Artificial Insecurity

• In Event: Critical Criminology 2: Critical Approaches to Policing and Control

Abstract

Marx discussed how capitalism started with primitive accumulation, where the wealthy evicted peasant farmers from the commons, and enclosed and privatized the land. This created artificial scarcity, forcing peasants, and later, colonial subjects, to competitively sell their labor power for a wage, producing as much as possible in order to survive. Poverty is required for economic growth, and scarcity is required for capitalist expansion. Contemporary foreign aid within racial neocolonial capitalism continues dependency and artificial scarcity through structural adjustment and other forms of austerity, disproportionately affecting marginalized populations on the peripheries of both the global north and south. Building on decolonial, feminist, and abolitionist scholarship, and Neocleous’s work on policing and the fabrication of order, I introduce the concept of artificial insecurity as a critical framework to understand how the social forces causing and maintaining scarcity are also causing and maintaining insecurity. Racial capitalism artificially creates insecurity by weakening or removing social structures that promote safe, secure communities. People living in under-resourced, violent contexts are forced to seek protection from police and other carceral systems that abuse them, and their other alternative survival strategies are often criminalized. Just as racial neoliberal capitalism is sold by global policy makers as the only viable policy choice for improving quality of life and achieving upward mobility, people are socialized to see policing and other elements of the carceral state as the only ways order, security, and safety can be achieved. The sustainable development goals bridge socioeconomic and criminological concerns, framing the strengthening of militarized, carceral capacity to violently control crime and disorder as a necessary condition for development. This framework informs the need for anti-capitalist, abolitionist alternatives that eliminate both artificial scarcity and artificial insecurity so that we can achieve quality of life and community safety sustainably and democratically.

Author

• Nathan W. Pino, Texas State University, USA