Beatrice speaks with Ruth Wilson Gilmore about how to understand the concept of "the state," the capitalist state's capacity of organized abandonment, and the extraction of time.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. Order her book Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation from Verso Books here: www.versobooks.com/books/3785-abolition-geography

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 0:00

If we think about what the entire constellation of relations and possibilities are, that envelop any individual who eventually gets plucked out of their life, then what abolition is about is changing everything and that means all of that constellation of relations, of human-environment relations.

[Intro music]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:54

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Today I am joined by prison abolitionist and carceral geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, which came out in 2007, and a new volume of her work was just published in May by Verso called Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation that brings together three decades of writing into one big book.

Ruthie, welcome to the Death Panel. It's truly an honor to have you here on the show.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:55

Thanks. It's great to be here. And I look forward to our conversation.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:58

I think most regular listeners of Death Panel will be familiar with your work. We joke that there are two books that we mention and cite on the show so often that it should be on a Death Panel bingo card, and one of those is Engels' 1845 Conditions of the Working Class in England, and the other one is Golden Gulag. And one of the reasons that Golden Gulag, but also your work in general, especially I think it's a 2007 or 2008 essay that's in this volume, Abolition Geography, that you and Craig Gilmore co authored, called Restating the Obvious, has been so influential in our thinking, especially on mine, is because what it demands you to rethink about what the state means and what the state is. In the part of the essay that I'm specifically thinking about, which is the first paragraph of a section called Stateless World, Hahaha, which, by the way, is a great subtitle, you and Craig write that, "a state is a territorially bounded set of relatively specialized institutions that develop and change over time in the gaps and fissures of social conflict, compromise and cooperation. Analytically states differ from governments, if states are ideological and instrumental capacities that derive their legitimacy and material wherewithal from residents, governments are animating forces, policies plus personnel, that put state capacities into motion and orchestrate or coerce people in their jurisdictions to conduct their lives according to centrally made and enforced rules". And as you write in Golden Gulag, also, "the state makes things but it is also a product of what is made and destroyed". So to start us off, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind talking about this distinction for us between state and government? What is the state? Or what does it mean to think of a state as a capacity? And why is it important to differentiate between state and governance?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 3:50

Okay, um, thanks. That's a great question, and I'm really honored to be paired with Engels as among the most cited on your podcast. That's cool. [laughter] That's very cool. All right. So that distinction, first of all, between state and government, and I think we use the word government, not governance, was to emphasize that there are in any given state, a number of agencies or sub state institutions that in the aggregate make up the state. So, you know, to be a little less abstract for now, we can say that states have agencies for education, for health, for tax collection, for policing, for infrastructural development, for the Treasury in general. So all of these agencies have, you know, certain structures that change over time of course. They have certain capacities that have been won through struggle whether that struggle is legislative, administrative or otherwise. And then at any given moment, a particular state, which is to say the agencies of that state are enlivened by the personnel, by the kind of ideological predilections of whatever, you know, government might be in charge to do things in particular ways, given the general capacities, that those institutions have to conduct certain projects using fiscal and bureaucratic abilities. And that lead to but don't necessarily, in a mechanical way, result in an outcome that is determined by the institution of the state itself.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:51

I appreciate the way that you put that. And I think one of the things that's sort of frustrating is that often, particularly in the context of the COVID pandemic, so many people when they think of the state, and they think of the government, and they think of power, there's very -- I'm trying to think of a nice way to put this, there's a kind of very almost like collapsed perspective that thinks of these things as being all synonymous or all sort of one thing and existing at the kind of same level. And I think it's important to look at your work and examine particularly the things that you look at where we're talking about sort of ways that the state is building up local capacity through investing in fiscal architecture, that's not necessarily directly injecting money into municipalities, but is expanding, you know, the kind of surplus capacity of an area by investing in prison and jail sort of expansion or in INS facilities, these kinds of warehousing institutions that are, you know, based around a kind of idea that the state is the only one who's allowed to be doling out violence. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the ways that the state justifies itself, because I think it's really important to kind of tease out how the state is a kind of idea that's very separate from governance, or government, rather, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sort of switch those words up earlier. But, you know, the, the kind of idea that I think a lot of people have is that the state and the government are one thing and it's just two different words for the same thing. And that's just so far from the truth.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 7:29

Well, I have two things to say about your question and interrupt me if I've misunderstood you, okay?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 7:34

Of course.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 7:35

As you said, in the first part of your question, for a lot of people, there's this kind of collapse, it's almost automatic, but very often I'm thinking between state and government, but also, and this is the collapse that Craig and I were trying to write against in our piece, and that I, with Craig and with others and alone, have been trying to write against in many things. And that is the notion that what the state is, is the monopoly of violence. And this is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to say. That even if, under some kind of loosey goosey understanding of the state as defined by Max Weber, that it has, since the 19th century, you know, increasingly monopolized the legitimate use of violence and not all violence, just the legitimate use of violence, is a confusion that all kinds of people bring to their analytical and political work. So the state is also the institutions that provide health care when the state provides health care. That's not not the state. That's not the government, that's the state. The state is also the institutions that provide education and provide the education of educators. That's also the state and it's not just the government. So you see that when I talk about these different institutions, what matters here is not that the state is one thing and government is the other, but the state gives us certain analytical insights into what we should think about when we are fighting. And government gives us other analytical insights into what we should think about when we are fighting. So if we replace a government with a new government, we haven't changed the state until we change the state. And if we change the state, but we, you know, have governments that are ideological predisposed to expanding vulnerability to premature death, then we haven't really changed the state except for on paper. So these are some of the, you know, the considerations that we bring to our work all the time. And I take it, that if people who listen to this Death Panel podcast, think so much about such things as Engels' 1845, then they're thinking always about these two aspects of the state, even if it hasn't been like really clearly in the front of everybody's mind.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:19

Yeah, I think that's something that we always try and push here on the show. And that's partially because of the analysis of one of my collaborators who studies fiscal federalism, and, you know, policies of sort of decentralized finance. And I think a lot of people, particularly in approaching the COVID pandemic, sort of think that if we could only replace the sort of figureheads in the government, that there is a capacity to create a pandemic response that would be better. But I think part of what we're sort of hoping to challenge is the idea that it's possible to simply replace a government without addressing the underlying state itself. And so that's sort of what I was hoping we could get at, which is that, you know, this idea that you talk about often of the anti-state state, which kind of is a way to describe what many people might think of as a kind of, like the conservative libertarian approach to shrinking government or smaller government. And so much of that is talked about in terms of, you know, people, quote, unquote, defunding health care or defunding welfare. And it's just a lot more, I think, complicated than that, which is what we're always trying to explore and talk through here on Death Panel. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you see welfare programs sort of fitting into what we've been talking about.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 11:47

Okay, great question. Great question. Well, one thing that immediately comes to mind is that, of course, we are pretty much talking about the various iterations of the capitalist state. So it's not like state in general, it's the capitalist state, and we are in, you know, have been deep in the throes of the latest iteration of capitalism, saving capitalism from capitalism, and the anti-state state has grown up in that series of crises and in that long conjuncture, so that's like introductory to be able to talk about a few other things. One of them is this, if we go back to, you know, Engels' 1845, or if we go back to say, Capital, Volume One, we see the state arising in the context of the various crises and contradictions, that the development and I almost want to say the evolution of industrial capitalism brought to the attention of Marx and Engels, right? So if we, you know, reading Capital, Volume One, well, there isn't some chapter that says, an a-ha, the capitalist state [laughter]. But the way, you know, the way Marx says, a-ha, you know, that here's the mode of production, finally, the pivot in the middle of the book. Well, that doesn't happen. What does happen is, in the chapters, we see certain very concrete struggles, resolving in such a way that Marx will tell us in passing, and then this law, you know, protecting children from certain kinds of labor, or, you know, forbidding women from doing certain sorts of things come into being. That is the development of the capitalist state. It isn't like the state was there sitting around waiting, you know, for the women and children to say "help!". [laughter]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:03

No, I mean, I think that's so important, all laughing aside --

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 14:07

if we can't laugh, what we're thinking about this stuff, shame on us, because --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:11

Yes, absolutely. [laughter]

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 14:12

I find laughter sometimes clarifies things, more than, you know, really stern, fist pounding approaches to ideas and problems.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:24

I absolutely agree there.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 14:26

And another thing about Marx by the way, just want to say, is the guy was like quick with a joke, and while all the jokes weren't good, but they're everywhere in the guy's writing and so the extent to which a certain capacity for thinking about the world is something that we have derived from that guy who had the opportunity to think and write and think and write and think and write and think and write for so long. means that we ought to take the whole thing seriously rather than looking for the sections of the writing to recite as though the recitation is what we need to do, rather than performing as intellectual material actors in the world to, you know, rehearse the world differently by bringing the notes from Marx, and the notes from Engels, and the notes from Gilmore and whomever, to the struggle at hand.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 15:22

Would you say more about that actually?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 15:23

Sure. Something I, I kind of stumbled on two years ago, but couldn't quite say clearly to myself what it was, I had stumbled on to, was [laughter] back in back in the 1980s, I was in many reading groups and study groups and doing various things and raising my fist here and there. And the world in that decade was changing in so many different ways. So you know, the time of, in the United States, of Reagan, the end of that decade was the last years, the sort of death throes of the Soviet Union, you know, culminating with the end of the Berlin Wall, there were, you know, so many different things going on -- structural adjustment, kind of scrunching the world into preparation for as it were the next round of capitalist expansion, there were struggles within the Non-Aligned Movement, the kind of remnants of or the development of the Third World movement, to sort of take on capitalism in its own terms, rather than oppose it in alternative terms, so we eventually get the BRICS. All of these things are happening. And what I noticed was that in a lot of the political intellectual formations I was part of, and let me tell you, and the listeners, I was a dropout at the time. I wasn't a professor. This is not an academic problem that I'm addressing here. Nor do I do academic problems, although I am a professor [laughter].

But what I noticed was that when we read together, if we were reading a work on political economy, or a work on anticolonialism, or a work on, you know, one of the pressing issues of our time, our habit was to like kind of glean from the work certain statements that we would then throw out into the world as though the statement itself would be enough to get our comrades to change what they were doing into something else. That's what I mean by recitation. We'd recite these things -- we would learn them well. We would say but Cabral says and somebody else would say, yes, but Angela Y. Davis says, and somebody else would say yes, but Ruth first said, and somebody else would say, but Walter Rodney says. All of that was true, and we were being careful readers. But we weren't actually enlivening the work that we were getting from the reading, in the context of our own struggles. This is what I'm trying to say. And so it took me like more than 30 years, to figure out a way to present to people who might be interested in this dilemma, what it is I thought we ought to be doing anyway.

And what it is I fit thought, and now I think we ought to be doing anyway, is taking, you know, all of the various ways of understanding the world that seemed to make sense in the struggles that we inhabit today, and then using that material as though we were actors, rather than reciters, which is to say, using the material in such a way that we are sort of creating a world in our use of it. And when I say actors, I'm really drawing on the work of people like Bertolt Brecht, who is like a really great influence on me when I was a young person, and the notion of a theater that itself in the way the work is made. So the relationship between and among the people who make an entertainment, and the relationship between the people who make the entertainment and the people who come to enjoy it, the audience, as it were, is constantly presenting how society is made, and therefore it can be remade. Whatever the story is, it can be some old story, it can be Galileo, it may not be a story about today.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:46

Right.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 19:46

For those sorts of insights to come alive.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:50

I think that's so interesting. Especially I only realized recently that you're, you're sort of -- you came to geography through theater, and I was wondering if that sort of influenced the way that you think of space and place, because it's -- the first time I read your work -- to be fully honest, I did not get it. I got some of it. And I think I totally didn't get all of it. And I was introduced to your work by Trevor Paglen, who people in the art world might know. But I was at Cooper Union, and he came to teach a seminar on 4D Design, on temporal design, so you know, engaging with time, and he talked about his work and he said at the end of the talk, you know, if anybody is like sort of interested in this, then what you have to do is read Golden Gulag, and this must have been like, 2009. And so I read it, and I loved it being someone who grew up in California, who had a lot of friends who were incarcerated, it just like -- it was a great read. But I think I took from it very different things than what I took from it much later. And part of that is definitely because I was like, 19, at the time. And you know, when you're young, you just, you know, you think differently than when you're a little bit older. But as I've read and reread Golden Gulag over the years, I keep coming back to the way that you engage with time and space as a kind of -- you know, it reminds me of a lot of the things that you think about if you start to engage in performance art, and in time based media. And so I was sort of curious how you came to geography and sort of where your, I guess, interest in that came from.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 21:33

Great question, which I love answering [laughter].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:37

Good. I'm glad [laughter].

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 21:41

In the late 80s -- so to go back to the long answer I gave you earlier about, you know, the problem of recitation, but in the late 80s, as I spent many years doing various things, but spending a lot of time in reading groups and study groups, trying to figure out what was happening, I decided that what I should do is study political economy in a really deliberate and as we like to say, rigorous manner. And so I thought what I would do is go to into a planning program, because planning is one of the applied academic disciplines in which Marxist and historical materialist theory in general still has some high degree of wealth, and I didn't want to, you know, try to go into an economics department, and they're only really two in the United States at the time, and really only two now, Riverside and UMass Amherst, where it appeared to me that I would be compelled to learn all the things I didn't want to learn in order to be certified to learn the things I did want to learn. So.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 22:59

Interesting.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 22:59

All right. So I was looking at planning and then looking at some other interdisciplinary programs. There was a kind of newish Cultural Studies program at Irvine in those days and a few other things. And then, quite by chance, my partner Craig Gilmore and I went off to the occasional Rethinking Marxism conference, the 1989 -- no, 1991 edition, I guess. Yeah, something like that. And at Rethinking Marxism, Craig went off to hear a talk by this guy called Neil Smith. I went off to hear another talk. And when we got back together again, Craig said, oh, well, you were talking about your interest in going to Rutgers, but you're not going to go in planning, you're gonna go into geography because I just heard this talk that really would have thrilled you. [laughter] So I thought, geography? Well, how odd. I hadn't had a geography course since I was 12 years old. But hang on, that course when I was 12, 1962, height of the Cold War, right, height -- you know, Cuban Missile Crisis, all that stuff is happening. Jack Kennedy was still alive. But all this stuff everybody, you know, plumping for a big fight. In my geography course, in middle school, we had a textbook and the textbook explained the difference between capitalist development and socialist or communist development. It was really kind of an astonishing thing. In an era in which it was not legal to be a member of the Communist Party, for little girls, young girls in middle school to sit down and read a textbook, a totally standard textbook -- this was not you know, specialized, specialized or sneaky thing and find out what the Soviet Union mode of production was. And my friend, Kathy and I, who had to present that section of the textbook to our class, decided on reading that section that we would become communists. Alright.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 25:22

I love that.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 25:22

[laughter] So I told this story that I just told you to a dear friend the other day. My friend is Indian. She's from Kerala, which is famously wonderfully, almost mythically, you know, one of the socialism in one state states that seems to be hanging in there. And Mythri said, oh, that's so interesting. You must have been a student at a good school where they weren't worried you'd go astray learning these things, and she was absolutely right. She was absolutely right. I mean, it was like elites, and I was not an elite, but I desegregated an elite school -- elites got to study things that the rank and file of working class and middle class kids were forbidden to know anything about. [laughter]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:17

Yeah. I mean, it's so funny that you mention that because it just, it's so strange. I remember, sort of basically being in college and discussing capitalism and naming capitalism as a phenomenon in college and being like, well, it's so strange that my entire sort of schooling growing up like, it was never mentioned, there was no mention of communism or capitalism, it was just taken as kind of self evident and mutually reinforcing that that was just the way things were. And there was definitely I think -- I liked that you put it in terms of trust there, because I think that's definitely part of it, you know?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 26:57

Mhm, mhm. It's really true, and over the many years, so that was 60 years ago, that I was in middle school -- over the many years, I've thought, you know, quite frequently about what that peculiar special education I got, did to shift my consciousness, not away from my family and friends who were not, you know, sent off to desegregate some school, but rather, to denaturalize the world in which I come of age and been, you know, sent to be one of the frontline fighters in the fight against Jim Crow, right? So it's not like I didn't think already, that we could change the world. But still my consciousness opened in a peculiar way. And stories like that are stories about so many people who are, you know, kind of legendary in the world of anticolonial struggles, whether we're talking about, you know, someone like Fidel or somebody like Agostinho Neto, or somebody like, you know, Cabral, and so forth. But to come back to geography. In my adult years, I realized in thinking about what geographers do, and the fact that it's a very interdisciplinary discipline, led me to an understanding, or maybe not quite an understanding, led me to have the hunch that if I went into a geography PhD program, one, I would have an amazingly broad array of tools, analytical and methodological tools to choose from, and two, there would be no question in my program of study, that what I could learn about was how people change the world, not in terms of great men of history, but in terms of, you know, to go back to Marx, by combining our labor with the external world, we change the world, and thereby change our own nature, that kind of thing. And that is very much what being in drama school was about, we combine our labor with the external world with these pieces of two by four, and some costumes, and some scripts and some lights and some makeup, and some, you know, understandings of psychology and human drama. And we change something. And what Brecht said was, well, we can make this all more self conscious without becoming too precious about it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:34

That's a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing that. It's amazing to me that, I think some of the things that I learned from reading your book the first time, like, as I mentioned, it kind of -- some of it went way over my head, but the thing that I took away from it the first time I read it in 2009, is that it finally explained to me feelings that I had had about friends that had been criminalized, that there were was a kind of expectation that we were supposed to think of our friends who were criminalized as being bad because they had been marked as bad by the process of criminalization, you know, through this three strikes rule, just doodling on like an, you know, LA County bus on the way home is basically enough to depending on, you know, what your specific axis of marginalization is, like, it's a very easy way to be criminalized in the late 90s and in California. And it was frustrating, because it was like, these are people that you love and these are people who you know are not bad. But the media, the state, the government, the entire framework that you're told is this kind of expectation that you're going to naturalize their badness, right, as true somehow or destiny. And it never sort of felt right. But there was no framework that I had for understanding why, you know, I might be right that my friends were not, you know, "bad". And that's really what your book gave me, the first time I read it, was like an answer to a feeling that I had for a long time that, you know, things were working out in a certain way, but that it had nothing to do with my friends, and them being bad people at the end of the day, and it was such an important insight that completely shifted the way that I thought of everything, of all of my politics, and changed the way that I thought about my sort of place in the world and what you know, I needed to do. It's one of those things that I think is very often quoted from your book, which is this definition of racism, that is "…the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death…" And it sort of is tied into this idea of organized abandonment. And I was wondering if you would mind expanding on sort of where you started to become involved specifically in looking at the carceral state and sort of how you started to think of carceral geography, you know, in this obviously like interdisciplinary way because I think it definitely relates to the very sort of like intentionally broad framing that the prison industrial complex was supposed to have, but that you write about in Golden Gulag kind of having been collapsed or restricted in some ways through the way that it was sort of watered down as it was reproduced or recited.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 32:30

And by the way, I have to say, it's so exciting to me to hear your story of reading Golden Gulag and having, you know, over time, your eyes open to what you thought might already be true, as well as learning new things. That's really great. Really, really great. And Trevor, you know, is a student of mine.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:51

I know, I know. Yeah. [laughter]

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 32:53

He's greatness in the art world, but you know, he's a geographer too [laughter].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:57

Yes, yes.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 32:59

And a wonderful one. So thinking about organized abandonment and vulnerability to premature death. Let me talk about that a little bit. I'll talk -- I'll start it this way. The title of my dissertation, the dissertation became Golden Gulag, had one of those dissertation heavinesses that nobody could carry. It was called, From Military Keynesianism to Post Keynesian Militarism, colon, and then a lot, a lot more words. And, you know, you're supposed to title a dissertation so everybody who reads it, which is say four or five people, can understand where it is, where it fits into, you know, a body of thought, a body of literature, blah, blah, blah. And it was already then that I was, you know, starting to think about, and rethink organized abandonment, not as a movement away from some, you know, utopian or Edenic earlier period. And that's why military Keynesianism is in the title. Not like the good old days of good capitalism. It was like no military, that meant people dying. But that that incredible expansion of the US political economy in the post-World War II period, and the remarkable growth of California in that time, created the conditions in which there was enough surplus to circulate through households and individuals and neighborhoods and counties and regions, such that for example, the University of California built multiple campuses, the California State University System expanded, the master plan for higher education in California was the envy of the world. That it proposed that the public -- that a public good should be free and appropriate education for all residents of California from kindergarten through PhD. Think about that. That's a remarkable thing.

And, you know, there was expansion of health care, a lot of, you know, suburban development, so on and so forth. So it's not as though any of these elements of postwar growth was without contradiction. Of course, they all are rife with contradictions. But the turn that began in the late 1960s, so about the time that I started college, not in California, elsewhere, is the turn in which this kind of constant expanding aggrandizing social welfare state, which is to say, the agencies producing and providing social welfare, you know, within the state, started to run into roadblocks. And those roadblocks were first and foremost roadblocks that were erected by design by large banks and corporations that having willingly submitted themselves to high levels of taxation, in the context of the Great Depression, were no longer willing to continue to carry that fiscal burden, right? So this happened, you know, in California, it happened in the United States federal government, it happened in a number of ways, all of which I lay out probably in excruciating detail in the second chapter of Golden Gulag.

So what happens when that kind of squeeze is put on the public purse? Well, you know, one thing that could happen, but didn't was that the legislature could have struck back and commanded, demanded that large banks and corporations continue to pay, you know, significant sums into the public treasury in order to continue to support and enhance opportunities for advancement and protections from calamity for the people of California. But they did not do that. And, you know, there are many reasons why. So, when I think about organized abandonment, I'm thinking about it at whatever level a certain kind of instance of abandonment might happen. So in the context of the state of California, this is large banks, corporations, their lobbyists and so forth with the legislature and with people in the government with the Budget Office, Legislative Analyst's Office, you know, all of them together, deciding that the only way that California could, as it were, guarantee its future would be to pull the rug out from under more and more people, right? So it's a turn in which something called the economy stands in for all matter and measure of wellbeing, for humans and the environment both. And organized abandonment is also the case if you think in terms of, let's say, unregulated, or deregulated rental units, where a landlord might not have any incentive or disincentive with respect to keeping, you know, the lightbulbs working in a corridor, or in a stairwell, rather, and so, a little old lady, which I've become, could fall down the stairs, you know, this would also be organized abandonment and vulnerability to premature death. So premature death can happen to somebody at any age, and it's the decisions that make that vulnerability so pervasive and frightening is what matters to me in the story, and how that vulnerability and the frightening qualities of that vulnerability become kind of in discourse, transformed into things like choice. Well, you should live somewhere else.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:32

Right. Just move.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 39:33

Yes, you should do something else, right. Vote with your feet. Find a better landlord. That all of those responses that have become so dominant in our discourse from then until now, are responses that effectively privatize everything. Like that's what privatization is, it's not so much is it a private prison, which is like a myth that people get all excited about. But rather, you know, what gets dropped onto the shoulders of individuals and households and communities that used to not be there before, or doesn't have to be there anymore?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:14

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the thing that for me organized abandonment has been most useful in understanding is actually this thing that you mentioned, of the kind of framing of this being almost a necessary decision about how to organize society in order to ensure the survival of the population moving forward, which is kind of hinged on this economic framework of, you know, some people almost deserving slow or early death, this kind of -- it's actually a very familiar framework to anyone who studies eugenics, which is primarily what I look at, because I come at things from the angle of studying disability, impairment and debility. And so you know, the eugenics movement, one of the ways that they sort of took control of the apparatus of health systems and research systems in the United States, and this obviously did not stay contained within the borders of the United States, was by discrediting the movement that came before them, which was the rehabilitation movement, and the rehabilitation movement coincided with the rise of the era of asylums, and this was really influenced by things like post war innovations in orthopedic surgery, where you had the idea that you could reclaim bodies from, you know, either industrial accidents or accidents of war to be, you know, reclaimed from the surplus and made of use again to the economic order. And the whole idea of many of these large state hospitals or asylums was a kind of economy of care argument of, you know, this is how we're going to sort of centralize care and bring together like specialty and medical authority, and the eugenics movement really sort of gets popular by saying, well, these rehabilitationists are wasting money, because some of these people, they're never going to be cured, they're never going to be made of use again, and really, that that money that we're spending that time, that energy, that capacity that goes into trying to reclaim the surplus or rehabilitate the surplus, that that in and of itself constitutes a threat against the survival of the the race, right, because obviously, this is a whole race science and like eugenicists are sort of framing things under this idea of there being sort of different types of people, they think of race as a kind of, like in the Darwinian sense of like classifying between species.

So they thought of like the human species as being subdivided amongst like a couple different types of species, and that the only way to sort of survive was to take resources, money, support, capacities away from the population of incurable kind of non life and orient that towards the more normative forms of life that were, you know, considered productive towards a better society. And they frame this in ways of like, oh, we're going to cure cancer in three generations, we're going to, you know, get rid of intellectual disabilities, we're gonna get rid of madness through this sort of elimination and extermination, but it's all hinged on the idea of the future fiscal survival of the state and the nation as a kind of nationalistic, you know, race science framing of who the state is for and who the nation is for and who counts as part of the we and who does not count as part of the we. And your work has been so helpful for me just in sort of understanding not just things that have happened in my own lifetime, but things that, you know, like the eugenics movement, looking back at these moments where you see health systems really change and state spending really changed, influenced by a very small discrete set of choices that really kind of proved this, this point that you make in Golden Gulag, that this is about relationships that change over time, and that, yes, sometimes they can be persistently challenged by people like eugenicists, until you get something like the eugenics movement becoming dominant. And like the rise in mass sterilization, but you also -- like, there are ways that this works for good. This is a kind of -- that the struggle is neutral. It's not like always good or always bad.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 44:34

Exactly, exactly. I mean, one of the questions that your example, very, you know, rich example of eugenics, brings to mind is the question of how indeed, is organized abandonment sustained.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 44:55

Yeah.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 44:55

And the way it's sustained is through the use of organized violence and whether the violence is letting people die, compelling people to die, sterilization. I mean, the whole time you were talking, all I could think of was Oliver Wendell Holmes saying, "three generations of imbeciles [is] enough", right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:16

Yeah. Buck v. Bell is still the law of the land.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 45:20

Yes. That there is, in any round of organized abandonment, there must be something to sustain, secure. and as it were, direct it, you know, keep its effects from, let us say, appearing as intense homelessness in San Francisco say, or appearing in some other way. And, of course, what we see is that in these instances, what is unacceptable is need that politically will not be addressed, whether it's the need of somebody who must be actively dependent on somebody else for their life to proceed, because they can't do something -- my mother had a sister who was thus dependent, one of seven kids, or others whose need, you know, appears in other forms, whatever they are, whether they're, you know, the needs of kids who have different modes of learning, or, you know, little kids in school or old people who have various needs, because of diminished capacity, physical and mental overtime that comes with old age, and so forth. And the formality of, or excuse me, the formalization of organized violence that is most striking to all of us in the year 2022 is policing, and the military, and then, you know, the various forms of policing, including Border Patrol, and so forth. And, you know, we can kind of follow those lines and see that, you know, in this long period of organized abandonment, that has characterized the rise of the anti-state state, one of the most robust parts of the anti-state state to emerge has been the rising power of police departments.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 47:31

Yes.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 47:32

And while some small police departments blow away in the wind, they don't actually disappear policing functions, they're taken up by, say, the county sheriff of the area where the town might have lost its police, so the policing doesn't go away. And that, again, is on the one hand, one of the reasons that so many people when in despair, bring themselves to talk about the state, imagine the state is only the police. I mean, it's kind of understandable that people think this, you know, forgetting that public education is also the state and so on and so forth.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:15

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it's also, you know, it's one of those things that -- where I totally understand why people think of the state as only the police, because for so many different things, we even talk about the police and the carceral state as being, for example, like the common phrasing of like, oh, you know, some people can only get mental health care once they're in prison, which is absolutely not true. Like many people who were institutionalized for psychiatric labels during the asylum era, where they were institutionalized for 30, 40 years, never once receiving a single session of therapy, but being given Thorazine every day and handed knitting and sort of sent to be, you know, sedated in a corner, and that that was called therapeutic, the kind of things that we I think popularly talk about prison and jail as being this kind of thing that is, in some sense, like, offering functions of the state that used to be taken up by other institutions or various systems of organization. I mean, if we think about the kind of myth of like, oh, there's -- some people can only get health care in prison compared to the reality of what health in prison is, which is a sort of condition of complete extraction and forced debility that results in lots of disability and suffering that is, you know, a function of both the place, the space that they are in and the conditions of life that they're denied. Part of it is also this kind of aspect of taking the time away from someone, that the time and freedom are so connected. And this is something that I think really comes through in your work as well. And I wonder if we could talk a little bit about, you know, maybe the body as a kind of place and freedom as a kind of understanding of time or unfreedom as being like an extraction of time from people based on labels.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 50:25

Oh, totally, totally. This is exactly something that I've been rather obsessed with of late. You might have noticed I'm something of an obessive and I think you are too.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:36

[laughter] Definitely.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 50:37

So I'm really glad we met [laughter].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:39

Yes. Definitely a little obsessed, but that's okay.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 50:43

[laughter]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:44

It's a good look, you know?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 50:45

I think so too. I think so too. But here's the thing, when thinking about the body is as an aspect of geography, right, so it's not a decoration on something called geography, it's part of what geography is. So I am, you are, all of us are spacetime. I mean, that's what we are. It's not -- it's not even, you know, mystical or anything. It's just like a fact. And the older you get, the more you notice [laughter] that you are spacetime. And so then thinking about, for example, mass incarceration, and mass criminalization, even when people are not necessarily locked in cages, but people's ability to move around or stay put are interrupted by the fact of criminalization, then, you know, we can take a step back and say, so what is the political economy that kind of holds this form together? So earlier, I was saying, you know, organized abandonment sets so many people adrift, that something has got to, you know, step in and shape the direction of that drift, so that those who don't want to encounter that drift, have the option not to as they go through their luxurious lives in San Francisco, or New York, right.

And then others, you know, are compelled to have these encounters and the encounters become, you know, fraught, in a number of ways. Well, back to the body. So, if for each of us, we are a place, a kind of place, as my geography professor Neil Smith theorized a long time ago, then what what happens in mass incarceration or mass immobilization is that the economic activity surrounding that is dependent on the extraction of time from each person. So from each spacetime, right, that it's time that's extracted, whether or not the person who is unfree also is working to make spaghetti in the prison or sweeping the corridors or doing anything else. That it's the extraction of time that makes it possible for the money to come from the public purse, that then pays the guards and the secretaries and the locksmiths and the doctors and whoever else work in the facility, or for those who are, say, under house arrest wearing, you know, ankle manacles, that it's the extraction of their time, that makes it possible for the manufacturer of the manacle and others to, you know, be paid and to maintain, and indeed aggrandize the integrity of the institutions of which they are a part, right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:09

Yeah.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 54:10

This is what's happening. So it's time is becoming money, which is kind of corny if you've grown up in the United States, where, you know, people always say time is money, it actually is, but perhaps not in the way that whoever coined that phrase might have intended. And so it's getting time back is the necessity for having, you know, integrity, what do they call it -- bodily integrity, of any kind, whatever, you know, situation one might be in in terms of strength, well being, and so on. And it's the the extraction of time, just like it's the extraction of cobalt, or copper or lithium that goes into circulation to produce the possibility for people to make their livings and their livelihoods based on the unfreedom or marginally lower freedom of others.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:23

Hmm, yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, I think this is why organized abandonment has been so helpful in my own work that's also collaborative with my partner. But, you know, he and I, we just put out or it's about to come out our first book called Health Communism, where we talk about organized abandonment. And we also talk about Marta Russell's money model of disability, which looks at kind of the ways that as you're saying, the way that health is constructed, or disability is constructed, is very much through the kind of jobs that are created around it. It's almost, you know, one of those moments of sort of thinking about thinking through like what people really mean when they say that people are unproductive or a burden, right? That we tend to ascribe these population level phenomena like health -- health is not an individual trait. It's a society level construct that attempts to give language to chances for survival at the population level. And we think of it as a kind of intrinsic property, like a possession that people have or that people can buy themselves, right. But that ultimately, health is this sort of regime of scarcity, it is this understanding of it being a destination itself, that one should be orienting their life towards reaching, right, that as if this is like a kind of place that we can actually go to be healthy.

But the truth is that no one is healthy, because what health actually is, right, is something that encompasses way beyond the individual's own bodily state, and it encompasses, things like feeling psychically safe and secure, like having clean air and clean water, having housing, having housing that's not commodified so heavily that three quarters of your income goes to your housing, counts as I think, a social determinant of health. And, you know, this is why your work and Engels' work are such touchstones for us, because it really, you know, sort of thinking through the ways that health becomes kind of like a mode of production, I think, has been just very helpful to us not just in thinking through things like the COVID pandemic, but just disability writ large. And policies like Medicare for All, which, you know, are essentially financial reforms that are changing the payer of health care, but not changing the structure of health care, or the experience of health care, or what counts as health care, and sort of thinking about how so much of what we think of as health is really dictated by the range of things that for example, like insurance companies will pay for, and that ultimately, you know, instead we take these things that are structural components, and we think about them as they are sort of like individual traits that we have, that are sort of markers of difference between us, but that ultimately, this is more of a kind of impossibility, it's a state that no one can ever be. And we think of health often as things that it's not, like for someone to be healthy, they should not have a disease, they should not have cancer, they should be non disabled.

But, you know, and we joke that it's like the purest state of health is just to simply not exist, right, like to have no body, no meat sack, no space and no time. And that that's really the only kind of actual conceptualization of health under capitalism that is sort of true, right, is this kind of moment of negating all of the normal processes of the body like aging and capacity, debility, impairment, but we naturalize the fact that it's okay to sort of commodify these things in this way because this builds jobs and this grows the economy and this grows the intellectual capacity and the nationalistic pride of the United States that's so proud of its health, infrastructure and capacities. And ultimately, you know, we are not entitled to health, it's a commodity and it's a possession that we have to sort of engage in the marketplace of, but it's, I think -- I would be sort of curious to hear you talk about maybe how you see health and maybe how you also see sort of like health and aging relative to the fact that we think of -- or so many people think of prison as being for the health of society, this idea that like safety happens through extraction, elimination and slow death and through the removal of people who are sort of naturalized or destined via whatever labels have been applied to them through criminalization, through their social determinants of health or the circumstances of their life course, but, you know, are determined by forces that could be as simple as -- you know, we talk about them as simple choices, but ultimately, like these small choices can never be separated from political economy at the end of the day.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:00:34

Exactly, exactly. I have so many things I'd like to say. So let me let me see what I can squeeze in, I can squeeze in, and I can't wait to read your book, by the way.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:00:44

Oh, thank you.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:00:44

I'm so excited about it. So why don't I start there and think a little bit out loud, you know, kind of riffing here, on health communism and what that has to do with abolition. For many people, abolition seems to be this kind of narrowly directed thing that proposes to knock down all the prisons and jails or at least open the doors, the gates, and that that's it, that is the entire ambition of abolition, which is absurd.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01:24

Yeah [laughter].

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:01:25

And if we think differently, think about what the entire constellation of relations and possibilities are, that envelop any individual, who eventually gets plucked out of their life and sent into prison, then when abolition is about is changing everything. And that means all of that constellation of relations of human-environment relations. And that's when people say, oh, well, you're just unrealistic. And it's like, you know, they -- so ending slavery was unrealistic. And there's so many things that are unrealistic, and we still try to do so. So let's take an example of many examples to kind of put together some of the things you were talking about with this question of the carceral. And that is the the question of disability. So not only is it untrue, as you pointed out, that people who are sent to prison suddenly have, you know, miraculously excellent health care that they didn't have in the free world, or, you know, miraculously excellent diets that they didn't have in the free world, although that's never not altogether untrue. But pretty much that's not the case. It's also true, that many, many, many people in prison suffer from one or more disabilities, that are part of one of the forces that push them on the path to prison in the first place. So it's, you know, completely connected to what you're saying about disability, about people having or not having a right to life, being considered actually life and the regime of scarcity associated with disability. So one example for people in prison is that the rate of suffering from asthma is incredibly high. Like it's really high, it's completely higher than in the US in general. And while we know that about people who are in prison, we also know that in the US among those who suffer from asthma tend more likely than not to be poor people, urban and rural, high degrees of childhood asthma suffering, that becomes fatal, even though for somebody with good health insurance and protection from certain ambient toxins, asthma is never fatal, right. So all of these things are true. So what do we have here that we're looking at? We're looking at the fact that prison or certain configurations of healthcare, have become again in political discourse over time, natural, necessary and inevitable, that this is how things must go, rather than are unnatural, unnecessary, and certainly if we organize things differently, which is possible, would not be inevitable. So then to be an abolitionist means to fight for housing in which for example, and this is not exclusive, asthma is not exacerbated by the presence of vermin feces, or the use of pesticides, to control vermin, both of which make asthma worse, or that to fight against prison means to fight for clean water, because of all of the debilitation -- is that a word [laughter] -- that unclean water, you know, puts into people. All of these things are part of what abolition is. Abolition is in terms of a perhaps known reformist reform to fight for free, universal, non exclusionary health care for everybody, even in the more narrow definition of what health care is in the moment, which is, can you go to the hospital, get treated and go home. That's only part of it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:54

Right. Or if you get COVID, how quickly are you going to get to the hospital, you know, or to the doctor, which I think is so important to consider now when we think about how COVID deaths are naturalized to someone's pre-existing conditions, when it's so determined on, you know, whether or not you're afraid of going to the doctor and how long it takes you to get care. Yeah.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:06:13

Exactly. Or, I mean, here's another example. This is another way of thinking, abolition, you know, writ kind of large, which is to say writ large enough that people who have interest in commitments to do a variety of things can get busy in those things, and thereby become abolitionists, right? So here's an example. So if you're fighting for decent housing, whether or not you see it, you're fighting for abolition. And there are ways that you know, people who have been doing incredible work, self-organized homeless people and others, joining forces with people who are trying to prevent un-housing, prevent people who are currently housed from becoming un-housed, you know, can join forces. But another example is this. Throughout the rural United States, the disappearance of inpatient health care facilities is astonishing. They're just gone. They don't exist anymore. So we could take like one example, let's go to rural South Dakota, rural South Dakota, there are virtually no inpatient health care facilities, one. Two, there are people, indigenous people who have been fighting to maintain the integrity of their reservations or have been fighting against treaty abuse in South Dakota for many years. Three, there are people who are part of the water protectors movement, who are trying to ensure that poisonous, global warming producing products do not ruin one of the major watersheds, freshwater watersheds of the world, of the entire planet. Four, in South Dakota, we have not one but two examples of how capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism drops huge burdens on households and individuals and siphons resources to those who already have the most. So one is the usury laws of South Dakota, which produced the 20 or 25% credit card that many people use today in order to buy their groceries or get health care, because they don't have enough in wages and salaries to do that. So that's one example. Or the other example also, South Dakota, is it has become a major offshore money hiding place like the Cayman Islands. It's like number two offshore money hiding places in the world, is the United States, and number one in the United States is South Dakota. So all of those things are true in one state.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:09:11

Right.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:09:11

Right, in one state. So we can see how a struggle over access to rural inpatient health care also is necessarily a struggle over, you know, control of the political economy of the state of South Dakota, which is also a struggle over the fight against -- well, the fight for land back to cut to the chase, and so forth. They're all connected. As a result of which I actually hesitate to label myself a carceral geographer. I mean, I know that that's like, what I figured out over time, was carceral geography but I don't think I am. And I mean, I like to think maybe a liberation geographer or communist geographer, something like that.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10:01

Yeah. I love that. I really appreciate you sitting down with me today to talk through everything, Ruthie. This has been absolutely wonderful. And thank you so much for your time. Thank you, really.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:10:13

Thank you. I really enjoyed talking with you. And you know, if I had another hour, it would be yours. [laughter]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10:18

I know, I wish we could just keep going. But we'll have to have you back. Anytime you want to come on, Death Panel is more than welcome to have you. We'd love it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:10:22

That would be great. And in fact, one thing we didn't talk about, which I would love to talk about in some future conversation, is fiscal federalism and devolution because it's also something I think is a pretty big deal. And there are some contradictions arising these days that people are thinking about in pretty interesting ways that we might just try to talk through.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10:53

Well, I think that is the perfect place to leave it for today. Ruthie, thank you so much for joining us. Again, if you want to check out Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation that just came out in May from Verso Books, highly recommend. Again, that brings together three decades of her writing into one big, big book. It's great to have it all together in one volume.

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As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)