LITMIR.BIZ

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ore I have digged . . . become my property without the assignation or consent of anybody.”⁵ The phrase “the turfs my servant has cut” intimates that the property owner is entitled to the produce of the labor of anyone he hires or forces to work upon his land. Though “every man has property in his own person,” the product of labor ultimately belongs, in Locke’s formulation, not to the laborer but to the owner of the property upon which the laborer works. “Improvement,” then, might be achieved not just through the enterprising individual whose industry animates the dormant commons, but through the institutions of wage labor and chattel slavery. It is the purpose of government to facilitate, and to secure, this process of expropriation and improvement.

      Contrary to Locke, Hobbes argues that property is not intrinsic to the state of nature but is the invention of political authority, of the sovereign who can secure the possession of goods and land and oversee their improvement through industry. Property, in other words, only emerges as a concept when conjoined with security. Hobbes is close to Locke, though, when, in an oft-cited passage from Leviathan, he holds forth on the necessity of labor discipline. While the unable should receive the charity of the sovereign, he writes, “for such as have strong bodies . . . they are to be forced to work; and to avoyd the excuse of not finding employment, there ought to be such Lawes, as may encourage all manner of arts; as Navigation, Agriculture, Fishing, and all manner of Manifacture that requires labor.”⁶ The duty of the sovereign is to provide security for private property, and to compel through law the labor of those who hold no title to the means of production.

       Securing the Social

      One lineage of Social Security can be traced to 1834, when the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed in England and Wales. Systems of localized poor relief had existed since at least the mid-sixteenth century in England, but not until the 1834 Act was the administration of poor law centralized and codified at the level of the state. The 1834 Act created a network of workhouses, which absorbed the unemployed into institutions of disciplined and disciplinary labor. The Act sought a solution to the problem of the general insecurity and “superfluous” populations created by early industrial capitalism. Dispossessed of the means of their own subsistence, the proletariat is forced to enter the market to sell their labor for a wage. But there is of course never a guarantee of employment and thus the state must intervene, in a biopolitical manner, to ensure the reproduction of the working classes. In one sense, the poor law provided a measure of security—miserable, horrid security, in the case of the workhouses: “houses of terror,” Marx called them in Capital—to a population defined by its insecure existence, its naked subjection to the basically inhuman laws of the market.⁷ In another sense, though, poor laws protected the bourgeoisie from the threat of large-scale social unrest and helped ensure the maintenance of capitalist property relations.⁸ This dual purpose—securing the individual (and the hetero-familial unit to which he belongs) and securing the larger capitalist order—characterized the Social Security provisions inaugurated a century later on the other side of the Atlantic.

      Contemporary social insurance programs, though, differ from earlier “poor laws” in important ways. If in eighteenth-century England the poor laws provided a “charity” to the unemployed, Social Security is allocated only to those who contribute to its funding. The Poor Law Act of 1834 demanded labor from its beneficiaries, while Social Security limits its benefits—with few exceptions—to those who labor. The insurance component of Social Security, Jennifer Klein has argued, inspired the rapid proliferation of non-state, for-profit insurance providers⁹—a moment of entrepreneurial ingenuity in which a capitalist industry arose to protect people against the ravages of capitalism. The market is the solution to the market: a refrain that would echo loudly in the latter part of the century, and indeed one that continues to reverberate in the neoliberal moment, in the context of recurring economic crises.

      The securitization of the social went hand in hand with its capitalization. Security became not simply something provided by the government, but something purchased on the market. The biocapitalist industries of life and health insurance emerged in concert with the biopolitical functions of the Social Security state. One object of security for both state and business, in other words, became life itself—an evolution that enabled the broadening and deepening of security governance, the intensification of its effect upon the individual and social body.¹⁰ The tripartite pact between state, business, and labor—consolidated to an even greater degree following the Second World War—blunted the class contradictions at the heart of the security/insecurity binary and contributed to the hegemonic reach of the security project. The ultimate effect was the continuation of capitalist social relations, the reproduction of a social order based on the security of private property and accumulation in perpetuity.

       Security in the Shadow of War

      From its inception, but with a particular intensity following the Second World War, the Social Security project dovetailed with the rhetoric and policy of National Security. During both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, arguments made for the expansion of Social Security deployed the vocabulary of National Security. Major public infrastructure projects such as the Interstate Highway System—inaugurated by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956—and Saint Lawrence Seaway reconstruction—a project undertaken jointly with Canada, which enabled the development of massive hydroelectric power works, and which significantly expanded commercial shipping routes from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes—were likewise justified on National Security terms. Sputnik and the Soviet threat it embodied, meanwhile, occasioned sharp increases in math and science funding, initially allocated for in the National Defense Education Act of 1957—another instance of a major federal investment in domestic public infrastructure made in the name of National Security.¹¹ Generally speaking, the welfare state and the warfare state emerged from the war closely entwined, and would remain conjoined for the next two decades.

      Expanding and deepening its social infrastructure at home, during the early stages of the Cold War the United States worked to construct a “Keynesian empire” abroad. This National Security paradigm was founded on a developmentalist logic that cohered with domestic policy, specifically Social Security. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States asserted itself as a world power intent on creating and dictating a new international political and economic order—the initial manifestations of which were the European Economic Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) and the financial framework conceived at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. The intellectual rationale for the Bretton Woods system was capitalist security—the belief that peace amongst nations depended upon a liberal system of international trade, one that would be regulated by select governments and supported by international financial institutions (created at Bretton Woods) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (known in 1945 as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or IBRD). Though a departure from the explicitly territorialized logic of the modern colonial system, the international economic order devised at Bretton Woods and instituted in the decades to come maintained the stark divide between the overdeveloped global North and underdeveloped global South. It maintained, moreover, a commitment to the ethos of “free enterprise.” The architects and authors of U.S. policy during the Cold War imagined the freedom of enterprise as that freedom which conditions the possibility of all others. Here we find a more modern version of the Enlightenment axiom that there can be no liberty and security prior to the liberty and security of private property.

       Neoliberal Security

      In the late 1960s and 1970s, the particular economic expression of U.S. foreign policy underwent a dramatic change. Before the close of the 1960s, “embedded liberalism”—the economic order, based on a market sphere subject to extensive social constraints, that facilitated high levels of economic growth in the advanced capitalist world throughout the 1950s and 1960s—had begun to show signs of distress. In the early 1970s, a conjunction of factors—notably energy crises, high unemployment, and inflation—resulted in fiscal crises across the global North, and the Bretton Woods system of international financial regulation broke down. Embedded liberalism no longer seemed capable of guaranteeing the conditions for capital accumulation. The alternative that established itself in the early 1970s, and that has remade the capitalist world in the years

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