Abstract
Resist the Punitive State is an unapologetically radical text which explores in captivating detail a range of examples of grassroots resistance to the harms caused by neoliberal politics and policies. The authors set the parameters of the book by posing the following question; What do we do when housing, mental health, disability, prisons and immigration policy become synonymous with state violence? Through a series of carefully articulated chapters, this work conceptually interrogates the role of the State in meting out such harms and the theoretical frameworks and strategies employed by oppositional movements. In doing this, it makes a valuable contribution across many arenas including critical social policy and criminal justice.
Perhaps one of the main strengths of this work is the introductory chapter which grounds the book within an analysis and critique of the capitalist state. Through this, it contextually embeds the emergence of neoliberalism as both political ideology and as statecraft offering a theoretical lens with which to understand the struggles that feature in this work. The end of the Fordist-Keynesian era meant political and economic changes which reorganised the State along neoliberal lines. With this, there has been a concerted and sustained attack on welfare provision and the rights of workers resulting in increased precarity in the spheres of production and a worsening of overall material conditions. As a consequence, we have seen the re-deployment of the Right arm of the State to manage ensuant problems at the bottom of social space through repressive welfare policies and the criminal justice apparatus (Cooper and Whyte, 2017). It is argued that the Beveridgian model of welfare has given way to arbitrary, coercive and stigmatising practices denoting a ‘punitive turn’ across many areas of service delivery.
Yet optimistically, the punitive turn has met with widespread contestation in the form of broad social movements and local activism. Using the example of housing, the book highlights how its structural reordering in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has contributed to social cleansing by uprooting working-class communities through mechanisms of gentrification and regeneration on one hand and disinvestment and privatisation on the other. Housing has become a market for investors, a means of capital accumulation, rather than a public necessity which meets social need. Chapter 2 focuses on an ethnography of community activism in the arena of housing in New York City. It shows how oppositional movements have drawn upon the anarchist Occupy Wall Street movement as a source of inspiration. It critically examines the notion of prefigurative politics as a form of resistance, highlighting both its limitations and its possibilities for disrupting dominant systems through direct action, rent strikes and blockades. Here, prefigurative politics has facilitated the creation of democratic and egalitarian spaces and its models of resistance as a precursor to alternative futures. In a similar vein, chapter 4 contributes theoretically to debates on class struggle and citizenship caused by displacement and dispossession in the specific locale of inner-city London. Here, the author outlines the successes and failures of housing campaigns against forced evictions and homelessness spear-headed mainly by working-class mothers. Chapter 6 too exemplifies the lethal consequences of the marketisation of housing and positions the poor as neoliberalism’s collateral damage through its focus on the Grenfell Tower fire. Here housing is positioned on the frontline of class war, as a commodity rather than a public good. These chapters together offer a stark warning against the bolstering of capital within housing, the threat of a US style housing market and the re-emergence of the private landlord. Resistance is key to challenging these insecurities and even where it has not stopped the juggernaut of neoliberal capitalism it is inherently valuable in marking objection and solidarity.
The book articulately captures how the practice of neoliberalism is accompanied by a pervasive ideological discourse which weaponizes stigma and blame to accomplish its task. Referred to by Wacquant as the ‘cultural trope of individual responsibility’ discursive mechanisms operate to shift the responsibility for inequality and precarity away from the state onto the individual (Tyler, 2013; Wacquant, 2009). Chapter 5 focuses upon the experiences of psychiatric system survivors. It draws upon the theoretical tradition of Mad Studies a field of scholarship, theory and activism which has developed from the lived experience of system users. Using neoliberalism as a lens it details how welfare reform policies construct us all in terms of our economic utility. This ideology individualises distress and madness promoting a medicalised ‘recovery’ model which seeks to push mental health service users and the disabled (also see chapter 7) into work and off benefits. Apart from creating ideological ‘them’ against ‘us’ dichotomies to legitimate and reinforce hostile polices it perpetrates the myth that such distress and its mode of recovery operates in a vacuum unrelated to wider economic, social and political factors.
Chapter 10, considers penal abolitionism and local challenges to prison expansion in England and Wales. It highlights how the sharing of criminological knowledge can assist in de-mythologising the prison as a necessary and useful institution which has no suitable alternative. Such political consciousness raising plays a crucial part in resistance against prison building and beyond. Most significantly, this book illustrates the ways in which, despite the disciplinary onslaught, alliances can be built across sectors and spaces for dissent can be carved out which can resist and transform the punitive state. To conclude, this book is a valuable resource to students, academics and activists demonstrating how through mutuality and collectivisation we can generate subversive knowledges and work collaboratively in pursuit of a common good. In the context of the current global pandemic, this work is also timely offering critical criminologists a way to connect their critique to the wider landscape of neoliberal policy.