absence of a violent response to intensified relative (as well as absolute) poverty is particularly puzzling when compared to the proliferation of massive urban riots in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the Kerner Commission appointed in 1967 by President Johnson recognized, these riots were not mute explosions of brute force.7 If anything, they were the most articulate expression of grievance that large swaths of the country had available to them, as Black populations, who had only recently arrived to northern cities in what is called “the Great Migration,” faced massive exploitation and wretched conditions. Historian Michael Katz compares conditions of marginalized populations under neoliberalism to those faced at that earlier time and finds that, “with the notable exception of the Vietnam War, most of the conditions identified in the [Kerner Commission] report as precipitating civil violence did not disappear” but actually worsened to a severe degree.8 Asking in his aptly titled 2008 essay “Why Don’t American Cities Burn Very Often?” Katz observes,
Poverty, inequality, chronic joblessness, segregation, police violence, ethnic transition, a frayed safety net: surely, these composed a combustible ensemble of elements, which a reasonable observer might have expected to ignite. In 1985, two sociologists who studied crime and violence observed: “the ghetto poor were virtually untouched by the progress that has been made in reducing racial and ethnic discrimination.… We thus face a puzzle of continued, even increasing, grievance and declining attempts to redress grievance through collective protest and violence.” Writing in 1988, Tom Wicker pointed to the same puzzle. The “urban ghetto is, if anything, more populous, confining, and poverty-ridden than in 1968.” Yet, the “urban riots that generated so much alarmed attention twenty years ago have long since vanished—rather as if a wave had risen momentarily on the sea of events and then subsided.” Why did no one light the match?9
Katz answers his own question with the idea of incapacitation—the means of making dissent powerless—which includes a set of developments in the country since the last wave of popular insurrection. He proposes a set of six “mechanisms” for “the management of marginalization”: selective incorporation, mimetic reform, indirect rule, consumption, repression, and surveillance.10 “Together,” Katz notes, “they set in motion a process of de-politicization that undercuts the capacity for collective action.”11 Because each of these mechanisms assails the capacity, rather than the righteousness, of dissenters, I argue that movements are pressed to respond in kind by publicly performing power in the face of incapacitation attempts instead of arguing the justice of their cause. The remaining sections of this chapter will look at how marginalization is managed under neoliberalism and what it might mean for social movements.
Katz observes that the inherent violence of inequality never disappears; instead, it is displaced from public to interpersonal expression. While writing the article, Katz was called up for jury duty in his home city of Philadelphia. The trial involved the murder of an elderly African American man by one of his longtime acquaintances, even a friend, in an argument over a loan of five dollars. The crime took place in North Philly, a neighborhood of apocalyptic poverty (where I also lived for three years) only minutes away from Philadelphia’s glitzy Center City. In trying to understand what connection neoliberal developments and the incapacitation of dissent might have to such tragic instances of interpersonal violence, I find it useful to turn to James Gilligan’s research on violence in prisons, mentioned above. Gilligan’s analysis reminds us that neoliberalism’s widespread social incapacitation imposes an essentially humiliating powerlessness and that, by making social action unimaginable, this humiliation is likely to express itself through interpersonal situations closer to home. “The German word for attention—Achtung—also means respect. And that makes sense: the way you truly respect someone is to pay attention to them, and if you are not giving them your full attention, you are disrespecting them…we all need attention. When we get it, we know that we are being respected. That also helps to explain the etiology of violence: assaulting people is a foolproof way to get their attention. Since everyone needs respect/attention, if they cannot get it nonviolently, they will get it violently.”12
Gilligan’s analysis of interpersonal violence as stemming from the systematic disrespect of relative inequality helps us reframe Katz’s question. Instead of only asking why American cities don’t burn very often, we might ask why Americans often shoot each other instead of burning cities. How, in more academic terms, does the endemic violence of neoliberalism’s intensification of inequality become systematically displaced from public to interpersonal spheres?
Before trying to answer this question, we should notice how this same shift, from social control by presumed consensus to control by incapacitation of dissent, essentially redefines the work of social movements at every level. As incapacitation of dissent results in a generalized humiliation among the poor and marginalized, movements must turn their focus away from bemoaning the absence of some anticipated justice, which fewer and fewer people expect in the first place—outrage at exceptional injustices may even sound insultingly obvious to those suffering injustices as routine—and instead focus on resisting the imposed sense of powerlessness. Under these conditions, movements arise simply to prove that it’s still possible to do something, that incapacitation isn’t complete. The focus on the incapacitation of movements, rather than the justice of their cause, can be understood as the most significant shift in social control from the welfare state to the neoliberal era. Consider the foundational 1962 Port Huron Statement that established Students for a Democratic Society. The statement, which in many ways framed New Left concerns, reveals how movement rhetorical strategies of the time were primarily concerned with attacking the justice of the status quo: “Many of us began maturing in complacency.… As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss.… Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era.”13
Reading these words now, their pained sincerity is no less striking than their absolute distance from our own times. Whatever one’s social position or political affiliation, the idea that complacent comfort, virtue, or some sort of Golden Age is in danger of being undermined by a threat of hypocrisy and decline is an idea from some other world. Political radicalization must now happen by other means, since no one—Left or Right—would entertain such naivety in the first place. Even those most likely to bristle at mention of “the hypocrisy of American ideals” would now never argue that the country is in an untroubled, untarnished Golden Age; rhetoric of hypocrisy and the decline of American virtue is now even more typical of the Right than among Left critics—albeit with different alleged causes. Talk of values and righteousness has largely been abandoned by liberals and the Left; such talk persists mostly within the Right, but then only as a thin pretext for the brutal exercise of force by those in a position to do so over those who, until recently, seemed little inclined to fight back. If movements are to do their job and disrupt the daily reproduction of the status quo, they cannot merely point out how unfair things are, which is obvious enough. Instead, they have to figure out, work through, and overcome those social “advances” that have convinced people that they are powerless to do anything about it. In many ways, as later chapters hope to show, they’ve already started.
Disruption Disrupted:
Or, Why Have the Poor Been Putting Up with Getting So Screwed?
That Katz measures the incapacitation of the poor in the neoliberal era in terms of the vanishing of urban riots—why he asks “why did no one light the match?” instead of asking why they aren’t, for example, voting in greater numbers—may need some additional explanation. We’d do well here to turn to Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s classic work on the sociology of social movements, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. In the authors’ analysis of a series of hard-won gains of the poor against the powerful in American history, “[I]t was not formal organizations but mass defiance that won what was won in the 1930s and 1960s: industrial workers, for example, forced concessions from industry and government as a result of the disruptive effects of large-scale strikes; defiant blacks forced concessions as a result of the disruptive
