The Awakening (2011) by Rashid Johnson
This post is a small disruption from our regular programming, in the spirit of marking out a new project I wish to undertake and its process to come. The work presented here has thus far been focused on a critical and comparative approach to historiographic literature, with its sights set on the early modern period and the origins of the capitalist mode of production. There are various attempts at syntheses, encounters between accounts that I hope are or have been generative engagements. The goal of this practice has not always been clear to me throughout its writing, though I can attempt to say this of my intentions here: to develop a method of historical and historiographic practice that engages the social constitution of capitalist social relations, in and through their abstract and concrete forms of appearance, through engagements in the historical actuality of class struggle.
It has resulted in a methodological approach regarding the theorization of the capitalist mode of production, developed here from readings of Marx and many others, that the tendencies of capital’s movements and dynamics of development are intrinsically those movements of the class struggle of which its antagonistic social mediations are directly constituted in practice. My interest has been in this motion between abstract and concrete and back again, of which Marx’s logical-historical presentation in Capital remains a lodestone, in order to create a theoretical praxis that too may elide the division between the capitalist mode of production’s idyllic movement and the many moments of its concrete historical life wherein it may appear to both betray and fulfill these imperatives. To put it shortly, we must have a theory of the capitalist mode of production that is itself capable of accommodating the very inconsistencies in its own historical developments, where those apparent violations of its own rationality are indicative of a concretely partisan rationality in its constitutive struggles.
For me, this is a project that will require work far beyond the limited capacities of this blog, and will likely transform its objective in the practice of its fulfillment. At present, the form of presentation has been through various scattered themes of interest, short-lived research programs. I have some new constraints on my writing activity, as I work a physically-demanding job with long hours, and I need to adjust some expectations for myself on output. My trade-off on that, however, is that I would like to devote that energy to a specific long-form project, and post on here my notes throughout the process of that work in as complete a form as I can for such fragments. This would be more of a showing of one's work while in the process, not too different from the scattered array of posts that exist thus far, but with more intention towards a final outcome.
That said, my interest was piqued recently by an exchange between John Clegg and Adaner Usmani’s work on mass incarceration in the US and a critique of their position written by Jack Norton and David Stein. Here are the essays in question:
The original article “The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration” by Clegg and Usmani for the Fall 2019 issue of the journal Catalyst: https://catalyst-journal.com/2019/12/the-economic-origins-of-mass-incarceration
Norton and Stein’s critique “Materializing Race: On Capitalism and Mass Incarceration”, published October 22, 2020 in Spectre: https://spectrejournal.com/materializing-race/
Clegg and Usmani’s response, “Reifying Racism”, published September 10, 2021 in Spectre: https://spectrejournal.com/reifying-racism/
I encourage those that are interested to read the works in full, but I will give a brief survey of their contents and arguments, while also lapsing into my own critical thoughts, and will conclude with how this debate has informed a long-term research project and theoretical production I wish to undertake.
Clegg and Usmani’s original essay is an articulation of work that they have been developing in academic publications over the past few years, presenting a thesis that they claim to be a critique of contemporary discourses and research on mass incarceration. According to Clegg and Usmani, there is a standard narrative, that mass incarceration is a race-based institution of social control, the origins of which lie in the actions of a cabal of white politicians in the US exploiting fears of violent crime and social disorder as a reaction to the political momentum and gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Contra to this “standard narrative”, Clegg and Usmani claim that these critics of mass incarceration often focus too heavily on non-violent drug offenders as low-hanging fruit for criticism, and a racial demography of the US prison population that is actually shifting in recent decades to represent more non-Black people incarcerated, even if the Black population is disproportionately represented. For the authors here, an important corrective is necessary, that being the imperative to acknowledge the reality of rises in violent crime in US cities in the 1960’s, the white and Black public and political responses to this rise in violent crime, and the constraints on social responses from state and local governments to these concerns that led to a punitive response as an economically viable solution, rather than the agent actions of a racist population. In a summary of sorts, Clegg and Usmani state:
“Why did America respond punitively? The answer to this question lies in the balance of class forces in the United States. In reaction to soaring crime rates, the American public, white and black alike, demanded redress from the state. Politicians, white and black, pivoted to respond. But the weakness of the American working-class prohibited meaningful social reform. Moreover, due to the persistent incapacity of the American state to redistribute from rich taxpayers to impoverished cities, no sustained, significant effort to fight crime at its roots was feasible. As a consequence, state and local governments were left to fight violence on the cheap, with only the inexpensive and punitive tools at their disposal. Thus, the overdevelopment of American penal policy at the local level is the result of the underdevelopment of American social policy at the federal level. American exceptionalism in punishment is but the flip side of American exceptionalism in social policy.”
According to Clegg and Usmani, there was no one unified state response to this rise in violent crime, and the stratification of state structure and authority between local, state, and federal government institutions induced a pattern of development in which federal policies for redistributive funding for social programs which could have alleviated the causes of violent crime, such as deteriorating formal and informal social mediations internal to populations due to urban population booms following expanded industrialization and racialized unemployment dynamics conditioning turns to illicit trades. This stratification of state authority and the structuration of funding appropriations through taxation prohibiting such redistributive policies meant that “agency was diffuse”, and not attributable alone to racial antagonisms. The authors wish to emphasize a point that “the standard story has led us astray. It has done so in three main ways. It mischaracterizes the population that languishes inside American prisons; it ignores the shaping role of violence on the politics of the punitive turn; and it overlooks the decentralized and atypically democratic character of American criminal justice institutions. It is ripe for replacement.”
Quite generously, Clegg and Usmani have a new story for us all, stating that “the story of American mass incarceration is the story of the underdevelopment of American social democracy” where the attribution of causality in this punitive “turn” in US social policy owes its racialized instantiations to, following the work of Michael Flamm, a moment in which “racism was potent precisely because crime was rising”, and the general representation of these violent offenders were disproportionately Black. The authors structure their heavily analytical argument on taking these assumptions of the empirical bona fides crime data and statistics seriously, believing contemporary critics of mass incarceration to be ignorant of such realities because of the potential political difficulties that would arise from acknowledging the severity of their concerns to more empirical metrics of public opinion.
Jack Norton and David Stein’s response takes this presentation to task, quite thoroughly and rightfully so. I will not hide the fact here that Norton and Stein’s critique, while not without its flaws, is closer to my position on the matter. They begin by pointing out that this “standard story” that Clegg and Usmani draw upon is nothing but a strawman, and one that picks merely the weakest, if at all actually extant, representations of work on mass incarceration to date. This should be apparent to any reader familiar with this scholarship. Whatever Clegg and Usmani are critiquing, it is not substantively represented in their argument. Most notably there is no engagement with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s essential work Golden Gulag, which Norton and Stein demonstrate as a better articulation of that which Clegg and Usmani are claiming to present as their own original insights, while relegating Gilmore to a single footnote. I must make a note here as well of the absence in Clegg and Usmani’s work of any substantive engagement with work in the Black radical tradition regarding the political economy of American slavery and the racialization of class, mass incarceration, and even post-WWII racial fascism (sadly ignored by many still), while they deem it fit to signal their political fidelity with the reduction of such contributions to a famous quote from Kwame Ture in their conclusion.
Furthermore, Norton and Stein make a salient point in noticing that Clegg and Usmani develop their methodology from an analytical disaggregation of “race” and “class”, which is never reconciled into the actual dynamics of racialization as a mode of class formation and articulation in the US. In Clegg and Usmani’s work, there is little to offer about the specific modes of social practice constituting the mediation of social relations and their reproduction, as there is not offered any specific understanding or definition of capitalism, and this racial outcome is but an overdetermination of proprietary relations developed from the peculiar agrarian transition of the US out of the plantation system. There is quite little for them to say that is directly critical of carceral institutions and the agency of the actors that constitute them, and mass incarceration’s racialized execution, in living practice. As Norton and Stein make clear, “[i]n the U.S. capitalist society, surveillance, policing, prosecution, and imprisonment materialize racism and therefore race. Police determine who can exist on which streets and when; who can protest and how; who is deemed threatening. A racial, classed, and gendered calculus of whose lives matter structures every encounter between police and the policed.” Initiating this critique, they write:
“[Clegg and Usmani’s] solution to mass incarceration – that a stronger welfare state should be fashioned magically from an unspecified ‘balance of class forces’ – elides the actual history of struggle for an expanded welfare state in the United States. We agree that a vibrant social welfare state would have undermined the nascent system of mass incarceration. But instead of enumerating the social movement struggles for a broadened welfare state in the 1960s –and how they were stifled – Clegg and Usmani resort to nebulous comparisons with European welfare states. As Usmani described in an interview about the article, repressive penal policy is a response to ‘underdevelopment of social policy in the United States.’ In his estimation, this resulted from the ‘underdevelopment of the American labor movement.’ Usmani’s whimsical answer imagines a possible history of the U.S.-as-European-style social democracy. The actual history of struggles for a robust welfare state can help move this analysis beyond a fantasy in which the U.S. might instead have become Sweden.”
This also points out another historical weakness in Clegg and Usmani’s work, specifically that of the unexamined character of this “underdeveloped” state of the American labor movement. The authors intend that the underdevelopment was a result of these post-Civil War and Reconstruction structuration of property relations and the manner in which they produced a racially-divided working class, thus incapable of working together as one voice to demand social programs capable of properly addressing conditions from which violent crime arose. Conveniently there is little to say from there of the militancy of labor in the first half of the 20th Century, the many active efforts of capitalists to reinforce (if not outright construct) racial fractures in class solidarity, and much less the many instances of white workers’ agent complicity in such. Likewise, one would have to account for this fragmentation through the enactment of the New Deal, and the post-WWII boom from which this “underdeveloped” labor movement now acted in accordance with the presentation of Clegg and Usmani’s new narrative.
Yet this is just par for the course in what they have to offer to this research program in general. For all the talk of an analysis that focuses on the “balance of class forces” (language directly cribbed from the Political Marxism of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood), there is a veritable absence of the historical actuality of the class struggle and conflict that would illuminate to us what such forces even were in the period under their investigation. There is only a gesture towards the actions of social agents reified in their bourgeois categorial designations, as “public opinion”, “violent crime”, “social reform”, etc. Emphasizing this troubling lack of historical precision, Norton and Stein write:
“Such disinterest in the daily activities that upheld the U.S. apartheid structure is part of a pattern of passive voice construction that occurs in their article. There are precious few actors in Clegg and Usmani’s analysis. They write, ‘American cities in the 1960s were characterized by the collision of two sets of facts, one stable and one changing. On top of an existing pattern of racial discrimination and the economic exclusion of African Americans came the transformation of the urban economy, the continued urbanization of Southern blacks, and middle-class flight.’ What happened to the ‘urban economy’? For all their supposed focus on the economic, there is very little analysis of capitalism. Urban labor markets, they say, were simply ‘deteriorating.’ But redlining, balance of trade problems, the stagflation crisis, the Federal Reserve’s high interest rate policy, these don’t come up in their narrative. Nor do efforts to mitigate these economic circumstances, such as the Comprehensive Employment Training Act – which at its height provided public service jobs for upwards of 750,000 people – or the efforts of Coretta Scott King and the Full Employment Action Council to expand the public sector via a federal job guarantee. Instead of class conflict over the role of the state during the ascent of neoliberalism, we get ‘a collision of two sets of facts.’ This is pretty thin gruel as far Marxist analysis goes.”
Frankly, I found it hard to imagine bouncing back from this, yet Clegg and Usmani managed, though without much further substantive engagement than a reiteration of their thesis and core claims. They take up the challenge to engage Gilmore, however they (quite expectedly) fumble it, and ungraciously at that. In their defense, they (finally) state their explicit criticism as being directed towards the influence of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and that they owe a debt to Gilmore’s work. They cite many aspects of Gilmore’s work that they draw from and agree with, among them being her own criticisms of liberal representations of mass incarceration as merely a continuation of American slavery, her discourse on the role of racism in shaping California’s law and order politics which in turn were exacerbated by their retrenchment, and her analysis of the role of prisons in managing the racialized surplus population produced in California just prior to the boom in prison construction. Where they claim to diverge, however, is in stating that Gilmore “denies the chief mechanism that links deteriorating labor markets to rising incarceration: namely, the rising crime rate.”
According to Clegg and Usmani, Gilmore denies any relation between the prison boom and crime. To substantiate this, they turn once again to their data and trusty graphs, all in order to counter Gilmore’s claim that crime was itself politically-constituted, both in the fears that politicians conjured by sensationalizing it and by passing laws which criminalized more behavior. This points to the general confusion of Clegg and Usmani throughout their work, which is a pervasive ignorance of “crime” as a socially and historically determined category within a dynamic of actual class struggles over conditions of living and the fortification of racial orders of property rights. While Clegg and Usmani make the claim that Gilmore confuses causality with the effects produced by the phenomenon, they are themselves guilty of this methodological error in their own stubborn acceptance of the political neutrality of empirical metrics on crime.1
For a response to critique that announces itself as a critique of “reifying racism”, little is on offer about reification, while it could easily be said that Clegg and Usmani are themselves guilty throughout their work of operating with a reified notion of capitalism’s operative categories and the political operations and functions of the US state form’s federalist system. Everything is but neat channels that must accommodate public opinion within formal constraints to funding social programs that incentivizes punitive policies as a response of economic rationality. Class struggle is absent as there is no labor movement protagonist here that can represent the desired political constituency, except as an absent-subject which complies with the chosen historical narrative. Such confusions over the social constitution of the US state form can be seen from their characterization of the role of American slavery in developing this racialization of class (forgive the charitable interrelation of race and class I offer them here):
“[T]he plantation economy and its afterlives deformed American working-class formation, giving succor to nativism and white racism, thereby making collective action on the European model impossible. Second, because America was a confederation of a neo-European colony with a slave society, local property rights were overdeveloped. This enfeebled the federal state, making it that much more difficult to redistribute resources from rich people in rich places to poor people in poor places (what Gilmore vividly calls “fiscal apartheid”). We would venture that these exceptional features of American political economy can explain both the outlying levels of violence in the United States and the penal (rather than social) response to it.”
Yet can we even speculate that the US federal state would have engaged in such egalitarian redistribution if it had such an option on offer? Even this articulation points to a game of historical hypotheticals that the authors frequently indulge in, refusing to accept that this is not an option in a historical investigation on modern US state formation and the class struggle constitutive of that form. Likewise, what makes a penal response not social? Is not such a “turn”, or, rather, the elaboration of such a tendency and its historical continuities and conjunctural shifts, informative to us of the qualitative characteristics of capitalist social relations in the US? Furthermore, if collective action on the European model did not occur, is there no collective action worth interrogating here specific to the US that would not better inform this investigation?
Clegg and Usmani opt to avoid these concerns for a game of pointing fingers, magically finding things barely considered in their initial work to identify as faults with the specific critiques of Norton and Stein, or for their de-emphasis on the racial modality of class formation and struggle in the US context:
“Nor can we accept Norton and Stein’s claim that we are ‘apologizing for racism’ when we point out that white workers sometimes materially benefited (even if only individually or in the short-term) from racially segregated labor markets. Here Norton and Stein not only confuse an analytical for a moral argument, but also foreclose the kind of materialist analysis that has been the mainstay of Marxist writings on racism, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Stuart Hall to Noel Ignatiev and Gilmore herself. Indeed, despite their frequent references to ‘materiality,’ it is the idealism of Norton and Stein’s approach to racism that stands out to us. In treating it as a disembodied subject that ‘materializes itself’ in the world, Norton and Stein reify racism. The notion that racism can become an independent power with a life of its own, one capable of not only haunting our social interactions but also embodying itself in our institutions, is an example of what Karen and Barbara Fields call ‘racecraft.’ Such idealism is not only analytically misleading, but can also lead to some political dead ends.”
Humorously enough, none of these other Marxist authors are cited in the original article by Clegg and Usmani. Such cynical deployments cannot be taken lightly, and any claim to a legacy of struggle that they attempt to signal should be taken as seriously as their research appears to take it, which is to say not very. This invocation of reification itself reduces this phenomenon of the fetishized appearance of capitalist social relations as a mere pejorative for an articulation of a process of race’s reproduction in modes of social practice that they appear to fail to understand, or, if they do, they do not take seriously. Underscoring the role of agentive subjects as the social actors that animate the institutions that they represent is not reification, but a fact of the existence and reproduction of institutionalized forms of power in capitalist society: they are reproduced by actual people.
Thus understanding racism cannot play the intellectual exercise that Clegg and Usmani demand, of separating prejudice from power, as these are intrinsically linked aspects of a sociality that reproduces itself through these instantiations of racialization and their concrete history. Racial ideology is not the actor, but that there is a perceptible and operative logic of racial ideology undergirding the reproduction of capitalist exploitation and domination in the US informs us that this is a substantial force of social reproduction in US history which cannot be addressed by separating its influence from a neutral assumption of “economic forces.” Concluding their rebuttal, the authors clarify the stakes as they see them, after assuring us that, despite their use of counterfactuals, that they do not believe European social democracy was possible in the 1960’s in the US, but that this is a necessary speculation correlative to the logical proposition of their thesis. In their final statement, they state:
“Nonetheless, if one did seek to derive normative or strategic conclusions from what is, in the end, an analytical article, we think they might be both more and less pessimistic than the conclusions of Norton and Stein. More pessimistic in the sense that if we are right, there is presently little opportunity for a substantial reversal of the nightmare that is America’s prison system. The problem of mass incarceration is deeper and more intractable than an analysis of misguided criminal justice policy and racist politicking in the 1960s will allow; it is an indictment of America’s entire political economy. Less pessimistic in the sense that if workers in the United States ever achieve the leverage to disrupt that political economy, then we may be able to start dismantling the American gulag here and now, before the revolution or the anti-racist rapture. This is because we think the racist ideas in white people’s heads will be no match for a mass movement that puts power in the hands of ordinary people. And thus, the end of mass incarceration is currently unlikely – but not impossible.”
This is perhaps the best summary statement of the authors’ confusion of this matter. Mass incarceration is not a dynamic of the historical actuality of class struggle in the US, concrete walls filled with real people with social and political agency that must be supported and cultivated in active solidarity by partisans in their cause, it is a policy problem waiting for a mass movement to bring the right public pressure to gain concessions from the state. This mass movement need not worry about such notions of solidarity, all it has to do is “disrupt” an abstract “political economy” which has produced the swelling growth of this carceral complex and its outsize power in American social life. Furthermore, is it just “racist ideas in white people’s heads” that they believe their opponents are in fear of? Or could it be that those who hold those ideas might be a materially-fortified social force and buttress of state power, and that these ideological commitments are themselves genuine recognitions of this racial fidelity that is intrinsic to property relations in the US historically?
This leads me to then articulate the project I wish to undertake, and the contours of my interests here that I wish to synthesize in a more in-depth critical engagement with the literature on mass incarceration and the long-term social and historical determinations of American slavery2 and the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the formation of capitalist social relations in the US. Against the analytic and sociological investigation offered here by Clegg and Usmani, I wish to take a Marxist methodological approach that takes as primary the dynamics of class struggle as the guiding proposition for understanding any “patterns” of development, in order to animate this history as living dynamic. I believe this to be the sole means available to us to render the present trajectory as contingent and open to collective action, though this is only possible if we recognize its definite historical continuities and determinations. Mass incarceration need not be a solely racially-determined phenomenon, but its disproportionately racialized administration and the site of carceral struggle as a stated continuity with Black liberation struggles severely complicates attempts to disaggregate US state power’s operation from its reproduction of racial class formations.
I want to propose a synthesis between this Marxist position of the primacy of class struggle in capitalist origins and development and a longue durée historiographic conception of the continuity in emancipatory struggle from the origins of the capitalist mode of production in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African and Indigenous expropriation in the Atlantic and US, and the uneven and combined development of social relations of production between the plantation economy, Northern industrialization, and world-capital. Through this I hope to develop a conception of the social constitution of the US state form post-Civil War and through Reconstruction, and plan to draw upon the 20th century work of the Black radical tradition as well as Marxists and other necessary historical works for engagement. The aim of such a scope and synthesis would be to examine the ongoing dynamics of class struggle, class formation in the racial differentiation that constitutes relations of exploitation in the US, the racialized constitution of relations of property and production in the US, and through this an examination of the living dynamics and limits to the social constitution of the US state form through this continuity of a racial compact that is intrinsic to its reproduction.
What I hope to gain from a longue durée approach is a generative engagement with the historical debates on the role of slave labor as developing in tandem with the capitalist mode of production, specifically with regards to the role of slave labor in the social constitution of surplus value on the scale of world-capital, and the role that such forms of exploitation other than wage-labor play in the social and historical determination of the social form of abstract labor and thus the generation and reproduction of value relations in capitalist production. It is clear from much of the historiographic literature I have read and engaged in thus far that the origins of capitalist social relations and the dynamics of class struggle emerge from the so-called feudal context, and that which is qualitatively specific to capitalist development can be understood through this immanent self-transformation of form. As Cedric Robinson tells us, “[t]he social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes of European feudalisms contributed more to capitalism than the social ‘fetters’ that precipitated the bourgeoisie into social and political revolutions. No class was its own creation. Indeed, capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world's political and economic relations.”3
For Robinson, this identification of the continuity of feudal relations of class domination into the expansion that would see the development of the capitalist form leans heavily on preservation, it necessarily articulates the continuities of what are so often described as “pre-capitalist” relations of exploitation into the formation of a capitalist world economy, and the subtle transformations of ruling class composition in their own cultivation of capital as the social form of production. What is essential to Robinson is the question of how “slave labor as a critical basis of production would continue without any significant interruption into the twentieth century.”4 This relation to the continuity of slave labor into the modern period in some contexts, and its relation to the generalization of the wage-form of abstract labor’s mediation in others, is an important question for Marxist theory to address.
I also plan to take up an unfinished challenge left open by W.E.B. Du Bois in a footnote that opens chapter 10 of Black Reconstruction, where he states that “[t]he record of the Negro worker during Reconstruction presents an opportunity to study inductively the Marxian theory of the state.”5 Du Bois’ monograph remains an essential work of American history, capturing the dynamics of class struggle in the social constitution of relations of property and US state formation in and through the Civil War and the struggle for emancipation’s continuation in Reconstruction, the means by which it was defeated, and not a mere failure as so many contend. This understanding of American economic development as itself only an aspect of the historical actuality of class struggle and the role of the US state as a moment of this constitutive class antagonism6 articulates another important part of my interest here, as racialization historically appears as both condition and consequence of the development of capitalism in the US, and a limit to the possibility of substantive equality and emancipation within that state’s reproduction. In line with this analysis, I aim to turn to politico-economic and psychological theories of fascism, specifically racial fascism in the US context, in order to further develop this understanding of how racism operates as a social force of production in the antagonistic social mediations of US capitalism.
This is certainly a lot to bite off, but I hope to take my time and work through relevant literature in the coming months. My plan right now is to develop a reading list, which I can share on this site, and to post regularly (weekly or bi-weekly, time permitting) on my note-taking process and the development of this long-form critical essay, showing my work in the practical process of theoretical production. I very much hope that this will be a productive engagement for readers and subscribers, and welcome input on the process in comments or elsewhere that you may know how to reach me. I will work to make sure the note-taking posts are presented in a readable and straightforward format. Thank you!
Regarding this concern, Clegg and Usmani have this to say: “Why should we trust these data? First, and most uncontroversially, there is substantial over-time agreement in the rate of homicide reported by both police and mortality statistics. Concerns about police reporting practices do not apply to coroners, yet both sources report a doubling of the American homicide rate between 1960 and the peak of the homicide wave. Second, while independent data on other forms of victimization are unavailable before the first victimization survey in 1973, after 1973 they trend similarly to police data. This suggests that any biases in the police data are minimal (to the extent they existed at all, they were likely short-lived). To explain a quintupling of the violent crime rate between 1960 and 1995, they would have to be impossibly large, sustained, and far-ranging.” Short-lived biases in police data! Now isn’t that something? One would hope a resort to such sources would demand closer scrutiny and a direct engagement with the broader social and political context of their production.
John Clegg is also researching and developing a theory of capitalist slavery in the American context. I am currently reading his articles on this and plan on further dealing with his position in this regard.
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (2000) p. 10
Ibid, p. 11
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (1992) p. 381
To borrow Werner Bonefeld’s formulation on the capitalist state.