Crisis in the Plural: Capital, Whiteness, and Violence in the 1980s

Abstract

The 1980s are recognized as a period of crisis and transition for many cities. From a political economic perspective, it involved a(nother) crisis of manufacturing capital and a turbulent transition toward finance, real estate, and service sectors. The period also marked a transition toward more aggressive forms of policing, including “broken windows” policing, an intensified war on drugs, and a broader punitive or carceral turn in urban and national governance. According to most scholarly accounts, these forms of policing were a response to an underlying economic crisis and can be understood through a political economic lens. While many of these accounts are compelling and important, it is worth questioning their analytical recourse to a single “economic” crisis. What might be gained by thinking about crisis in the plural? About a series of smaller crises that, at times, “compound and collide” (Gilmore, 2022) into a full-blown crisis in which ”the social formation can no longer be reproduced in the same way” (Hall, 1988)? This paper re-examines the urban crisis of the 1980s. While recognizing the capitalist crisis identified by many scholars, it also pinpoints two further crises: one bipolitical, the other libidinal. Recognizing these three crises and the ways the compounded and collided, the paper argues, can help to understand the many changes introduced in this period, especially more aggressive forms of policing.