Governing social marginality: Towards a feminist political economy of poverty, crime and punishment

This dissertation offers a feminist historical materialist analysis of the ways in which poverty and criminality have be governed throughout the longue duree of capitalism. The central argument advanced in this dissertation is that contrary to the assumption of liberal and some critical scholars (particularly those working within the Foucauldian or post-structuralist tradition) that the use of coercion declines with the onset of capitalism and the historical expansion of the proletariat and the wage relation, coercive frameworks are on-going. Drawing primarily on Britain and the United States, it is argued that welfare and legal/penal regimes overlap to form coercive frameworks that are integral to the instantiation and reproduction of capitalism.;In addition to supporting the development of capitalism, it is argued that these coercive frameworks are used to address the crises and contradictions that are generated by capitalism, the effects of which are felt unequally along a number of lines, including those of class, gender and race. Whether these insecurities are addressed through social welfare policies or draconian criminal and penal policies and whether risk is individualized or socialized depends on an historically specific configuration of social forces. Throughout this work, the historically specific means used to govern social marginality are rooted in dominant ideas, institutions and material potentials. These forms of governance are then dialectically related to historically specific relations of power, production and social reproduction.;It is further argued that whereas many critical scholars writing within the Marxist tradition have tended to view the coercive power of the state as 'extra-economic' and therefore separate from capitalist accumulation which relies purely on economic forms of coercion, a central argument advanced in this thesis is that the coercive frameworks that are institutionalized in welfare and legal/penal regimes have been central to the development of capitalism and to its continued reproduction. At particular historical conjunctures, they do so by operating as mechanisms of primitive accumulation that enclose common spaces, criminalize and punish alternatives to wage labour and compel the majority of the population to adhere to historically specific relations of production and social reproduction.