[lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Wed Apr 1 13:18:41 PDT 2009


On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


>
> On Apr 1, 2009, at 3:36 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> Let's put Foucault's point bluntly: the purpose of the prison system is to
>> create criminals and expand various social practices and discourse to
>> "control" criminality. As far as I can see, the U. S. prison system is a
>> wonderful case study that illustrates Foucault's point.
>>
>
> I find this a seductive explanation, but just how does it happen? Did Nixon
> sit down and plan it out when he unleashed the war on crime? And what about
> the role of politicians pandering to the "get tough" crowd of voters? In the
> U.S., the incarceration boom had pretty broad popular support.
>
> Doug
>

I think you have to go with Merton in this one... the creation of criminals is the latent function of the manifestly-intentional action of "getting criminals off the streets, locking them up and throw away the key!"

And, I am flabbergasted at (whatI think I read correctly is) Philip's argument that the closing of mental hospitals and the attempt to normalize/decriminalize mental illness was something the left desired in the name of capital accumulation. The Left's position, as I recall it, was that the criminalization/incarceration/lobotomization/sterilization (and a whole bunch of other -izations) was premodern and barbaric and that a more humane regime could be made to function - for society and many of the mentally ill and disabled - if treatment occured in the context of gradual integration into society at large.

While that argument, here in The States, was embraced as a means of cost-cutting in the context of federal, state and local fiscal crises - cost-cutting which included cutting the programs intended to help, facilitiate and monitor individual trajectories, successes and failures, this has nothing to do with the intent of the folks on the Left looking to reduce medical barbarism. I, of course, have no idea what happened - or why - in Italy.

Along these lines, I must admit, someone could make the argument that Foucault's distaste for the internalization of social surveillance could lead to an argument that the folks who pushed this approach were actually seeking to inculcate modern/capitalist modes of self-surveillance in the mentally ill and disabled (who, of course, were defined as such at least in significant part because of their failure or inability to socially self-surveille) and that this might serve the wider interests of modernization/capitalism. However, that someone would have to make that argument by ignoring Foucault's genuine ambivalence and vacillation on the relative merits of some social self-surveillance, though he certainly would have wanted that process to emerge from a post-panopticonic society.

The Left certainly has a frought history with its embrace of modernization but I think this has to be seen as contradictory rather than something we'd use to kinda moralistically critique folks working in other times and places.



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