Javier Clark illustrates the contemporary social production of “non-subjects” and the conditions under which they evade traditional revolutionary formulae.
Not even a dry statistic can any longer serve to conceal a tragedy in America: reviewing hospital data from between the winter of 2016 and the summer of 2017, researchers in West Virginia found that “14 babies out of every 100 born in the state are exposed to at least one substance during pregnancy.” West Virginia is, for context, effectively synonymous with postindustrial poverty: the introduction of continuous mining processes and, later, the closure of mines and factories outright left Appalachia barren of long-term employment, and locales once structured singularly around the pit or the plant began to undergo the social equivalent of cardiac failure. “In 1998, Weirton Steel was no longer the largest employer in West Virginia. Walmart was.”1 The results were predictable enough. One in four children lives below the poverty line; in Hancock County, at the tip of the state’s Northern Panhandle, 60% of elementary school students qualify for free lunch.
Of course, none of this is at all exceptional. Any of the now-vacant factory-cities of the Union could stand in for Weirton: one can hardly tell descriptions of Flint, Camden, or Rochester, the former habitats of the American industrial working class, apart from each other in recent news stories. So vanished the black grease of the assembly-line press from these places, so came the black tar of the lighter and the metal spoon— West Virginia currently leads the nation in overdose deaths per capita; a bleak achievement, but an achievement nevertheless, considering the competition posed by such places as Northern California, where syringe litter became a local political flashpoint in the tourist town of Eureka, and Boston, where Massachusetts Avenue is today known as the Methadone Mile. COVID – that is to say, the mixture of precarity and social isolation that the pandemic engendered – resulted in an estimated five million new opioid, methamphetamine, and alcohol addictions. America, today, is the land of the pipe and the home of the needle.
Things were not always like this, though. In the 1950s and 1960s, the heroin-centric American drug trade was structured by the geopolitics of the French Connection: morphine precursor was manufactured from Anatolian opium, from which the fortunes of the NATO-friendly generals and colonels that controlled the Turkish state were derived, then trafficked across the Balkans; this was achieved in part by repurposing the ratlines that had carried the remains of the Ustaše to the West, refined into pure no. 4 heroin in Marseilles (where the Corsican mafia won their place in the post-war French order by dislodging the Communists from the docks), and shipped to New York City. There it was divided among the ethnic mobs still closely woven into inner-city, working-class neighborhoods, before being finally sold to a small market of beatniks, veterans, and the permanently unemployed – a frowned-upon aside to the more lucrative protection rackets and numbers games they operated. Jimmy Breslin reminisced that “it was a pleasure to cover criminals like [Bumpy] Johnson. They weren’t into drugs and their crime was more self-contained with gambling and loan sharking. Once the drugs took over the crime scene, it wasn’t as much fun anymore.”
Unlike with contemporary drug trafficking (the operations of the so-called “cartels”), there were real limits to this arrangement. Demand could not spread much farther outward from the Northeast because of the distributional complexity that a wider market would have entailed, and street dealers had to be intelligent, discreet, and capable of enough local political finesse to avoid prosecution. Consequently, independent heroin syndicates were lean entities, modeled on the mobs that supplied them, and violence was always outsourced to an adjacent world of professionals. Even the men who made the hand-to-hands on the corners were skilled workers, in their own way: they could make a Vice Squad undercover from his fake track marks and shoe leather alone. They knew their customers, and their customers knew them. It was a self-governing subculture unto itself.
Crack and the CIA colluded to change that. At odds with the rascal de Gaulle and his successors, the Company aimed to cut the Corsicans and their French intelligence handlers out of the process outright in the early 1970s, shifting to Golden Triangle heroin routed through Mexico in order to enrich a spiderweb of regional anti-communist allies. Dope flowed under complete CIA control after what a Danish journalist termed the Great Heroin Coup, and flow it did (Frank Lucas infamously claimed to have had Southeast Asian no. 4 heroin smuggled home directly in the coffins of dead GIs), but with the transatlantic channels closed and the entrenched Jewish-Italian syndicates moving more cautiously as a result, upstarts now went for the Mexican, Caribbean, and Latin American cocaine connections instead. Sooner or later, someone had the thought to sell crystals of coca boiled with baking soda, and on an anonymous street corner in Washington Heights or the North Philadelphia Badlands, history was quietly made.
Criminality offers a funhouse mirror reflection of capitalist recomposition: the discipline of the old underworld in some ways paralleled the solidarity of the workers’ movement – demonstrated, for example, by the fact that the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles grew directly out of the shattered Black Panther Party. For a time, the kingpins at the top were expected to act as genuine inner-city statesmen. In 1968, the National Guard had to beg Little Melvin Williams, who extracted tens of thousands of dollars a day from the bloodstreams of West Baltimore, to prevent a post-riot political catastrophe by “pacifying the ghetto” — and he obliged. All Contra intrigue aside, the success of ready rock had much to do with being in the right historical place at the right historical time. As deindustrialization set in, the white ethnic working classes had already long moved out of precarity through decades of homeownership and union wage-productivity agreements, but urban Black workers had only just gained a slice of the post-war spoils as they were abandoned by industry entirely — the perfect socioeconomic formula to produce drug addicts and drug dealers.
When the factories and shipyards closed, so, too, did the local shops, restaurants, and service stations. In 1968, North Lawndale, on the West Side of Chicago, was anchored by Western Electric, International Harvester, Sunbeam, and the Post Office, and had birthed a militant housing integration movement. It was an honest-to-God community. By 1986, “North Lawndale, with a population of over 66,000, had only one bank and one supermarket; but it was also home to forty-eight state lottery agents, fifty currency exchanges, and ninety-nine liquor stores and bars.”2 Perhaps no single event better demonstrates the essence of the era than landlords in the Bronx setting their own properties on fire so that they could flee with the insurance payouts. Vacant homes and abandoned buildings, numberless, ever-present, became the physical infrastructure of the new economy in these cities: dealers could use them as stashes and addicts could use them as shooting galleries. “Before crack, there were kids in the park. People in the front yard. Barbeques in the summer. Crack hit, and it just went… Families stayed indoors, kept their kids at home.”3
By way of sheer demand, crack initiated something of a democratic revolution in the American drug trade: no longer were professionalism, legal acumen, a reputation for reliability, or even disciplined hierarchies as such required. “Anyone could ride the Amtrak or the Greyhound up to New York and come back with a package.” City kids, aware that schools were preparing them for an economy in which they were no longer needed, dropped out with a mind to eventually acquire a package of their own.4
Why toil in retail for $4.25 an hour with a high school diploma when you can make $400 in a few hours on the block without so much as a middle school education? “The drug economy is the economy,” Joshua Ottenberg, the former acting prosecutor of Camden County, New Jersey told the New York Times in 2008. “That’s been the truth for a long, long time.”
Large inner-city drug operations during the speedball super-cycle (roughly 1985–2015) were built around a cocaine connection, supplied in kilograms by the lower rungs of a Mexican or Colombian cartel, as well as a heroin connection, which was, by the 1980s, typically also Mexican rather than Southern European (a gift from the Central Intelligence Agency). Both were then sold on corners or out of vacants (crack was packaged in vials, which were so commonly discarded on the street that children in New York sometimes collected and resold them to dealers, and dope in glassine bags or gel capsules, though the two were usually bundled in “boy and girl” deals), and retail was overseen by middle-managers paid according to their share of the total package. A 60/40 split on one thousand vials of coke worth $10 apiece, for example, which what authorities internally call an “active open-air drug market” can work through in a couple of days and nights, would leave the supplier with $6,000 and the dealers with $4,000, and some cities had hundreds of such markets. At the bottom, blurring the boundary between sellers and users, was the informal daily help, the lumpenproletariat within the lumpenproletariat, paid irregularly depending on the success of the main operation. The bums who kept lookout, the addicted “touts” who spread the word in the street, and the truant high schoolers who served customers hand-to-hand could all end the day holding a fistful of dirty twenties for their troubles. That was the frontier romance of the whole Game. As a heroin dealer on Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia put it: “This is one of the few places in America where you can wake up Monday flat broke and on Tuesday you can have $10,000 in your pocket.”
For all the miseries of the corner, though, the truly invisible population throughout all of this was made up of those who could not afford to leave but were not selling or using, left functionally confined to their homes by the street trade. One researcher observed in Chicago that “vacant lots are evidence of residents’ collective efficacy, not of neglect. The gym shoes hanging from electrical wires are placed there by dealers to mark the boundaries of drug-dealing areas, and buyers look for them. Even trash plays an important role by providing places to hide drugs and guns; if it is removed, the trash pile will be replenished.” Dealers in Baltimore have forced garbage collectors to ignore certain alleys where they hide the ground stash. Public housing complexes, full of stairways and narrow corridors, are even more conducive to these insurgent forms of control – beat cops in New York City were warned to be cautious of “airmail” hurled from the high-rises. Children in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes would periodically stop attending school in the late 1990s as sniper fire between competing gangs in different towers escalated.
Life cannot be lived indoors, though. For all their virtues, those who refused bliss in the needle, refused fast money on the corner, and miraculously managed, with food stamps and two or three minimum-wage jobs, to get by, became the urban mass base of tough-on-crime politics. As Jamie Kalven writes in his excellent series on policing in Chicago, “desperate for some sort of relief, residents will sometimes support constitutionally suspect measures — sweeps, gang loitering ordinances, one-strike eviction policies, etc. — even at the cost of their own freedoms. They just want to see something done.” In West Baltimore, constant pressure from community groups to curb street dealing is what makes a tough line on crime so politically salient, and, everywhere, facilities for managing addiction, such as supervised injection sites in Kensington or homeless shelters in Atlanta, are met with hostility. Even as early as 1973, it may have been Rockefeller with his name on the law, but it was Mothers Against Drugs, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the New York Branch of the NAACP, and the National Afro-American Labor Council that pushed it through, and when the Times polled New Yorkers the next year, “71 percent of black respondents favored life sentences without parole for ‘pushers.’” Of course, terrified grandmothers can no more be blamed for dialing 911 than a maimed steelworker can be for choosing to fire up a shot of dope — they made their own history, but they did not make it as they pleased.
It is obvious, then, that the disappearance of industrial work lies at the root of both the political and the economic logic of the War on Drugs. Put another way, deindustrialization is why the drug dealer has replaced the mobster as the stereotypical American criminal. This was the double-edged nature of community: as Nicholas Pileggi observes in Wiseguy, the source material for Goodfellas, tightly-knit working-class subcultures “whether Brownsville, East New York, the South Side in Chicago, or Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, unquestionably helped to nurture the mob. These were the neighborhoods where local wiseguys felt safe, where racketeers had become an integral part of the social fabric, where candy stores, funeral parlors, and groceries were often fronts for gambling operations, where loans could be made and bets placed, where residents made major purchases from the backs of trucks rather than from downtown department stores.”
Graft was truly superabundant in the era of the factory. Beat cops, on top of their cut of the local bookies’ earnings, were bribed with free liquor by front shopkeepers. Teamsters would tip off hijackers for part of the take; longshoremen were legendary for their pilferage before the introduction of sealed shipping containers. In the 1970s, the mob-connected Concrete Club indirectly controlled New York City’s entire $10 billion construction sector, and, under their enlightened rule, “workers regularly stole materials like metal wiring or pipes from the work site to make an additional buck on the side. This behavior was so common and systematic in the industry, it acquired a name, mungo” (a sad historical rhyme with the “harvesting” of vacant homes by desperate addicts in Baltimore a decade later). Going even further back, when the IWW attempted to organize the tens of millions of Southern and Eastern European Catholics that made up the urban proletariat in the early twentieth century, their anti-state, anti-contract radicalism fell on deaf ears, because in, for example, New York City, “many Italians obtained employment on municipal construction projects, in the Sanitation Department, and on the docks through Tammany’s good offices” (here is the reason for the historical absence of socialism in America: much of what was assumed to be the industrial working class was, in actuality, the petty-racketeering class).
On the other hand, that these acts were criminal did not necessarily mean that they were antisocial. Dockworkers in a gang were so close that they trusted each other to sell stolen goods, but those same bonds between them were also the invisible social infrastructure of sabotage and wildcat slowdowns, the acts of defiance that allowed them to take pride in their being workers. “Longshoremen usually lifted heavy burdens in pairs and became so accustomed to each other’s movements that they needed no verbal communication to coordinate their efforts. For such a working couple to part company created a scandal among their workmates.”5 At the U.S. Steelworks in Gary, Indiana, workers reputedly hid lengths of stolen copper cabling in their lunchpails, but, as the New Leftist Steve Packard wrote of the time he spent there:
From the wholesale wrecking of machines to trickier, more selective actions, endless sabotages go on every day. I’m on many jobs where the foreman tries to hustle us too much or insists that we do a job in some dangerous or unpleasant way, and somebody breaks a machine. Nothing can be proved: only the workers know just what combination of speed, pressure, change of pace, angle of feed is sufficient to make some dirty old monster start to shake and throw sparks, and smoke to a crunching halt… The men don’t usually talk about this stuff; communication is carried out through undercurrents and understandings. But everyone in the mill agrees that the workers are right, which is why there is nothing the boss can do.
Even among beat cops, there was a certain feeling of responsibility, however warped. They let vice flourish, but their relationships with the local wiseguys and the families on their posts, with whom they interacted day after day, also gave them reliable eyes on the street, an understanding of neighborhood social dynamics, and the ability to recognize patterns, all essential to adjudicating everyday disputes, not to mention solving rapes or burglaries. While Southern cops can trace their ancestry directly to slave patrols, most Northern police departments originated from the more prosaic social realities of post-Civil-War America: returning runaway children, enforcing and not enforcing building codes (usually another source of income), and watching over the “bummery” of itinerant day laborers. Even into the 1920s, it was common for beat cops to help tramps and recent immigrants find lodging, or even temporarily house them in the police station directly — a way of funneling immigrants into political machines and controlling an unruly class all at once. Such were things that William Manchester could write of the Depression:
Nobody called cops pigs in the early 1930s… In New York, men on the beat had been distributing food in the most stricken neighborhoods since 1930. The money came from city employees, including themselves, who contributed 1 percent of their salaries; as Caroline Bird pointed out, this was “the first public confession of official responsibility for plain poverty, and it came, not from the top, but from the lowest civil servants, who worked down were the poor people were.
Eliminating graft had the long-term effect of breaking up these informal obligations. As the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders rather dryly put it in 1967, “pressures for administrative efficiency and cost cutting have brought about the withdrawal of many operations of city government from direct contact with neighborhood and citizen.” A 1970 study of “Whitetowns,” the hyphen-American enclaves that went from voting for Roosevelt to Rizzo, sums it up a little more clearly: “As City Hall reformers installed computers and accounted for every paperclip, they lost touch with the ‘little people’ in Whitetown and Blacktown.”
Property values, insurance rates, investment, re-election campaigns, and the distribution of city resources are all affected by the reported crime rate, and, as a result, the political incentive for Police Departments to cook the books is overwhelming. Rather than walking beats, patrol cops are now structurally compelled to fill arrest and citation quotas while suppressing felony cases that require longer-term investigation to sustain a statistical performance of high “activity” and low violent crime. This culture is internally enforced by the rituals of CompStat:
The management system was created in April 1994. Captains, lieutenants, and other unit heads from individual boroughs travel, on a rotating schedule, to police headquarters each week and are quizzed, in granular detail, about crime trends and the plans to combat them. The NYPD brass asking the questions is armed with reams of statistics, which are analyzed and mapped and projected onto multiple screens. The three-hour sessions can be so confrontational that anxious commanders sometimes vomit the night before appearing on the CompStat docket… Los Angeles, London, and Paris use a form of CompStat. Baltimore has CitiStat; New Orleans has BlightStat. Burlington, Vermont runs CommunityStat, to battle the opioid epidemic.
Just to give you an indication of the magnitude of the problem of deliberate misreporting: in 2000, the Baltimore Police Department “had to reclassify 9,572 reports because they had been wrongly downgraded to lesser offenses, turning a much hyped 10 percent crime drop into a 3.5 percent increase.” Thousands of reports of sexual assault were deliberately miscoded and rejected throughout the 1980s in Philadelphia to polish the prestigious Sex Crimes Unit’s case clearance rate. “To make your city look good,” the unit’s supervisor told a reporter, “you would go under with sex-crime cases. Basically, it was public relations.” A ProPublica investigation in 2016 found that through the use of exceptional clearances, cases that are classified as solved but that do not actually result in an arrest (because, for example, prosecutors decline to charge the case, as they are themselves pressured to do in order to inflate their politically-important conviction rate), police departments nationwide “effectively made it seem as though they had solved three times the number of rapes that they actually had.” The Era of the Urban Dashboard, in which education and policing are quantified as tickers on a Bloomberg Terminal, might as well be called the Era of the Juked Statistic.
By tying cops to their radios, breaking up the old political machines and consolidating their wards into huge new districts, and flouting residency requirements in order to hire white applicants from the suburbs, the patterns that a diligent foot patrolman could detect go unnoticed — ten different cars might respond to ten burglaries on the same block. Downgrading and not recording crimes, which the CompStat systems introduced by reformers unintentionally encourage, moreover, kills the ability of investigators to identify such patterns afterward by cross-referencing reports. Ordered to meet “productivity targets” and without any informal obligations to the neighborhood to govern their behavior, the mentality of an occupying force instead develops. When everyone is a statistic, everyone is going to be treated like one. Why invest weeks into a single arrest, which might mean, say, working that string of burglaries by pounding the pavement and interviewing residents, when you can haul in teenagers day after day on simple possession charges and double your salary through overtime (what cops call “collars for dollars”) in the process?
This environment breeds another practice: instead of taking bribes, cops just steal, and they’re not the only ones who do so, either. In 2014, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office used civil asset forfeiture procedures to seize a $300,000 home from two parents whose son had been charged with selling $40 worth of drugs, and in some years auctioned off as many as 200 properties, mainly to slumlords (though also occasionally to enterprising police), which, incredibly, sometimes meant that “the DA was forced to seize the same property multiple times, retaking homes caught in a loop of absenteeism, neglect and the eventual return of criminal activity.” Why? As Endnotes observe, the downstream effects of industrial decline in cities like Ferguson, Missouri (where between “2004 and 2011 court fines netted $1.2 million, or around 10% of the city’s revenue”) have led to a “mutation in the form of the local state: revenue collected not through consensual taxation but by outright violent plunder.” Because forfeitures, fees, and fines are increasingly necessary to fund the modern state in the era of abandonment, from “hunting at the border” (targeting Black areas for parking tickets) in North Brunswick to deliberately misimpounding cars in Memphis, police today constitute a class of highway bandits, legally as well as illegally robbing those shut out of the formal economy decades ago.
Part of the reason they can operate as they do is that the reforming, nonpartisan journalistic culture of twentieth-century America, which was one of the earliest defenders of the despised civil rights movement, no longer exists to discipline them. Classified ads were an essential way for threadbare working-class households to buy used goods or find side jobs, and the revenue that they provided, combined with a stable base of subscriptions in the city, meant that newspapers could afford a corps of professional prose journalists with long-term beats, reporters who were capable of gathering sources and identifying social patterns in much the same way good gangsters and good detectives were. People used to write letters to the editor. As this audience collapsed over the years of deindustrialization, regional newspapers consequently underwent “delocalization,” acquired by national chains that gutted the newsrooms and that, almost in parallel to the effects of CompStat on policing, demanded fast, sensational content to attract scarce advertising dollars. At most local papers, intensive investigations now simply have to be foregone entirely. Take this example, from 2016:
Phil Luciano, a columnist at The Peoria Journal Star, got a story tip recently about Caterpillar, the heavy equipment company that was based in Peoria, Ill., for 90 years before a recent relocation to Cook County.
The tip seemed promising enough. But as one of only seven full-time reporters at the paper, he felt stretched too thin to do much about it.
“Who’s our Caterpillar reporter?” Mr. Luciano asked. “We don’t have one right now.”
While cops cheat on the stats, journalists distort the narrative. Municipal corruption goes uninvestigated and labor abuses go unexposed, but leads still need to bleed, and national scandals are always close at hand. Since hundreds of rural television stations were acquired by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, their independence has vanished, and local coverage has been replaced with scripts prepared directly in Washington (clips of dozens of Sinclair anchors reciting the same speech on air about ethics went viral a few years ago). Their urban counterparts are not much better off: as an article in the New Republic complains, freelance journalists have been “gigified,” and the “deskilling and casualization of their work — the tendency to replace reported work with warmed-over takes or viral material ripped from social media — reflects trends in the wider economy.” Contributors, whom professional reporters have largely been displaced by, are often paid for the views they generate. As the result of a thousand technological and social cuts, journalism has, in effect, been reduced to a pure numbers game, with a stronger incentive to self-promote online than to “climb the tenement stairs.”
Not even career criminals have been spared the rigors of the gig economy. “As early as 2011, the suburbs housed more poor than the cities — with 16.4 million suburban poor making up about one third of the national total,” according to Phil Neel, and, importantly, “many suburbs even lack complete sidewalk systems — and going anywhere is synonymous with driving there.” Because of this, the traditional drug corner serving a base of homeless addicts has more or less disappeared in most of the country (with some exceptions, like the “Million Dollar Mile” in San Francisco and Kensington in Philadelphia), and deliveries by car, arranged digitally, have become the norm in the suburbs. Since large quantities of fentanyl can also now be purchased directly from anonymous suppliers with crypto, there is even less expertise or discretion required to successfully operate as a drug dealer today than there was during the golden age of the corner. “I will toss $50 to $100 in there, whatever we agreed upon before. As soon as he sees the money, he tosses the drugs from his car to my car. I drive off. He can do 10 deals in less than two minutes. I mean, you can make $1,000 in business in two minutes or less,” explained a former heroin addict in St. Louis. If the Game in the 1990s was modeled on a fast-food drive-through, the Game in the 2020s is modeled on DoorDash — in fact, everything except the physical delivery has already been subsumed by Bitcoin and Telegram.
Under these conditions, “organized crime” is an oxymoron. Before being decapitated by a federal conspiracy case in 1997, the Gangster Disciples in Chicago operated “a musical promotion company, a political-action committee, and an interstate drug and gun distribution network. Today [2013], the Gangster Disciples are no longer single criminal enterprise but are represented through smaller, neighborhood factions that are largely leaderless and disconnected from one another.” A great deal of recent reporting reiterates this theme of decline. As a Times profile points out, even the ubiquitous classification of inner-city murders as “gang-related” has “become increasingly fuzzy, as the large, well-organized operations built around drug dealing have splintered, and are now little more than cliques or sets.” If, in 1992, the Cobras and Vice Lords could arrange a truce after the Chicago Housing Authority semi-seriously threatened to call the National Guard to the Cabrini-Green projects they fought over, a similar threat made in 2013 did not even so much as slow down a war between the Black P Stones and GDs.
Here is the fundamental illogic of American drug enforcement: prosecuting the wholesale suppliers, the cautious leadership, and the experienced middle management of large drug organizations, which is always politically helpful for Police Departments and District Attorney’s Offices (dependent as they are on such high-profile cases for funding, promotions, or re-election) without a complementary effort to reincorporate the inner city into the formal economy (which would, if attempted, also make it possible to rehabilitate many of the addicts that frequent it) other than through “redevelopment” means that the drug trade simply carries on without them, decomposing into an ever more unstructured and, consequently, ever more violent form. What this therefore suggests is that rising murder rates and declining homicide case clearance rates in several cities are not really the results of police underfunding, post-riot work slowdowns (“blue flu”), or even popular refusal to cooperate with investigators, as almost every party to these discussions claims in some form or another—they are, rather, the historical consequences of the success of the War on Drugs. Because it treats the drug trade as a criminal rather than as a social phenomenon and is as subject as any government program to political vicissitudes, the meaning of this “success” is foreshortened. Their success can only be our failure.
Police reform is likewise pointed in the wrong direction. In Camden, New Jersey, the much-praised system of community policing was only implemented after a dramatic expansion of urban surveillance. “One hundred and twenty-one cameras cover virtually every inch of sidewalk here, cameras that can spot a stash in a discarded pack of Newports from blocks away.” With so much information now gathered automatically, reintroducing beats becomes a way of parsing it: “human intelligence” gathered from conversations with residents is used to direct remote camera and microphone monitoring. The Chicago Police Department received criticism in 2015 for using their community policing program (publicly endorsed by Obama) to “effectively deputize a small group of residents to engage in surveillance. Police encourage attendees to organize block groups and form phone trees, all with the goal of reporting ‘strange’ license plates, ‘suspicious’ behavior, and descriptions of cars and people passing through the neighborhood.”
Community policing does not mean incorporating the police into the community; it means incorporating the community into the police. In 2018, Amazon filed a patent for a “database of suspicious persons” made up of suspected trespassers that homeowners identified on their property, and, today, over 2,000 Police Departments have partnerships with Amazon to automatically receive posts made on Neighbors, an app for Ring camera users. This serves to enable the more traditional practices of the police state, too, as was demonstrated when the NYPD used their facial recognition tools to find the Instagram account of a Black Lives Matter demonstration leader in 2020. “More than 50 officers surrounded his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, shutting down his street and urging him to voluntarily surrender, as NYPD helicopters hovered overhead.”
Most commentators treat the proposed social credit score in mainland China or the “smart governance” of American cities as future scenarios of integrated surveillance run rampant, but the fact of the matter is that the eyes and ears of such systems already exist and have existed for years. According to a German writer who worked for the Chinese e-commerce company Pindoudou, “schools, like factories and offices, now use all sorts of monitoring technology such as facial recognition, seat cushions with sensors, and the like, to automatically detect (and punish) ‘misbehavior’ such as daydreaming, resting on the table, or going to the bathroom a few seconds too long.” Pay is deducted based on these infractions at work. This is nothing unique to Eurasia, of course: Amazon uses handheld package scanners to monitor workers’ moment-to-moment activity in warehouses, down to tracking the length of bathroom breaks, and supervisors are required by the system to police any Time Off Task. “It incentivizes you to be a heartless son of a bitch,” as a former operations manager put it.
Cashiers, delivery drivers, call center employees, and the other anonymous figures of the “precariat” have long been subject to management-as-surveillance, but as a report in the New York Times (the paper of record for the professional-managerial class) describes, the techniques used to monitor them are becoming increasingly widespread as more and more work is stripped of skill or judgement and reduced to pure clerical tedium: “Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, ‘idle’ buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs… At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses.” During the pandemic, there was even, fittingly, a boom in the sale of “mouse movers” that simulated clicks and keystrokes.
If the professionals of the New Economy are now just as mistrusted (if not, of course, equally as exploited) as the stepped-on underclass of the service sector, what political meaning does work have today? The Greek communist collective Blaumachen identifies the phenomena described above as constituting “not the production of a quantitative increase of the lumpen proletariat, but that of an increased lumpenisation of the proletariat — a lumpenisation that does not appear as external in relation to waged labour but as its defining element.” In essence, they argue, the postindustrial proletariat is gradually collapsing into the surplus population, producing a vast but liquid “non-subject” that relates to work only as an endless differentiation of gigs, which are, given the humiliation that they entail, seen as something to be avoided wherever possible. Consequently, the sense of a historical mission that was so foundational to the construction of the classical workers’ movement is absent—the image of the proletariat at the end of history is reduced from that of the source of all wealth to that of a class of wage-hunter-gatherers, wandering the wreckage of the affluent society that it built.
Unable to unite behind a party or a program, their discontent does often erupt into spectacular, insurrectionary riots (as ultraleft journals never tire of pointing out), but also manifests in smaller forms. On Douyin, Chinese workers regularly encourage each other to “run off with the bucket,” a term for “packing up one’s belongings in a bucket (also used for washing clothes, etc.), leaving the factory dormitory, and looking for another job.” Similarly, young workers in America are already notorious for their propensity to resign, and social media allows trends like “quiet quitting” (in which over 50% of the American workforce is reportedly engaged) and “bare minimum Mondays” to spread widely. This is, moreover, only true of those who are part of the labor force to begin with, and tens of millions of would-be workers across the world are not. As Nicholas Eberstadt found, low unemployment figures disguise the fact that “the work rate for prime-age American males (defined between 25‒54 years of age) in 2015 was lower than during several years of the Great Depression and has been steadily falling for fifty years.” Japan has long had a vast sub-class of NEETs, deliberately underemployed “freeters,” and hikikomori, social casualties of the 1990s asset price bubble, but, today, even Chinese rural migrants, whose labor over the past four decades served as the motor of global accumulation, have “developed a reputation for whiling away their time playing online games or streaming TV, picking up day jobs only when they need money to pay their phone bill or rent.”6
Whereas the classical workers’ movement constituted itself around the rejection of capitalism and the affirmation of labor (principally in the form of soviets and workers’ councils, which, it was almost universally assumed, would continue tending the machines once the red flags flew), it might be said that the “non-subject” tends toward the rejection of labor and the affirmation of capitalism. Anti-work reflects a restlessness within the structure of the system, unwilling to submit but unable to grasp hold of anything else. Denied the release that the wildcat culture of the assembly line could provide for student romantics in 1968, the ethical, the sensitive, and the checked-out of our generation, those who rightly refuse both the dishonesties of a career and the ugliness of side-hustle self-promotion, those who, in short, would once have gone into the workers’ movement, are now left politically adrift, full of ideology but empty of strategy. Likewise, without the cheap rent that was a benefit of industrial density, there is no possibility for the reformation of the avant-garde that served as both the throat and the brain of the movement— fora of hobo-intellectuals were the locus of working-class cultural life in Chicago during the heyday of the IWW, and, even into the dour 1950s, as Jane Jacobs wrote, beat poets and Irish longshoremen would hold court through the night in Greenwich Village. If postmodern work appears as an endless differentiation of tasks, postmodern social life appears as an endless proliferation of subcultures.
“While the anonymous millions of Sanders supporters do appear to come from lower on the social scale,” Gabriel Winant recently observed, “the ideological cadre driving the Sanders movement features a huge proportion of activists who are credentialed meritocrats in their own right, or descended from them.” Addressing an audience of professionals, as he himself acknowledges, Winant concludes that mass socialist politics might be renewed through a united front of “downwardly mobile fragments of the PMC” and the “broader working class”— a worker-programmer alliance. He is keeping an old tradition in political sociology alive: Robert Michels famously identified the “socialist petty bourgeoisie” of tavern-keepers, tobacconists, and grocers in working-class neighborhoods as the agents of the “embourgeoisement” of German Social Democracy, and many today level that charge at the “professional-managerial class” of graduate students and teachers, but rather than misleading the true revolutionary class, the electoral left today faces the problem of leading no class at all. For decades, the French Socialist Party was headquartered in Solférino, a former palace on the Seine, perhaps a symbol of their long-delayed triumph over the ancien régime; in 2017, they sold the property and moved into a converted pharmaceutical factory in a gentrifying suburb of Paris.
What is the historical reason for this, though? Why are there so few workers’ movements of parties and programs right here, right now? As more and more living labor is dislodged from production, at the regional scale by offshoring and on a planetary scale by automation, what remains of the post-war social democratic superstructure is consequently dismantled, resisting everyday precarity, whether by battling evictions or occupying public land to demand housing (one in five people booked in Seattle jails in 2018 were homeless, for example), assumes precedence over securing more generous contracts, let alone preparing for the glorious day of the factory councils. Consequently, attempting to organize workers as workers today through the old forms of union-and-party spadework, built in Europe around tightly-knit proletarian neighborhoods and in America around modernist industrial concentrations like Detroit or Gary, Indiana (the model for Magnitogorsk in the Stalinist Soviet Union), is like trying to wage an insurgency by means of trench warfare. Chuang note that “the motorcycle delivery driver and the burned-out office worker are more representative of Chinese employment today than a migrant worker on an assembly line making shoes or electronics for export.” This sketch is only true of the coastal cities — deeper inland, the rural surplus population displaced by what local governments actually officially call the “primitive accumulation of capital” is absorbed by bleaker trades still:
Guiyu is the largest e-waste site in the world, with an estimated 150,000 workers processing more than one hundred truckloads each day. Locals have dubbed the wasteland where materials arrive — an expanse of more than fifty square kilometers — the “electronic graveyard.” In the surrounding villages, in thousands of improvised shacks, workers cook circuit boards on wood-fired skillets to loosen lead and tin soldering. They pry off microchips and drop them into sulfuric acid baths to extract gold and silver. They burn wiring for the copper inside.
Moreover, without the space of the shop floor to nurture them, the self-effacing worker-intellectuals that made up the everyday social vanguard of the movement no longer automatically emerge, and organizing instead becomes the domain of activists who are pure creatures of the grant-and-publicity game (what one brilliant writer called “the gentrification of the left”). Max Elbaum makes an insightful comment to this effect in his history of the New Communist Movement:
It was common for three, four or five activists to share a household and survive on the wages of one or two working full- or even part-time. It was also relatively inexpensive to conduct political campaigns, and sufficient funds could be raised via small contributions from the organizers themselves and their immediate social base. This stands in sharp contrast to the 1980s-1990s pattern of dependence on wealthy individuals or foundations for the money to staff progressive organizations.
If the disoriented Social Democrats of Europe have spent the past several decades responding to postindustrial immiseration with a program of managed decline, then the technocratic liberalism and much of the “socialism” born of the 2010s have essentially been dedicated to regearing the state for a program of self-managed decline: the nonprofits, churches, and other nodes of “community organization” that comprise the modern Democratic Party are also the first line of societal defense against riots. They find a natural political opponent in the lumpen-bourgeoisie that thrives on the legal, illegal, and semi-legal exploitation, rather than the sophisticated management, of the surplus population. This is what produced the especially diseased politics of Bolsonarismo in Brazil, for example: militias of former police officers (in a staggering reversal of the reputation they once enjoyed as protectors of the favela poor) “collected protection money and forced residents to pay them for services — illegal cable TV connections, taxes on transport cooperatives and a high percentage charge on car purchases and rentals. One study estimates that in the past thirty years, Rio militias have taken over half the territory once controlled by organized crime, with over 4 million inhabitants.”7 Their approximate American equivalents (other than, of course, cops), such titans of industry as payday lenders, car dealership owners, casino magnates, and private military contractors, provided the financial connective tissue of the Trump campaign. In sum, the organized left today represents those who aim to fleece the global abject with a handshake and a smile (like by exporting e-waste to West Africa in the form of charitable donations), while the right represents those who want to shake them down at gunpoint.
In coming decades, they may not be able to at all, however, because the surplus population is gradually being taught to exploit itself. The historical function of the gig economy, mystified by the California Ideology of homestead self-reliance, will be to cut the formational middlemen out of the capitalist mode of production entirely by recentering accumulation around patent rentiers a la Peter Thiel and a class of lumpen-consumers left, without long-term employment and even without consistent housing, to hunt for subsistence by any means necessary. Without the firm class-political identities generated by labor, moreover, political identities become a matter of words, not deeds, and are, as such, increasingly bought and sold in the attention economy of “influencing:” this is the world of livestreamed debates, bad podcasts, and e-commerce courses. To be a public intellectual in the twenty-first century means to support yourself through the same (non-)labor as those who sell nudes, stage travel photoshoots in their backyards, advertise vapes and vibrators under viral posts, and produce clips from nonexistent podcasts. A recent article in The Atlantic summed it up:
This new style of lo-fi influencer shifted the center of gravity of youth culture and began, for a small core of highly visible examples, to generate substantial financial rewards. “Every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a living,” the artist and writer Jenny Odell explained in a 2017 speech that, appropriately enough, went viral and which eventually turned into a book.
There is, I think, a growing discomfort with the fact that, when any amount of attention can be parlayed instantly into payment, anything and everything is a potential piece of content. “In one ongoing example TikTok users hear people talking in public — they eavesdrop — about friends behind their back and then make a TikTok video about what they heard. These sometimes include personal information that make identifying the parties involved possible.”8 The exemplary videos of short ambush interviews with passersby, in which interviewers try to get a reaction by asking blatantly invasive questions, perhaps belong to a similar genre. Contrary to David Graeber’s entertaining assertion that “communism is the basis of all human sociality,” then, the desire to avoid what he termed “bullshit jobs” by foraging constantly for content has instead served to accelerate the erosion of the boundary between work and everyday social life itself.
History has remorselessly demonstrated that capital could weather the separation of producers from their means of production, which was the motor of the workers’ movement over the long arc of formal subsumption. Today, the question is not whether capital or the proletariat will erect the new society, a contest already decided in favor of capital, but whether or not the surplus humanity that this society generates will accept the exclusion inherent to their very existence. Agamben captured a common frame of mind in contemporary radicalism when he wrote that the real objective of protest movements ostensibly aimed against “corruption” is to “form a community without affirming an identity,” one in which “humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition).” In much the same intellectual vein, though clearly identifying a community (or, as Marx and Engels called it, a Gemeinwesen) with a post-capitalist mode of “nonproduction,” Théorie Communiste posits that “gratuity, the radical non-accounting of whatever, is the axis of the revolutionary community that is building up.” What the strike was to industrial capitalism, then, whatever social form combines the riot, the blockade, and the occupation will be to postindustrial capitalism. History no longer stands at the old crossroads of socialism or barbarism. History will either end in communism or hedonism — the mutual seclusion of the contending classes in the Virtual Plaza.
- https://wvpublic.org/what-happened-to-weirton-part-3-as-goes-the-mill/
- Wilson WJ. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1996.
- Farber D. Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. Cambridge University Press; 2019.
- Simon, D., & Burns, E. J. (1997). The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA35331438
- Montgomery, David 1987. Thinking about American Workers in the 1920s. International Labor and Working-Class History, Vol. 32, Issue. , p. 4.
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-12-07/why-people-are-quitting-jobs-and-protesting-work-life-from-the-u-s-to-china
- André Singer, Lula’s Return, NLR 139, January–February 2023 (newleftreview.org)
- https://archive.ph/Lm54n