Fearing inflation, inflating fears: the end of full employment and the rise of the carceral state

2016-07-25“Fearing Inflation” is about the politics and economics of unemployment from the 1930s-1970s. It blends social, political, labor, and economic history with the interdisciplinary fields of feminist economic theory, radical criminology, and African American Studies in order to reveal the centrality of full employment demands to Black freedom politics. This study investigates racial justice movements that sought to eradicate structural unemployment and examines contests over governmental responses to people who were disemployed due to automation and globalization. Drawing upon archives of activists, politicians, economists, and the Federal Reserve, I uncover the relationship between the rise and decline of the political program for governmental guarantees to jobs or income, and the increased federal governmental focus on criminalization. ❧ “Fearing Inflation” highlights how Jim Crow political power, organized business interests, and the Federal Reserve helped prevent the success of civil rights struggles for full employment. In so doing, my project shows that unemployment after the 1940s was not a technical problem of market inefficiencies, but a political problem of vying social forces. Postwar unemployment was more than a personal affliction; it was an essential component of public policy that emphasized a low inflation rate. With currencies tied to the U.S. dollar after the1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, inflation of the dollar imperiled this entire arrangement. This resulted in the maintenance of a surplus labor force to temper the power of workers to increase their wages (and inflate prices). By highlighting these relations, my study locates unemployed people (and movements on their behalf) as a central force in the history of twentieth‐century capitalism and social policy. ❧ “Fearing Inflation” investigates the social movements and government actors of the 1930s-40s that established an ethos that it was the federal government's responsibility to provide jobs or income for those whom the private market abandoned. I emphasize how—due to fear on behalf of capital of wage‐push inflation—government and the Federal Reserve participated in actions to inhibit working‐class power from the 1950s-70s, and unmade a consensus about the need for full employment planning. In the midst of these contests, I describe the evolution of two key efforts to win legislation for guaranteed jobs: the Bayard Rustin-designed “Freedom Budget for All Americans,” of the 1960s, and the subsequent efforts led by Coretta Scott King of the Full Employment Action Council in the 1970s. In so doing, I argue that the history of wealth and power is shaped by both the “failure” of campaigns like the Freedom Budget, and the “success” of those that preceded it like the March on Washington. As such, I suggest that one can see the making of neoliberalism in Keynesianism’s uneven development (through which Keynesianism harmonized with existent white supremacist and patriarchal practices). And since many of these problems of structural unemployment and economic precarity have deepened with the rise of neoliberalism, I follow E.P. Thompson's argument that by looking at “lost causes” of prior organizers and activists “we may discover insights into social evils we have yet to cure.