Abolition Geography by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Author:Ruth Wilson Gilmore [Gilmore, Ruth Wilson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2022-05-09T18:30:00+00:00

Structure and Flow

Interinstitutional competition and copying is hardly a feature specific to devolution. The contemporary dynamic brings to mind a—perhaps the—major change that occurred during and after World War II, at a time of state aggrandizement. To prevent the Department of War’s normal postwar dismantling, military elites and industrial and political members of their bloc figured out how to use fiscal and bureaucratic capacities, developed for New Deal social welfare programs, to grow rather than wither the department.44 They built and expanded bases, hired uniformed and civilian staff, promoted mass post-secondary education, established the Gunbelt, oversaw one of the biggest population relocation projects in the United States, and churned trillions of dollars through public and private research, development, manufacturing, and think-tank outfits—including universities—that together produced not only vast industrialized capacity for war-making but also the ideological and public relations methods to promote and naturalize this remarkable transformation.45

The military-industrial complex is the short name for all of these activities, relationships, people, and places, and one of its achievements was the creation of the Sunbelt—a political-economic region that produced a string of presidents: Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush. After Johnson, most candidates ran on anti-state platforms, and, having won, they all set about making the state bigger while destroying individuals, institutions, and initiatives that might improve working people’s lives and hopes: radical anti-capitalist organizations, full employment, public-sector unions, the short-lived “peace dividend,” welfare rights, prisoners’ rights, open immigration, public education, peace itself.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, prison, policing, and related agencies of state and local governments have demonstrated patterning similar to that of the Department of War in the late 1940s. As we have seen, there’s a more detailed history of police/military interaction. But for our purposes here the pattern of achieving legitimate stability is what matters. Police, prisons, and jails have consolidated their numbers, relevance, status, and capacity—sometimes competitively, but always with combined growth.

In other words, devolution creates its own intrastate struggle for dominance; in the same way that capitalist firms concentrate while extending their reach, so do institutions patterned on the capitalist imperative to grow or die. Certainly, the rise of the voluntary sector, as Jennifer Wolch demonstrates in The Shadow State, shows how ordinary people built the capacity to withstand some aspects of organized abandonment and meet basic needs. A good deal of the contemporary social justice not-for-profit sector is heir to the desire—whether altruistic, cynical, or desperate—to demand or provide services externalized from the state.46 In such a context it isn’t a foregone conclusion that in current practice, whatever legitimacy the police and military might have in theory, they automatically will withstand pressure to shrink.47 Rather, they make themselves ideologically and practically indispensable.

Indeed, while the postwar Pentagon successfully imitated fiscal and bureaucratic forms intended for social welfare agencies in order to expand its war-making abilities, today’s crisis-driven agencies—including the Pentagon—strive to absorb their institutional rivals’ missions in order to survive and thrive. Since the late 1970s, for example, the US Department of Education

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