Socialist Progressives

Simply stated, capitalism needs poverty and creates poverty, but is simultaneously always threatened by poverty. The poor keep wages down, but they also create trouble in three ways.

First, their presence calls into question capitalism’s moral claims (the system can’t work for “everyone” when beggars are in the street). Second, the poor threaten and menace the moneyed classes aesthetically and personally simply by being in the wrong spaces. Gourmet dining isn’t quite the same when done in the presence of mendicant paupers. And finally, the poor threaten to rebel in organized and unorganized ways as they did in the sixties and seventies.

Capitalism will never escape these contradictions. The best it can do is manage them with criminal justice, the ideological racialization of poverty, and the geographic segregation of the poor.

One more point. When viewing this history and the present, it is important to think in terms of concomitant and overlapping agendas. Police on the street are not usually consciously pursuing the violent reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. More often local cops in Staten Island; Albuquerque; Ferguson; Waller, Texas; etc. are pursuing their own personal power trips, which very often take on racist angles.

But regardless of what cops think they are doing, their work usually also fits into local political agendas of segregation and real-estate development. And both of those smaller projects fit into the larger national project of social control in an increasingly unequal class society. In other words, the macro, mezzo, and micro levels all line up but also all remain somewhat autonomous.
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