The Dialectics of Abolition

IF 0.5 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
Lisa Lowe
{"title":"The Dialectics of Abolition","authors":"Lisa Lowe","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898165","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The Dialectics of Abolition Lisa Lowe (bio) Ruth Wilson Gilmore has devoted decades to the study of the prison-industrial complex and to organizing for its abolition, and her profound contributions have become cornerstones of carceral studies and the prison abolition movement owing to their compelling explanatory power. Her famous formulations that \"capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it\"1 and that \"racism is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death\"2 have become indispensable for scholars, students, and activists. Now, three decades of her essays are available to inspire new generations, meticulously collected and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. It is a daunting task to attempt to briefly highlight Gilmore's contributions to our understanding of the conditions that lead to prison expansion and the abolition imperative, but I trust that collectively, this forum may highlight a range of them. In my comment, I emphasize the profoundly dialectical thinking and practice that underlie Gilmore's invaluable work on the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s, and the significance of her situating this expansion both within the contradictions of neoliberal globalization and in relation to the political struggles of people on the ground responding to these increasingly violent conditions. Gilmore's commitment to thinking and acting dialectically means that she always approaches prisons systematically within the conditions of globalizing racial capitalism. Situating the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s within contradictions of neoliberal globalization, she analyzes this historical shift as a transition from \"military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism.\"3 Significantly, she draws attention to how this entails the US postwar racial state's structural adjustment from \"the welfare-warfare state to the workfare-warfare state\"4 as well as the \"organized abandonment\" and \"organized violence\" of the \"anti-state state.\"5 Yet Gilmore has emphasized repeatedly that \"the prison fix\" is not an isolated phenomenon: the decisions to build prisons—and to invest in industrial punishment, policing, and military rather than in public welfare, health care, roads or schools—have been central to a structural reorganization of the US postwar \"landscape of accumulation and dispossession.\"6 [End Page 371] In other words, Gilmore emphasizes the ways that US prison expansion cannot be separated from the multiple crises of racial capitalism as it expanded globally in the second half of the twentieth century and thus, dialectically, that prisons cannot be countered as a single institution and that abolition cannot be understood or fought without consideration of this global imperial context. Racial capitalism is inherently unstable, and it comes into crisis when the contradiction between accumulation and exploitation reaches a level that is unsustainable, expressed in the United States by overproduction, diminishing profits, and unemployment, on the one hand, and widening wealth gaps, racial segregation, and increasing impoverishment of communities of color, on the other. These crises manifested internationally as foreign investment, flexible accumulation, and export processing, which rearticulated the colonial divisions between the first and third worlds and was secured by overt and covert US imperial wars in countries where socialism or left-leaning independence movements gained significant footholds: in Africa, Central America, Northeast and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Meanwhile, these crises of globalizing racial capitalism were expressed domestically as deindustrialization, state withdrawal from social welfare, deepened economic divides, criminalization of racialized gendered poverty, and the militarization of the border. Yet while some may have declared that globalization meant the \"end of the nation-state,\" Gilmore has always stressed that even as the traditional role of the state changes, the state does not become less powerful. To the contrary, the state expands and fortifies as it reorganizes, and it is precisely in prison buildup that we observe the apotheosis of the state's means to restructure both criminal justice and the political economy in order to safeguard capital and exerting social control. With increasing intensity since the 1960s–1970s, these contradictions of racial capitalism dialectically produced antagonisms that erupted in radical Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red Power movements, labor strikes, urban rebellions, and social movements, from antiwar to women of color feminist to anti-apartheid movements. 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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The Dialectics of Abolition Lisa Lowe (bio) Ruth Wilson Gilmore has devoted decades to the study of the prison-industrial complex and to organizing for its abolition, and her profound contributions have become cornerstones of carceral studies and the prison abolition movement owing to their compelling explanatory power. Her famous formulations that "capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it"1 and that "racism is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death"2 have become indispensable for scholars, students, and activists. Now, three decades of her essays are available to inspire new generations, meticulously collected and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. It is a daunting task to attempt to briefly highlight Gilmore's contributions to our understanding of the conditions that lead to prison expansion and the abolition imperative, but I trust that collectively, this forum may highlight a range of them. In my comment, I emphasize the profoundly dialectical thinking and practice that underlie Gilmore's invaluable work on the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s, and the significance of her situating this expansion both within the contradictions of neoliberal globalization and in relation to the political struggles of people on the ground responding to these increasingly violent conditions. Gilmore's commitment to thinking and acting dialectically means that she always approaches prisons systematically within the conditions of globalizing racial capitalism. Situating the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s within contradictions of neoliberal globalization, she analyzes this historical shift as a transition from "military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism."3 Significantly, she draws attention to how this entails the US postwar racial state's structural adjustment from "the welfare-warfare state to the workfare-warfare state"4 as well as the "organized abandonment" and "organized violence" of the "anti-state state."5 Yet Gilmore has emphasized repeatedly that "the prison fix" is not an isolated phenomenon: the decisions to build prisons—and to invest in industrial punishment, policing, and military rather than in public welfare, health care, roads or schools—have been central to a structural reorganization of the US postwar "landscape of accumulation and dispossession."6 [End Page 371] In other words, Gilmore emphasizes the ways that US prison expansion cannot be separated from the multiple crises of racial capitalism as it expanded globally in the second half of the twentieth century and thus, dialectically, that prisons cannot be countered as a single institution and that abolition cannot be understood or fought without consideration of this global imperial context. Racial capitalism is inherently unstable, and it comes into crisis when the contradiction between accumulation and exploitation reaches a level that is unsustainable, expressed in the United States by overproduction, diminishing profits, and unemployment, on the one hand, and widening wealth gaps, racial segregation, and increasing impoverishment of communities of color, on the other. These crises manifested internationally as foreign investment, flexible accumulation, and export processing, which rearticulated the colonial divisions between the first and third worlds and was secured by overt and covert US imperial wars in countries where socialism or left-leaning independence movements gained significant footholds: in Africa, Central America, Northeast and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Meanwhile, these crises of globalizing racial capitalism were expressed domestically as deindustrialization, state withdrawal from social welfare, deepened economic divides, criminalization of racialized gendered poverty, and the militarization of the border. Yet while some may have declared that globalization meant the "end of the nation-state," Gilmore has always stressed that even as the traditional role of the state changes, the state does not become less powerful. To the contrary, the state expands and fortifies as it reorganizes, and it is precisely in prison buildup that we observe the apotheosis of the state's means to restructure both criminal justice and the political economy in order to safeguard capital and exerting social control. With increasing intensity since the 1960s–1970s, these contradictions of racial capitalism dialectically produced antagonisms that erupted in radical Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red Power movements, labor strikes, urban rebellions, and social movements, from antiwar to women of color feminist to anti-apartheid movements. The US state responded to these political challenges...
废除的辩证法
露丝·威尔逊·吉尔摩(Ruth Wilson Gilmore)几十年来一直致力于监狱工业综合体的研究和废除监狱工业的组织,她的深刻贡献因其令人信服的解释力而成为监狱研究和废除监狱运动的基石。她著名的表述是“资本主义需要不平等,而种族主义将不平等奉为神龛”1,以及“种族主义是国家批准的或非法的生产和利用群体差异的过早死亡脆弱性”2,这些表述对学者、学生和活动家来说都是不可或缺的。现在,布伦娜·班达尔和阿尔贝托·托斯卡诺精心收集并介绍了她三十年来的散文,以激励新一代人。试图简单地强调Gilmore对我们理解导致监狱扩张和废除监狱的必要条件的贡献是一项艰巨的任务,但我相信,这个论坛可能会共同强调其中的一系列贡献。在我的评论中,我强调了深刻的辩证思维和实践,这是Gilmore关于20世纪80年代美国监狱建设的宝贵工作的基础,以及她将这种扩张置于新自由主义全球化的矛盾中,以及与当地人民对这些日益暴力的条件作出反应的政治斗争有关的意义。Gilmore致力于辩证地思考和行动,这意味着她总是在种族资本主义全球化的条件下系统地对待监狱。她将20世纪80年代美国监狱的建设置于新自由主义全球化的矛盾之中,并将这一历史转变分析为从“军事凯恩斯主义到后凯恩斯主义军国主义”的过渡。值得注意的是,她关注了美国战后种族国家从“福利战争国家到劳动战争国家”的结构调整,以及“反国家国家”的“有组织的放弃”和“有组织的暴力”。然而,吉尔摩一再强调,“监狱修复”并不是一个孤立的现象:建造监狱的决定——投资于工业惩罚、治安和军事,而不是公共福利、医疗保健、道路或学校——是美国战后“积累和剥夺景观”结构重组的核心。换句话说,Gilmore强调美国监狱扩张的方式不能与种族资本主义的多重危机分开,因为它在20世纪下半叶在全球扩张,因此,辩证地说,监狱不能作为一个单一的机构来对抗,而且如果不考虑这个全球帝国背景,就不能理解或反对废除。种族资本主义本质上是不稳定的,当积累和剥削之间的矛盾达到不可持续的水平时,它就会陷入危机。在美国,一方面表现为生产过剩、利润减少和失业,另一方面表现为贫富差距扩大、种族隔离和有色人种社区日益贫困。这些危机在国际上表现为外国投资、灵活的积累和出口加工,重新确立了第一世界和第三世界之间的殖民地划分,并在社会主义或左倾独立运动获得重要立足点的国家(非洲、中美洲、东北亚和东南亚、中亚和中东),通过公开和隐蔽的美帝国主义战争得到保障。与此同时,这些全球化种族资本主义的危机在国内表现为去工业化、国家退出社会福利、加深经济鸿沟、将种族化的性别贫困定为犯罪以及边境军事化。然而,尽管有些人可能宣称全球化意味着“民族国家的终结”,但吉尔摩一直强调,即使国家的传统角色发生了变化,国家的力量也不会减弱。相反,国家在重组的过程中扩大和加强,正是在监狱建设中,我们看到了国家为了保护资本和施加社会控制而重组刑事司法和政治经济的手段的典范。自20世纪60 - 70年代以来,这些种族资本主义的矛盾愈演愈烈,辩证地产生了对立,爆发了激进的黑、棕、黄、红权力运动、工人罢工、城市叛乱和社会运动,从反战到有色人种妇女女权主义到反种族隔离运动。美国政府对这些政治挑战做出了回应。
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来源期刊
AMERICAN QUARTERLY
AMERICAN QUARTERLY HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
0.80
自引率
0.00%
发文量
58
期刊介绍: American Quarterly represents innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that engages with key issues in American Studies. The journal publishes essays that examine American societies and cultures, past and present, in global and local contexts. This includes work that contributes to our understanding of the United States in its diversity, its relations with its hemispheric neighbors, and its impact on world politics and culture. Through the publication of reviews of books, exhibitions, and diverse media, the journal seeks to make available the broad range of emergent approaches to American Studies.
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