Policing the polycrisis: Liberal democratic state terror and other contradictions

Abstract

The pleasant daydream of capitalist social democracy has now ended, taking with it the possibility of a negotiated class detente. Capitalism has spent the last 50 years repeatedly colliding with external limits, which it has had to convert into merely internal barriers to avert terminal crisis. The stagflation crisis, the global financial crisis, and the crisis of social reproduction are just a few of the potential apocalypses warded off by the ruling class. This process of deferral has saved capitalism’s skin so far, but only by introducing new internal contradictions into capitalism that it must again defer, resolve, or be killed by. For the duration of the neoliberal period, the bourgeoisie has increasingly relied upon the repressive state apparatus to manage these contradictions. Cops, courts, and cages provide the capitalist state with both the directly repressive violence and the indirectly ideological violence that it depends upon for its continued existence. The qualitative transformation of the prison systems of social democracy into the mass incarceration of neoliberalism is one index by which we can register the increasing illiberalism of liberalism. Capitalism must both immiserate on a massive scale and imprison anyone who behaves miserably. Activists and organisers who threaten this intolerable system, like the student Palestine solidarity encampments, are met with police terror. Far from banishing crisis, this dependence upon the ‘justice’ system to incapacitate opposition constitutes a new potentially fatal internal contradiction. Capitalism can live now only so long as it continues to incarcerate, and by so doing it creates an enormous wasteful, futile, loathsome prison regime that teeters constantly on the brink of collapse and on which its whole legitimacy is now staked. The struggle against mass incarceration should be an immediate tactical priority for the communist movement.