Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of organized abandonment can be distinguished from both Johan Galtung’s structural violence and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Whereas Galtung highlights how impersonal social structures produce harm by preventing people from meeting basic needs, Gilmore stresses that abandonment is not accidental but an active, organized strategy where resources are deliberately withdrawn from some populations while they are secured for others. And while Mbembe emphasizes the sovereign’s power to decide who may live and who must die through spectacular forms of coercion and exposure to death, Gilmore shifts the focus further to the slower, systemic management of surplus life: communities are left to languish, but only in tandem with the intensification of policing, prisons, and other instruments of organized violence.

LLM

Gilmore’s framework sits right inside this tension between deliberate orchestration and normalized doxa. Let me break it down:

1. On Purpose vs. Unaware

• At the policy and capital allocation level organized abandonment is largely deliberate. Budgets are cut, services are privatized, neighborhoods are disinvested—these are decisions taken with foresight about where value will be extracted and where it will not.

• At the street-level or everyday level much of it is experienced as naturalized, even invisible—“just how things are.” Here abandonment becomes woven into doxa, to use Bourdieu’s term: the unspoken horizon of the possible.

2. Doxa, Custom, and Normalization

Yes—over time, abandonment becomes routinized. The abnormal becomes ordinary. This is precisely how organized abandonment maintains itself: through normalization. Gilmore is clear that abandonment is not just a one-off event, but a long, grinding process that remakes expectations and possibilities, embedding itself in common sense.

3. Culpability and Rank

• Higher-ranking actors are culpable in the strong sense: they make decisions that allocate life chances and know—or could know—the consequences. Even when cloaked in technocratic language (“efficiency,” “budget balancing,” “urban renewal”), the distributive outcomes are predictable: some live, some languish.

• Lower-ranking actors often reproduce abandonment without the same degree of awareness or power. Their culpability is more limited, but not nonexistent—since they often internalize and perpetuate abandonment as “the way things are.” Here complicity is typically more diffuse, woven into routines and practices rather than decision-making authority.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very sharp and important distinction you’re drawing—because it resists the too-easy excuse that “the little people don’t know, the big people don’t care.” What you’re pointing out is that complicity operates at every rung, but in different registers.

• Lower rungs: There’s often more agency than is admitted. People know how abandonment works in practice—they see who gets cut out, who’s punished, who survives. Yet, as you say, “they know which side their bread is buttered.” Here complicity often takes the form of willful unknowing (Bonhoeffer’s term captures this exactly): a refusal to press on what one already suspects, a conscious turning away. It’s immoral not because they orchestrate the system, but because they collude in its daily reproduction, smoothing its operations in exchange for security or advancement.

• Higher rungs: Decision-makers often inhabit a bubble of abstraction—spreadsheets, projections, metrics—far removed from the lived consequences of abandonment. Their distance means that they can genuinely feel disconnected from the suffering they orchestrate. But the moral gravity of their position is immense: they set the terms under which abandonment and violence unfold. Their culpability is therefore qualitatively greater, even if it comes wrapped in technocratic detachment.

• The middle strata: This is often where the system’s smooth functioning depends most—mid-level managers, local politicians, professionals who carry out directives. They often feel both squeezed and insulated, yet they are crucial translators of abandonment into everyday policy and practice.

So abandonment is both top-down and horizontally maintained. Those at the bottom may not design it, but they may grease its gears. Those at the top may not touch its consequences, but they are responsible for setting it in motion.

This brings us close to Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis of the “banality of evil”: not monstrous intent but the willingness to go along to get along, to normalize cruelty because one benefits from its order.

ChatGPT said:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s organized abandonment names the political-economic strategy through which capital and the state withdraw life-sustaining resources from targeted populations while shoring up instruments of organized violence to contain them. But this framework also raises the question of complicity: how abandonment is not only designed from above but reproduced through everyday action and inaction. Here, moral and political philosophy can sharpen what Gilmore shows structurally.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer insists that ignorance is often willed—a refusal to see what one already half-knows. For him, lack of awareness in the face of injustice is not innocence but immorality. Applied to organized abandonment, this diagnosis speaks to those on lower rungs who claim to be “just following orders” or “doing their jobs.” They may not set policy, but they collude in its reproduction, choosing comfort and conformity over the risks of refusal.

Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of the “banality of evil,” shows how violence persists not only through the spectacular cruelty of tyrants but through the ordinary willingness to go along to get along. Bureaucrats, functionaries, mid-level actors—all normalize abandonment by routinizing it, embedding it in procedures, and neutralizing its moral sting. Their culpability lies less in intent than in their abdication of judgment, their submission to the machinery of rule.

Gilmore, finally, reveals how this moral economy of complicity is tethered to racial capitalism itself. Organized abandonment is not accidental drift but structural design, made durable by the intertwining of economic imperatives and political decisions. At the top, culpability lies in deliberate orchestration—budget cuts, disinvestment, privatization—executed at a safe distance from lived consequences. At the bottom and middle, culpability lies in willing the unknowing, smoothing the operations, accepting the doxa of abandonment as “just the way things are.”

Together, Bonhoeffer, Arendt, and Gilmore show that abandonment is not only organized from above but also normalized across society. It is a structure of rule that requires both architects and accomplices: the planners who pull away resources, the bureaucrats who implement, and the ordinary people who consent by refusing to know what they already suspect.

ChatGPT said:

That’s the dark edge of it—you’re pressing right into the paradox Gilmore, Arendt, and Bonhoeffer all circle without fully collapsing into.

If the system presents only obedience or death, then the very notion of “choice” becomes hollow. Agency is formally present but substantively void. You can choose—but only between complicity and annihilation. This is where the illusion of freedom becomes another mechanism of control: the system preserves its legitimacy by insisting that individuals “chose” to obey, while structuring the world so that disobedience amounts to self-destruction.

• For Gilmore, this is racial capitalism’s cruel efficiency: abandonment creates conditions where survival itself is precarious, so the margin for refusal is vanishingly small. The system doesn’t need your enthusiastic consent; it only needs you to keep moving along the grooves it has carved.

• For Arendt, this reveals the limit of “judgment”: if the world is structured such that refusal equates to ruin, then banal complicity isn’t only about moral laziness—it’s about the manufacture of powerlessness.

• For Bonhoeffer, though, this is precisely the moral crucible: obedience under threat of death does not absolve one of responsibility. For him, true resistance is often suicidal, but that does not erase its necessity. His idea that refusing to know is immoral anticipates this: even under coercion, one must see clearly, even if one cannot act without annihilation.

So yes—the system thrives on the illusion of meaningful choice. Obedience looks voluntary because you could “always” choose otherwise, but the cost of that otherwise is so catastrophic that the choice collapses into coercion. This is how abandonment, violence, and complicity knit together: people “choose” to go along because the only alternative is expulsion, destitution, or death.

The deeper horror, then, is that the system weaponizes survival itself: to live is to comply, and to resist is to risk being unmade.