Politics of Crime and Economic Change

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Marx wrote in _Capital_, vol.1:
***  The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal
retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil,
this "free" proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent
manufacturers as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand,
these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as
suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They
were turned _en masse_ into beggars, robbers, vagabonds.... Hence at the
end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout
Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the
present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into
vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as "voluntary" criminals,
and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under
the old conditions that no longer existed.  ***

In the above passage, Marx is commenting on primitive accumulation and how
it caused both certain working-class behaviors and laws that criminalized
them, and criminalization helped the ruling class to contain the threat of
masses of unemployed men and women _at large_, roaming freely, unsubsumed
by factory discipline, making trouble.

Since the early 1970s, something comparable has taken place in the United
States. The post-WW2 boom was over, stagflation was plaguing economy,
factory workers were going on wildcats, social movements had added a new
segment of the working class to the status of full citizenship entitled to
social welfare rights, and so on. The ruling class, facing a crisis, had to
organize a new hegemonic project, and in their program, Law & Order was
(and still is) one of the key instruments to move politics to the Right, to
create a new economy based on lower wages and diminished expectations.

Doug wrote:
>*Though, as LBO subscribers know, if you count the incarcerated population
>as unemployed - almost 8% of all black adult males - then the unemployment
>rate for black men would rise from the reported 6.7% (in December) to 16.5%.

That's exactly the point, or one of the main points of politics of
criminalization & incarceration, along with the making of a new hegemony
based on attacks on social rights & labor rights + plus emphases on
'personal responsibility.'

Yoshie