Loïc Wacquant – Subclasses without combat

Large class movements have repeatedly been sparked by police violence in recent decades. In France, the riots that regularly occur after the murder of young people by the police are the most important form of protest in the urban banlieues. And the “Black Lives Matter” movement brought around 20 million people onto the streets in the USA in 2020. Very quickly it was no longer just about police arbitrariness, but also about the mass incarceration of the poor and racist repression in general.

These struggles have long since found theoretical expression. “Surveillance and Punishment”, probably the most famous book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, would be the case without it Attica prison riot in 1971in which the US government had 39 prisoners shot, was not written in this form. The connection is even clearer in the case of abolitionism. For black theorists like George Jackson or, more recently, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, overcoming the “prison state” (prison state) in the tradition of the fight against plantation capitalism. From the perspective of abolitionists, police violence and mass incarceration – similar to slavery in the past – are not “wrongful developments” but rather an indispensable feature of liberal societies. In their view, restricting the freedoms of the poor is an instrument for maintaining order and inequality between classes.

»Punishing the poor«

This context must be kept in mind if one wants to meaningfully discuss Loïc Wacquant’s work. The French sociologist, born in 1960, who studied in Chicago and worked closely with Pierre Bourdieu, was influenced early on by the US debates about prisons, police violence, racism and inequality and has primarily pursued two lines of research since the 1990s: On the one hand He deals ethnographically with the life of non-white proletarian neighborhoods in France and the USA, which also resulted in books about boxing. On the other hand, Wacquant has distinguished himself as a theorist of the punitive state and has repeatedly pointed out the connection between neoliberalism and the explosive increase in the prison population. Almost everywhere in the Western world, prisons have filled up at the same pace as working conditions have become more precarious. While in 1970 there were 161 prison inmates for every 100,000 citizens in the USA, 40 years later there were almost five times as many.

For Wacquant, this increase is not explained by the increase in crime, but by the state’s need to stabilize social conditions that are becoming precarious. The French sociologist is far from the only author to observe this connection. The British Marxist Stuart Hall, for example, drew a drawing in 1978 »Policing the Crisis« how security discourses create a climate of “moral panic” in which growing social instability can be countered with police methods. And the aforementioned US geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote “Golden Gulag” in the late 1990s, a political economy of the US prison system in which she examined the connection between surplus population and the prison boom.

Wacquant’s book “Punishing the Poor”, which was published in its original French version in 2004, can certainly be considered a milestone in this theoretical context. With a perspective trained on Durkheim, Foucault and Bourdieu, he traces how the neoliberal offensive, for which Democratic President Bill Clinton was also responsible, simultaneously dismantled and rebuilt the welfare state. Wacquant shows that stricter punishments caused the prison population to grow, and then deals with the two most important target groups of the wave of criminalization: the black proletariat of the urban slums and the sex offenders.

Dealing with racism was therefore part of Wacquant’s project from the beginning. Since the 1990s, he has repeatedly pointed out how much the neoliberal poverty and punishment regime, including in Europe, is ethnically differentiated. In his most recent book (“Jim Crow. Le terrorisme de caste en Amérique”, 2024) he describes the racist tyranny that was established after slavery was abolished in the USA in 1865 and which continues to shape living conditions, especially in the south of the USA, to this day. Wacquant comes to the conclusion that “neither in South Africa until the end of apartheid in 1991 nor in Nazi Germany from the first anti-Jewish laws in 1933 to the start of the war in 1939 (…) was a peacetime caste regime based on physical coercion and murderous brutality to such an extent as that Jim Crow regime in the southern states of the USA.

The punitive state

In his Adorno Lectures, which the sociologist who teaches in California gave last week at the invitation of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Wacquant once again tried to develop an overall perspective on the punitive state. He is concerned with the question of how the neoliberal state “with its expanded penal apparatus influences the formation and fate of the ‘precariat’ – that is, the precarious parts of the post-industrial proletariat who are trapped in the left-behind districts of the dualizing metropolises and the main target of the punitive represent the state”.

In the lectures, which spanned three evenings, Wacquant first traced different theoretical derivations of the penal system. He paid particular attention to Bourdieu’s image of the “two hands of the punishing state”. The left is the protective side of the Leviathan, the right is the disciplinary one. According to Wacquant, the punishing state therefore has a Janus head and provides two different “services”.

Wacquant does not simply distance himself from the political conclusions of abolitionism, but actually ignores them.

In the second block, in which he continued his early research, Wacquant presented the increased importance and racist differentiation of the prison system under neoliberalism. What was particularly interesting about this part was that comparative empirical material was once again used, which made it clear how The trend towards mass criminalization has now also spread to European countries.

Finally, Wacquant devoted the third lecture to a current ethnographic field study among prosecutors in the USA. According to Wacquant, he was able to accompany the Californian judicial system for over three years and record more than 100 hours of negotiations between the public prosecutor and lawyers. From this, the sociologist developed an internal perspective of the punitive state, so to speak, turning the perspective of his early research – on the side of racially marginalized people – on its head.

At the end of the series of lectures, Wacquant explained that he wanted to forego advice on reforming the judicial system, but then made a – surprisingly traditionalist – proposal for combating crime: “If the state allows the spread of precarity and urban decay, it nourishes social, moral and symbolic disorder, to which he then responds by using his punitive apparatus to contain local problems. But punishing disruptive poverty only worsens misery and disorder (…) thereby setting the causal sequence in motion again.« Wacquant’s political conclusion amounted, one might say, to a brief plea for the welfare state.

Debates about Wacquant

There have been two main debates about Wacquant’s work in recent years, which flared up briefly in Frankfurt following the lectures. The first has to do with a devastating criticism that Wacquant formulated a year ago of the term “racial capitalism.” With the concept of “racializing capitalism,” a (quite plural) stream of materialist racism research draws attention to the inextricable intertwining of modern capitalism and violent appropriation by racist regimes. Wacquant rejects the term “racial capitalism” because, in his opinion, it directs the focus away from capitalism, which, according to him, can also exist in a non-racist manner.

nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter nd.DailyWords look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.

The second debate runs somewhat parallel to this and has to do with Wacquant’s perspective on poverty, racism and the prison system. These are precisely the questions that concern abolitionism, which has noticeably gained in importance as a political-theoretical movement in recent years and seeks not only to analyze the “carceral state” but also to overcome it. Wacquant not only distances himself from the political conclusions of this approach, which also questions the left’s ideas about the state, but actually ignores it. In both debates, Wacquant gives rise to the impression that, although he deals intensively with underclasses and racism, he makes central political subjects in this field invisible or presents their positions in a simplified manner.

One can probably debate for some time whether Wacquant’s new interest in an ethnography of prosecutors is related to the relative absence of social struggles in his work. What is certain, however, is that the French sociologist should not be canonized as “the” representative of the criticism of repression and prison in neoliberalism. In order to adequately appreciate Wacquant’s contribution, one would have to engage in parallel with those approaches to materialist and abolitionist criticism of racism that (unlike black liberalism) have still not really arrived in German discourse and scholarship. Perhaps the Institute for Social Research will dare to take the debate one step further in this direction.

We-don’t-give-each-other anything

Our Christmas campaign not only brings the joy of reading, but also warmth and festivity into the house. With a three-month trial subscription you get a pair of left socks from Socks with attitude and a bottle of sparkling wine Social Sector – perfect for a relaxed winter time. A gift that informs, warms and supports the dropout program EXIT Germany supports. Order a we-don’t-give-each-other gift now.