The Dialectics of Abolition

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...