Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
needs in the “hidden abode” of households or the broader ideological and political projects that fabricate the social order within “civil society.” This latter category includes the discourses and interventions of the administrative state introduced in the preceding chapter as pacification and its prose.
This broader, humanist approach breaks the determinism often associated with Marxism. It reminds us that labor is not just an “abstract” factor of production. It is also “concrete” flesh-and-blood workers: individuals and peoples with “‘political passion[s]’. . . born on the ‘permanent and organic’ terrain of economic life but which transcend . . . it, bringing into play emotions and aspirations in whose incandescent atmosphere even calculations involving the individual human life itself obey different laws from those of individual profit.”27 Capital’s inescapable reliance on labor, and the dogged, irrepressible, and incommensurable humanity of “living labor” means that resistance to exploitation is a structural feature of capitalist civilization. Workers’ autonomy continually presents itself in the everyday “weapons of the weak”—work slowdowns, insubordination, and disrespect for authority, so-called “petty crimes”—and the threat of politics, the dangerous prospect of collective consciousness and mobilization.28 This essential antagonism between labor and capital—in addition to the capitalist’s imperative to accumulate—also contributes to the constant change and dynamism that characterizes capitalism. As capital flees from and attempts to undermine the victories of working classes, the world is continually remade through “creative destruction”: the search for new profitable investments, new technologies to deskill labor and speed up production, new markets to tap, and new behaviors or needs to commodify.
Capital accumulation, then, entails much more than the growth of capital through investment and trade. It also forms and continually reforms the groups and classes that constitute a social formation. In providing the labor power that makes the system move, workers produce their own obsolescence. Put crudely, there is a progressive deskilling: the crafts of artisans and mechanics are transformed from concrete activities of living labor and transmuted into the assembly line, which employs fewer and fewer workers of increasingly less skill until all are replaced by robots and a handful of highly trained technicians. As this process unfolds, the basic needs of the population are increasingly separated from their capacity to provide them. In previous modes of production, basic needs were often met by the primary producers themselves in some kind of subsistence economy. Under capitalism, however, all accoutrements of life—from the basic necessities of survival to the most vulgar and silly consumer thing—are increasingly provisioned to the population through the market (commodity exchange) and the state (social policy).
Noting the deepening spiral of commodification entailed in capital accumulation, Marx argued that capital accumulation necessarily produces “surplus” workers. The creation of ever-expanding wealth or capital also entailed the production of dispossessed workers or proletarians. As capital grew larger and larger and as technology advanced to make labor increasingly efficient, it produced ever larger working classes and, with them, larger surplus populations:
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labor-power at its disposal. . . . But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labor-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labor. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism.
While Marx noted that this process was “modified in its working by many circumstances,” it constituted the culmination of his critique of political economy, what he called “the general law of capital accumulation.”29
The emphasis Marx placed on this process is well justified. The polarization of wealth and power is the basic conflict that defines capitalist societies, and “surplus populations” are one of the key actors in this struggle. Historically, they are the “masterless men” uprooted from traditional obligations but without place in the constantly changing economic order. The consolidation of “capitalism entailed the taking of land, the criminalizing of the conditions of survival for those thrown off the land, and the violation of criminal laws by people who had no choice but crime for their livelihood.”30 Crime became most strongly associated with a particular subset of surplus populations, what Marx called the lumpenproletariat. Distinguished morally from the proletariat, this “lowest sediment” of society includes vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes.31 While other strata of the surplus populations (the so-called “deserving poor”) were managed with the gentler hand of social policy such as poor aid, the lumpen became the primary responsibility of the police.32 Managing these surplus populations spurred the formation of the administrative capacities of the state, while the threat they pose to social order has given rise to many of the security practices and disciplinary institutions that pacify the seeming disorder produced by immiserated surplus populations. The security apparatus and social policy are the iron hand and velvet glove that pacify class struggle. Together, they enforce the rule of capital and private property, maintain the separation of needs and capacities, and fabricate capitalist forms of order.
PACIFICATION AS THE INCORPORATION AND RACIALIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS
As capitalism developed into an increasingly totalizing world-system, the “strong” states at the core of the world-economy—that is, the regions that accumulated a disproportionate share of global value—politically incorporated and pacified the working class through the extension of the franchise and collective bargaining rights, the creation of police forces, and the amelioration of misery through social policy. Focusing on the New Poor Law in 1834 and the contemporaneous expansion of the vote, Neocleous argues that growing administrative capacities of the state in the United Kingdom politically incorporated the working class and subsumed class struggle through the legal system:
Recognizing the power of the working class, the state assumes a position as the wedge between needs and capacities, but does so through a series of administrative forms. The development of national insurance, as one element of the response to the threat of the working class, signals the formal recognition of need by the state, a process which consolidates the separation of needs and capacities of the working class and yet at the same time locks it in a relationship with capital and the state. In return the working class is granted increased political rights: individual rights of citizenship, such as the right to vote, and the collective rights through the legal immunities granted to trade unions.33
The political incorporation and legal recognition of the working class—the franchise and collective bargaining—subsumed working-class politics within the state, creating the possibility for peaceful mediation within “civil society.”
This process speaks to the unique role of the state as the “part” of the social formation that, as an expression of the “general interest” and legitimate holder of the monopoly on violence, assumes the role as the universal arbiter of social struggle.34 The state, then, becomes the uneven institutional synthesis of the conflicting demands and competing strategies of different fractions of a social formation.35 The selective repression, accommodation, and incorporation of social struggle within the institutional apparatus defines the scope and boundaries of a given state-form. Hence, the recognition of collective bargaining rights moves the politics of organized labor from the realm of criminality and revolution—what, in the United States, was called “industrial warfare” before the New Deal—into routine administration—what we now call “labor relations.” This is an ambiguous process. On the one hand, labor won real power and used it to the benefit of the working class. By the mid-twentieth century, the labor parties (or parties with unions as a central constituent, like the US Democratic Party) ruled “the West” and built welfare states.36 On the other hand, the incorporation of labor also mollified it. It entailed a selective process of repression and accommodation that purged the radicals and narrowed the political horizons of organized labor. It subsumed