Aysegul Ergul

"Over the past three decades, the industrialized world has witnessed four resilient social trends: (1) the consistent erosion of union-membership; (2) an increase in income polarization and inequality; (3) a dramatic resurgence in popular protest; and (4) a steady rise in public and private policing employment. In this paper, we examine the  relationship between these trends by theorizing and operationalizing the notion of the “industrial reserve army” and a series of relate tenets in order to conduct an international (N=45), empirical test of a nascent Marxian model of policing. By treating total policing employment as an empirical barometer of bourgeois insecurity we find that this insecurity is conditioned by two elements of Marxian political economy: (1) relative deprivation (income inequality) and (2) the rise of an industrial reserve army (manufacturing employment and unemployment). Second, while surplus value and labour militancy (strikes and lockouts per 100,000 population) rise along with union membership, the presence of higher rates of unionization appears to ameliorate the need for more policing in all but post-USSR countries. While unions assist in checking the immiseration of workers through labour actions, union membership is nonetheless inversely correlated to policing employment, giving credence to the Marxian idea that while unions help mitigate against the exploitation workers, they also act as “lieutenants of capital,” performing an essential policing function under capitalism."

In this paper we operationalize and empirically test six core tenets of pacification theory derived from Marxian political economy using time series data for the USA from 1972-2009. Our analysis confirms that rising inequality is statistically significantly correlated to increased public and private policing over time and that increased public and private policing is also statistically significantly correlated to increased industrial exploitation as measured through “surplus-value”. While unionization correlates to strikes and lock-outs which suggests that unions have an important mobilizing role for the industrial reserve army, unionization also inversely correlates to total policing employment. As union membership decreases, policing employment increases, which gives credence to the notion that unions may also act as policing agents for capital. We conclude that when these findings are coupled with our previous international research of 45 countries for the snapshot year of 2004 (Rigakos and Ergul 2011) that produced almost identical results, there appears to be significant empirical support for pacification theory. The relationships we have discovered recur both across time and international contexts despite the fact that variations in legal norms and institutional histories of policing are varied and complex.