Shutting Down the Streets

Political Violence and Social Control in the Global Era

Luis A. Fernandez, Amory Starr, Christian Scholl

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814708736
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Derecho penal

Recently, a wall was built in eastern Germany. Made of steel and cement blocks, topped with razor barbed wire, and reinforced with video monitors and movement sensors, this wall was not put up to protect a prison or a military base, but rather to guard a three-day meeting of the finance ministers of the Group of Eight (G8). The wall manifested a level of security that is increasingly commonplace at meetings regarding the global economy. The authors of Shutting Down the Streets have directly observed and participated in more than 20 mass actions against global in North America and Europe, beginning with the watershed 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle and including the 2007 G8 protests in Heiligendamm. Shutting Down the Streets is the first book to conceptualize the social control of dissent in the era of alterglobalization. Based on direct observation of more than 20 global summits, the book demonstrates that social control is not only global, but also preemptive, and that it relegates dissent to the realm of criminality. The charge is insurrection, but the accused have no weapons. The authors document in detail how social control forecloses the spaces through which social movements nurture the development of dissent and effect disruptive challenges.

1

What Is Going On?

We began writing this book as a wall was built in East Germany. Two and a half meters high, it was composed of metal fencing with concrete foundations and was designed to cradle a curlicue of razor and barbed wire. Each bolt and hinge of the wall was soldered in place. It looked like a fence around a prison or a military base, and, indeed, it sported motion detectors and video cameras. But this fence wound its twelve kilometers, at €1 million per kilometer, through forest surrounding a small seaport town. It protected the three-day meeting of the Group of Eight (G8), expected to issue its annual proclamations about intentions to “Make Poverty History,” except in Africa, or to stop global warming. The fence (a “technical barrier”) was employed to keep out terrorists and, coincidentally, those who had expressed their desire to participate in the meeting, point out its hypocrisy, or draw attention to the failures of similar economic strategies in their home countries, whether in Europe, Africa, or other regions of the postcolonial Global South. It was guarded by no fewer than eighteen thousand police, as well as contingents from the German military.

The fence imposed an exclusionary geography—castle, moat, hinterlands—on a purportedly democratic nation and landscape. This security was funded mostly by provincial taxes paid by German citizens, whose willingness for such public expenditure was, in turn, purchased with a currency the sociologist Barry Glassner has called “the culture of fear.” Terrorists are over there, over here, around the corner. Immigrants are invading occupations and culture. The youth are increasingly and irrationally violent. The anxiety evoked by these probabilities somehow overwhelms the quieter world in which our jobs (or hopes of them) become increasingly “precarious.”¹ Media images and public policy bring violent persons into sharp focus and offer grand, comforting solutions, while the glacial melt of our economies is portrayed as natural or at least inevitable, and surviving is left to our own cleverness.

This is the era of what we call “alterglobalization”—the multilingual term that refers to the diverse yet synchronous solidarity movements that not only oppose globalization in its current form but also propose alternatives, or alter globalizations, to it. Alterglobalization is yet another phase of the centuries-long struggle between imperial powers and their targets. In this era, much is old, and little is new. As during colonialism, global elites use military force, political institutions, culture and ideology, rearrangements of the social order, and economic trickery to grasp the resources, labor, and markets of the parts of the world with natural wealth and the productive parts of their home countries—the farms, the small shops, and, lately, the creativity of their digitized teenagers. As throughout the era of colonialism, the apparent damages and dehumanizations delivered by this process are justified, even celebrated, as long-term improvements in the lives of the victims. As with colonialism, resistance takes every possible form and then some.

But today the world is supposed to be a democratic one, with human rights. And the vast majority of people expect it to be so. Now colonial processes take place in a global social fabric in which the invisible ink connecting the points of violence, theft, and destruction is painstakingly revealed by a resilient network of scholars and activists. Under the fierce protection of a web of geeks and expert communities, widespread access to new communication technologies enables instant circulation of reports of suffering and struggle, often with pictures and video. Critical interpretation of events gets faster, and political parties are cast aside in favor of direct solidarity among movements and peoples of every social position. In other words, it is getting harder to hide massacres.

This book is about the social control of dissent in the contemporary era. Global, preemptive, and violent social control demarcates dissent as criminal. The charge is insurrection. The accused have no weapons. We must conclude that protesters are not the ones who are “out of order.” Democracies are not supposed to criminalize dissent.

A number of scholars have studied the policing of protest and the interactions between police and protesters, defining models of interaction, and showing how they are changing historically. Our concerns are quite different. First, we see policing as just one tactic of a system of social control far more subtle, indirect, and significant than civil management of protest. Second, we do not limit our definition of dissent to protesters. We are concerned with a much larger group—those people who would dissent. And we shift the unit of analysis from individual (would-be) dissenters to the social movements that give life, sustenance, and strategy to dissent.

Because we are making a drastic and significant shift from the familiar territory of the policing of protest to the social control of dissent, the remainder of this introductory chapter provides a review of social control and dissent as they have been conceptualized and studied previously and outlines the conceptual and methodological bases of our study.

Understanding Social Control

There are two conceptions of social control. The first, running from Thomas Hobbes through George Herbert Mead to today’s criminal justice literature, conceptualizes social control as a set of mechanisms intended to protect the health of society by enforcing (even eliciting) normative social behavior. The second, running from Karl Marx through Noam Chomsky, sees social control as a tool of class struggle, in which mechanisms ranging from the state’s use of force to ideological reproduction are used to protect elite power. Both approaches recognize both formal and informal mechanisms, but Michel Foucault connected the two approaches and, further, showed how power is pervasive in control and resistance—even showing how those polarities interpenetrate.

Political theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke grappled with how governments could rule (or control) their citizens while still protecting their “natural” rights and liberties as citizens. For Hobbes, social control meant the ability of the state to maintain stability so that society remains civilized (counterposed to what he viewed as a “brutal” state of nature). According to Morris Janowitz,² social control was a concept used by American sociologists to describe a “common endeavor”³ aimed “toward an ideal.”⁴ As developed by the liberal discipline, social control came to be thought of as the means by which a humane society reduces coercion, eliminates misery, and increases rationality. It was originally considered to be antithetical neither to pluralism nor to social transformation. Indeed, social control was understood to be the outcome of evolving social organization. In the 1920s, social problems were understood as failures of social self-regulation (social control). During the 1930s, this perspective spread to Europe and influenced the philosopher Karl Mannheim to conceptualize freedom as the social control (via parliamentarianism) necessary to protect society from authoritarian rule threatened by social planning.⁵

What Janowitz calls an “alternate formulation of social control as a process of socialization leading to conformity” was proposed by social psychologists in the 1940s. By the 1960s, sociologists reimagined what was going on. Instead of being seen as a benign process, they suggested that social control was wielded by the nation-state to incorporate the “mass of the population” (“the periphery”) into the society’s central institutions and value systems. The mechanisms of social control? “Civility,”⁶ “self-control,” and “disciplined cultural appreciation”⁷ —what Foucault calls “disciplinary power,” internalized and reproduced by the objects of power. Janowitz concludes that force and coercion have been restricted to ever “narrower limits in relations both within and between industrial societies.”⁸ Meanwhile, as parliamentary participation declined, social inequality has divided the population into interest groups, and social movements have emerged as a method of shaping society. As elite political structures suffer crises of legitimacy, they are less able to dictate moral and social value systems. It is here that we see the shift to what Foucault calls “biopower.” Rather than influencing social relations through values and morality, power operates in the realm of desire. Consent is “manufactured” not only through mass mediated ideology but also through the production of insecurity, distraction, and consumership.⁹

While scholars in various other subfields were understanding social control in new ways, the disciplinary field of social control itself shrunk to a narrow concern with management of deviance and crime. What Jack P. Gibbs describes as the functionalist approach of the 1960s continued to see conformity to consensual norms as delivering reciprocal social relations. The conflicting Marxist perspective recognized social control operating in a context of antagonistic inequity, viewing criminal law as a means of enforcement and reproduction of class relations. The Marxist perspective was perhaps a little overzealous, ignoring crimes like murder, which are usually punished even in noncapitalist societies, and laws such as traffic regulations, which benefit all classes (of automobile users, although still discriminating against bicyclists).

The functionalist emphasis on norms helps us see how social control is enacted in subtle and indirect ways by all members of society, not only elites—a revelation that would make Foucault in/famous. At the same time, some actors have more capacity than others for agency in shaping social control.¹⁰ In 1977, Gibbs announced that social control studies had been “in the doldrums for several decades,” and hence there was no clear definition of social control. In 1982, he rejected social control as a general, collective process and insisted that it must have actors. The “social” dimension of social control refers to that process through which parties manipulate others through “means other than a chain of command.” As normative consensus declined, Gibbs expected social control to shift to law and to positive incentives. In 1989, he argued that control should be the central object of sociological investigation.¹¹ Simultaneously, Dorothy E. Chunn and Shelley A. M. Gavigan urged critical scholars to abandon the “liberal” and “instrumental” concept of social control “in favor of one attentive to the dynamic complexity of history, struggle, and change.”¹²

Meanwhile, almost all U.S. social control literature hurtled down one trajectory, criminal deterrence. Robert F. Meier and Weldon T. Johnson defined deterrence as “concerned with a particular source (the legal sanction), a signal (a threat) and a target (violators).” After one rigorous test, they concluded that extralegal factors are as powerful in producing compliance as legal ones.¹³ Other scholars have sharply criticized criminology for failing to take a broad, systems perspective on the function of law, imprisonment, social control, and criminology itself in the context of capitalist social relations.¹⁴

American sociology, devoted to the idea of a liberal/liberatory democratic state and still in the main exceptionally reluctant to acknowledge class struggle, fetters social control to deviance. Critical criminologists concerned with such matters as the discrepancy between law enforcement of working-class and capitalist-class crimes remain marginal in their attempt to bring attention to white-collar and corporate crime, let alone the larger issue of criminalization as a dimension of class relations and capitalism. In contrast, European-style political studies conceptualize social control as the maintenance of existing class relations through private property and force. The state participates, taking the side of capital. In P. A. J. Waddington’s words:

Patrolling the boundaries of respectability—and thus reproducing patterns of domination and subordination, and inclusion and exclusion—is the exercise of largely invisible state power. Individual officers selectively exercise their discretion on the street under the guise of neutrally enforcing the law and keeping the peace. But the police “keep people in their place” in quite another, and much more visible, manner when they suppress overt dissent against prevailing social, political and economic conditions. Here the notion of the police as neutral and impartial enforcers of the law is exposed for the myth that it is; since their first duty becomes transparent—to protect the state, whose coercive arm they are. This exposure of the fundamental role of the police as custodians of the state’s monopoly of legitimate coercion can be revelatory.… [P]olicing of public order exposes the tensions between state power on the one hand, and citizenship on the other.¹⁵

Nicos Ar Poulantzas rejects the simplistic assumption that the state is an instrument in the hand of capitalists, stressing the relative autonomy of state institutions. Regardless of its degree of autonomy, it is clear that today the state contributes to the smooth functioning of capitalism by reproducing its hegemony, defending its property rights, and eliciting consent of lower-class groups through strategic alliances.¹⁶

Social control can be understood as the central preoccupation of the Frankfurt School and other Marxists, who undertook a systematic analysis of the subtle ways that political consciousness and criticism are preempted through culture, ideology, and institutions.¹⁷ In the United States, similar analysis has flourished in specialized fields, such as education and media studies. Both European and American scholars have developed an analysi...