threaten to compete for the legitimacy necessary in successful grant applications. Additionally, the demands of institutional survival are often quite different than those of forcing social change, or even of just helping people. Many of the demonstrators I interviewed for this book said that disillusion with the ineffectualness of nonprofit work was a central motivation for their conversion to more directly disruptive approaches. One spoke of her brief tenure in one organization as a sort of training in defeatism:
I was a canvasser for a day and a half for Working Families Party in Connecticut. The second day they dropped me off in a neighborhood, there were three evictions on the street, and so I was like, alright, I’m obviously not going to be canvassing in this neighborhood, instead I am going to help this person move their couch. So I came back to the person who was running the canvas and I was like, yeah, I didn’t make any money, I was helping this person move out of their house. And she was like, “What? How…that’s not what you’re supposed to be doing.” And I was like, “So you wanted me to go through this working-class neighborhood and badger people for money [to lobby against evictions] instead of helping this person out who actually legitimately needed my help? I quit. I can’t deal with this anymore.” It’s like, way to take a bunch of energetic radical kids and turn them into zombies.32
Worse, by claiming to be the legitimate voice of wider movement concerns and cooperating with state agencies, nonprofits often end up exposing less institutional approaches to direct repression. Scholar Aziz Choudry terms this phenomenon the “co-opt and clampdown” strategy: nonprofits provide a way for state agencies to claim to be helping the cause, often in the same moment that they are cracking the skulls of those fighting for it in the streets.33 As authorities often rely on “good protester/bad protester” talk to divide movements and isolate their more radical elements for repression, such characterizations can be devastating. Just as nongovernmental organizations paved the way for military intervention in Afghanistan by advocating from afar for Afghani women’s rights, domestic nonprofits conveniently make those who fall beyond the NPIC pale vulnerable to repression. In their book Paved with Good Intentions, Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay examine how this strategy has played out among Canadian development NGOs, including NGO-funded counterconferences, Oxfam’s close collaboration with the World Bank, and how the Canadian “federal government consciously funded the participation of the NGOs in the [alter-globalization] protest movement as an effort to contain its militancy and limit its demands.”34 By their account, among the greatest foes to movements seeking to force social change in the current era are those philanthropic institutions who claim to be working for the same ends.
Policing As A Real Problem
Another shift in the conditions of neoliberalism that has centrally transformed the character of social movements is activists’ core antagonism with police, both because of their social role in general and in protest situations in particular. Members of previous generations of movements are often too quick to ascribe such anticop antagonism to the madness of youth and its dangerous predilection for senseless violence. But this antagonism is anything but senseless. If co-optation, indirect rule, consumerism, and “civil society” domestication form the enticing carrot of dissent management, we should not be surprised when we find a big, heavy stick in the other hand of neoliberal social control—surveillance, police, and prisons. Even those types of enforcement inherited from previous eras have undergone an incredible expansion and intensification over the last several decades. While many excellent studies have focused on surveillance and prisons, the role of police in these “advances” in social control have only—finally—come to light through the Ferguson/Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, even with these struggles, the centrality of policing—both in daily life and in the protests challenging the structures of daily life—is still seriously underrecognized, except by those who do not have the option to ignore it. And even those who know how bad it is still have trouble theorizing how we got here.
Policing has always been a problematic and contradictory institution, despised and spiteful, marbled through with both servitude and sadism. In the words of former slave Harriet Jacobs, writing in 1861, “Any white man, who could raise money enough to buy a slave, would have considered himself degraded by being a constable; but the office enabled its possessor to exercise authority. If he found any slave out after nine o’clock, he could whip him as much as he liked; and that was a privilege to be coveted.”35 In the neoliberal era, policing is not simply one means among others to maintain control—it is absolutely central to the existence of the state itself. In Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Loïc Wacquant presents a thoroughgoing analysis of the discursive and material constitution of the neoliberal state.36 The neoliberal state finds itself challenged not only by the material insecurities generated by a drastic increase in income inequality and the abolition of the social safety net but also by a crisis of appearances. As the state in its roles of distributing social goods (“provisional”) and regulating business (“regulatory”) gradually vanishes under neoliberalism, it risks the appearance of not being a state at all, of disappearing behind private interests, unless it compensates in impressiveness through the mighty “grandeur” of its functions of policing, military intervention, and imprisonment:37
Thus is resolved what could appear to be a doctrinal contradiction, or at least a practical antinomy, of neoliberalism, between the downsizing of public authority on the economic flank and its upsizing on that of the enforcement of social and moral order. If the same people who champion a minimal state in order to “free” the “creative forces” of the market and submit the dispossessed to the sting of competition do not hesitate to erect a maximal state to ensure everyday “security,” it is because the poverty of the social state against the backdrop of deregulation elicits and necessitates the grandeur of the penal state.38
Part of the point, then, is to make sure that state violence is seen and makes an impression on potential rebels. The neoliberal state has a day-to-day need to assert omnipotence through widespread surveillance and forceful repression to make up for the disappearance of its friendlier functions, and to incapacitate expressions of dissent even before they appear.
The penal force of the neoliberal state appears in different guises. In trying to understand the management of dissent and the conditions faced by social movements, the most relevant of these are policing and incarceration. The Black Lives Matter movement has finally begun to bring to attention the way that policing and the entire state apparatus around crime and punishment function to produce inequality directly, not coincidentally. Until this movement, policing and prisons were widely misunderstood as a mere effect of social inequality, a “superstructural” result of racism in the “base.” Police and prisons are not mere symptoms of the dearth of opportunity and severity of need in communities of color resulting from “deeper” issues of housing discrimination, access to quality education, and redlining and other banking policies. They do not simply arise from personal prejudicial attitudes endemic among whites. Rather, policing and prisons have arguably become central to the production of racialized power inequalities in the US, as Alexander lays out in her now-famous book The New Jim Crow. The successes of the civil rights and Black Power movements made legal practices like the Jim Crow laws, which explicitly inscribed inequality by race, discursively unworkable by the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the material investments of white supremacy did not disappear but instead sought a new manner of social inscription: while the civil rights era succeeded in enormously decreasing white vigilante violence which, since Reconstruction, had helped maintain a Black underclass, police and prisons would soon come to assume the same function. Nixon’s successful “law and order” campaign of 1968, which in the 1970s and 1980s evolved into an unprecedented assault on communities of color, became the new home for white supremacy. Rather than explicitly encoding race, these policies proliferated law enforcement powers under the guise of a supposedly race-neutral War on Drugs, empowering a discretionary policing that allowed but never acknowledged highly racialized logics of application. In turn, political leaders and pundits, conservative and liberal alike, deflected criticism of the obviously racialized consequences of these policies with an incessant hammering of “colorblindness”—a discursive trick that claims pointing out these consequences to actually be the central cause of racism itself. While Naomi Murakawa
