Policing the industrial reserve army: An international study

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the industrialized world has witnessed four resilient social trends: (1) the consistent erosion of union-membership; (2) an increase in income polarization and inequality; (3) a dramatic resurgence in popular protest; and (4) a steady rise in public and private policing employment. In this paper, we examine the relationship between these trends by theorizing and operationalizing the notion of the "industrial reserve army" and a series of related tenets in order to conduct an international (N=45), empirical test of a nascent Marxian model of policing. By treating total policing employment as an empirical barometer of bourgeois insecurity we find that this insecurity is conditioned by two elements of Marxian political economy: (1) relative deprivation (income inequality) and (2) the rise of an industrial reserve army (manufacturing employment and unemployment). Second, while surplus value and labour militancy (strikes and lockouts per 100,000 population) rise along with union membership, the presence of higher rates of unionization appears to ameliorate the need for more policing in all but post-USSR countries. While unions assist in checking the immiseration of workers through labour actions, union membership is nonetheless inversely correlated to policing employment, giving credence to the Marxian idea that while unions help mitigate against the exploitation workers, they also act as "lieutenants of capital," performing an essential policing function under capitalism.Trade-unions have always been the most effective representatives of the organized labour movement to protect workers from the erosion of their wages and to control changes made in working conditions and hours worked. For Marxist political economists, the function of trade-unions was never limited to the immediate Crime Law Soc Change (2011) 56:329-371

The Pacification of the American Working Class: A Time Series Analysis

“…3 While the variables used in this study equate to those in our previously published international study (Rigakos and Ergul, 2011), the sources have changed, as has the construction of one key indicator: the industrial reserve army. Our decision to employ a longitudinal analysis in this article has led us to replace our manufacturing unemployment variable with a new "cumulative deindustrialization" measure.…”

“…We have operationalized these tenets in a hypotheticodeductive manner for the purpose of statistical testing. We must admit, however, that in setting up these hypotheses we have been significantly aided by our previous international research (Rigakos and Ergul, 2011) that investigated identical relationships across 45 countries for the comparative "snapshot" year 2004. In that study we sought to develop a "nascent theory" with the "exploratory" aim of producing an empiricallygrounded Marxian political economy of policing.…”

“…In fact, during the economic bubble of the late 1990s and just ahead of the Great Recession, U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan argued that "growing worker insecurity" played a pivotal role in workers' having stopped asking for wage increases which was by extension beneficial for US capital . Of course, this insecurity took place during a period that witnessed a massive rise in corporate profits, a decline in real income (Wolff, 2011) and consistent increases in public and private policing (Rigakos and Ergul, 2011).…”

“…In this paper, we build upon our previous international research (Rigakos and Ergul, 2011) that investigated the relationships between four resilient and seemingly unrelated trends: (1) the consistent erosion of union-membership; (2) an increase in income polarization and inequality; (3) a dramatic resurgence in popular protest; and (4) a steady rise in public and private policing employment. We analyze the relationship between these variables in the context of a theory of pacification which argues that the role of "policing", broadly defined, has both historically and contemporaneously been designed to "make workers productive" (Rigakos, 2011) by "fabricating a social order" (Neocleous, 2000) that seeks to protect private property relations in support of bourgeois interests.…”

Socialist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2 (Full Issue)

“…In this paper, we build upon our previous international research (Rigakos and Ergul, 2011) that investigated the relationships between four resilient and seemingly unrelated trends: (1) the consistent erosion of union-membership; (2) an increase in income polarization and inequality; (3) a dramatic resurgence in popular protest; and (4) a steady rise in public and private policing employment. We analyze the relationship between these variables in the context of a theory of pacification which argues that the role of "policing", broadly defined, has both historically and contemporaneously been designed to "make workers productive" by "fabricating a social order" that seeks to protect private property relations in support of bourgeois interests.…”