Marx on Stage: Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Theory of the State

• In Event: Staging the Political: Theater, Politics, and Representation

Abstract

Perhaps the most powerful answers to the problem of democracy’s retrenchment come from social movements, which, working both inside and outside of state institutions, are perpetually renovating and reimagining democracy's form and content. Among the most vibrant social movement clusters in the United States is that associated with the call for the abolition of police and prisons; indeed, as legal scholar Amna A. Akbar notes, “abolitionist organizing has become a center of gravity” for leftist movements across the country. Political scientists seeking purchase on our contemporary crisis of democracy ought, therefore, to look to the theoretical and practical insights of abolitionists for potential guidance.

This paper represents one such effort. Undertaking one of the first extended academic exegeses of the work of abolitionist geographer and social theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this paper seeks to illuminate her theory of the state. By synthesizing and creatively extending Gilmore’s work, at once more complicated and more optimistic than many abolitionist treatments of the state, this paper contributes to ongoing debates on the proper orientation to the state in abolitionist scholarship and movement spaces.

Gilmore’s theory of the state, I argue, derives from an encounter between two idioms central to Gilmore’s thinking: the Marxism that is a core methodological and theoretical commitment of her published academic work, and the practice and study of drama — Gilmore’s college major and a rich conceptual vein in her writing. Specifically, I argue that, for Gilmore, the state might be understood as a “stage” — a human-built space that, though without agency of its own, arranges the materials and capacities available for others to act with and through.

I begin by elaborating Gilmore’s critique of the contemporary capitalist state: that, in the aftermath of the global crisis of 1968, the state has leveraged death-making racial logics to drive investment in carceral solutions to social problems. Next, I give propositional form to the background theory of the state involved in these arguments, charting its inheritances and departures from prior Marxist theorizations of the state in the work of Lenin, Gramsci, Poulantzas, Althusser, and Hall.

This brings me to the core of the paper, where I explain Gilmore’s abolitionist innovation on the Marxist theory of the state by attending to her frequent invocation of concepts from the world of drama. Placing Gilmore in dialogue with Hannah Arendt — who herself noted deep resonances between political action and drama, and opposed such action to violence — I argue that Gilmore's implicit figuration of the state as a stage for political action makes visible a nonviolent logic of state power. Therefore, understanding the state as stage enables Gilmore to navigate what might otherwise be a fatal paradox of her thought: how to square a commitment to the state form with an abolitionist commitment to oppose the state violence on which this form might seem to depend. Whereas the nonviolent logic of state as stage presently coexists with more familiar, violent logics, Gilmore suggests it might one day crowd them out. Indeed, Gilmore’s advocacy for “non-reformist reforms” might be understood in this light, as operations on the level of the state/stage that both 1) seek to transform its “set” by negating its present, violent capacities, and also 2) provide an opportunity for oppositional groups to “perform” their commitments for a mass audience, prefiguring the alternative form of power that might one day displace state violence altogether. This notion of abolition as a liberatory future to come, but which requires a certain drama-inflected praxis in the present, gives new and deeper insight into the meaning of Gilmore’s celebrated formulation that “abolition is life in rehearsal.”

I conclude the paper by considering the significance of this metaphor of state as stage for an abolitionist theory of law — the central preoccupation of the dissertation project from which this paper derives. Bringing the writings of performance studies scholars and theater practitioners into conversation with political and legal theorists and Gilmore herself, I posit that if the state is a stage, then law might be understood as a democratic analogue of the director — that is, the site of structure, judgment, and decision-making that enables and governs “rehearsal.”

Author

• Daniel Epstein, University of Chicago