Category Archives: prison-industrial complex

Foucault Tourism

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Today to Cockatoo Island: penal colony within the convict colony, industrial reformatory, factory, shipyard, UNESCO World Heritage site and now a venue for the 18th Sydney Biennale. The extraordinary bricolage of colonial punishment, industrial production and knowledge economy cultural production makes for one of those slightly dizzying jet laggy experiences you have only while traveling.

My British forebears did know how and where to build prisons, you have to give them that. The island is isolated in the middle of Sydney harbor, with the prison itself located on top of a steep cliff. Recent excavations have uncovered minute solitary confinement cells, which have a distinctly contemporary look in this Abu Ghraib era. The officials built themselves sandstone residences with a Georgian feel but placed at the highest point to give them a panoptic viewpoint. Grain silos dug into the rock still have chain rings, to which the excavating prisoners were linked while working. The prison was created right at the end of the transportation era in 1849–convicts were not sent to New South Wales after 1850, although they went to Western Australia as late as 1868.

As has often been pointed out, these colonial punishments add a totally different complexion to the idea that European jurisprudence had moved from physical punishment to mental discipline by the early nineteenth century. My view has been that revolutionary action in Europe won workers there a certain (if limited) reprieve from punishment; but colonial punishment intensified in the later nineteenth century as imperialism abandoned all pretension of colonial self-government in favor of direct rule from the metropole. That did not preclude the disciplinary formation of colonized subjects, as the reformatories attest.

In 2000, a group of Aboriginal people occupied the island and claimed it as sovereign territory. You can still see their murals, using the Aboriginal flag as a motif. Using the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, Isabell Coe and others asserted that Britain had never formally claimed the island, a claim rejected by the courts as “inconceivable.” Really? A deserted island on the edge of the harbor? Regardless, Coe created a tent embassy on the island and asserted sovereignty. The occupation of occupied indigenous land and the counterclaim to sovereignty was a powerful performative act.

This, then, is no ordinary post-industrial site to hold an art exhibition. The artists whose work was shown here seemed to be aware of the challenges and many rose to the occasion. I liked Jonathan Jones’s simple approach:

Jones mixed typically British crockery with sea-shells that might be found in an Aboriginal midden in what is now New South Wales. The intermingling is simple but effective.

A more complex approach was taken by Lebanese artist Khaled Sabsabi in his installation “Nonabel.” You enter a darkened air-raid shelter and see the reflection of a young boy in water projected onto the circular walls. All of a sudden, the image changes dramatically and a montage of Arabic calligraphy and sound installation made me jump, although the phrase being used in the piece apparently means: “if you destroy the image of violence, it will disappear.”

Khaled Sabsabi “Nonabel”

Finally Alec Finlay brought the location of imperial domination up to date with his sound and sculpture installation. To quote his description:

Finlay takes the fluctuations of the stock market and represents them as the ‘buzz’ of Australian honey-bees (recorded by sound-artist Chris Watson), broadcast from 10 multi-storied wooden hives. Each hive stack bears the acronym of a major stock exchange – New York, Toronto, Sao Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney – and produces a stream of audio, a buzzing that varies in density and volume in accordance with economic activity.

It was a remarkable sound, rising and falling with the market activity.

Alec Finlay “Swarm ASX”

What made it all the more powerful–although I suspect unintentionally–was that I came upon this piece in the Convict Precinct, just after reading a sign placed by the Sydney Harbor Trust. It described how, when the prison was first established, the prisoners were confined in wooden boxes at night. Is this what the favorite corporate slogan “thinking outside the box” actually means? That if you don’t produce useful ideas, we’ll put you in a box? Bees are said to form colonies. Others describe them as democracies or societies. Finlay also makes nests for “unproductive” wild bees out of books about bees. It’s layered symbolism like this that does important imaginative work, as we would do well to remember in our messaging and imaging in directly political contexts.

The Debt-Prison System

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Debt is prison. Few debtors, whether dealing with students loans, credit cards or mortgages, would disagree I imagine. By this phrase I intend not a metaphor but a description: debt is a systemic way to limit options, impose unfreedom and sustain the unfree labor market on which capitalism depends. In the United States, this debt-prison system is necessarily intertwined with what Angela Y. Davis calls the post-slavery prison-industrial complex. Resisting debt servitude in this country is a central part of extending and completing the Civil Rights movement.

The old face of the new refusal

This is a proper concern for Occupy for any number of reasons. As I mentioned a while ago, Wall Street was the site of New York’s slave market. Combine that with its role as a barrier against the indigenous population (hence the name) and as a site of financial speculation and we begin to understand what the symbol “Wall Street” really means. So while what I have to say here may sound like a history lesson, it’s very much a history of the present that enables us to see what how high the stakes are in the apparently technical problem of student debt.

Transatlantic slavery was a system dependent on debt financing. The slavers borrowed money for the costs of the voyage and the trade good they exchanged for human property in Africa. These goods were far from worthless and developed into a money form based on copper. The enslaved were purchased by American planters buying on credit. It was only with the sale of the products of the plantation back in Europe that true profit entered the system.

But this profit was spectacular: a ship called the Lively left Liverpool, England, in 1737 with cargo worth £1307 and returned with £3080 in cash plus a cargo of sugar and cotton. In short, a profit of at least 500%, unavailable anywhere else in the early modern financial system. Don’t take my word for it: here’s Adam Smith, inventor of the concept of the market in his 1776 Wealth of Nations: “The profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known.” Haiti was the wealthiest place on the planet when its revolution began in 1791.

Just as the factory system described by Marx was not participated in by anything like a majority of workers but was typical of its time, the slave system was the hallmark of American capitalism. Today I would argue it’s the debt-prison system that marks out the peculiarity of the United States. Debt servitude, racialized segregation and mass incarceration of those so racialized are thus the true American exceptionalism–while debt is central to capitalism worldwide only in the United States do we have such a peculiar and networked system of debt as racialized punishment.

US slavery persisted much longer than in Europe, as we all know. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the enslaved enacted a general strike against slavery in which half a million people moved away from plantations to the North. The South claimed that millions of its capital were, so to speak, contained and hence “lost” in the bodies of the enslaved in 1863. The period known as Reconstruction (1865-77) was a struggle by the formerly enslaved to escape being, as it were, recouped by the planters into the debt-prison system. In so doing, the freed used many of the tactics we continue to deploy today from occupying to marches and strikes. It failed because of a Wall Street real-estate speculation crash that produced the typical binary form of US racism in its wake.

The freed claimed their own land to farm. If the Freedmen’s Bureau would not give it to them, they occupied it. The concept was simple: a small group of people would create sufficient food for themselves and a surplus to trade with. It was a sustainable anti-poverty system that did not rely on wage labor. But as David Graeber puts it:

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.

The idea that the freed would work freely was abhorrent to the planters and to Northern capital alike. Instead, they were to be compelled to work for their former owners.

All the new labor systems that were developed to this end were, as Angela Davis puts it, “dramatic evidence of the persistence of slavery.” That is to say, share cropping, tenant farming, the scrip system and the convict lease system of imprisoned labor all depended on a new series of connections between debt, labor and prison. Share cropping meant that the farmers were entitled to a share of the crop they produced, usually a third. However, as this meant they were paid only once a year, they had to make purchases on credit for the rest of year at the notorious crossroads or company stores. Very often the annual payment would not cover this debt meaning that the sharecropper could never escape the land. In fact, wage laborers were often not paid in cash but in scrip, a paper form allowing you to buy things at inflated prices in the company store.

Even this labor was too expensive for the planters. So the new Black Codes passed in the South after the Civil War criminalized minor financial transgressions. In Mississippi any person who “handled money carelessly” could be declared a vagrant and imprisoned. Simple theft, whether of bread or an animal, was turned into a felony and those convicted were imprisoned. The new African American prisoners were turned into a virtually free labor force by the convict lease system in which employers could use convicts to work for almost nothing. Even today, the University of California gets its office furniture from prison workshops.

The freed resisted these innovations. In South Carolina, the legislature attempted to borrow money to buy land for the freed. Wall Street would not buy their bonds. The laborers organized and called strikes for waged field labor. In Louisiana, workers refused to labor for their former owners, organized and marched. One freed organizer named John J. Moore testified that planters said  to them: “if you do not let politics alone you will get killed here.”

But in 1873, Wall Street crashed, having speculated wildly in railroads and real estate. It took down the Freedmen’s Bank and with it about $3 million of deposits made by the formerly enslaved. Emboldened by the crash, known then as the Great Depression, planters reduced wages where they were paid, as in Louisiana, from $18 plus food to $13 only a month. When the Hayes-Tilden compromise withdrew Federal troops from the South, the political gains of Reconstruction were rapidly overturned and the convict lease labor system swung into full effect.

Even now, the freed were not willing to give up. In 1887, a major strike on the sugar plantations of Louisiana was repressed only by armed force, in which about thirty strikers were killed and hundreds injured. Although the strikers came from all backgrounds, the planters defined them as “black” and themselves as “white.” It was three years later that the “Separate Car Act” enforced racialized segregation on trains in Louisiana, leading to the infamous 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson case at the Supreme Court that declared “separate but equal” facilities to be legal.

In short, the debt crisis that has generated over one trillion dollars of student debt, $700 billion in credit card debt, 4 million foreclosed homes, 6 million other homes in danger of foreclosure is part and parcel of the system that has placed over two million people in jail.

The consequence is simple and challenging: there will be no making the debt system better, or less burdensome. Even today, sub-prime lending was reported to be on the rise again. Graduate student loans accrue interest immediately as of next year so that someone working on a PhD will have eight years of interest at a minimum of 6.8% by the time they graduate. Debt is so central to what we are trying to occupy when we Occupy Wall Street that it cannot be separated out.

I do not think this is depressing but rather it shows that Occupy continues to advance our understanding of the tasks that lie before us. It should be remembered that it was once said to be impossible to abolish slavery, and not long ago it was supposed to be inevitable that there would always be segregation. It’s not inevitable that we agree to live in debt, accept debt as our punishment for not having been born wealthy and apply for opportunities to get more and more in debt. The first step is refusal, which is why the new slogan going the rounds is Bartleby’s rejoinder to a Wall Street banker:

I would prefer not to.

Me too.

The Out of Control Society

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The disciplinary society of enclosed spaces known as school, army or work has largely collapsed under the assaults of neo-liberalism. What is becoming clear is that the society of control that was imagined to be its replacement is getting out of control.

Permanent school in the form of life-long training was the society of control: now we have debt out of control, and machines to do the labor. Permanent prison was to replace the panopticon but society can no longer afford it. The permanent counterinsurgency has collapsed into a brutal necropolitics–the right to determine who shall be killed.

Debt was today discussed in genteel terms on the New York Times editorial page. The Times found it “welcome” that Mount Holyoke has frozen its price of attendance at a trifling $53,000. Sewanee, the University of the South, has reduced costs to “lure” students with a mere $44,600 charge, to be kept constant for four years.

On the facing letters column, the President of Sarah Lawrence, the most expensive school in the country, suggests that with grant aid her institution can be an “affordable choice” if “educational value” is factored in. In short, financial aid is another form of privilege. It’s been widely noted that for many students Harvard can be less expensive than the California State system, which was designed to cater to working- and middle-class students.

Less well-heeled institutions have stopped bothering to pretend. The University of North Iowa Regents today approved cuts, reported to involve closing its Physics department, among several others, as well as a Lab School and its museum. 30 tenured and tenure track faculty will be dismissed.

Yesterday came a spectacular declaration of the collapse of global counterinsurgency into sovereign assertion of the right to kill. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed:

Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Mr. Holder said. “This is simply not accurate.”

This is, to the contrary, by any standard out of control. If the Bush administration had said this, we would all have gone crazy–and maybe run for President on the idea of restoring the rule of law.

Let’s consider how Deleuze defined the society of control in 1990:

The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.

It is possible, then, to claim that the rapid change of direction we are seeing is simply an intensification of the society of the control. Deleuze did note that universities would abandon research and education would become corporate throughout. However, it seems now to read better as

Debt is continuous and without limit.

It was striking for ,e to see how often the closing phrase of my preceding post on debt was cited on Facebook and elsewhere:

The most dangerous idea now might be this: it’s not worth paying for college because there are no jobs anyway and no job that you want would pay you enough to service the debt.

As I reflect on this context, it seems that being dangerous means taking the fact that everything is out of control as a starting point.

In the era of the emerging disciplinary society, such people were called visionaries or prophets, like the Digger Gerard Winstanley, who saw that the “earth was a common treasury for all” in a 1649 vision during the English Revolution. So he and some companions went and occupied St George’s Hill in Surrey. They called for what has been called a “general strike” against waged labor and for communal living. The Army and the gentry soon put an end to all that. Their heir was the far better-remembered “prophet against Empire,” William Blake, who railed against “One King, one God, one Law.”

As if to remind us that this is no longer the age of prophecy, Mark Butterworth’s play Jerusalem has been running on both sides of the Atlantic since 2009, although it opened in New York in 2011. The play is a lament for the passing of a certain possibility, shrouded in mythic Englishness by being set on St George’s Day in rural Wiltshire with a lead character called Byron. Johnny Byron. Johnny occupies a patch of common land, like a latter-day Digger, except that he deals in drugs and his trailer acts as a hang-out for the local marginal population.

Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in "Jerusalem"

His encampment was an Occupy in all but name and the action begins when it becomes one, because a local real estate developer plans to turn the land into a sub-division (in US terms), so Rooster (as he is known) is served an eviction notice. These themes, like the English flag and the song “Jerusalem,” are not without clear overtones of white nostalgia for empire. The play ends in such a way that you either have to assume that Rooster is sleeping with a teenager or that her brother has been abusing her. It’s the dangerous supplement to the good old Oedipus complex that has been the stuff of drama for so long.

What Jerusalem was not was a revival of the prophetic voice–most critics talked about Shakespeare not Blake, lat alone the poet Byron, a reference they all seemed to miss. Nor did it in fact prophesy Occupy because the overwhelming majority of sites were urban, not rural, such as the long-lasting Occupy Bristol, closest to Wiltshire.

What’s dangerous about rejecting even the out of control society is very clear to people–that you risk giving up the one chance you might have, however attenuated, to break out of your social strata. US social mobility is amongst the lowest in the overdeveloped countries. At the same time, the chance of being perceived as a prophet, as opposed to an out of control homeless person, is too low to mention. In Terence Malick’s odd film Tree of Life, the only prophet that could be evoked was Job, whose sufferings at the hand of an apparently malign deity ring somewhat truer than stories of redemption.

The religiosity is the problem. Where messianism once offered a counterpoint to law, it scarcely does today in the evangelical US, where being Christian is a requirement for office every bit as strict as the shariah of Iran.

It’s the anarchic streak implied by “out of control” that now rings true from Rosa Luxemburg to Winstanley and Occupy–“no god, no master.” It’s perhaps the least commented on feature of the movement and it’s most dangerous one: not just out of control but a rejection of the desire to be controlled.