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Article Excerpt
Statesmen, diplomats, business leaders, aristocrats, fascinated by their profession, invited the Pinkertons to their dinner tables and in time accepted them as the law in America, a land they viewed as part frontier. Within a decade the Agency had changed from a unique private American firm of bounty hunters to a sophisticated organization of international law-enforcement officers.--Horan (1967: 255)
Still, for every economic hand wringer, there is at least one cowboy capitalist ready to tame the new frontier. "It's like Texas in 1879," said Ihsan Hussein Ali, who was not sure why he chose to cite that year in particular. There are no rules.--Vieth (2003)
THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE EXAMINES THE CURRENT RECRUDESCENCE, global expansion, and market concentration of the private security industry. (1) Today s private security boom is to a large extent powered by the revival of an old service for new markets: assisting in original accumulation. Private security has once again been called upon to help conquer new frontiers for capitalist exploitation, assisting with primitive accumulation in a transnational neoliberal project that proceeds largely through "accumulation by dispossession" (Harvey, 2003: 67). (2) The neoliberal (3) economic policies of global privatization and economic deregulation currently championed by the U.K. and the U.S.--coupled with the "war on terrorism" (which is substantially an imperialist exercise)--are creating a hothouse for private security entrepreneurs, largely U.S. and British, who offer for sale a panoply of services to governmental, nongovernmental, and transnational corporate clients. Private security is growing at a spectacular rate in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa (Cilliers, 2003, and Gumedze in this volume), India, as well as the Middle East and the Far East, including China (Dutton, 2000, and Trevaskes in this volume). In Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, hundreds of thousands of private security guards--some registered, many not--patrol factories, cattle ranches, oil pipelines, mines, retail businesses, and the homes and gated communities of the rich (Huggins and MacTurk, 2003; Webb-Vidal, 2006; Ungar, this volume). Though North America remains the largest market for private security, the market with the greatest profit potential is found outside the advanced capitalist nations. (4)
With over 13,000 mostly small local and regional companies employing over a million and one-half guards, the U.S. market is highly competitive and primarily price driven. In this labor-intensive business, the only way for the three leading companies (which together command about 40% of the total market) to increase profits is through consolidation, which is stated as a primary objective in their annual reports (Securitas, 2005: 45). Beyond acquiring a larger share of the domestic market, one of the most enticing business prospects for the giants is to police failed or failing states on behalf of the U.S. government and transnational capital. In occupied Iraq, U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer's September 2003 neoliberal "shock therapy" removed tariffs and duties on imports, reduced the tax on corporate property, and--by Order 39 of the Coalition Provisional Authority--opened all sectors of the economy to foreign investors (Whyte, 2007; see Ruggiero, this volume). But the chaos surrounding U.S. occupation requires heavy security for entrepreneurs. Tens of thousands of security contractors and private soldiers supplement regular military forces of the coalition (Scahill, 2007), and private security will undoubtedly play a central role in securing that part of the Imperium after most of the regular military forces withdraw. (5)
Privatizing Iraq is an early phase of the neoliberal (and neoconservative) project to establish control of the resource-rich "arch of instability," which includes an archipelago of countries running from the Andean Region (especially Colombia and Venezuela) through Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The privatization of Iraq is part of a historic process of forging a wage-earning class by destroying previous modes of production. (6) This privatization cannot look like colonial theft, so the objective of the neo-imperialists is to create a bourgeois constitutional state--beholden, of course, to the U.S. and multinational capital--to protect private property, ensure contract law, and rationalize production for smooth corporate functioning. But this neocon dream is fundamentally at odds with the reality of neoliberal policy, which diminishes sovereignty and weakens state apparatuses, and in the process cripples the mechanisms that could regulate the market and exercise an effective monopoly of legitimate force on behalf of corporate interests. In other words, neoliberal policies lead to "failed state syndrome," generating popular resistance and low-intensity warfare. The extreme class asymmetry of neoliberal rule militates against routinization of class relations and the institutionalization of conflict resolution, such as prevailed during the liberal corporate or Fordist period, when Keynesianism fostered class interdependence (Wilterdink, 1995).
In their cogent study of the origin and early development of private security, Spitzer and Scull (1977:19-20) employed a useful analogy to capitalist development. Private policing made its appearance with the transition from a mercantile to capitalist economy, a time during which the colonial posse comitatus and constabulary forms of policing were abandoned for "piece-work" by private guards and detectives. During the Gilded Age, the American Bankers' Association, various industrial "employers associations," and cattlemen's associations were formed to pool financial and political resources for mutual property protection and labor discipline (Weiss, 1986; 1981). (7) Eventually, however, an essential contradiction became intolerable: piece-rates gave private security providers too much control over their work, in effect encouraging a reduced output. Especially on the labor front, armed confrontation inflamed rather than subdued the objects of policing. Contingency or piece-rate policing "proved relatively unstable and short-lived" (Spitzer and Scull, 1977: 27) because it "could not organize police labor on a rational basis and integrate control services within a coherent administrative framework." By the 1940s, private detective policing had been abandoned by the major corporations in favor of more rationalized and legitimate controls based on compromise, mutual accommodation, and cooptation of labor organizations. This was a major difference in class relations between laissez-faire and liberal corporate capitalism (Kolko, 1963; Weinstein, 1968). In contrast, today's "frontier" policing is a throwback to the laissez-faire capitalist era of labor spies and strikeguards doing piecework on "designated assignments," and bears familiar contradictions. Neoliberal "structural adjustment" and buccaneer capitalism generate increasing unemployment and underemployment among young men, many of whom join the ranks of criminal gangs, insurgents, and sectarian militias that constitute a considerable challenge to accumulation. (8)
To provide a broad historical context in which to understand the contradictions of private security, we will sketch the historical outline of private security transformations, and conclude with this observation: private security contractors are unlikely to subdue individual and collective resistance or transcend direct conflict because of the basic asymmetry between the antagonists. With the structural inequality and weak state apparatuses of neoliberalism, the development of an institutionalized method of worker self-discipline, such as the trade-labor movement in U.S. history, is unlikely. Capital will be unable to re-create on a global basis the mutual accommodation characteristic of the Fordist period, when Keynesianism resolved class struggle "over distributive questions" while union bosses disciplined the rank-and-file for smooth profit accumulation.
Challenges to Accumulation and the Private Security Response in Three Political-Economic Periods
Over its long historical development in England and North America, the commercial or contract security business has waxed and waned and assumed different forms and functions in response to the changing needs of capital (economic development) and the transformation of the state. This political economy of private security is best exemplified by the history of giant detective businesses such as the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which was a pioneer in exploiting profit opportunities and in helping to define the three epochs in the political economy of private policing. These periods of private policing...
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