further consolidated the new workfare regime. Not simply the punitive regulation of surplus populations, Reagan’s drug war also reshaped the institutional structure of the state. In 1981, the Reagan administration replaced the centralized LEAA with a network of crime control boards and committees. Unlike the LEAA, which emphasized uniform application of policies, this new arrangement prioritized structural competitiveness. The idea was to decentralize decision-making, empower local authorities rather than federal policy makers, and, as such, insert a market ethos into the administrative state. Although the Reagan administration disbanded the LEAA, money continued to flow from the federal government and down the administrative hierarchy to state and local law enforcement. Now, the FBI, DEA, and the drug interdiction programs of the Defense Department—respectively enriched with $96 million, $14 million, and $33 million dollar budget increases—took over LEAA’s role as “the grantmaking arm of the national law enforcement program.”⁸⁴