The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
that period of servitude and became free, unlike Venis and Adam, whom he later owned and had the right to punish, with whips if he so chose. As a father and husband, he also had the right to punish his wife, Sarah, as well as their children—a right that enslaved husbands and fathers could not claim.
BEFORE I CAN GO ON, I NEED to explain why I keep referring to states, force, and punishment. There has been much theorizing about what “states” are, and I will address those issues in the last chapter, for the very idea of a “state” is problematic. For now, however, I am referring to the state as a territory held under one governing entity, be it a kingdom, a dictatorship, or a democratic republic. Beginning with Weber, social theorists have generally argued that coercion and a monopoly on the use of force are central foundational processes in all states.6 States are, by definition, stratified, with some categories of people having far greater access to resources than others.7 The state uses force as needed to control inhabitants and to control/defend borders. The inhabitants of the territory, or at least most of them, believe that the use of force is legitimate; it is the state’s right and obligation. The state authorizes agents to make laws, make demands, regulate behavior, and, when necessary for enforcement, exert force. Those who resist will undergo punishment that is itself authorized by the state and carried out by agents of the state. The primary beneficiaries of the monopoly on the use of force are a subset of the population, the elite, and, to a lesser extent, those on whom they depend—their agents in using state power to enforce stratification. Stratification, in turn, enables wealth extraction—and wealth extraction is the basic point of state formation. Wealth extraction requires categories of people who are powerless to prevent the expropriation of the fruits of their labor. The power to punish is the essential tool that makes this feedback loop possible.8
Thus, states are about inequality, about making it possible for some few to gain wealth off the labors of the many, and the threat of punishment is an important component in convincing people to cooperate. Most people would prefer to keep the value of their labor for themselves, but the state apparatus provides the force to convince even the recalcitrant that they cannot do so. The state enforces the rights of individuals to own or control property, the resources people need to produce food and goods—the means of production. In enforcing those rights, the state at the same time enforces the propertyless condition—the dispossession—of many people. So, in enforcing the rights of property, the state also fulfills its other critical function: the supply and control of a cheap labor force to do the work of making wealth for others.
In these tales, we will see the state protecting the rights of the elite to own huge amounts of land and to use the labor of the dispossessed for their own benefit. In the early colonies, that dispossession applied only to those who were enslaved and indentured, but soon spread to many more people, people who were legally free. This is why force is required: to make sure that there are enough people without property who will go hungry unless they turn their labor over to someone else in return for wages or at least for a way to eat, and to be able to punish those who don’t cooperate or threaten to upset the system. How else would an elite “persuade” other people to make them rich? How else can wealth trickle up into the hands of the very few? In fact, people do at times revolt and resist, despite punishment, on a regular basis. Sufficiently organized, they sometimes force concessions, though punishment means that only rarely are they able to change the basic structure of inequality.
So when I refer to “the state,” I am referring to an entity that has the legitimate right to exert force both in relation to its borders and in relation to its inhabitants. Such entities are “sovereign.” The United States was becoming a modern nation-state by the time my ancestors left the East Coast and arrived in Kentucky. Modern nation-states claim that their sovereignty, their right of self-determination, their right to demand loyalty and obedience and thus their right to use force to punish—their right to exist at all—is based on the existence of a homogenous “nation,” a “people” who share the same values, culture, language, and history.9 Getting seriously disparate peoples to conceive of themselves as a nation, to legitimize the existence of the state, has been an ongoing challenge—and still is, as documented by the present furor promoted by the descendants of some immigrants over the acceptance of other immigrants as part of the state.
IN FACILITATING WEALTH EXTRACTION, the state acts as what sociologist Charles Tilly calls a “protection racket”—something that is often euphemistically referred to as the “social contract.”10 The state provides “protection” to citizens, and in return the citizens allow themselves to be exploited. The state may also provide benefits for some of the population in the form of a rising standard of living, helping to ensure their allegiance. This means that the legitimacy of a state in the eyes of its more protected citizens rests largely on its control of the use of force. The state, to fulfill its side of the contract, must be effective in maintaining an “orderly” society. It must provide its citizens the local peace they need to raise families with at least minimal success and to produce the surplus needed to fulfill elite demands, all without the fear of additional extractions of surplus by marauding neighbors or outsiders. Belief in that contract is part of what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have called “the manufacture of consent”—the orchestration of beliefs and fears that get people to accept, and ideally not even recognize, elite rule and their own exploitation.11 But if Tilly’s “protection racket” is to work, citizens must believe they need protection—otherwise they might keep for themselves the value they produce, refusing to pay for protection. So, if there is no real external enemy, no threat of war or invasion, something fearsome will have to be invented. Certain people can be framed as dangerous, in need of punishment to protect everyone else. Punishing the already compliant, the “us,” won’t work. It is “them,” those Others who are framed as enemies. I will introduce several such enemies in these tales, ranging from witches to those so framed today—women with babies, criminals, Muslims, and immigrants—all of whom supposedly threaten the security of the compliant clients of the protectors. I will show how “the law” creates criminals, and how the state and its media allies foster fear of certain groups, telling us how dangerous they are in an attempt to manufacture consent. That the state provides protection in the face of fear gives it legitimacy in the eyes of many of its citizens. That the state created the fear in the first place remains invisible to most.12
The power to punish allows the state to make clear what happens to the noncompliant. The state itself, just like a Mafia boss running a protection racket, must be feared. So “governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to the crime rate.”13 Punishment provides the state with the opportunity to use certain bodies to produce “shock and awe,” spectacular displays of power over life and death. Executions and imprisonment, decisions to withhold life-supporting services such as healthcare, welfare, education, as well as the ability to declare exceptions to those rules, all demonstrate that the state is indeed sovereign, both to its own people and to other states.14 As Achille Mbembe says, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”15 Steve Martinot states, “The prisoner is the means by which the state produces its overarching power.… The prisoner is the sign of the state’s presumed political legitimacy.”16 The stories of my ancestors offer numerous examples of how spectacular punishment and the demonstration of sovereignty are linked.
Ultimately, then, a state to be a state has to punish. It can’t just claim a monopoly on the use of force; it can’t just say, “Hey folks, we, the state officials, are the only ones who can use force, so we are in charge of punishing anyone who needs it. And if you try, we’ll punish you too. Somebody stole your stuff, report it to us and we’ll punish the thief. We are the only ones who can use force, with a couple of specified exceptions.” Very few people will buy into that, unless it is demonstrably true. The state has to prove its monopoly by actually using force to punish. And the force must be based on laws, no matter how unequal, to justify that use of force.
The state demonstrates its monopoly by punishing a carefully selected few, those defined as “Other”—as not real or rightful members of the polity and therefore inferior—by the majority of citizens. Selecting Others ensures that the punishing