The Pacification of the American Working Class: A Time Series Analysis

Abstract

In this paper we operationalize and empirically test six core tenets of pacification theory derived from Marxian political economy using time series data for the USA from 1972-2009. Our analysis confirms that rising inequality is statistically significantly correlated to increased public and private policing over time and that increased public and private policing is also statistically significantly correlated to increased industrial exploitation as measured through "surplus-value". While unionization correlates to strikes and lock-outs which suggests that unions have an important mobilizing role for the industrial reserve army, unionization also inversely correlates to total policing employment. As union membership decreases, policing employment increases, which gives credence to the notion that unions may also act as policing agents for capital. We conclude that when these findings are coupled with our previous international research of 45 countries for the snapshot year of 2004 (Rigakos and Ergul 2011) that produced almost identical results, there appears to be significant empirical support for pacification theory. The relationships we have discovered recur both across time and international contexts despite the fact that variations in legal norms and institutional histories of policing are varied and complex.

Private Security Work in Turkey: A Case Study of Precarity, Militarism and Alienation

“…While state policing formations and notions of police science were well entrenched in continental Europe, these public forms were eventually met with competition from private policing agencies (Button, 2007; Johnston, 1992; Rigakos, 2000; Shearing and Stenning, 1983). Today, it is a well understood empirical reality that the private sector outnumbers the public police sector in almost all capitalist economies (de Waard, 1999; Jones and Newburn, 1995; Rigakos and Ergul, 2013; van Steden and Sarre, 2007). It is thus no surprise that the size of the private security sector has typically vacillated alongside developments in securing wage labour, extracting surplus value and enforcing class relations as evidenced through the strong correlation between economic inequality and total policing, both public and private, per population (Rigakos and Ergul, 2017).…”

Pacifying Disruptive Subjects

“…It is here that the concept of pacification becomes useful as a critical tool for understanding police power. Recent work (Neocleous, 2010(Neocleous, , 2011(Neocleous, , 2013Neocleous and Rigakos, 2011;Rigakos and Ergul, 2013) has suggested that rather than being a concept restricted to imperial conquests conducted in bygone times, pacification can be usefully reclaimed as a tool for critical theory 'for analysing the broad vision of police and capital' (Rigakos, 2011: 78) in the contemporary context. The history of pacification demonstrates that it is a productive process, never solely involved in simply suppressing resistance in both imperial and domestic settings, but instead consciously employed in the construction of a new social order.…”

The Expansion of Conducted Energy Weapon Use in Ontario: Pacification and Policy Development

“…Neocleous links Marx's idea around the violence of accumulation as a fundamental process of pacification. Rigakos and Ergul (2013) further connect pacification to police powers through a Marxist lens by saying,…”

“…And the police are a central component to this process. Rigakos and Ergul (2013) explain that "[p]acification is the continuum of police violence upon which the fabrication of capitalist order is planned, enforced and resisted" (p. 169). Neocleous (2011) insists that the historical origins of pacification and its first instance of usage are significant for connecting Marx's idea about bourgeois and security.…”

“…Neocleous (2011) argues that the Oxford Dictionary's reference to the Edicts of Pacification of 1563, 1570 and the Edict of Nantes in 1598 as the first instances of the usage of the word 'pacification' are important because "they are the point of departure for the period in which the insecurity of bourgeois order had to be secured" (p. 38). Further, Rigakos and Ergul (2013) claim that "[i]t is at this point that a politics of security, a need to fabricate an order necessary for the functioning of the bourgeois state becomes central to the development of liberal philosophy both domestically and imperially" (p. 169). The objective of pacification was to be [allegedly] achieved through the operations of policing that aimed to shape a new social order.…”