Punishment

Alessandro De Giorgi

Since the early 1980s, global processes of capitalist transformation across Western societies have revolutionized both the field of production and the com- plex of governmental institutions, practices, and technologies that, in the after- math of World War II, had consolidated into the Keynesian welfare state (Jessop, 1996, 2016; Mishra, 2014). The neoliberal paradigm of governance that has come to dominate Western societies through the last quarter of the twentieth century has resulted in a drastic redistribution of social wealth toward the top of the racial and class hierarchy, a vertical increase in economic inequalities, an acute precarization of work within increasingly segmented labor markets, a mas- sive attack on workers’ rights, and a systematic dismantling of the social safety net that had been instituted in the wake of the Keynesian compromise between capital and labor (Bonefeld, 2017; Harvey, 2005; Schram, 2015). In this sense, the neoliberal revolution has involved an organized assault against the economic relevance and political centrality of industrial labor – and, specifically in the USA, against the radical struggles for racial justice that had emerged from civil rights movement (Camp, 2016; Flamm, 2005; Parenti, 1999: 3–44).