The intertwining of racial- and labor-formation also shaped class conflict in ways that facilitated the pacification and administrative subsumption of social struggle. Instead of creating a classless utopia or, even, a robust welfare state, the racialized incorporation of the working class produced a split system, a herrenvolk-welfare state. As the United States became an industrial power after the Civil War, it naturally gave rise to waves of labor militancy: an initial upsurge of mostly railroad workers in the late nineteenth century, a second swell of miners and factory workers in the early twentieth century, and the seeming triumph of industrial unionism with the Congress of Industrial Unions in the 1930s, which provided necessary bottom-up pressure to push the New Deal in an increasingly pro-labor direction. At the same time, these waves of working-class militancy were undermined by racism. White workers organized for better wages and working conditions, while also excluding racial monitories from the benefits of the unionized workplace and the welfare state.56
Racism mediated the class struggles that produced the New Deal, creating a herrenvolk-welfare state. As the black revolutionary autoworker James Boggs explained, the color line was a “horizontal platform, resting on the backs of blacks and holding them down, while on top white workers have been free to move up the social economic ladder of advancing capitalism.”57 Racism undermined the bargaining power of unions, depressed the wages of white and black workers alike, and increased the amounts of surplus value that became capital. These politics limited the New Deal, creating a welfare state that never matched its European counterparts. While measures like recognition of unions, Social Security, unemployment compensation, the minimum wage, and the GI Bill created a white middle class, these policies were implemented in a discriminatory manner. The wealth gap between blacks and whites widened, despite the wartime economic boom that finally ended the Great Depression and decades of prosperity that followed.58
While the racialized incorporation of the working class created a weak welfare state, the interaction of herrenvolk democracy and industrial capitalism also produced a unique situation where seemingly contradictory systems of punishment coexisted.59 As the United States became a significant economic and political power, it also became an increasingly important cultural and intellectual center. The Northeast, for example, became the crucible of modernist penology: the Auburn (1816), Philadelphia (1829), and Elmira (1876) penitentiaries punctuated two waves of prison reforms that sought to discipline, rehabilitate, and reintegrate “criminals” into an expanding industrial economy.60 In the South, in contrast, the convict leasing system was a form of “levying violence” that led “back toward slavery.”61 These different systems coexisted and helped to distribute and manage social surpluses. Not only did this split system maintain the racial divisions within the working class and allow capital to exploit the particularly vulnerable class of workers, it also channeled political energies. Racial fear and conflict muddled class antagonisms. While racism was an important state strategy to pacify and administer class struggle, white workers also enforced racism from below, continually renewing these arrangements.
The racially devalued segments of the working class also formed a disposable class of labor that helped sustain capital accumulation at a higher rate. These dynamics, Boggs realized, counteracted “the fundamental contradiction between constantly advancing technology and the needs to maintain the value of existing plants . . . by collectively and often forcibly restricting blacks to technologically less advanced industries or to what is known as ‘common labor.’” As whiteness channeled both the productive violence of pacification and the politics of organized labor, it produced unique political arrangements and subjectivities. Instead of a strong welfare state and a self-conscious, politicized working class, the United States became “a unique Land of Opportunity in which whites climb up the social economic ladder on the backs of blacks,” and “the American people have become the most materialistic, the most opportunistic, the most individualistic—in sum, the most politically and socially irresponsible people in the world.”62
This split system and the subjectivities that it engendered provide the necessary historical and theoretical perspective to approach the incomparable incarceration rates and levels of police violence that exist in the United States today. Rather than focusing just on class struggle or racial conflict, examining the systemic interconnections among labor-formation, racial-formation, pacification, and state-formation reveal how seemingly natural groups and institutions—“elites,” “workers,” “Americans,” “black folks,” “the police,” “the prison” or “the state”—are formed and reformed through social struggle. The resolution of these conflicts and their institutional condensation produce the specificity of a given state-form. Hence, the history of imprisonment, policing, and pacification in the United States had diverged from the European experience long before the differences in incarceration rates made this reality plain. Indeed, the split systems of punishment—celebrated institutions of modernist penology in the North and convict leasing in the South—are the outcomes of, on the one hand, the particular ways the US working class has been pacified through racialization and, on the other hand, the strategic failure of the US working class form as a collective subject to meaningfully confront capital and effectively seize power in key crises such as Reconstruction or the upsurge in labor militancy that followed World War I. Instead, the US working class, disarticulated and divided by racial strife, became a junior partner to capital: a labor aristocracy committed to preservation of their privileged position and not a revolutionary force out to remake the world. This history was the immediate context informing the emergence of the workfare-carceral state.
THE WORKFARE-CARCERAL STATE
By the mid-twentieth century, the herrenvolk-welfare state began to disintegrate under the combined pressure of revolt from below and world-scale changes in the organization of capital accumulation. The civil rights and Black Power movements politicized the color line, contested the criminalization of black and brown Americans, and tried to renew and restore the humanity of all the peoples of the United States. These movements joined a growing struggle against the Vietnam War to produce generalized revolt. The once staid labor movement radicalized. Wild cat strikes proliferated. Cities rebelled and “rioted.” Some even took up arms. At moments, it must have felt like a genuine revolutionary situation: a collapse of state authority. Indeed, elsewhere in world—even in places in the advanced capitalist West such as France and in the Socialist Bloc, as in Czechoslovakia—there were no doubts about the scope of the struggle.63 To pacify this mounting rebellion within the United States, the Johnson Administration’s Great Society reforms tried to move beyond New Deal. Instead of a singular focus on economic security, the Great Society brought attention to civil rights, housing, education, and health care. With this broader focus, the Great Society took on systemic racism more directly than any government policy since Radical Reconstruction.64
This effort to complete the New Deal, however, came at the moment when the broader political economic arrangements that underpinned welfare states were exhausted. The largest productive expansion in the history of the capitalist world-economy, the post–World War II boom, was petering out. Technological development and increased competition reduced the rate of profit. The compact between labor and capital that had moderated class conflict, managed the boom and busts of business cycles, and formed the core of the welfare state now hindered accumulation. Unemployment and inflation surged, creating the “stagflation” that mired the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Keynesian measures used to manage the world-economy since the 1930s proved inadequate in the face of a new development: the largest financial expansion in the history of the capitalist world-economy. The Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates collapsed in 1971, and exchange rates were allowed to float. States deregulated financial, capital,