The Anti-State State w/ Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore

Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore about their concept of “the anti-state state,” the process of the state’s transition from supporting social welfare to policing its provision, and why abolition is the only way.

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

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Beatrice Adler-Bolton:

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I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and I'm honored today to be joined by my two guests, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, to talk about an important idea in their work called the "anti-state state." Ruthie is a professor of geography, American studies and Africana studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is co-founder of several organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She is the author of the book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, and three decades of her work is gathered in the book Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation.

Ruthie, welcome to the Death Panel. It is so great to have you back on the show.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:40

It's great to be back. Thank you, Beatrice.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:43

And Craig is an organizer and independent researcher. He is a co-founder of the California Prison Moratorium Project, and has been active with Californians United for a Responsible Budget, the No New Jails Coalition, and LA Prison Times.

He previously served as an editor at Prison Focus, and his publications include numerous essays and the graphic novel, Prison Town: Paying the Price, co-written with Kevin Pyle. Craig is a member of the community advisory board of Critical Resistance and was awarded the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Environmental Justice Activism in 2003. Several essays in Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation are also co-authored by Craig. Craig, welcome to the Death Panel. It's so great to finally have you on the show.

Craig Gilmore 2:23

It's a thrill to be here. Thank you.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:25

Thank you both so much for being here. It's an understatement to say that your work has shaped how so many of us think about state power, crisis and governance as material and ideological mediums that organize life and death.

And I'm really, really grateful to have the chance to talk through this idea together today. Now, as I mentioned at the top, we're centering our discussion around this idea, which runs through both of your work, what you've called the anti-state state, and the network of anti-state state actors that animate it.

Now, at first blush, it's a formulation that might sound contradictory, anti-state state, but it actually names an important iteration of the state that is all around us right now to the point that many people are a kind of fish in water, oblivious to the obviousness of this phenomenon.

The anti-state state is a political formation in which the state expands and intensifies its coercive, punitive and extractive capacities through the governing language and rhetoric of anti-government, ending big government, cutting spending, austerity, crisis action, etc., while simultaneously divesting from social and collective provisioning. So rather than actually retreating or shrinking the government, the state is actually just reorganizing its capacities.

This idea I'm sure will strike listeners as especially legible in the current conjuncture. We're recording this amid escalating ICE operations in the Twin Cities, following ICE invasions of Chicago and Los Angeles last year. And of course, all of this is downstream of the One Big Beautiful Bill budget passed in July, which appropriated $170 billion to ICE.

ICE's new budget is larger than the combined budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshal Service and the Bureau of Prisons. And we see it in all levels of governance right now. The second Trump administration has dressed everything that they do in the language of efficiency, austerity, frugal mindedness and towards the elimination of so-called waste, fraud and abuse.

And specifically, I think it is important to talk about this right now, because the idea of the anti-state state helps us get at the answers to three very important framing questions that you name in a 2011 talk that you gave, Ruthie, which is in Abolition Geography. It's the first essay called, "What Is to Be Done?" And you talk about studying the past to understand the present and revising the present based on, as you put it, new senses of the past. And you say that we must ask three important questions: Why this? Why this here? Why this here and now?

And frankly, being here in Minneapolis personally, as ICE descends on us, kidnapping our neighbors, holding indigenous folks hostage, to demand that tribal nations sign agreements with ICE allowing enforcement on their sovereign territory, as ICE is shooting people in the street, murdering them, shooting into homes, throwing tear gas into cars full of children, gassing whole neighborhoods, taking people out of their cars, leaving the empty car rolling down the street, you know, all this spectacular, heavy-handed violence is fueled by so much fiscal muscle, so much state capacity, so much funding, while they send fraud investigators to chase a fantasy of rooting out corruption and waste in preschools that receive federal funding.

These three questions -- Why this? Why this here? And why this here now? -- are just constantly top of mind for us right now, because, as you go on to say a little while later in that talk, Ruthie, "We make history, but not under conditions of our choosing."

So this is where the anti-state state becomes such a useful lens. It helps explain so many of the contradictions of our current moment. Why calls for small government coexist so seamlessly with massive police budgets, why austerity for social welfare sits so comfortably alongside endless funding for carcerality? Why the state appears both absent and omnipresent depending on where you're standing and who you are. And crucially, I think it also helps us understand how this formation secures legitimacy, not only through force, but also through popular attachment and naturalization, through racialized narratives of danger, disorder and appeals to "public safety," that run cover for organized abandonment.

So that's all to say that today, what we'd like to do in this conversation is to clarify what the anti-state state is, to discuss how it came into being, how it's operating right now, and what it demands of abolitionist politics in the immediate and the long term. We want to make this legible for listeners who are encountering the concept for the first time, or for people who have thought about this for a really long time, you know, without diluting the complexity.

And I want to think with you too about what it means to organize, plan and build in the shadow of a state that governs by disavowing governance. But before I continue on to the first question, where we're going to talk about what the anti-state state is, I just wanted to leave it open for a moment in case either of you wanted to jump in and respond, or build off of, or even correct anything I've thrown out. Just to lay out sort of your top line thoughts of what you want to make sure listeners are hearing right here at the beginning.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 7:15

I think that was a fantastic introduction to ideas that we have really wrestled with a lot over the years, and as we have put our heads together over the years to write some things, but mostly put our heads together in our organizing lives in California and elsewhere, we continually would encounter really profound misunderstandings, I think, is the best way to put it, about what was going on.

So one of the things that you said in one of the questions you sent to us, Beatrice, was, how does the anti-state state differ from the state in retreat, as many people like to say, or privatization, as many people insist on, or neoliberalism, that catch-all term that everyone turns to, to try to understand things.

So for us, and it sounds like for you, which is very exciting, the ant-state state gives us a way to show what abolition can see. The anti-state state offers us the opportunity to think symbolically, conceptually and materially, about what is going on. You talked a little bit about legitimacy. There is certainly an entire range of symbolic attributes to what becomes accepted as legitimate.

Conceptually, the notion that somehow state actors who have seized or retained state power in the name of undoing those very capacities they sought to control, then gives us a way to turn our attention toward the material outcome of these struggles. And the outcome is not only, as you lay out so forcefully, that the ICE budget is now enormous, that if we add together all of the policing and organized violence, other than the military budgets in the United States, we will see that policing adds up to a greater sum than most of the militaries on the planet, right, than most of the militaries on the planet. And abolition then gives us the opportunity to think case by case.

So in Minneapolis, in Washington, DC, in Cape Town, South Africa, in Nairobi, in San Paulo and Rio, what kinds of symbolic, conceptual and material connections enable the anti-state state to achieve and exercise the capacities for violence that produce its power, but also to give us some notions about where to interrupt that. And as long as we could go about the dire, I think we also always have to return to what is to be done.

When we think through the lens of the anti-state state, which is to say when we think as abolitionists about the various ways that state capacity produces vulnerability to premature death, one of those outcomes is austerity, as you described so beautifully in your introduction. Now austerity, of course, is not exclusively the product of state actors. That austerity is a feature of contemporary capitalism, as profitability reigns supreme over all other possible uses for value as it circulates. There was a really great -- I think it was a neon sign that some enterprising, probably activists in -- somewhere in the Midwest put over a freeway that said "Austerity is class war," and it is. If anything is class war, austerity is class war.

That said, if, as we learned from Stuart Hall, who is one of our great references in everything we think about, if race is the modality through which class is lived, then criminalization is a front in that class war. So it's not an either/or: austerity class war or criminalization class war. This is part of an entire war that is happening on many fronts in the US and around the world.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:58

I really am so grateful also for all of the ways that you all point to Stuart Hall's work. It's continually, I think, something that I've been returning to a lot in this moment. For listeners who might be encountering the term, the anti-state state, for the first time, I want to make sure that we're starting at the beginning for people, even though they live inside of its consequences every day, could you both begin by explaining what you mean by the anti-state state?

I know I kind of gave a brief overview and talked about why it's useful, but you know, as you said, this framework is an important corrective that steps in for a lot of misunderstanding, and that's why I think it's so useful and worth focusing an entire episode on. So can you talk a little bit about, again, what you mean by the anti-state state, what the framework makes visible, and what the context was that made it feel necessary to name, and how this concept can help people move beyond the idea that we're looking at a failed state, rather than a state that's reorganizing itself?

Because I think that there's a kind of shift from like passive to active that this really importantly inspires in people when we're thinking about what is happening and what are we living through? What are we organizing against? What are we trying to theorize against? What are we trying to protect each other against? And what do we need to build also? Like, the anti-state state as an intervention takes us out of that passive perspective and puts us back into a perspective of saying like, well, actually, what is this process of reorganization accomplishing?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 14:37

We developed the concept, anti-state state, to give ourselves and our comrades the opportunity to think about precisely what you just said, Beatrice, what is this state accomplishing, and how and to what extent are these accomplishments deliberate, if not inevitable, how they gather momentum over time, so that various agencies of the state imitate rather than compete with other agencies of the state in order to secure their own reproducibility. Now that was a little abstract. Let me make this very clear.

As the agencies of imprisonment and all of the related agencies that go into being able to hold someone against their will, for part or all of their lives, grew during the past several decades, the competition within particular states -- so whether we're talking about the state of California, the federal state of the United States, the county of Los Angeles, the city of Los Angeles, or Minneapolis, or -- you get my drift -- that with the competition of agencies within any particular state intensified, because, as you said earlier, the levels of expenditure and support for programs that secure wellbeing, whether health, education, art, parks, transportation, hospitals, clean water, clean air, as those capacities suffered cut after cut after cut, police and prisons generally grew. And this is provable.

One thing that happened within many states is that agencies devoted to some kind of wellbeing, education for example, health for example, housing for example, began, in part, to imitate the forces of organized violence, prisons, policing and presented themselves to those who make budgetary decisions as participating in a necessary transition from supporting social welfare to policing its provision. We see this so many times in so many places. In fact, I think in Abolition Geography, I point out that the US Department of Education eventually acquired its own SWAT team. Now think about that.

That is a very strong, perhaps feels like over the top example of what I'm talking about in general. So policing public housing, excluding certain kinds of people from the ability to have shelter and make their lives there, excluding people from jobs, and the policing that goes with that, and so on and so forth, are all part of what I'm talking about. These tendencies, in the aggregate, helped to build and consolidate what we call the anti-state state.

And again, to say for maybe the third time, and we'll probably say more times during our conversation today, the anti-state state bears that name in our work because those who have state power, whether elected officials or appointed officials, whether they're newcomers to government or long-time participants in government who are trying to hold on to the power that they had, makes no difference.

The point is that they have repeatedly normalized, both symbolically and conceptually, the notion that government should become smaller while presiding over its aggrandizement, mostly -- mostly in the forces of organized violence, which is to say, police, prisons, detention, courts and so forth. So these are ways for us to think together about how the anti-state state has grown into what it is today.

Craig Gilmore 19:49

Beatrice, I would say maybe one quick thing about the context out of which the idea came. In response to the capitalist crisis of the 70s, both Toni Negri and Stuart Hall wrote work which named the end of the post-war planner state or welfare state, and named the creation of a new state formation.

And Ruthie and I read those essays in the 80s and were surprised that they seemed not to be in more general circulation. That is to say, people were aware there had been a crisis in capitalism, but had not taken seriously how the state had reformulated under Reagan and Thatcher in particular, to the point that by the time the anti-state state finds its way into print, people were saying things like, states don't matter anymore. The state is fading away. Corporations are going to run the world directly without state interference, which ignored both what states were doing to subsidize corporations and their owners, but also ignoring the massive increase in repressive state apparatus.

And that willful ignorance, I think, is still visible across the English speaking left, that any number of our so-called comrades think of policing and prisons as unimportant or subsidiary, but not as important parts of what the capitalist state is today. And I think that's the sort of context out of which we felt compelled to say the state still matters, and this is how it's working. And you all who have -- are claiming the state is going away, have kind of fallen for the anti-state state magic show.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:54

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this occurs also in discussion around healthcare provisioning, where you have this framing that a lot of people -- maybe they lean on because it sounds right at first, or it seems kind of catchy as an idea, where they're like, oh well, you know, we're seeing this moment, right, of the massive incursion into healthcare provisioning by private equity trying to solve problems of healthcare affordability with price transparency. Meanwhile, you have this landscape of "access," that is explicitly designed as a marketplace, as if the marketplace format will solve the access problem. You hear people say, like, oh, well, healthcare is broken.

Or, the state has stopped funding healthcare, right? Or, this is -- prisons and policing are a sign of a rot within the state, as if it's a kind of growth on the state, or like a cancerous entity, and not a specific and deliberate intentional reformation of capacities around, for example, in the context of healthcare, injecting private firms with public money, right? Because even health insurance companies receive such incredible amounts of public money. Or in the case of prisons and policing, it's not an accident. We didn't fall into the massive scale of incarceration that we understand as kind of a baseline of daily life today, like that didn't happen as an accident. I think there's a framing that people default to where they -- they act like it wasn't an intentional reorganization.

And I think the anti-state state, as a framing, really importantly puts a stop to that kind of rose-tinted look at how we got where we are. Which I think the biggest problem with that kind of framing that, again, naturalizes or casualizes this reorganization of the state into the formation that we live in now, is not that it's wrong, per se, even though that's also important -- accuracy is important -- but it's more that it makes it seem like this was just how it was going to be, or that this is a kind of phenomenon that was not intentional, that was not -- I don't like to use the word designed, because I think that's kind of over-utilized in these framings too, where you're like, this isn't by accident, this is by design.

But, you know, there's a kind of, like, treating this as if we've just slipped down a hill and landed in this valley of carcerality by accident, right? Versus a deliberate like, we are going to take this path. This is going to be the way that we're going to grow the state. This is going to be the way that we're going to grow wealth and GDP, and that these are the capacities that we're going to invest in, both in terms of public money, but also in terms of public-private contracts, and the kinds of energies and ways that we're provisioning for needs, or just provisioning our time and energy as a society, right? Like all of these ways that we've intentionally gone down this road in a state-building way, right? Like it's not that the state has withered away and carcerality has sprung up in its place, right? It's that the state has built itself through increasing its capacity to levy harm, through increasing its capacity for organized abandonment, for increasing its capacity to spur "innovation" in the healthcare sector through contract games and public-private partnerships.

And I think a great example of that is, you know, right now we're facing this moment of transition within Medicaid, where for the first time, we're going to see work requirements broadly implemented across Medicaid, which some people have called Welfare for Deloitte, right? Because this is going to require a massive amount of investment in surveillance infrastructure and the kind of processing infrastructure to both put people through redeterminations, create systems for them to report on their work, and that these are things that actually the state Medicaid departments can't do. They're going to have to hire out contracts. So it's a kind of make work program for management consulting firms who are going to step in and say, oh, we can -- we can make you a software, which won't work, or will break, you know? We can make you a software to manage this process, right?

And when we think about what's going on in terms of the imposition of work requirements, right, is at the top line, you have the rhetoric of, there are all these people getting Medicaid, getting this entitlement, who do not deserve it, who are frauding -- fraudsters, cheats, layabouts, scroungers, and we will save money by making sure that those people don't get benefits. Meanwhile, there is massive investment that is going to be going into the implementation of these work requirements, the surveillance, the maintenance of work requirements, that all of this is going to go into, again, private firms that can step in to manage the capacities that the state allegedly cannot manage on its own, right? And so that people kind of treat that as like an accident, like, oops.

They are just giving all this money to Deloitte. Do they realize that? And it's like, well, this is the point of reorganizing part of the capacity of Medicaid and the provisioning of Medicaid to go less towards social provisioning and more towards surveillance and management and the guard duty jobs that you all both reference in terms of anti-state state actors, where it's not just about the overt positions of surveillance, or the overt carceral managers, right, but it's also about the creation of a whole category of worker that is the guard duty job, right? Whether that's a manager whose job is to ensure that people are not stealing company time, right, or it's someone whose job is to surveil people's reporting on their own work habits, right, in order for them to continue to receive medical benefits.

And so, we're in this position right now where this precision isn't just about being didactic, but it's about actually, how do we get to the point where we can really understand what we're looking at? Because if it's misunderstood what we're up against, then it's really easy to, I think, approach it in absolutely the wrong way. Because, I mean, if we think about where this conversation is sitting right now, I think it really sits squarely within the entire broader project of Death Panel. We've been trying to narrate how contemporary governance really produces vulnerability to premature death through healthcare, environmental exposure, work conditions, housing precarity, structural violence, carcerality, while at the same time, it's producing this vulnerability and insisting that these outcomes are accidental, unavoidable, incidental, people's own faults, right?

That it's not this structural production. And in our recent episode, Health Fascism and the Anti-State State, we obviously talked about this idea of both of yours. And we argued that what might look like fragmentation, or paradox, or incongruity, or dissonance, or chaos within federal institutions tasked with the governance of health: Health and Human Services, HHS, under RFK Jr, or CMS under Dr. Oz, FDA under Bhattacharya, that what we're actually looking at is a coherent political project, right?

It's not chaos. It's understood as a coherent political project in which we're looking at governing through a narrative of crisis and a narrative of demanding fiscal responsibility and performing fiscal responsibility, which manages surplus populations through punishment, disavows responsibility for negative social determinants of health that it creates, while also, again, claiming that those who do not meet its expectations of healthy have only themselves to blame and only carceral solutions will be sufficient for dealing with those populations.

And we're living through this moment that I think is really defined by these overlapping crises which are so primary in everyone's life: resurgent authoritarianism, escalating militarization, permanent war, climate catastrophe, collapse of public infrastructure. And again, this increasingly punitive culture beyond the carceral core of our society.

And at the same time, you have the rise of anti-state rhetoric, attacks on big government, social spending, public responsibility, becoming louder and louder and more aggressive, even as police budgets, border regimes, surveillance infrastructure, continue to grow and expand the state and state capacity.

So I guess what I'm saying is, can we talk about how the concept of the anti-state state, and I know, Ruthie, you touched on this briefly earlier, but just to return to this for a second, how does the concept of the anti-state state help us really read this present conjuncture with greater clarity, and what does it reveal, I think, about why calls for less government can coexist so seamlessly with demands for more punishment, more policing, more coercion, more compliance, and how this framework can help listeners also resist the confusion and mystification that I think really dominate the political discourse right now.

Because I think for a lot of people whose analytic is primarily one of neoliberalization and privatization as being these moda operandi, the sort of impetus for state formation and capacity building and reformation, it doesn't totally allow someone who's looking through that lens to really understand what we're looking at here with the anti-state state.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 31:18

Beatrice, I think you already eloquently laid out what this concept helps us to think about. But let me revisit an example that you gave, and that is the current reconfiguration of Medicaid, because the elements that you pointed toward perfectly illustrate what it is we're talking about.

So we have first the fact that Medicaid happens, which is to say, the agencies -- the specific agencies responsible for delivering that particular strand of healthcare to people who need it are dispersed around the United States for all kinds of reasons, which we could talk about in another episode. Secondly, the insistence that somehow this program is one that is by definition abused by its beneficiaries, requires an enormous outlay of resources in order to reduce that kind of abuse.

Now, I want to say something about the symbolic here, right now. One of the words that's so frequently repeated, that carries all kinds of symbolic weight of wrongful beneficiary is the word entitlement. Entitlement. And I think all of us abolitionists should mindfully refuse to accept entitlement as a negative concept, and instead remind ourselves that the reason that entitlements under capitalist welfare states exist is to meet the entire need of a particular kind of beneficiary, whether the beneficiary is somebody in need of health care or the beneficiary is somebody in need of a grant to go to college. The Pell Grant program is also an entitlement program. Entitlement is a good thing, not a bad thing.

But in the dominant discourse today, entitlement's taken as bad, and I guess it's been bad ever since Clarence Thomas condemned his sister, who took care of their mother, as somebody who is entitled. So the anti-state state enables us -- in fact, it requires us -- to use all of our wits to look through the veils of misdirection, the symbolic veils that say entitlement and make people think bad, the conceptual veils that say, oh, the problem is excess expenditure, so the solution is bringing in more management, which is the structure of organization of every large scale institution in the United States. More management, less direct provision of whatever it is the people are there directly to provide, whether it's emergency rooms, schools, universities or even for-profit corporations.

And then finally, to think about how the ways public and private work together, again, is not an indication of a shrinking, much less a failing state, as a way for certain fragments of the professional managerial class in the institutions that they work for, corporations like Deloitte, figure out how to turn the enormous US Treasury into a spigot for them to run resources into their accounts. So all of these things are happening.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:43

I love you describing it as a spigot, Ruthie. I couldn't help but giggle. And I think that's why I'm so grateful for this conversation, because I think a crucial move in your work in this analysis is shifting us away from what the state claims to be doing, and taking that at face value, and looking instead toward what it's materially capable of doing, what capacities it's growing, what capacities it's shrinking, how it mobilizes land, labor, capital, violence, the spigot of the Treasury.

Because, I think, there's a way to look at shifts in governance through top-line rhetoric, and think about that in terms of accountability, right? They said they're doing this, but they actually accomplished that. They said they wanted to do this, but they're actually doing that.

And I think that there's a real limitation to simply citing and highlighting hypocrisy, because I don't think it -- it is actually hypocrisy. As you said, the language of entitlements, I think we absolutely need to embrace it as a positive, because it's, well, when they say they're going after entitlements, right, and that they're trying to reduce waste, fraud and abuse and reduce the budget through disciplining the Medicaid population, what they are saying straight out is that they will be kicking people off of their benefits in order to reduce that overhead, while funneling money into corporations like Deloitte. That is what they're saying explicitly.

It's not hypocrisy, right? It is -- the state is claiming that it is increasing its material capacity for creating private contracts, for creating roles that have to manage that private contract, for doing that on the backs of people who are going to be denied benefits through divesting from the actual provisioning of care, from what is called the health coverage of last resort, the most important bottom rung of the safety net In the United States, which is changing small things like Medicaid look-back windows for covering care before you were actually eligible, right?

And these are all things that were really high on the agenda of the first Trump administration, which they immediately got to work on upon coming back in office. And this is about shifting the material capacity of the state, and reforming the state around different types of provisioning for different types of people, provisioning for a different class of person, and doing that through direct extraction from provisioning via "entitlement programs," which, if we think about some of the structure of Medicaid itself, right, when you have the passage of Medicaid and Medicare, there's a lot of talk that goes into Medicare, right? There's a valorization of Medicare. We're taking care of people who "have worked and paid into the system their whole life," you know, people who have really earned it. There's barely any mention of Medicaid. If you look at Lyndon Johnson's speech when he's celebrating the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, Medicaid is mentioned for like a half a sentence, and the whole rest of the speech is about Medicare.

And there really wasn't a ton of thought put into exactly what the point of Medicaid was, right? What was the point of this program? What were we actually trying to provision? Are we trying to make sure that people have healthcare? Are we trying to put a lid on the dissent that arises and bubbles up when so many poor people don't have healthcare? Or are we trying to subsidize low wage employers, right? Are we trying to make sure that low wage employers aren't vulnerable to union power demanding that they provide benefits to their workers, right? And so Medicaid has always been this kind of point of contention around what is this material capacity actually supposed to be for?

And what we're seeing right now is actually more of a concretization of what Medicaid is supposed to be for than we are seeing a shift in Medicaid policy, right? They're attempting to assert in a kind of final way, here's what we're finally saying is the point of Medicaid, right? It's not about provisioning for people who need it. It's about subsidizing low wage employers, and it's about subsidizing management consultants, right? It's about creating these guard duty jobs, right? And so this, again, is about taking us from looking at just ideology and what people say they're doing, to what is the actual material capacity that we're looking at? What is the state actually doing.

And so I wonder if we could talk a little bit about state capacity, and why looking at state capacity actually matters more than rhetoric, or more than scale even, and how the strengthening of coercion and punishment, while hollowing out of care and undermining of social reproduction, is this core dynamic that the anti-state state, as a formation, and anti-state state actors are really concerned with doing and are very overt about saying that that's what they're doing. This, I think, helps us explain the shift in the growth of prisons, policing, militarized governance, alongside the erosion of housing, healthcare, education and social reproduction as a dual dynamic, not as a bunch of bad things that are all happening simultaneously, but as one shift.

And that's why I think this is also really important, because it ties in prisons, policing, carcerality, into the broader picture, which as you were saying, Craig, so many people still treat carcerality as a kind of ancillary topic, right, or as not maybe the main focus, instead of seeing it really as central to the dynamic of every type of organizing and every type of struggle that anyone is engaged in, because it is centrally the focus of the state, right.

And if you're organizing in your workplace, right, you are also organizing against the carceral state, right. You are organizing against the anti-state state's provisioning away from, for example, investing its capacities in workplace safety compliance and surveillance through OSHA and instead investing in ICE, border security, detention, militarized police, incarceration, carceral housing programs, carceral re-entry programs, right? So it's -- even if you're struggling in an area where you might think it's totally unrelated to the carceral state, I think the anti -state state helps us see how there is no possible way to struggle in a way that is unrelated to the carceral state.

Craig Gilmore 42:09

You know, Beatrice, with regard to the first part of your question about why capacity is more important than rhetoric, I mean, it's interesting to me that we even need to talk about that. The idea that -- the idea that listeners to this podcast don't always -- don't already come to statements of public officials, and especially elected public officials, with a good deal of skepticism, would be a little surprising.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:35

Well, I'd say, I think listeners do definitely see things the way they -- that we do, but I would say they probably are surrounded by other people in their life who don't see it that way.

Craig Gilmore 42:46

Yeah. But I mean, there's a -- for the past few years, James Baldwin has been the subject of over-memeing. I would say, you know, his memory is being memed. But one of the ones that pops up periodically is, "I don't believe what you say because I see what you do." And it strikes me that, you know, we've already covered a lot of that in the conversation today already, but looking at where the state is spending its resources, and how much of those resources it's spending makes the rhetoric that we're anti-state, we're trying to shrink the state, just completely unbelievable. So Trump, for example, the federal budget under Trump in his first term grew from around $4T to around $7T, and we're supposed to take this as an anti-state presidency? So that's my short answer to the first part of the question.

The relationship of the coercive state, the hollowing out of reproduction and various other social goods, is, on the one hand, fairly straightforward, that money is being taken from parts of the budget and from parts of the population and being channeled to the rich and to coercive forces which are going to extract more from the poor and protect the rich and their property. The public economics of that, I think, is pretty straightforward and pretty well understood. What's perhaps less understood, and a point that I learned from Ruthie, is that the state in setting those budget priorities is also renewing or reinforcing certain images of certain kinds of people who live under that state rule. And so we have people who are threats who didn't used to be threats, or who are bigger threats than they used to be. We have the undeserving poor. We have people who are perhaps not undeserving, but giving you full healthcare would be a luxury we can't afford.

We came back to the US during the debate under Obama's first term about universal healthcare and were shocked, having come from the poorest country in Western Europe and who had just expanded their universal healthcare with a whole bunch of new services, to find out that the richest country in the world could not afford universal healthcare. And in doing that, they make the people who are not receiving those benefits, they change their political status, or they reinforce their political status. They're undeserving, they're threats. They're people who don't -- we should not be spending this money on. And that, I think, is also tied to a concept which is crucial in a lot of Ruthie's recent work and in the work of other people like Vanessa Thompson, which is surplus populations, populations whose work in the productive economy is not sufficient for the state or the capitalist to care whether they're there or not.

And so Ruthie has pointed out, for example, that people in prison are not economically productive, but rather their being in prison allows the state to channel money through those prisons to the people who guard them, to the electric companies, to the people who build the prisons, etc., etc. So it's not that money doesn't pass through these surplus populations, but it's not the productive work of the surplus population that produces the wealth. No wealth is produced. It's simply a transfer of money.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:57

What you're saying right now also makes me think a lot of the work of Liat Ben-Moshe in her book, Decarcerating Disability, where she talks about the system of disability incarceration that was like the state hospitals, which there are many calls to bring these systems back, to bring back mass institutionalization and the total institution that Goffman names in his work. In creating these capacities, also you're creating a constituency, right, where you use the surplus population as this point of genesis where you pass capital through them, but you also create these constituencies that are then committed, that are reliant upon the sustainability of the carceral model, right? So one of the biggest barriers to organizing to close disability institutions throughout the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, for example, was guard unions who said, you're going to take away our good jobs.

Or sometimes parents who said, well, I'm in a position where, if I -- like I need to work, and if I can't have my child in this disability institution, right, like I can't go to work, right, because there's no other option for providing support for my child in home. I can't have them live in the community because there are no resources. It's either incarcerate my child or I don't work. And so you create these constituencies that are then -- you know, their material survival is contingent on the continuation of carcerality, and any prosperity that they can imagine in their lives, or for the lives of their children or future generations, becomes, again, also contingent on the expansion of carcerality, right?

And so you also create people whose whole lives revolve around carcerality, to the point that they will defend these things, regardless of how they feel about the situation morally, right? Their entire being then depends on carcerality and so you can really easily, I think, see how this works in some of the arguments that you'll hear from people around like, oh, well, we just need better police training, right? We just need better guard staffing ratios. We need more humane prisons, right? We need more modern prisons. We need the modern jail. And what that produces, right, is again, what people are calling for is, yes, let's continue to flow more money through the surplus population. Let's continue to treat the surplus class like a rock that we can squeeze for gold. That their lives only matter to us insofar as they bring a dollar amount per head, right?

And let's continue to actually increase that capacity, because my life will only be made better if we can increase the capital flow through the surplus population. And so these demands for better conditions, right, versus demands to free them all, to decarcerate, to empty institutions, to close prisons, to stop building, to end the carceral apparatus. Those would be materially against the best interest of all of these various constituencies that have then been built up through the flow of capital, through surplus populations.

Craig Gilmore 50:10

The one thing I would add to that, Beatrice, is that in some cases, in the US, I think we have situations in which some of those constituencies have become so powerful that although they are technically dependent on public funds flowing into their pockets, people like sheriffs and people like police unions have an enormous amount of power now over where that money goes, how it's collected, so on and so forth. And so there's really a question of, who's dependent on whom these days, with the incredible power -- I think, I read Jessica Pishko's book last year, and it was just a chilling account of the sort of autonomy that sheriffs have across the United States.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 50:59

I want to jump in on a point that arises from your discussion of Liat's work and the point that Craig was just making, and that is that what we encounter through these processes is precisely what went to inform my long, but I still stand by it, definition of racism, which is to say that racism is the state sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death, which is to say, racism doesn't come after that.

Racism is in those processes, and those processes then produce a kind of common sense, which is exactly what you were discussing, that makes it almost impossible for people to see that another world is possible already with the materials and resources that already exist. That it's not a matter of well, in 50 years, the world could be different.

The world could be different already. It could be different already. So I wanted to add that at this moment, because these capacities that we've been talking about as they exist throughout so many different agencies of the state, including especially the prisons and sheriffs and policing and so forth, also arise and consolidate in the very agencies that seem at first glance to be the agencies for well-being, but which Liat Ben-Moshe and others show in excruciating detail are quite the opposite of what they purport to be.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 53:12

Absolutely. And I think -- you know, I don't think it's an overly long definition at all. I think it's important and precise. And what this makes me think of is actually kind of the next question on our list of things we wanted to discuss, which is to engage with the concept of crisis, right? Because so much of what we're talking about is initiated using the rhetoric of crisis as a driving force, right?

We're seeing this right now especially throughout all the things that we've discussed relative to the second Trump administration, whether that's the increase in ICE funding being driven by the narrative of a "border crisis," or a crisis of migration, the Medicaid changes being driven by a narrative of a crisis of fraud, even the investigations into preschools in the Twin Cities, which are driven by a public-private narrative of fraud and waste and abuse.

All of these kinds of moments, whether we're talking about the grand narrative of there being a big generational fiscal cliff that we're looking at with the deficit, right, and debt, and ways that the state is carrying debt, the narrative of we are carrying debt now that are going to be on the burden of the shoulders of your children and future generations, or the narrative around student debt, where we can't cancel student debt, because that would inject money into people who don't need it, right? That this crisis that exists around debt is not a crisis, right? So you have this dual framing of like, what is a crisis, what demands action, and what isn't a crisis, what demands continuation. And in your analysis, crisis is not treated as a series of temporary ruptures, right?

You both talk about it as a kind of permanent state, a condition through which the anti-state state governs, right? You have fiscal emergencies, moral panics, alleged crime waves, budget shortfalls. All of these are repeatedly mobilized in order to justify austerity and carceral expansion as a left hand/right hand move. They tend to come together. So I wonder if we could talk about the function of crisis as a strategy and as a narrative strategy, rather than how I think it's often talked about as like a moment of failure that needs to be responded to.

Because I think this understanding might help listeners communicate to people in their lives, you know, who don't necessarily see mass incarceration, policing and abandonment as these connected dynamics. They might see them as reactive mistakes, as we talked about earlier, rather than structured responses to managing the surplus population and managing a shift in modes of accumulation and the production of surplus profit and work capacity as well.

Craig Gilmore 56:03

I mean crisis, I think, is a hard -- is a hard word for people, especially when they think of it simply as like a personal crisis. You know, a death in the family, a flat tire on your car, whatever it might be. We tend to use crisis in a sense that for me, at least, comes out of Gramsci and through Stuart Hall. And Hall defined crisis as a state in which the current productive forces could not continue without a significant change in societal relations in general. That is to say, the capitalist economic system could not continue making money for capitalists the way it had been, without some substantial change.

And the anti-state state, as we said earlier, in large part comes out of the capitalist crisis of the early 70s, and the response to it generally called neoliberalism. And you know, our reading is that that resolution, that resolution to the capitalist crisis of the early 70s, itself goes into crisis in 2007-2008, and we're still living through that crisis. There has not been a resolution to it. The resolution of neoliberalism involved squeezing more and more money out of people, breaking unions, forcing more and more people into casual work, reducing benefits, etc., etc., which has produced, in the long term, a huge reaction, that is to say austerity, which we've already talked about as being something which is imposed on particular groups of people, on particular classes of people.

It's a way to squeeze money out of them and circulate that money up. That is -- so the period of austerity and the growth of the massive, mega-billionaire class are the same period. It's not like the billionaires felt austerity as austerity. They saw it as wealth building, and that wealth building happened through a reconfigured state apparatus: the anti-state state, was a way to move money which was not being, in many cases, produced by the old fashioned industrial economy. It was being squeezed out of people who were increasingly working two or three jobs and having trouble keeping their households together. What happened after 2008 was an increasing mobilization of those people.

So you know, for me, the 2008 economic crisis and the rise of anti-police activity in the United States in the 2010s are two sides of the same coin. That is to say, the people who are being most squeezed by austerity fought back, and we're seeing that, not just in the United States, we're seeing it all around the world. That as austerity has been imposed either by national governments or by the International Monetary Fund and so on and so forth, people are taking stronger and stronger actions to make sure that the next resolution, the resolution to the current crisis, does not involve them becoming more vulnerable to death, becoming even poorer, becoming even less politically powerful. So people are struggling in the current crisis for the power to lead dignified and secure lives.

And those struggles are -- to get back to the rhetoric that the state uses, those are the particular “crises” of immigration, the “crisis” of gender, or trans women using women's bathrooms, the various “crises” that states across the over-developed world are using around immigrants as threats. The “crisis” of too many immigrants, the “crisis” of them taking our jobs, the “crisis” of our culture being diluted or destroyed, are crises which are being manufactured in order to use repressive state apparatuses to destroy not just those populations, but the political work those populations are doing in order to secure their own lives.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:00:50

And I just want to add very briefly that as we think about austerity and billionaires as being two sides of the same coin, enormous on the billionaire side and disappearing on the austerity side, we see as well not only that the billionaires squeeze money out of industrial forms old and new, but also that the billionaires, like Peter Thiel, for example, turn their sights on the very militarized and other repressive apparatuses of the state as the new opportunity for them to twist the handle of the spigot on the Treasury to run more value into their coffers.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01:40

Absolutely. What you're both saying makes me think so much of something Stuart Hall said in an interview with Doreen Massey from 2010, right. He's talking a lot about kind of period of conjuncture in the government in Britain, and this transition from Thatcher to Major and Thatcher to Blair, and how austerity is also playing into that radical transformation and that rhetorical narrativization of that arc too. And he says that crisis is about periodization partially -- "A conjuncture is a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape. The post-war period, dominated by the welfare state, public ownership and wealth redistribution through taxation, was one conjuncture. The neoliberal market forces era unleashed by Thatcher and Reagan was another. These are two distinct conjunctures separated by the crisis of the 70s. A conjuncture can be long or short. It's not defined by time or simple things like a change of regime, though these have their own effects. As I see it, history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow, and what drives it forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed."

Then he goes on to say, "The question is, can we look at the present situation in that way? When does it begin? Has it been through a crisis before? What sort of crisis is this? Is it temporary? Is it going to transform things but not very deeply, followed by a return to 'business as usual'? Is it what's called a passive revolution, where none of the social forces are able to enforce their political will, and things go stumbling along in an unresolved way." And that's really what I think is often lost in conversations around this kind of particular conjuncture where we're seeing these massive accelerations of wealth transfer from public money into the pockets of billionaires, right, is that the political will that is a part of this is deprioritized in some people's analysis. And I think the anti-state state recenters political will and political capacity towards showing us how the state is reforming itself along these particular trajectories, right, but also in a way that I think undermines, again, this passive, naturalized narrative about the way that things are proceeding being just the way they're supposed to go.

And I think also, you know, one thing that could be helpful for listeners here is to bring in the idea of anti-state, state actors, right? Which, Ruthie, in your essay, The Shadow of the Shadow State, you describe anti-state state actors this way: "We are faced with the ascendance of anti-state state actors: people and parties who gain state power by denouncing state power. Once they have achieved an elected or appointed position in government, they have to make what they do seem transparently legitimate, and if budgets are any indication, they spend a lot of money even as they claim they are 'shrinking government.' Prison, policing, courts, and the military enjoy such legitimacy, and nowadays it seems to many observers as though there was never a time when things were different. Thus, normalization slips into naturalization, and people imagine that locking folks in cages or bombing civilians or sending generation after generation off to kill somebody else's children is all part of 'human nature.' But, like human nature, everything has a history, and the anti-state state actors have followed a peculiar trajectory to their current locations." And then you continue, "While neoconservatives and neoliberals diverge in their political ideals, they share certain convictions about the narrow legitimacy of the public sector in the conduct of everyday life, despite the US constitutional admonition that the government should 'promote the general welfare.' For them, wide-scale protections from calamity and opportunities for advancement should not be a public good centrally organized to benefit everyone who is eligible.

Anti-state state actors come from both camps and insist that the withdrawal of the state from certain areas of social welfare provision will enhance rather than destroy the lives of those abandoned." And so, this is again why I want to bring in political will and the idea of the anti-state stake actors into this conversation we're having about crisis as governance. Because while crisis can be this inciting moment that culturally everyone agrees upon, okay, we're in this conjuncture. We're in this moment of crisis, and we will be proceeding forward.

You know, as Hall says, history moves from one conjuncture to another and what drives it forward is a crisis usually. And so you have this moment where I think people think of it as, okay, we're at this precipice, right, and we're going to proceed in a periodic way from one crisis to the other, rather than seeing it as a flow driven by political will, where each crisis might move us forward in a way of growing and building the anti-state state, as you both have argued and talked about multiple times throughout this conversation, that this is a capacity that grows, right? This is a growing transition and a reorganization of the state.

And we're in this moment where I think there's a kind of discussion of what is even possible anymor in terms of what you can expect from political will that I think ignores the fact that political will has to be cultivated and created, and that it is not a natural resource that we just sort of tap into the ground and find, but that it's a -- it's something that is actively created by actors, sometimes anti-state state actors, sometimes actors who are pro-state, sometimes actors outside of the state, but that political will is something that every one of us participates in the cultivation and creation of. It's not a natural resource that we just have to look and find and then respond to the political will that we find, right? It's something that needs to be actively shaped.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:07:29

Amen (laughs). Amen. If I may, your term, or the term political will is extremely resonant. And when I, when we talk about what has happened over these decades, happening deliberately, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about political will of state actors, or maybe it's even clearer at this moment to say government actors and capitalist actors, as well as the political will of many people who perhaps trying to delay the assault of austerity on their lives have as say, union actors, in some cases, accepted certain kinds of agreements to protect some jobs, thereby making other jobs really vulnerable.

I mean, that's what the story was with the UAW in the 70s and into the early 80s, that was the story about OACW doing similar kinds of things, trying to protect some aspect of what had been won, whether it was wages and benefits, or in some cases, to protect and extend OSHA in the workplace, and the trade-off being to abandon certain kinds of workers to non-protection or to lower salaries or to fewer benefits. And that has become the structure of ordinary struggle today throughout the United States. And it's not the same throughout the world, by the way, but it is true throughout the United States in many different areas of struggle and work in the public and the private sector.

I want to say one other thing. I just said -- I kind of threw out into our discussion, what is true in the United States is not true throughout the world. It's also true that the United States is quite differentiated. So when we talk about the domination of the Washington, DC/Trumpist hegemony, this is true, and yet we know throughout the United States, there's a lot of of unevenness, and that unevenness is a result of already existing political activity that is consolidated over time, or lack of political activity that makes certain places more vulnerable over time. It has to do with the movements of capital out of certain areas, certain segments of the potential workforce, either to other places in the US or in the world, or into machinery.

There's a lot of movement of capital out of human labor into machine labor. All of these things are true. And I bring this up in order to gently disagree, in order to agree with what Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey discussed all those years ago. It is true that we have these conjunctures, and those stand in for us analytically as periods.

That said, Stuart Hall is the first to know, and certainly Doreen Massey, geographer, was not second to know between the two of them, that there is a lot of regional variation, and that regional variation matters for us who are trying to understand how our deliberate political activity, which is to say our political will, can reorganize the mess that is, into the world we want.

So thinking regionally enables us to look around and figure out how we can learn to become stronger, as well as to see what places might be more vulnerable, and at the same time to think quite deliberately about how, as we learn from Lenin, the forces of imperialism work by partitioning and repartitioning the Earth, and thinking that reminds us that there isn't like one gleaming, unbroken system of exploitation and oppression that has coated the entire surface of the Earth, but rather that, as Stuart Hall, again, and Doreen Massey knew as well as anybody, that unrolls unevenly. And that that unevenness gives us the opportunity to find vulnerabilities, systemic vulnerabilities that we can then turn to other ends.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:55

I was just nodding so hard that I knocked my glasses into my microphone (laughs). No, absolutely. And I think this actually brings us right into the next thing that we wanted to talk about, which is the role that California plays as a case study, what its political geography reveals about abandonment and punishment. California obviously features very centrally in both of your work and it's an early and aggressive testing ground for the anti-state state.

You know, you have tax revolts, regional disinvestment, massive prison construction. California is really a case study in how abandonment and punishment are planned together, and it's certainly been a case study in the context of the impact of this massive surge in the ICE budgets, right, as we've seen. And not to just be naming the terribles -- what has also been produced in California in response to things like this massive surge in ICE funding, and the surge of ICE, and the descent of ICE on various geographic locales in order to make an example of certain populations, right, has been tremendously robust organizing.

You have community defense that is committed to long-term, sustained engagement with the state, where you're not just about observing ICE, right, and watching what ICE is doing, but actively interrupting arrest, interrupting people being kidnapped, and interfering with ICE's operations in a way that doesn't take the massive budgetary increase as a sign that ICE's power is absolute. One of the recent episodes that we did with organizers with the LA Tenants Union talked about this organizing that they've been doing, the Eastside Local of the LA Tenants Union, for many years has been organized.

And in response to, for example, ICE raids in their community, they created a long-term -- they call it Centro, right? They're in locations in the community, part -- one of the most important ones is the parking lot of a Home Depot where many raids had taken place, right? And they parked themselves and made themselves a presence in the community, building on the organizing they were already doing, to respond to this increase in ICE budgets and this flow of -- show of force, right, imposed on East Los Angeles, and said in response to this, we are going to respond with sustained presence.

We're going to take on this additional organizing capacity because it layers upon the work that we're already doing against displacement. Because there is no way to differentiate between organizing against displacement in the realm of housing and against displacement in the realm of "immigration enforcement," right?

And so I wonder if we could talk about what California has taught you both about how the anti-state state is produced geographically, you know, through land use, budgets, regional inequity, infrastructure, all those different angles, and talk about how this analysis can help us, again, recognize similar dynamics unfolding in other regions or contexts, or states, etc., but what the kind of specificity of California has taught you both about this idea and how it's helped build this analysis.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:16:09

Let me, in the interest of time, just kind of lay out a range of the kinds of encounters, political encounters we had in California when we were still living and organizing there all the time. Perhaps one of the best known was a period when we were trying to stop a new prison, a new maximum -- maximum security prison, from being built in the city of Delano, which is the ancestral home of the United Farm Workers, so irony on top of irony. And as we were organizing, we were fighting on many, many fronts at once. And every abolitionist knows that we cannot be abolitionists unless we're always fighting on multiple fronts at once.

So we learned, thanks especially to the incredible insights of our late, great comrade, the world's greatest organizer, Rose Braz, that we could combine what we were doing with both environmentalists and environmental justice people. So that took us a while to find environmentalists and EJ people who would even give us the time of day for conversations, but that happened. And we eventually had a little mini conference in Fresno, which is kind of the heart of what we call in California, Prison Alley.

And at that convening, we not only had people who were doing environmental work, who were doing EJ work -- which is not identical -- who were doing anti-prison work, we also had the Mothers of East LA, who had successfully organized to stop a prison many years earlier, in the early 80s, come and talk to us about what they did.

And we learned together that the Mothers of East LA had themselves become environmental justice activists because they saw that the vulnerability of their children to having really bad asthma that would interrupt their schooling and make them therefore less able to make livelihoods and more liable to becoming criminalized, brought those mothers, who we hadn't known before, into doing the kind of work that we thought we were innovating by having our conference, you see. So, I mean, these are the kinds of things that we did.

Another example is that Prison Moratorium Project put out word throughout a number of communities in California's Central Valley, where my research showed that the next prison was likely to be sited. And we took out ads in newspapers and asked people to call a phone number and tell us if they wanted to talk to us. And we rented a little remote voice recording, you know, voicemail system, and people called us. And they wanted to talk to us about the fact that they didn't like what the prison was doing to the water table. They didn't like what the prisons do to the night sky, because the lights are always on. They didn't -- you know, there were all kinds of things.

These people were not in any way automatically inclined toward abolition, but they did want to talk to us, so we talked to them, and that produced more possibility for solidarity. In this town of Mendota, a place where the powers that be, the anti-state state that was running that small town, had long since given up on reviving that town's economy to continue doing what it had done in the middle to the late middle of the 20th century, which was to be a central place for farm support, like equipment manufacture and that kind of thing.

And so what the city power structure had done was to borrow an enormous amount of money to build a gleaming new high school and then to hire a very high price city manager to try to get a federal or state, they didn't care which, a federal or state prison sited there. And one of their selling points was, oh, the guards' kids can go to our fancy new high school.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:21:04

Oof.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:21:05

So as we were organizing to try to interrupt that movement, which seemed like it was just railroading towards victory, we went to some of their hearings. We interrupted the federal environmental impact statement approval because it had -- one, it was a bad EIS, but two, it was only in English.

And under the law in those days, it had to be in every relevant language for a community, and there, it should have been Spanish. And in that work of doing outreach to the community, the residents of that town, Craig and one of our then-young comrades, Yadiza, went and had a meeting, a house meeting with Spanish speaking residents who lived there in Mendota. And at first, they came to the meeting, they hosted the meeting and came to the meeting, but were very skeptical.

And they were skeptical for many reasons, not least of which was that they were mostly renters, and they were dependent on the agreeability -- their own agreeability with the local power structure, who are also included the landlords to live in their modest homes and work in the farms, work in the -- in the fields.

So remarkably, what happened was that Craig and Yadiza talked about the environmental impact statement and showed them the official English language version, which was almost 1,000 pages long, and then showed them the Spanish language version that the Bureau of Prisons had agreed to do under duress because we had insisted on it, that was only 35 pages long.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:23:06

Wow.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:23:07

Right. And it was that dramatic moment -- here's a brick of paper, here's what they decided everybody in this room was eligible to know about, that moved people to become more active in this movement.

So these are like some different examples. We could talk about people organizing inside prisons to oppose the state of California deciding that it was going to build some gender responsive prisons that would make it -- prison nicer for women and their children, called Fritz. So prisoners, people who were in -- locked in prisons for women, at great risk to themselves, signed a petition that they smuggled around between and among the prisons. 3,500 people signed it with their own name and prisoner number that said, not in our name.

Do not build nice, new prisons for us. So these are some of the examples. So every example that I've just given you gives us, as it were, the inside out of what the anti-state state was doing. It was abandoning people in rural communities. It was building new prisons in order to lock up more people. It was building a brand new shiny high school, but likely enhancing the criminalization of the modestly educated and modestly remunerated people who lived in the town. It was in abandoning people to dire health problems by building highways and increasing particulate matter that makes asthma one of the world's greatest health threats. And for well-resourced people, asthma is something that can be managed.

For a poor person without good healthcare, it is deadly. So these were all examples of the anti-state state, working hand in glove with capital, building the repressive apparatuses and how people came together to organize to resist that oppression.

Craig Gilmore 1:25:41

Beatrice, the one thing I would add is that one of the things that came out of those fights and other ones, as Ruthie mentioned, that we don't have time to talk about, is that there's been now more than 25 years of accumulated experience fighting on a variety of fronts, which has accumulated. It hasn't dissipated.

And so when California's Democratic governor saw a photo op to take part in a raid in a homeless encampment, and Los Angeles's Democratic mayor, a former community organizer, thought that was a good thing to do politically, and did the same thing a week later, people had ways to think about how the state works, what the contradictions are, how we might intervene effectively.

When publicity around the number of people who were being arrested or stopped by the cops had mental health issues, produced, as you would expect, a call for mandatory mental health prisons or hospitals in which people would not be arrested and sent to jail, they'd be arrested and sent to a hospital, people understood how to think about the state, what that process was going to look like, and how to intervene.

So I think there's been like -- there's an institutional memory now, at least 25 years old, in California, that has built up lessons, which are being passed on generation to generation to generation of new organizers. And that's been an essential thing for the state. You know, the state, California has shrunk its prison population almost in half in the last 20 years, at the same time that it has a governor who's, you know, thinks it's a good idea to bring photographers while he destroys a homeless encampment.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:27:36

Absolutely. And I really appreciate all of those things that you guys were highlighting there. I mean, I think especially what you're saying, Craig, about the development of the movement and institutional memory and knowing how to respond, I think is so important when we think about how to retain hope as a practice of discipline, as Mariame Kaba says, or the ways of like, how do we even evaluate wins or successes, right? I think for folks who are newer to our movements, it can be really easy to be discouraged of like, you know, this fight -- we didn't get exactly what we wanted, right.

But I think so much about the conversations I've had with Mon Mohapatra from Community Justice Exchange and all the work that's gone in New York against feminist jails, the No New Jails Network, and all of the knowledges that that's produced, and the ways that we've seen incredible growth of affinity and solidarity between folks working against classic incarceration, let's say, for lack of a better term, psychiatric incarceration, immigration incarceration, all these ways that -- you know, family policing -- we've seen these movements grow together, to this point where there is such a beautiful, united, shared analysis that helps everyone work against the many ways that this begins to pop up, whether we're seeing it in photo ops, in policy proposals, in ways of engaging with the community that are going to be directly affected by new prison projects, new detention centers.

I think so much of the organizing that happened in South Florida around the Glades, where you had environmental activists, Indigenous activists, even hunters, who were coming together against the so-called Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp that was being built in the Everglades. Finding ways to build through generations against these dynamics is so important. And I want to make sure that we're moving on to talk a little bit about the promise of order, the legitimacy and emotional and political attachment aspect of this, because the anti-state state secures popular consent by channeling certain dynamics: fear, racial anxiety, racism, economic precarity, into support for punitive solutions.

There are so many examples of that in just these examples of California that you both laid out, whether we're talking about the high school or towns that had given up on revitalizing their economy other ways, you know, hiring a consultant to bid for moving any prison into the community, right? You have this way of channeling consent, right, channeling these anxieties, right?

And anti-state state language also becomes a way of displacing blame while deepening domination, right? There's not a conversation happening around why are people suffering in that town? It's about, how do we incentivize a prison, any prison at all, to come here, right? And so we have the ways that the anti-state state cultivates emotional and political attachment. We've talked about this a lot in terms of people who benefit from these in terms of jobs, but also in terms of like, it cultivates attachment from people who themselves are experiencing abandonment often.

So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the kind of promise of order and what play that has in making this formation durable, and also how it connects into a vision of understanding power, right, in a way that can complicate the idea of power, right? Because I think when we think of the ascendancy of people to positions of power, positions of elected government, appointed government, through anti-state state rhetoric, the ascendancy of anti-state state actors, I think it importantly also complicates our understanding of what power is and how power is achieved.

And when we spoke in 2022, Ruthie, we talked about how power is not a thing. People -- as you write, "People can and do make power through, for example, developing capacities. But that is not enough, because all an individual organization can do on its own is tweak Armageddon." And we talked about the capacities of power and I think that's an important aspect of the anti-state state, where you have the promise of order and the complication of power and certain political dangers that arise, right, in the context of these very specific modes of action and modes of state redistribution and reformation.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:32:14

Well, I would like to start talking a little bit about how people develop an attachment to, and I know that that term has way more specificity than the way I'm using it, but attachments to a certain sensibility with respect to order, that anxiety or frustration or fear or anger that is related to organized abandonment of oneself, or one's own community, or some nearby selves and communities, can make certain proposals of order on the part of state and capital actors to be very attractive and indeed, reassuring sounding. And here what comes to mind are a couple of things, and this has to do with studies of fascism. One is Alberto Toscano's fantastic book, Late Fascism. And if you haven't talked with him, you should.

[ NOTE: we recorded an episode with Alberto Toscano on his book Late Fascism shortly after this episode aired. Find that discussion here.]

He's really thoughtful and amazing to talk with. And also an older piece, an older book that was written actually as dispatches from Germany in 1932 and 1933 by Daniel Guérin, who was a French Communist, who as a very young man, probably 19 or 20 years old, went with a friend of his to Germany to just kind of track for the summer, in their university holidays, because they thought the real communists are in Germany, and we want to go learn from them. But of course, those years were the years of the transition to the absolute control of the German state by the Nazis.

So, as Alberto kind of lays out in his book, which is again, I'll say fantastic, he looks at the analytical work that many post World War II anti-fascist thinkers have provided to us in order for us to think about fascism that isn't Nazism and isn't Mussolini fascism, but still is fascism as it actually exists. So he cites, for example the work that Marcuse and Angela Davis did talking about preventive control, preventive oppression and other, again, post Second World War works, to remind us that fascism wasn't a historical phenomenon that miraculously ended with the end of the Second World War. But to go to what Guérin wrote about in this beautiful book, The Brown Plague, which everyone should read, he writes about one of the many places where he and his comrade spent a night or two.

And this particular situation was in 1933, a home of what seemed like an ordinary bourgeois family, perhaps Jewish, I don't remember, but a bourgeois family. And the hausfrau of the household, assured, nervously assured these young men that they believed if they just kept their heads down -- they the household, the adults in that household -- if they just kept their heads down, all of the terrible things that were starting to unroll in Nazi Germany were going to pass over them, pass them by, and they would not suffer. And that, I think, is the -- is part of how the legitimacy works. It's not just like a very assertive legitimacy, an assertive identification with the repressive capacities of the state, but that many people think that if they just stay off the radar in some way, whatever way that is, that they will not be caught up by the trouble.

And certainly, Brown Plague, and certainly Alberto Toscano's book and other books, show us again and again that there is no outside, and therefore there is no time to lose. And I'll just say one other thing here, which goes all the way back to our discussion earlier today, concerning where and how prison in particular, but prison and policing in general, fits into the struggle -- the global struggle for human emancipation. And Craig was pointing out that for many people in the English-speaking left and beyond, this is a foolish starting point because prisons and policing are about a margin of society, whereas the central forces of the working class are where we should put our minds.

And what we geographers bring to the discussion always is an understanding that every border is always an interface. That wherever you start, which is to say, if you start from inside a prison, you are always immediately in the middle of the entire social formation. You can trace it out in all of its dimensions. And that means that if you start in the middle of something else, whether it's a homeless encampment on Skid Row in LA, or a detention center, or a workplace where people are struggling to have, like the New York nurses are at the moment, struggling to have a good situation for nurses to be able to care for their patients, whatever it is, that will inevitably, if you pay attention, lead all the way through the social formation to prisons, to the state, to capital and so forth.

Because, as you and Artie know better than many of us, that social reproduction is about understanding all of the resonant materialities of how we make and maintain our lives. It isn't something that's only about household. It's about the entire world. And abolition gives us an analytical way to think those relations across rather than around, or interrupted by the forces of the anti-state state.

Craig Gilmore 1:39:59

I would add just two things, I think. One, that the legitimacy of the cops and of state violence in general is so much based on ideas of public safety that when we were just getting the California Prison Moratorium Project off the ground in '98, we identified the need to take the idea of safety back from the cops. So what a bunch of our -- for years, at public meetings, we would do little things about what do you need to make your household safe? What do you need to make yourself feel safe?

And for us, part of that -- what we did in the workshops came out of the work that Ruthie and I had done in and around Mothers Reclaiming Our Children in Los Angeles in the early 90s, in which the police were not seen as an organization that delivered safety, quite the opposite. So we felt the need to grab safety back and talk about education, talk about a secure place to live, talked about healthcare, etc., etc. So that was one thing.

And then the other thing I wanted to raise was, in terms of legitimacy, is that the legitimacy of the police in the United States and elsewhere, is not what it was 20 years ago. That there's been a huge crisis of legitimacy among the public about the police, which you saw most dramatically, I think, in 2020.

Emblematic of that for me were the people across the United States who I call collectively, the Portland Moms, who were not abolitionists, they were not anarchists, they were not street fighters. They were people who were out in the street, protecting their households, protecting their neighborhoods, protecting their cities or towns, and they saw the police and police violence as threats to that. And you know, when I see widespread mobilizations around Home Depots in Los Angeles, that's what I think about.

Those are not -- you know, that's not all black bloc anarchists coming out to fight the cops at Home Depot. Those are people whose understanding of what the police are and what ICE is, is not what it was 20 years ago, and that that crisis of legitimacy that they are going through and working very, very hard to resolve, is something that we need to exploit

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:41:01

Absolutely.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:42:31

One of the questions that you put to us in raising the shadow state, which I really appreciate, is how there's such risk in managing harm without structural transformation. And in a way, we've been talking about this off and on for our entire conversation today, that certainly when we discuss the production of small or large scale institutions that we can understand as ones that manage harm rather than structurally transform to emancipate us, or that do structural transformation, in the case of how Medicaid has actually come to be in the health landscape of the United States, it seems very much to be managing harm rather than emancipating people from the anxiety of ill health.

So that suggests that nonprofits, NGOs, quasi-public actors, must always be aware, you know, must always have the consciousness of how our work proceeds in relation to the deepening or undoing of the material conditions, the conceptual capacities and symbolic power of the anti-state state. And the risks of managing harm -- well, I can talk about it by flipping it over and discuss a case that I was going to bring up at the end of our conversation, but I'll bring up now, of comrades in South Africa who've been doing amazing work as part of the larger shack dwellers' movement. So this particular organization is called Abahlali.

My pronunciation is not great, but it's Abahlali. And Abahlali has been around for a little more than 20 years, just celebrated its 20th anniversary. And it's got about 180,000 members currently, and all of the members live in settlements that were built by the people who live there, generally by first occupying land, either public land or not used privately owned land, and putting up their houses immediately. I don't mean over a few days. I mean over a few hours, and then defending those constructions.

And nobody pretty much does this alone. So it will be three or four or five or six households will occupy and build together. Abahlali does not do that initial organizing to occupy and build, but what they have become over time, having started this way themselves as a self-built community that was constantly defending its right to be where it was in the city of Durban, and demanding from the municipal government and other providers, electricity, water, sanitation, transportation and so forth, Abahlali has become a political and organizational actor that enables these settlements that are scattered all around especially three major urban areas, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, to look after themselves, to agitate for their own well-being, and to govern themselves in the context of already existing governmental agencies of the municipal, provincial and state government of South Africa.

The organization has one rule, and only one rule that's hard and fast, and that is that the people who are residents in the settlements and therefore in their houses and their settlements, may never sell or rent their houses. That's the only rule. That means that this entire movement has grown up on the basis of interrupting capitalist relations in land. The entire movement has grown up on that even though, at the outset, when my comrades were organizing themselves in the Kennedy Road Settlement in Durban, I can assure you that in the front of their minds was not, oh, we better interrupt capitalist relations in land, but rather, how do we get electricity? How do we make sure the police don't come and knock us out of our houses? How do we get water? How do we get sanitation? But over time, as people have worked to defend and extend these self-built communities, the rule arose and consolidated as the absolute requirement for people to have secure and dignified lives on the land.

It's a really -- it's an amazing, amazing organization, and it's one that we can all learn from, and should all learn from, wherever we are and whatever we're doing. So the example you gave of the Tenants Union in LA doing the work at Home Depot is kind of an extension of that, and brings us also to an understanding that in a certain kind of fundamental sense, abolition is always about land control and land use. It's about the ability to move around and the ability to stay put. That this is, in a kind of general and abstract way, what it is we're fighting about.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:48:52

I so appreciate that. I mean, I think it's actually a really concrete way to define abolition. We're talking about really materially what is at stake, right, that takes us out of the question of which I feel like so often, especially when you're talking to people who are not abolitionists, for example, and you can get drawn into that kind of public safety narrative, right, which ultimately is often something that we're not interested in talking about. We're interested in talking about the use of land, the use of capacities. What are we going to spend our time, our resources on? What are we going to invest our energies in, right? There's this great coloring book that I have, obviously, Baby Death Panel is going to have to age into this. It's going to take them a couple of years before they get into this. But it's an anarchist coloring book for children, and there's a page that has you color people dressed for different jobs.

This is -- do you ever think about how so many people's jobs are pointless? We could be doing so many other things with all that time and energy, right, and that's ultimately the conversation we're always actually having is like, what could we be doing with this land? What could we be doing with these material resources? What can we be doing with people's lives, other than stealing them from their communities and locking them up, other than giving them the only chance at economic stability through being a guard in a prison, right, or a nurse in a prison, you know, what does that sort of do to our communities and our society, and also, what could we be doing instead? So I think it's actually, in some ways, very concrete, and much more concrete than having the conversation around the sort of, what to do about the specter of violence, or the "need for community safety," right?

As if those things are not also downstream of the question of, what are we doing on land and with the land that we're doing this on, right? I want to take a second to bring organized abandonment back into this conversation. I know many people listening to this will have listened to our conversation back in 2022, Ruthie, on the occasion of the release of Abolition Geographies, where much of that conversation focused around the idea of organized abandonment. But as you talked about earlier, you brought in your definition of racism as the production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death. This is a process that, as we've been talking about, is spatial, it's historical, it's political. It's the question that is central to everything, and the anti-state state is a key mechanism through which this vulnerability is organized, normalized and distributed.

So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about how the formation of the anti-state state operationalizes organized abandonment, whether -- you know, we've talked a lot about housing and healthcare and education and environmental governance, but I wonder if there's anything else you'd want to add or bring in around how this framework helps us understand organized abandonment, whether that's public health collapse, houselessness, climate disaster, as a deliberate outcome of political choices, not as a slip up of governance.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 1:52:13

Well, I actually, unusually for me, I just have one brief thing to say, which is, we have, I think, very fully described many of the dimensions of organized abandonment in our conversation today, and what we can see over and over again are how the forces of organized violence appear and aggrandize to manage at least at the margins, but frequently not at the margins, those who are not content with having been abandoned. So that is the story of the people of Abahlali in South Africa. And by the way, I should have said -- mentioned that one of my comrades, Yousuf Al-Balushi, wrote a fantastic book about the movement called Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City that came out a couple of years ago.

But to go back to organized abandonment and organized violence, that organized violence steps in to manage, to control, to herd, to destroy those whose lives have been undermined by or made vulnerable by organized abandonment, and this is the fundamental foundation on which the anti-state state grows itself across all aspects of reproduction and social reproduction, whether it's about whether or not one can have gender affirming healthcare, to whether or not one can cross the border from Canada into the United States, or from some other place into the United States, or not.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:54:18

Absolutely. And I want to bring us back to some of these examples of abolition as a counter to the anti-state state. We've talked about abolition not simply as a position of opposing carcerality, prisons, policing, detention, but about, as we've been talking about, building collective capacities, building institutional memory, new ways of organizing life, new ways of building and sharing our analysis and building solidarity and refusing abandonment as a governing principle.

And I think abolition importantly places itself in direct confrontation with the anti-state state. So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about abolition in relation to the anti-state state, how it contests punishment and abandonment, and the role of non-reformist reforms and collective capacity building in that, in -- you know, in the ways where I think we can't romanticize the state itself, right, as simply being fixed with one quick policy tweak here or there.

But there are so many ways that non-reformist reforms, grassroots planning, organization, collective provisioning, with and against and without the state, all can interrupt this formation. And importantly, I think, also build in a memory of refusing logics of scarcity, of hierarchy, of disposability. At the end of every episode of the show, we say, "Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week."

And we don't say Medicare for All now, because Medicare for All is the end-all be-all fix to healthcare woes, but because Medicare for All as a non-reformist reform policy intervention, you know, both teaches people that it's possible to abolish an entire industry, to take away private insurance, it creates the capacity for solidarity and building a mass politics of health around the shared payer power of one single payer for everyone's healthcare in the United States, creates the chance for people to share knowledges across borders and boundaries, which things like Medicaid and individual providers of insurance policies, whether that's an employer policy or an ACA plan or Medicare, you know, we're all decentralized and fragmented through the current system that we have, and that is a counterinsurgent force that undermines solidarity.

So when we say Medicare for All now, we're not saying Medicare for All is going to fix everything, but that Medicare for All as an abolitionist principle and non-reformist reform is something that presents itself as a counter to the anti-state state, as a way of both building things for people that can help us live better lives and continue to organize and keep pushing, but also as a way of refusing the logics of scarcity and disposability.

Craig Gilmore 1:57:12

I think, I guess the first thing I'll say is is there's a variety of abolitionist -- self-proclaimed abolitionist analysis and practice, and it's hard to generalize across all of it. So I'm just going to say that good abolitionist practice and thought takes the idea of non-reformist reform as a challenge.

That is to say, it takes seriously the critique of reformism, and therefore is forced to think about systemic change and forced to think about long-term goals and what it's going to take to get from here to there. So, asks questions kind of in two temporal registers. One, will this improve people's lives next year if it happens, or the year after that?

And is that a step towards where we need to go, or is it a step in the wrong direction, in no direction at all? But it looks at not just the anti-state state, but you know, previous capitalist states, as states which intentionally immiserate people, and understands that the need to end immiseration and to restore security and dignity to the vast majority of people on the Earth is going to require massive, systemic change.

And if we don't work -- if we don't have that in our minds as we're working day by day and week by week, we're going to fail. So that to me is kind of the -- the understanding of why the state's doing what it's doing, but also thinking about, you know, Ruthie was admonishing people for many years, don't just think about winning, think about what you're going to do the day after you win.

So that -- you know, that is a sort of warning about, we win what we -- a non-reformist reform is only going to be non-reformist if we can take the step beyond it. And if we're not prepared, either thinking about what that step needs to be and also thinking about how we're going to be attacked by the anti-state state, by the police, by ICE, by the mainstream media, precisely because of our victory, if we're not prepared for that, we're going to lose.

And our non-reformist reform will be, at best, a reformist reform, and at worst, it'll just be -- it'll just be erased. I mean, we had the experience in California, Ruthie mentioned it before, we were fighting these gender responsive -- proposed gender responsive prisons. We won that fight, and as a result, we had our funding pulled by a couple of our major funders. And we had not really prepared for the idea that we might win this fight and as a result, lose our staffing. But, that's what happened.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2:00:08

And I'd like to add that good abolitionist practice is always a model, not a blueprint, which is to say there isn't a step by step guide that we can put out on a piece of paper, the way is put out for an architect to build something that says, do this and this and this, with these elevations, and the building won't fall down. Rather, what we have is a model, which is to say something that is quite -- has flexibility and malleability in it, the way we model clay, that -- that's what I mean by model. So not a maquette, a model. And that abolition has this flexibility and also an ability to stretch, to reach all of these different dimensions of everyday life, of social reproduction that we've been discussing now for a couple of hours, and meaningfully to become part of that world as its emancipation is unfolding. That means that for me -- for me -- abolition combines the strongest aspects of anarchism and communism -- not anarchism or communism -- anarchism and communism.

And so there are many, many aspects of actually existing anarchism that are amazing, they're great. We've been traveling around Europe a lot recently, because this fantastic anarchist publisher called Virus in Barcelona published Abolition Geography. So we're going to where they have contacts, which is -- tend to be anarchist spaces, and it's just been great. And yet, I am a communist, and not a member of a party, but a communist. And I do believe that we must have large scale and complex institutions through which we can secure our well-being and promote our happiness, for that matter. And health is a perfect example of that, as is clean water, as are, you know, many other things. So as a result of the fantastic book that you and Artie wrote, Health Communism, for a couple of years at the Socialism Conference in Chicago, I proposed that we be talking about abolition communism.

And unfortunately, I got a concussion one year, so I couldn't talk about it with Robin Kelley, but I did manage to come back and discuss it the year we saw each other, I think, in 2024. And these are all ways, I think, of thinking about the models that we can build, that we can add to. I mean, it's another reason that thinking in terms of clay might be metaphorically useful, that we can add to, that we can stretch out, and also be aware that if it dries, it can become brittle. So thinking that abolition is emancipation in rehearsal means that there's always something else to do.

There are always new ways of understanding our roles in relation to other roles, understanding that today's audience is tomorrow's co-actor and co-producer. All of these things are true as well. And the last thing I would like to say is that some of the structures that people are trying to enliven to produce the conditions for emancipation, self-determination include what many people are calling the new municipalism. And we can see it in lots of places. We can see it in various stages of development and de-development in Jackson, we can see it in Barcelona.

We can see it in many cities in the Global South, or parts of cities in the Global South. And what those comrades are doing is trying to use already existing capacities that were developed for the state, whether they were invented by states or not doesn't matter. Many state capacities were invented by corporations. Many corporate capacities were invented by states. But the new municipalists use state capacities in order to enhance the well-being of the people in the municipality, but also with the idea that eventually we will lose this -- these capacities we gained through electoral success or appointment success.

And so, what we do should not only be to make life better, but also to build capacities that are not part of the municipal state or some other structure, such as cooperatives and so forth, so that we can continue to flourish when we lose this power, toward the goal of getting it again or doing something else. And that, to me, is a really great way of thinking the model through time.

That the period in which we're struggling is not a period where we can say with any certainty, this is the beginning, that will be the middle and over there will be the end. But rather, we have an ongoing responsibility to create the capacities for our well-being and to figure out various ways for us to secure those capacities without becoming militarized and defensive, in order to be able to refresh and renew them again.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:06:40

Beautifully put, Ruthie. And I feel like you preempted my final question, which was ultimately about durability and how to think of ourselves in terms -- our work in terms of what the durability of the anti-state state actually means in terms of how we need to approach our work. And I feel like you absolutely already answered that, especially in the discussion of malleability and the perspective of thinking in a forward looking way, of connecting our struggles to the people who are just starting their work, and how that's going to proceed from there. And I really appreciate so much everything that we've gotten a chance to get into in this conversation. And before we wrap -- though that is probably the perfect place to leave it, is there anything --

Craig Gilmore 2:07:30

Well Beatrice, if you're gonna stop there, let me --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:07:32

Okay.

Craig Gilmore 2:07:33

I did have one more thing to say.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:07:34

Oh, perfect. Okay, yeah, that's why I was like, I wanted to --

Craig Gilmore 2:07:36

Which ought not be -- when you're doing the editing, it ought not be at the end, but in terms of the durability of the anti-state state, I mean, in addition to the promising examples that Ruthie gave, I think there's also the -- you know, I would argue that the rise of fascism is also potentially an alternative to the anti-state state, in the sense that organized abandonment under the anti-state state was justified or legitimized by fiscal prudence, we only have so much money, and while the same populations are being targeted by the fascist state, there's no longer the pretense that this is being done because we don't have the money. It's no longer being done because we're anti-state. It's now being done because we need to build up a stronger state to guard ourselves against threats. And so while the same kinds of people are being targeted, the rhetoric, I think, has changed in a way that it's not clear, you know, if there's a Trump third term, it's not clear you would call what he was doing anti-state state anymore, especially if he's invading Venezuela, invading Greenland, etc., etc. So I think there's a less hopeful alternative to the anti-state state, which would be simply a very powerful fascist state.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:09:03

Absolutely. Well, I think one of the things that Artie and I have been talking about so much over this last year is how we're seeing that formation really move into the governance of health and into the institutions of the state that specifically interface with health. In our -- you know, we did these two end of year episodes for 2025. One is our sort of annual COVID year in review and we -- you know, in the interest of that not being six hours, but also because there were sort of two deliberate dynamics, right, we did a second one, which was 2025: year of health fascism and the anti-state state, because we really felt like while that rhetoric has always been so primary in the administration of health and in the governance of health, the idea of cost effectiveness, of cost-benefit analysis, you know, quality, quality-adjusted life years, all of these kind of frameworks that govern how we evaluate health policy, or how we evaluate someone's health and distribute health resources, or the resources around even research into health and research into pharmaceuticals and things like that, has always been part and parcel to this rhetoric that is so much a hallmark of the anti-state state formation, of fiscal prudence and limited financial resources needing to be distributed in "budgetarily responsible" ways and things like that.

And that has, I think, accelerated in the space of the institutions of health in the last year, in a way that, even for those of us who were expecting it, was surprising a little bit, because as we've seen the -- you know, the rhetoric from Oz around getting healthy is important, it's your patriotic duty, because healthy people don't use healthcare resources, right? And that that -- the anti-state state, in the realm of health governance, you know, is so much -- so laying out the red carpet for health fascism.

And I think, you know, Craig, this point you bring in is really important, because there is, I think, an undeniable connection between the rhetoric of abandonment and the rhetoric of pitting people against each other, pitting our needs against each other and teaching people that if you get something, it only happens because someone goes without, which is so much part of the rhetoric of the anti-state state. You know, our needs are counter-balanced against each other in this framework always. It's a zero sum ideology.

And so, you know, I think that there's an undeniable relationship between that positionality to other people, and to society, and to institutions, and to the state, that ushers in the consent for and the comfort with fascism and with authoritarianism and with more robust state, I guess, formations, right, where you have this way that I think the anti-state state as a framework makes people more comfortable with the procession of fascism, and makes fascism feel more logical.

Craig Gilmore 2:12:13

Those of us who are not patriotic enough to be healthy don't deserve public support for our lack of health.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2:12:21

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's really great as you laid it out. Beatrice. And I haven't listened to that podcast, and now I will as soon as I have lunch, but [laughter] -- but I just want to add, and you can leave this in or edit it out, how in the United States, among many, many different kinds of people, when somebody like us who lives in a place that has universal healthcare is there and says, oh, but universal healthcare is way cheaper in Portugal overall than insured healthcare, some subsidized, some not, in the United States, people cannot understand that. They can't like in their heads do anything roughly like a cost-benefit analysis. I mean, forget about do a real analysis, but do a capitalist cost-benefit analysis, they can't figure out where to start. And so the hostile way that somebody will respond to somebody who says, oh, I come from a place with universal healthcare, what are you talking about? The hostile response is, oh, what you're saying is, in Portugal or in Sweden, what's mine is yours. Like, that's how they see it, right? It's a transfer from one pocket to another. And when I try to explain this to my doctor, I'm -- you know, I'm old and not healthy, and therefore not patriotic either. And I go to see my orthopedic guy, who's a really nice young man. He's in his early 40s, I think, and he takes very good care of my crappy knees. And I say to him, Sean, man, if we had universal health care, your life and your -- his partner is -- does, what do you call it, physical therapy -- I said your life and your partner's life would be just as good, but what would be different is all of the money that goes now to the profits of UnitedHealth and all of these other -- that's what would go. Not your livelihood, at all. He can't -- he can't even begin to think about it. Like, not at all. And he likes me. Like, we always chat.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:13:00

Yeah. I mean, I have had this conversation with so many providers over the years, and, you know, trying to address that is actually one of the core projects of the next book project that Artie and I are working on right now, called All Care For All People, forthcoming 2027 from Haymarket. But, you know, it's a -- it's interesting, because even when we -- when we talk to people about Medicare for All, for example, and what our good friend and comrade, the incredible health justice thinker, Tim Faust, likes to actually call FUSP, federal universal single payer, which is a much more precise and accurate term than Medicare for All, though I think that there are benefits from relying on the brand of Medicare, so to speak.

When we talk to people about single payer, and maybe they're past that point that your orthopedist is at, and they're like, I'm so sick of doing prior authorizations. I'm so sick of being told how to practice medicine by a faceless nurse practitioner who works for UnitedHealthcare, whose job is just to obstruct and add all this extra bureaucracy. I'm so sick of half of my job being about memorizing and entering the right billing codes and interfacing with the electronic medical records, which are just billing software and don't help me practice medicine, but then populate a patient's chart with pages and pages and pages of fucking like junk data that get in the way when I'm trying to figure out, you know, why are they here in my emergency room, why are they here in my office, etc., you know?

And they get to the point of, and it costs less, and we're going to save all this money. There is, I think, a slippery slope that we enter when we start talking about the cost framing, right? Because we do actually start to enter the territory of the anti-state state rhetoric there.

Craig Gilmore 2:13:08

Yep.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2:13:08

Yeah, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:13:40

And there is so much power in the formation of the anti-state state, it is so normalized and naturalized for people that there is, I think, this belief that it costs less is going to be the thing that wins Medicare for All. And I think it's important, to speak to your point earlier, Ruthie, about needing to embrace entitlements, as abolitionists, as a positive thing, as something we want, right, as something that we are entitled to, and that that is a good thing, to redistribute resources according to need, according to our capacity to distribute those resources, and constrained by nothing else, right?

That is how an entitlement should work. And I think it's important to think about Medicare for All beyond the cost framings, because the cost framings can very quickly lead us to a road where Medicare for All becomes the ultimate vehicle of the anti-state state, where it becomes a way of producing more patriotic citizens that are upholding their duty to the nation by keeping themselves healthy and fit, right.

And it is -- it is one of those things where I find it so interesting that even some of the best, sharpest minds on how to advocate for single payer, whether they're brilliant academics or brilliant organizers who have been in this fight for a really long time, they turn to the cost framing because the anti-state state is such a powerful formation that they think, a-ha, if we could just prove this, right, we'll get our foot in the door.

And I think it's so important to advocate from the position of, the point is to address these needs, right? The point is to decide how we're going to use our time and our resources, and how we're going to decide to take care of each other, what we are entitled to as human beings, what kind of lives we want for each other, what kind of experiences of care we want for each other.

Because people are not naive, they know and they believe that a version of care that is compassionate and responsive and attentive, and not a debt burden, and not a financial risk to them, and not something that needs to be financialized in the way that it is in order to jump through hoops, whether it's with the insurance company, or the networks, or finding providers on a list of providers that don't take your insurance anymore, being stuck in your shitty job because the insurance is good, right?

Like all of these frameworks, are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about when advocating for something like federal universal single payer. And we need to move away from the framing of, and it's going to be cheaper, because if we start to touch these tentacles of the anti-state state framing, and we let ourselves be pulled into that romanticized idea of why policies are passed when they build the anti-state state, we misunderstand the point of the anti-state state, because the point is not to make something cheaper so as to redistribute resources to everyone, right?

And Medicare for All will never pass on that rhetoric, because that rhetoric is not meant to serve a policy that is redistributive in that direction, as we've been saying this whole time. And it's such an important idea to think through, that I feel like part of the reason we really wanted to do this episode and spend so much time on this idea was to help people really feel sure in how to identify when that rhetoric is being portrayed as persuasive and why it's being portrayed as persuasive versus really, truly, materially understanding, why do policies that build the anti-state state pass? Is it because they're actually persuasive and because that's what people want?

Do people want cheaper care, or do they just want to not worry about it? Does your doctor want to just not worry about where his income is coming from, right? And of course, we're always dealing with just decades and decades of providers being propagandized by the AMA and all sorts of institutions that have organized to undermine policies like federal universal single payer policies because of the power that it would give workers and the power that it would give unions, right? There's so much, so much to cut through, right, and I think people shortcut to the, oh, it's going to be cheaper argument, because they think, well, maybe that will cut through all of the decades and layered propaganda that has gone towards making people think that a redistributive policy like that would be counter to their needs, you know?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:16:12

Yeah, I mean, you're -- I really love where you took the conversation just now, and it resonates very well with your baby's coloring book. And that is to say, there are many ways that we are not directly coerced to do certain things, but compelled to do them, and it's really difficult frequently to see where the division is, and that's the point of compulsion in relation to coercion. And while I got to thinking about this again recently, because one of my fantastic abolition colleague comrades, Zohra Ahmed, who is sometimes a defender of people accused of terrorism, and sometimes a law professor at I think Boston University School of Law, has done is -- was an analysis of, of all things, how IMF funding for Pakistan makes Pakistan always more liable to agree to whatever military action the United States wants to take, using Pakistan as a launching point toward the West, right, of Pakistan.

It's a fantastic analysis, and what you were saying makes me see, again, as Zohra shows in her study, how abolition enables us, compels us actually to think through all aspects of life and to ask ourselves about any given situation, as you just did, what is it about being tied to a job for healthcare that completely structures all of our capacity to reproduce ourselves daily, intergenerationally and so forth. What is it about people's incapacity to cross borders completely structures all of our relations, and getting out of the habit that we all share to some degree of bringing capitalist economic analysis to the problem. And you know, I did it myself by saying, ah, they can't even do a simple capitalist economic analysis of cost-benefit. That this is part of what emancipating our consciousness requires for us to emancipate ourselves in general. So I appreciate you and Artie doing this new book.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:16:58

Well, thank you so much. And I think that's so well put. You know, it is about emancipating the consciousness and not just pursuing the analysis by leading with what would be persuasive, right? It's about thinking clearly and deeply about what we actually want for each other, you know?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2:24:29

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:24:31

Well, I think that's the perfect place to leave it for today. I just want to end by expressing our deep gratitude, not just for the time that you've given us today so generously, but also for the thinking that you've shared here with listeners. Because I think the anti-state state is really not just an account of a political formation for the sake of accounting for it. It's a way of apprehending the present without surrendering to the idea of inevitability. We're in this moment right now where we're saturated with noise and panic and, frankly, false explanations, that lead us away from redistributive politics, and it's really important to recenter ourselves around that. Because ultimately, the anti-state state is an argument about how states metabolize instability. And I think embedded within your analysis is this really important theory of abolition that's not reactive, it's not utopian, it's infrastructural, it's temporal, it's redistributive. It's about appearing here as a counter-project to crisis governments, a commitment to building collective capacities that can endure, that can sustain life, that can refuse the constant demand for urgency that the anti-state state relies on. And I think it's important to reframe political struggle away from the realm of episodic resistance and toward the question of planning care and material provisioning across time, taking care of each other for the long haul. So thank you both, genuinely, for the level of rigor and patience and imagination that you brought into the conversation today, and of course, for all of the time that you've given our listeners. It's been really wonderful to spend time talking to you both, and I really appreciate it.

Craig Gilmore 2:26:03

Thank you.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2:26:03

Thank you so much.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:26:04

And patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. None of the work that we do would be possible without you. You make conversations like this possible. And to help us out some more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism, A Short History of Trans Misogyny and Abolish Rent at your local bookstore or request them at your local library, hold listening or discussion groups, and follow us @deathpanel_.

As always, 

Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

[ Outro music: “Tezeta” by Time Wharp ]

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