Corrupt Capital

Alcohol, Nightlife, and Crimes of the Powerful

Kenneth Sebastian León

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367185817
• eBook ISBN: 9780429589379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book offers a deep dive into the social, political, and economic forces that make white-collar crime and corruption a staple feature of the nightlife economy. The author, a former bouncer-turned-bartender of party bars and nightclubs in a large U.S. city, draws from an auto-ethnographic case study to describe and explain the routine and embedded nature of corruption and deviance among the regulators and the regulated in the nightlife environment.

This text offers a contemporary and incisive theoretical framework on the criminogenic features and structural contradictions of capitalism. The author both describes and explains how the dominant political economy is rife with structural contradictions that, in turn, generate various manifestations of white-collar crime, organizational deviance, and public corruption. The author uses the bar and nightlife environment to empirically anchor these claims. Methodologically, the research is innovative in advancing inquiry into ethically and logistically challenging environments. The style of writing and framing of the text is one that punches upward and avoids the voyeuristic and reductionist tropes historically associated with "dangerous fieldwork."

Through a range of disciplinary perspectives, Corrupt Capital offers both scholarly rigor and inviting prose to advance our understanding of crimes of the relatively powerful and powerless alike. An accessible and compelling text, this book will appeal to readers in criminology, sociology, law and society, political science, and all those interested in learning about the relationship between power, law, and routinized corruption in the nightlife economy.

1
Alcohol, nightlife, and crimes of the powerful

Academics, in particular, like to use words like neoliberalism, carcerality, ideological hegemony, racial capitalism, necropolitics, or the racial capitalist patriarchy to describe complex relationships, processes, dynamics, and configurations of power. Sometimes we use these words without defining them,¹ or we use them expecting their meaning to be clear to the reader. These words refer to complex, historical, and evolving systems and processes. They also signal the political location of the writer. Because I use similar words to capture a series of complex processes, this chapter first beings with outlining my approach to defining key terms and concepts that occur throughout the text.

Socio-legal contradictions, at the core

The United States is founded on a social contract philosophy organized around protecting life, liberty, and property. In a country that struggles to openly discuss class,² the very preoccupation with tyranny of the majority must be reconceptualized. This phrase is often portrayed in class-neutral terms as a safeguard against the possibility that, say, the Anti-Federalists, or some majority party that constitute 51% or more of the populace, would trample the rights of the remaining 49% or fewer, who happen to be Federalists or some minority party. Such a phrase, though, is not really about whether one party over-dominates the other in a two-party system. The Founders and Framers, like the Greeks and the Romans, were fundamentally preoccupied with an age-old dilemma: How can a political system retain both stability and legitimacy when the dispossessed many could one day mobilize against the propertied few? As Johnson (1995:644) writes,

One aim of the framers was to create a representative form of government that ensured against the democratic excesses resulting from the passion and self-interest that so troubled Madison. As the concern with “self-interest” suggests, the primary concern of the framers may have been with the tyranny of the majority over the property rights of the minority. With the experience of government under the Articles of Confederation, including the famous debtors’ uprising known as Shay’s Rebellion, fresh in mind, the Federalists feared that, unless checks were put in place, the debtor majority might trample the rights of the creditor minority in the political process, as well as in the courts.³

(emphasis mine)

James Madison emphasized what he perceived to be fundamental flaws in true democracies, which he characterized as “spectacles of turbulence and contention” that “have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and [that] have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths” (Federalism No. 63, at 425). To some, it might seem obvious that the “creditor minority” might represent the bourgeoise and the “debtor majority” the proletariat, although this analogy is imperfect and comes with its share of liabilities. In this dichotomy between the non-working rich (bourgeoise) and the laboring poor (proletariat), the functional role of the middle class is to serve as a buffer between these structurally opposed groups. The working poor–via upward mobility–could gain access to a middle-class identity, and are indoctrinated to support the prevailing belief systems that legitimize the institutions created for the primary benefit of the bourgeoise. The middle class is a functional buffer between these two groups and gives legitimacy to a political economy that extracts from the many to support the capital accumulation of the few.

These relationships are not abstract but cemented into the very Constitutional fabric of the United States. To account for this probabilistic outcome, the Framers and Founders intended for the U.S. Senate to be comprised of wealthy landowners that were purposively chosen by state legislatures. The Framers and Founders settled on the language found in Article 1, Section 3, concerning the selection of Senators. It would take the 17th Amendment to free the U.S. Senate from the insulation that the Founders and Framers did not need to justify or debate in any meaningful way. It would have been unnecessary to specify–and unsurprising to the social order of the time–that both eligible and actual Senators would be white, male, and land-owning, and be vetted by the elite networks of the various state legislatures.⁴ In no uncertain terms, the 17th Amendment has been criticized by the Republican Party in recent years under the rhetorical cloud of state’s rights and curbing federal power despite recognizing how corrupt Senate elections were prior to the 17th Amendment’s existence.⁵ In short, repealing the 17th Amendment would further curtail “excesses of democracy” and provide a protective institutional barrier for curbing the masses.

Of course, these power dynamics are neither deterministic nor absolute. They produce outcomes that are probabilistic. Laws and political systems appear stable and fixed until they are not, and there have been incremental and structural reforms at various historical points. Exceptions to the rule (or structural trend), however, do not negate the existence of the structural trends. My starting point is that this country’s socio-legal infrastructure is aligned with the logics of capital accumulation, and therefore subject to the same contradictions of capital that have been studied by everyone from Karl Marx to David Harvey to Patricia Hill Collins to Boots Riley to Aviva Chomsky.⁶

Prior to the Declaration of Independence or the viability of a constitutional convention, the 13 colonies themselves were, functionally speaking, corporate forms.⁷ With the U.S. Constitution being so central for actual U.S. governance and symbolic, socially constructed American identity, it is important to audit the kind of power structure that it legitimizes. I share these examples because they communicate what the state is fundamentally about. If we understand that state-corporate power is central to the very Constitution of this country, and that ours is a system of attempting to legitimize, through appearances, structurally contradictory objectives (foremost being the equality of people versus the fundamentally unequal requirements of capital), then we can abandon any pretense about the state being some neutral arbiter for competing claims. State power and corporate power are and have always been intimate bedfellows. With this overarching view in mind, I now turn to what it means to study the state in criminological terms.

Operationalizing the state for criminological analysis

The carceral state⁸ and the racial capitalist patriarchy–or any other terms used to reference configurations of power⁹–are not monolithic entities that do things. The law does not, as Donald Black’s well-known thesis suggests, behave,¹⁰ and society does not expect or demand anything of anyone. The U.S., or “the West,” or the 1%, do not wake up in the morning, brush their teeth, and impose a coherent 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year agenda on others. It is specific people, both as individuals and as organizational representatives, that do things. Human beings are the ones who make both conscious and unconscious decisions that influence what dominant groups will seek to recognize as “history.” The patterns of their actions are what we label, diagnose, and study, and subsequently organize into words or labels like “McDonaldization,” or “gender-based violence,” or “institutional racism.” In short, any coherent source of power, like the carceral state, white supremacy, patriarchy, or settler colonial violence, are references to the collective actions and reactions of individuals and groups, who are participating in various forms of conflict and cooperation to advance their respective interests. The study of systems, then, is the study of how the corresponding interests in such systems are influential in what people do and why they do it.

Whether it’s a study on border militarization, or of European colonialism, or American chattel slavery, or contemporary capitalism, none of these systems refer to static epochs of societal organization in which humans are reduced to automatons, merely carrying out the logics of their position(s) (e.g., we are not reducible to whether we own the means of production). Such systems also have intra- and inter-group dissidents and supporters. Street-level bureaucrats, educators, farmers, political sycophants, and political dissidents existed in every one of these contexts and their individual agency actively contributed to the contested evolution of such systems. Subjugated groups did not merely internalize or adopt the logics that others sought to impose, but repurposed and reconfigured them for their own use.¹¹ A structural analysis is therefore one that accounts for the contingent and contested nature of powerful systems, and how everyday people make sense of their own self-interests in relation to structural forces. How events play out are ultimately about what people decide to do, but human decisions are generally patterned in ways that we can understand in explanatory terms.

But it remains insufficient to attribute all kinds of harms or negative outcomes to “the state.” The state, like the business class, is not a monolithic entity that thinks, acts, or responds to anything in any coherent or consistent way. Intra-group divisions do not negate the existence of that overarching group, and their collective role in a class society.¹² Group divisions exist within elite private and public capital because “their distinct location in the economy creates requirements that are manifest as political interests that are incompatible with the interests of other capitalist class factions.”¹³

Due to this intra-group competition, political capital generally retains leverage over economic capital, as it retains the discretionary authority to prioritize one industry or set of actors of others (e.g., prioritizing coal versus solar tax subsidies and incentives, prioritizing rail transportation or bicycle infrastructure, whatever). The state retains power over any individual corporation within the ecosystem of industries, but can buckle to the demands of an organized collective of businesses.¹⁴ Organized private enterprises can take the form of chambers of commerce industry trade groups, where they might leverage their collective private capital against existing political leaders by supporting challenging candidates, or make campaign finance contributions contingent on the adoption of a favorable policy agenda. The business of government is business, but business is a contested arena. The ruling ideas are those of the ruling class, but this “class” also has competing visions for how to materially organize our social world. In short, it should not be surprising that there “is no close personal friendship between the top executives of the major distilling corporations … their relations vary somewhere between friendly rivalry and intense personal antagonism.”¹⁵

Nightlife economies

Some might wonder why I use the term nightlife economy instead of nightlife industry, or just nightlife. After all, we–as in people who have worked in nightlife–use terms like “industry night” and ask questions like, “Are you in the industry?” to negotiate insider/outsider status. As a stylistic decision, I view economy as a broader and thus more inclusive word compared to industry. It also lends itself to the presumption of inherent stratification and conflict among various regulatory and commercial actors, whereas industry might conjure an idea of some relatively homogenous group of private sector actors.¹⁶ Nightlife economy also implicates the modes of governance that, in turn, can be understood not only as the formal on-the-books regulatory structures, but also “the outcome of subtle organizational and interpersonal power-plays.”¹⁷ From this system-level orientation, one can better engage with how “interorganizational network[s] may be conceived as a political economy concerned with the distribution of two scarce resources, money and authority.”¹⁸ The nightlife economy therefore refers to the individuals, groups, and both formal and informal structures that surround the consumption of alcohol in commercial settings. My empirical focus is on bars and nightclubs, and I study them with an emphasis on how political economic structures influence how patrons and employees experience bars and nightclubs, both as places of ritualistic socialization and alcohol consumption, but also as occupational settings and subcultures.

Political economies and structural analyses

The components of a social structure can only be understood as they relate to one another.¹⁹ To fully understand crime, criminality, and criminalization, we must appreciate their relationship to broader features in our political economy. Defining political economy varies by context and application.²⁰ I use the term to reference the social interactions between politics and economics, or how individuals and groups of people organize themselves around material interests...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Disclaimer
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Alcohol, nightlife, and crimes of the powerful
• 2 Science, politics, and imperial criminology
• 3 White-collar crime and corruption: back to basics
• 4 Getting behind the bar … and staying there – on studying the nightlife economy
• 5 Metropolis East money games
• 6 Corrupt capital
• Epilogue
• Index