Quote of the Week: Immanuel Kant

"Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788.

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." —W. M. Hicks.

The Ideological Origins of the Private Prison System in the United States

As of 2010 the United States has the highest prison population in the world, accounting for a staggering 25% of the world’s prison population while only accounting for 5% of the world’s total population. According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (2010) 2,266,800 prisoners are incarcerated in the United States. While most of this is still in public facilities there is a rapid increase in prison privatisation in the United States. The first private prison corporation, Corrections Corporation of America established its first prison in Tennessee in 1984—in two decades it generated a 500% increase in profit. So how has it become that corporations in the United States have come to profit from society’s deviants, thus creating a market out of crime? This essay will track the growth of prison privatisation in the United States in order to understand its historical origins in relation to the emergence of modernity. Prison privatisation, although not unique to the modern era, has become a rapid growth industry in the United States because of the proliferation of capitalist ideology—specifically neoliberal capitalist ideology that emerged during the 1980s.

The causal factors of prison privatisation in the United States can be thought of as threefold: economic, social, and ideological. The emergence of a neoliberal economic and political ideology in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, although a response Keynesian economic policies which saw high inflation during the 1970s, has its modern intellectual roots in the Enlightenment (Steger and Roy, 2010). Classical liberalism, the philosophy that serves as neoliberalism's parentage, is deeply rooted in Enlightenment philosophy; the belief that reason was the foundation of freedom and the all men were born free with natural rights to life, liberty and property (Steger and Roy, 2010; Locke 1967). During the 17th Century, English philosopher John Locke (1967) argued against the insular mercantilist economy of absolutist monarchies, believing that "the reason men enter into society, is the preservation of property; ... there may be laws made and rules set as guard fences to the properties of all ... [and] whenever legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people ... under arbitrary power, they put themselves in a state of war with the people. (p. 430). Similarly, according to Steger and Roy (2010), Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith argued that the economy claimed "a superior status because it operates best without government interference under a harmonious system of natural laws" (p. 2-3). Smith (1853), extolling the moral superiority of an unregulated market, suggested that with providence "an invisible hand ... make[s] the same distribution of necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among its inhabitants" (p. 264).

The influence of the European Enlightenment can be seen on the ideals of the American Revolution; the people of Britain's American colonies, unrepresented in Parliament, but nevertheless taxed, used this economic and political oppression as motivation to declare themselves independent. Upon severance from Britain, Thomas Paine (1776) declared, "society in every state is a blessing, but government in its best state is but a necessary evil" (p. 1). Therefore, the argument Enlightenment philosophers were making was not merely that an unregulated market was the most efficient in distributing resources, but that it was morally the best form of economy to ensure, as Smith (1937) argues, that "every man ... is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man" (p. 651).

It is these classical liberal ideals that saw resurgence in the 1980s, now what is called neoliberal. Michel Beaud (2001) has argued that it marked an ideological shift that saw a bottom-to-top interventionism that was similar to the responses to the Great Depression. The Great Depression of the 1930s convinced economists such as John Maynard Keynes that the classical liberal "night watchman" government was ineffective to safeguard an economy, and hence citizens, from market failure (Steger and Roy, 2010). Keynes advocated for modest government stimulation, intervention, and regulation, to generate market growth in times of economic crisis. The government stimulus of the American economy by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society saw one of the most economically prosperous and (relatively) egalitarian times in American history. However, from the early 1970s a series of spikes in oil prices caused runaway price inflation; this, combined with rising unemployment was what economists called "stagflation"—the dream of the Keynesian economy was over, and "an entirely new breed of [economic] liberals sought a way forward by reviving the old doctrine of classical liberalism under the novel conditions of globalisation" (Steger and Roy, p. 9). Upon the election of the Reagan administration in 1980, in response to the Keynesian consensus of decades before, change was sought by “global power elites that include managers and executives of large transnational corporations, corporate lobbyists ... state bureaucrats, and politicians” (Steger and Roy, p. 11). Neoliberal policies espoused reduced government spending through the privatisation of public assets as well as control of interest rates through independent central banks.

The late 1970s and 1980s also saw a resurgence of social conservatism as a response to political upheavals of the 1960s in American society. Many advocates of neoliberal economic policy also embraced socially conservative values that emphasised a tough approach to law and order (Steger and Roy, 2010). The increase in privatisation of public assets during the 1980s certainly points to the increase in prison privatisation in the United States. However, this is not the only contributing factor. Richard Nixon, elected to the presidency in 1968, adopted a new strategy in response to 1960s social justice movements such as the Civil Rights movement and the largely student and intellectual orientated neo-Marxist New Left. Nixon’s “southern strategy” was to “criminalize where possible, and demonize where not” (Wood, 2003, p. 22). Republican political strategy counted on closet racism and framing the push for social justice with a class of degenerates associated with crime. Phillip Wood (2003) has pointed out Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murry’s argument of the immorality of the welfare system because of its funding of criminal behavior. Another critical political factor that has contributed to the increasing in American’s prison population is the increased criminalisation as a consequence of the “war on drugs” initiated by Nixon and exacerbated by Reagan in the 1980s (Sinden, 2003; Payan, 2006). The US Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act and the Sentencing Reform Act during 1984 creating a mandatory minimum parole for many drug-related crimes as well as abolishing federal parole. The irony of the war on drugs, as Tony Payan (2006) has pointed out, is that it saw a massive increase in federal spending on drug enforcement, hardly a tenant of neoliberal philosophy. Despite this contradiction in philosophy the neoconservative backlash in the 1980s and its push for a tough stance on crime combined with a neoliberal push for privatisation of public assets, including prisons, inevitably led to a burgeoning prison population that budding corporations sought to capitalise on. This gave rise to the American Prison Industrial Complex—the etymology borrowed from Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of a growing “Military-Industrial Complex”.

The conservative criminal justice policies in the United States in the post-Nixon era to 2000 has seen 650% increase in incarceration rates with a total prison population rise from less than 200,000 in 1968 to 1.3 million in 2000 (Wood, 2003). As a consequence, Byron Price (2006) has argued, demand has consistently outstripped supply, leading to an increase in federal spending on prison construction as well as an inevitable condition of prison overcrowding. Neoconservative criminal justice policy subsequently plays right into the hands of neoliberal economic policy. The core tenants of capitalist production seek to exploit the problem of prison overcrowding: maximise demand, open markets, and private investment. The combination of the poor economic growth of the 1970s and increase in public spending on correctional facilities led to massive fiscal deficits at federal, state, and county levels—conditions ripe for the privatisation of existing prisons as well as the construction of new prisons (Price, 2006). Many deals struck with state governments have a clause to guarantee a maintaining of 90% capacity or the state faces staggering penalty costs, forcing many states to adopt harsh sentencing measures to avoid penalty. The most significant expansion of private prisons began in the mid-1980s when most states nearing their debt limits, combating overcrowding, and contending with constitutional violations opted for the easy solution of selling off their prisons to private interests (Wood, 2003). Punitive justice policies maximise demand for criminals, privatisation allows for an increased market for corrections corporations, and these serve to exponentially create a system of equilibrium whereby private investment in corrections corporations demands a profit, thereby seeking the creation of demand and market share. At face value the economic argument is logical, but even the most ardent capitalist must question the morality of the creation of a demand for crime, because that is exactly what the prison industry requires to make a profit.

Wood (2003) has pointed out that it is not only corrections companies that benefit from privatisation, but construction, architectural, food, health, laundry, waste collection, transportation, and communications companies all benefit, thus are interested in maintaining and expanding private prisons. All these companies, as well as third party investors, have an interest in maintaining this system and the punitive criminal justice system which perpetuates it. As such many companies lobby politicians for privatisation as well as tougher sentencing—thus distorting both the political system as well as the criminal justice system. David Shichor (1995), as well as arguing for fierce individualism and mistrust of government as causal factors in prison privatisation, has also drawn attention to Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant ethic—the idea of religious devotion to work as a strong value within Protestant societies such as the United States. This combined with social Darwinist attitudes to work and social stratification serves as an ideology to justify profiting from others’ deviance and failure to conform to capitalist society. Many private prisons in the United States are located in Southern and Western states and target impoverished communities, incentivised by politicians offering tax breaks and low-paid non-unionised jobs (Sinden, 2003). There has also been criticism of privatisation as serving an inherently racist agenda, some even as far as suggesting prisons and prison labour is a new form of slavery (Wood, 1995). Theoretically, private prisons are exercising what is essentially state power, and therefore it is subject to arbitrary measures, often to maximize profit (Shichor, 1995).

In many societies, with regards to failed social, economic, health, and educational policy, incarceration is regarded as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff; a reactionary measure to crime to treat its consequences rather than addressing its causes such as poverty, mental illness or lack of education—to capitalise on society’s failures is morally reprehensible. As Shichor (1995) has argued, “private corporations were not established for serving public good; they were established to generate profit for their owners and stock holders” (p. 67). Instead of serving to rectify society’s criminal problems, prison privatisation only serves to aggravate it in concert with a distortion of the criminal justice system. However, the impetus of neoliberalism’s private enterprise is myopic, in the sense that it does not follow any moral intuition in the pursuit of profit—it is blind to all other considerations.

Beaud, M. (2001). A History of Capitialism: 1500-2000 (T. Dickman, & A. Lefebvre, Trans.) (5th ed.). New York, NY: Monthly Press Review. (Original work published 1981).

Dorfman, A., & Harel, A. (2013). The Case Against Privatization. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 41(1), 67-102.

Fulcher, P. A. (2012). Hustle and Flow: Prison Privatization Fueling the Prison Industrial Complex. Washburn Law Journal, 51(3), 589-617.

Locke, J. (1967). Two Treatises of Government. P. Laslett (Ed.). Cambridge: The University Press.

Paine, T. (1776). Common Sense. Philadelphia, PA.

Payan, T. (2006). Cops, Soldiers, and Diplomats: explaining agency behaviour in the war on drugs. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Price, B. E. (2006). Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privitization?. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

Shichor, D. (1995). Punishment for Profit: Private Prisons/Public Concerns. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Sinden, J. (2003). The Problem of Prison Privatization: The US Experience. In A. Coyle, A. Campbell, & R. Neufeld (Ed.), Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization & Human Rights (pp. 16-29). Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, Inc.

Smith, A. (1853). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London.

Smith, A. (1937). The Wealth of Nations. New York, NY: Modern Library.

Steger, M. B., & Roy, R. K. (2010). Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

United States Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (2010). Correction Populations in the United States, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus10.pdf.

Wood, P. J. (2003). The Rise of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States. In A. Coyle, A. Campbell, & R. Neufeld (Ed.), Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization & Human Rights (pp. 16-29). Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, Inc.

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." —W. M. Hicks.

Quote of the Week: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying this is mine, and found people naïve enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754 

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." —W. M. Hicks.

Cultural Capital or Cultural Cringe:A Critique of the 2014 FIFA World Cup

“There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means …”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.[1]

In 1949, George Orwell Painted a bleak picture of a vast totalitarian government in the future, influenced by his witnessing of both totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Orwell’s vision, although unrealised, shares some similarities with twentieth century capitalist democracies, namely what Theodor Ardorno and Max Horkeimer called the “Culture industry”—the deliberate manufacture of mass-produced and largely homogeneous artworks not simply for consumption, but for systematic ideological control.[2] Adorno and Horkheimer’s perceivably righteous and sustained critique of mass culture was part of a wider project aimed at what they believed was an underlying totalitarianism that was built into the supposedly liberating philosophical movement of the Enlightenment.[3] The culture industry is undoubtedly alive and well today; its pervasiveness is nothing short of ubiquitous. Nowhere is this more present than the multi-faceted cultural spectacle of one of the world’s largest sporting tournaments: the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup. This essay will approach the FIFA World Cup in the same guise that Adorno and Horkheimer's critical theory assesses the culture industry, specifically the tournament's fusion of culture with Capital as a form of effective marketing for the purpose of creating a docile consumer culture. I will assess, and critique, two of the official songs commissioned for the tournament against the backdrop of its entirety.

Adorno and Horkheimer have argued that the same objectifying of knowledge throughout human history as a means of control over nature, and other humans, is no less different in the means of Enlightenment thinking. The rationality of the Enlightenment uses abstraction as its methodology: the process of characterising reality with quantifiable properties.[4] This allows the mathematical characterisation of the reality we perceive, but reduces reality to a multiplicity of objects that are just representations, with the result that "factuality wins the day; cognition is restricted to its repetition; and thought becomes mere tautology".[5] This has the presupposition of distancing the subject from the object, allowing for its domination by a master.[6] Adorno and Horkheimer have criticised this rational domination as merely a replacement of pre-Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge and therefore subsumed into myth itself. In agreement with Hegel, they have argued that the Enlightenment's abstraction of reality has reduced knowledge to numbers for manipulation, and in doing so has over looked the cognitive process of determinate negation: rather than conforming the perceivable to absolutes, the truth is derived by a process of dialectic.[7] From the outset Adorno and Horkheimer point out the implications of the Enlightenment's "axiomatic self-restriction" in thought as "an automatic, self-activating process; an impersonation of the machine that reproduces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it".[8]

Adorno and Horkheimer have asserted that the hyper-rationality of positivism—the paradigm thought of Enlightenment—has allowed the domination and alienation of humans through economic means. Humanity, robbed of its subjectivity, is absorbed into the capitalist "economic apparatus ... [which] equips commodities with values which decide human behavior".[9] With the onset of modernity it is the market's objectivity that dictates all social life and "whoever resigns himself to the life without any rational reference to self-preservation would according to the Enlightenment—and Protestantism—regress to prehistory".[10] The capitalist division of labour and imposition of alienation requires individuals to conform "their body and soul according to the technical apparatus".[11] The rational domination of instrumental reason serves to meet economic ends. This is the foundation for Adorno and Horkheimer's argument, which suggests art is being absorbed into, and conforming to, commodification to serve Capital and cement a consumer ideology in society.

I will now turn to the FIFA World Cup itself and apply Adorno and Horkeimer's theoretical analysis of the culture industry to it. This will include an analysis of two of the tournament's officially commissioned songs: 'We Are One' by Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez, and Claudia Leitte; and 'Vida' by Ricky Martin.[12][13] Adorno and Horkeimer's views on modernity’s commodification of art are nothing short of scathing, and their remarks are justified when one looks behind the veil of the culture industry. For its one aim is not to offer any intrinsic or aesthetic value embedded in it, but to offer a cultural product that is congruent with the aims of capitalism—profit.[14] The officialdom of FIFA's musical accompaniments to the World Cup are not conceived in an intrinsic manifestation of culture but to justify their manufacture to its own ends.

Adorno and Horkeimer have drawn attention to Kant's aesthetic theory of ‘purposiveness without purpose’ to criticise the intent of the culture industry. For Kant, an artist will produce a piece with purpose, that is, some conception of the final product, but the final product has no further purpose other than aesthetic. Adorno and Horkeimer have suggested the culture industry has reversed this notion and has made systematic control for profit the final purpose of the modern artwork.[15] Ricky Martin's performance of 'Vida' bears all the hallmarks of a product for consumption: Martin was the established musical icon chosen to perform a song that was largely not by his own pen, but hand-picked by judges from thousands of compositions submitted into a competition that sought the song's choosing. The judges knew the standard they were looking for even before they found it: mass appeal, and therefore, profitability. There have even been some accusations that Sony Music Entertainment had beforehand chosen 'Vida' and encouraged the song's writer to enter the competition, nevertheless offering some prefabricated semblance of culture[16]

The marketability wrought by the homogenisation of these two songs becomes apparent upon closer critical inspection. They offer catchy melodies and hooks with basic lyrics that repeat many of the same themes: solidarity, unity, competition, and cosmopolitanism. While these values are undeniably important, the manner in which they are expressed is far from genuine—they are just the face of a product. Adorno and Horkheimer suggest the familiarity, and therefore the ability to be easily swallowed by the average listener, is what has consigned manufactured popular music to the “worn grooves of association”.[17] This is not Martin’s only contribution to official the FIFA World Cup soundtrack; in 1998 he provided vocals for ‘The Cup of Life’, also not written by himself. Vida is Spanish for ‘life’ and not coincidentally, ‘The Cup of Life’ translates to Spanish as ‘La Copa de la Vida’, recycling similar motifs for their ability to be grasped easily. “No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction” through the use of what corporate manufacturing dictates so that “any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided”.[18]

These songs and their associated videos paint (or impose) an idealised version of Brazil, with sun, beaches, happy children, and scantily clad tanned and toned women, interspersed with footage of the exhilarating moments of previous tournaments to remind the viewer of the product they are consuming. They present a homogenised and stereotyped representation of Latin American culture, ignoring the myriad of localised cultures that make up the continent. While both songs have the appearance of Latin American musicians—and unashamedly the culture industry has crafted this appearance with ethnically Latin American musicians—they are, inexorably in one way or another, the product of American commercial interests: Pitbull being from Miami, Jenifer Lopez from New York, and Ricky Martin from Pueto Rico (an American territory). They have provided a token amount of lyrics in Spanish and Portuguese—which are just repetitions of the English lyrics—despite the fact that the vast majority of the tournament's participants do not come from English speaking countries. This is a product carefully manufactured for the English-speaking consumer—the lucrative power of the American market is not exempt from FIFA's glare. However, these songs would not dare mention the uncomfortable costs the tournament has brought to the Brazilian people, or the juxtaposition of its material wealth with the slums of São Paulo—the elephant in the room FIFA conveniently chooses to ignore.

The ubiquitous blinding gloss of the tournament’s multimedia presentation conceals the inconvenience of capitalist exploitation; FIFA’s mechanisms of control are too powerful to be resisted, or even contemplated, en masse. The multi-faceted audio-visual components of the tournament can be clearly discerned as what Adorno and Horkheimer link to the Wagnerian concept of Gesamkunstwerk—“the fusion of all the arts in one work”. [19] It is not surprising then to regard the FIFA World Cup as a perfect “alliance of word, image, and music … because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content”.[20] The necessity of control dictated by Capital has the consequence of expanding its commodities to include every possible object and subject of which culture is not exempt.

The sacrosanct of artwork, in the minds of Adorno and Horkheimer, has been subjugated by mere commodity fetishism and stripped of its truly human function, a pure aesthetic value, in order to dominate them with a blindfolded consumer ideology. Undoubtedly, their critique of the culture industry is soul-crushingly pessimistic, and they have every right given the endless cycle of predictability that is offered to consumers as popular culture, but their criticisms can be construed as somewhat pretentious and even Eurocentric.[21] Despite this, Adrono and Horkheimer could be forgiven, given the manipulative power of the Nazi propaganda machine that eventuated in the barbarity that took hold of their homeland; for their concern is not culture itself, but its absorption into the technical apparatus that serves to reproduce it in ways so as to create a docility among citizens. Mass production for mass consumption.

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[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Penguin Books in association with Martin Secker & Warburg, 2008), 45-6.

[2] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. London: Verso, 2010, 120-4.

[3] ibid., 6.

[4] ibid., 13.

[5] ibid., 27.

[6] ibid., 9.

[7] ibid., 24; Lambert Zuidervaart, "Theodor W. Adorno," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified October 10, 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/.

[8] ibid., 25.

[9] ibid., 28.

[10] ibid., 29.

[11] ibid., 29-30.

[12] Martin, Ricky, “Vida,” Ricky Martin, Salaam Remi, and Elijah King, recorded 2014, One Love, One Rhythm – The 2014 FIFA World Cup Official Album, Sony Music Entertainment.

[13] Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez, Claudia Leitte, “We Are One (Ole Ola),” Armando Christian Pérez, Thomas Troelsen, Jennifer Lopez, Claudia Leitte, Daniel Murcia, Sia Furler, Lukasz Gottwald, Henry Walter and Nadir Khayat, recorded 2014, One Love, One Rhythm – The 2014 FIFA World Cup Official Album, Sony Music Entertainment.

[14] Ian Buchanan, Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 106.

[15] Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 124.

[16] Carolina Moreno and Mandy Fridmann, "Sony Accused Of Fraud In FIFA World Cup SuperSong Contest," The Huffington Post, Accessed August 15, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/23/sony-supersong-lawsuit_n_5201298.html.

[17] Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 137.

[18] ibid.

[19] ibid., 124.

[20] ibid.

[21] ibid., 127-8; Even Jazz—much to the dismay of its American aficionados—is not exempt from their criticism, which may even be interpreted as a righteous insult to the African roots to which it traces its cultural origins.

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." 

 —W. M. Hicks.