Gilmore piece – Assignment 07
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s From Military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism argues that after the shift from military Keynesianism – an economic policy that relied on the production of war-related goods to boost the economy – came another shift that resulted in what Gilmore (and others) refer to as the carceral state.
There is a “common sense” notion that has been propagated by the media and political elites, as Gilmore discusses, which assumes that the exponential growth of the US prison population was tied to an increase in crime. But, Gilmore demonstrates that this massive expansion (from some 600,000 people to nearly 2 million in less than 20 years) is due, in reality, to a political imperative rather than anything having to do with a rise in seemingly collective “bad behavior.” Indeed, she shows that the expansion of the carceral state was initiated as crime rates were on the decline.
It’s necessary, then, for Gilmore to take readers back to the social and economic crises that came to a head in one of the most infamous years in social struggle history: 1968. It was the height of the Black Power movement, a time of mass upheaval (1968 was the year that MLK, jr. was assassinated sparking an explosion of street rebellions in hundreds of cities across the country. As Gilmore points out, before this era, riots were generally started by white people) that political elites were able to utilize to paint a picture of a black community out of control. Gilmore explains that this social crisis was compounded by an economic crisis of capitalist profitability – largely a response to earlier Keynesian economic policies.
While it may seem counterintuitive, Gilmore points to a marxist understanding of crisis to explain how crisis and surplus are actually linked up. Once the productive forces of society are stalled, a transformation of some kind is forced to resolve this crisis. Gilmore posits that the surplus was in the form of human labor – i.e. all those cut off from legitimate wage-labor as a result of racist marginalization – as well as in the form of land – i.e. agriculture lands that were no longer being utilized for productive purposes.
Essentially, the solution to these crises was to utilize the surplus that derived from it to, as in all cases, the benefit of capitalism. It is here where Gilmore, using the State of California as her example, demonstrates that this land and labor was used to physically construct the carceral state – both the land used to build extraordinarily large prisons and a population to then fill the prisons with.
