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#abolish prison labor
personal-blog243 · 1 year
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The “criminal loophole” has been written OUT of the TN constitution!
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callese · 2 years
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Voters in three states approved ballot measures that will change their state constitutions to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, while those in a fourth state rejected the move. The measures approved Tuesday curtail the use of prison labor in Alabama, Tennessee and Vermont. In Oregon, “yes” was leading its anti-slavery ballot initiative, but the vote remained too early to call Wednesday morning.
In Louisiana, a former slave-holding state, voters rejected a ballot question known as Amendment 7 that asked whether they supported a constitutional amendment to prohibit the use of involuntary servitude in the criminal justice system.
The initiatives won’t force immediate changes in the states’ prisons, but they may invite legal challenges over the practice of coercing prisoners to work under threat of sanctions or loss of privileges if they refuse the work.
The results were celebrated among anti-slavery advocates, including those pushing to further amend the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits enslavement and involuntary servitude except as a form of criminal punishment. More than 150 years after enslaved Africans and their descendants were released from bondage through ratification of the 13th Amendment, the slavery exception continues to permit the exploitation of low-cost labor by incarcerated individuals.
“Voters in Oregon and other states have come together across party lines to say that this stain must be removed from state constitutions,” Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, told The Associated Press.
“Now, it is time for all Americans to come together and say that it must be struck from the U.S. Constitution. There should be no exceptions to a ban on slavery,” he said.
Coinciding with the creation of the Juneteenth federal holiday last year, Merkley and Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Georgia, reintroduced legislation to revise the 13th Amendment to end the slavery exception. If it wins approval in Congress, the constitutional amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of U.S. states.
After Tuesday’s vote, more than a dozen states still have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary servitude for prisoners. Several other states have no constitutional language for or against the use of forced prison labor.
Voters in Colorado became the first to approve removal of slavery exception language from the state constitution in 2018, followed by Nebraska and Utah two years later.
The movement to end or regulate the use of prison labor has existed for decades, since the time when former Confederate states sought ways to maintain the use of chattel slavery after the Civil War. Southern states used racist laws, referred to as “Black codes,” to criminalize, imprison and re-enslave Black Americans over benign behavior.
Today, prison labor is a multibillion-dollar practice. By comparison, workers can make pennies on the dollar. And prisoners who refuse to work can be denied privileges such as phone calls and visits with family, as well as face solitary confinement, all punishments that are eerily similar to those used during antebellum slavery.
“The 13th Amendment didn’t actually abolish slavery — what it did was make it invisible,” Bianca Tylek, an anti-slavery advocate and the executive director of the criminal justice advocacy group Worth Rises, told the AP in an interview ahead of Election Day.
She said passage of the ballot initiatives, especially in red states like Alabama, “is a great signal for what’s possible at the federal level.”
“There is a big opportunity here, in this moment,” Tylek said.
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cutthesky · 30 days
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An inmate in a California state prison donated $17.74 to Gaza.
He worked 136 hours for this.
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https://gofund.me/c838b29f
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blackbackedjackal · 9 months
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This is the worst holiday btw
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politicsofcanada · 1 year
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Do you think we should ban prison labour? Because prisoners get paid horribly low wages. Or maybe make a mandatory prison labour wage like 15 dollars a hour. But then again abolishing prison would be better, because then there would no enslavement of prisoners and no rape and torture of prisoners and lots of jobs created.
I don't think we should have prisons at all, but for as long as we do have them, working while incarcerated should be optional and subject to the same workers rights regulations as working while not incarcerated.
the end goal is to abolish the prison system, but in the meantime working while in prison should be a choice, said workers should have a union, make a living wage, and have legally mandated breaks and shifts no longer than 8 hours. I want them to make time and a half on holidays and get overtime pay if they work extra hours. I want the same rights for incarcerated workers as I want for unincarcerated workers. that's the bare minimum. ideally, workers (whether incarcerated or not) should have much higher pay, maximum 6 hour shifts, and a 4 day work week, any more than 24 hours of work in week meaning overtime pay
ideally, prison labour reform would only need to be temporary. that is only to make the lives of incarcerated people a little bit more livable until we can dismantle the prison system and restore freedom to those who have been imprisoned by an oppressive government, just as the workers rights that I want are largely related to a capitalist system that I believe should also be dismantled
the reason I push for reform as well as abolition is that if abolition takes a long time to put in place, incarcerated people should have more rights in the meantime. the same way that I want an end to capitalism, but in the meantime I want higher wages and a lower cost of living.
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selfborn · 2 years
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The Devil's Deception in The New World Order- Abdullah Hakim Quick
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twitterexile · 1 year
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sachyriel · 4 months
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They took the wage out of the wage-slavery.
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doomhope · 1 year
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UPDATE: turning off reblogs since voting is over for this cycle
this is absolutely not a "go vote or you're evil!" post BUT you should know that if you're registered to vote in Oregon, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, or Vermont you have the opportunity to vote to abolish prison slavery this year, and i think you should strongly consider it.
from the washington post:
"The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution bans slavery or involuntary servitude, except when it is used as punishment for a crime.
If passed, the proposals would wholly abolish slavery in those states, though they would not automatically change protocols on prison labor or inmate pay.
[...] the bills could give lawyers more license to pursue greater rights and higher pay for U.S. prisoners; Dolovich said that paying inmates below the minimum-wage protections set by each state is arguably 'a species of slavery.'
'It’ll be a fight in court. This question will be manifested by lawyers bringing cases on behalf of incarcerated workers,' she said. 'It’s a hopeful sign for me.'"
(Source; warning for more detailed discussion of prison slavery and related cruelty in the article)
so again, if you're able to vote and live in Oregon, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, or Vermont, please consider it. prison abolition will not happen solely via voting it away but if these pass it will certainly be a victory and hopefully a stepping stone for other victories.
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txttletale · 5 months
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niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs
it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics
BASICS OF MARXISM
friedrich engels, principles of commmunism
friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific
karl marx, the german ideology
karl marx, wage labour & capital
mao zedong, on contradiction
nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism
rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?
v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder
v.i. lenin, the state & revolution
v.i. lenin, what is to be done?
IMPERIALISM
aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time
albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized
che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)
eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america
edward said, orientalism
fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america
frantz fanon, black skin, white masks
frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth
greg grandin, empire's workshop
kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism
michael parenti, against empire
naomi klein, the shock doctrine
ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency
v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism
vijay prashad, red star over the third world
vincent bevins, the jakarta method
walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa
william blum, killing hope
zak cope, divided world divided class
zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations
MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES
antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks
ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples
ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices
gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia
jacques derrida, margins of philosophy
jacques derrida, speech and phenomena
michael parenti, inventing reality
michel foucault, disicipline and punish
michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge
natasha schull, addiction by design
nick snricek, platform capitalism
noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent
regis tove stella, imagining the other
richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class
safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression
stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history
theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry
walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction
OTHER
angela davis, women, race, and class
anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam
anna louise strong, the soviets expected it
anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet
carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba
chris chitty, sexual hegemony
christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor
eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism
elaine scarry, the body in pain
jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal
michael parenti, blackshirts & reds
paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed
peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism
rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure
sophie lewis, abolish the family
suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution
walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world
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personal-blog243 · 1 year
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If you live in Tennessee, slavery (underpaid coerced prison labor) is on the ballot. Early voting has already started! Vote yes on amendment 3!
It seems that what this addition says is that convicts will be allowed to have jobs only if they want, but they will not be forced. This seems to be a step in the right direction.
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fatehbaz · 9 months
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When you tag things “#abolition”, what are you referring to? Abolishing what?
Prisons, generally. Though not just physical walls of formal prisons, but also captivity, carcerality, and carceral thinking. Including migrant detention; national border fences; indentured servitude; inability to move due to, and labor coerced through, debt; de facto imprisonment or isolation of the disabled or medically pathologized; privatization and enclosure of land; categories of “criminality"; etc.
In favor of other, better lives and futures.
Specifically, I am grateful to have learned from the work of these people:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore on “abolition geography”.
Katherine McKittrick on "imaginative geographies"; emotional engagement with place/landscape; legacy of imperialism/slavery in conceptions of physical space and in devaluation of other-than-human lifeforms; escaping enclosure; plantation “afterlives” and how plantation logics continue to thrive in contemporary structures/institutions like cities, prisons, etc.; a “range of rebellions” through collaborative acts, refusal of the dominant order, and subversion through joy and autonomy.
Macarena Gomez-Barris on landscapes as “sacrifice zones”; people condemned to live in resource extraction colonies deemed as acceptable losses; place-making and ecological consciousness; and how “the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the prison” are analogous spaces of captivity.
Liat Ben-Moshe on disability; informal institutionalization and incarceration of disabled people through physical limitation, social ostracization, denial of aid, and institutional disavowal; and "letting go of hegemonic knowledge of crime”.
Achille Mbembe on co-existence and care; respect for other-than-human lifeforms; "necropolitics" and bare life/death; African cosmologies; historical evolution of chattel slavery into contemporary institutions through control over food, space, and definitions of life/land; the “explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary resource extraction” and modern institutions.
Robin Maynard on "generative refusal"; solidarity; shared experiences among homeless, incarcerated, disabled, Indigenous, Black communities; to "build community with" those who you are told to disregard in order "to re-imagine" worlds; envisioning, imagining, and then manifesting those alternative futures which are "already" here and alive.
Leniqueca Welcome on Caribbean world-making; "the apocalyptic temporality" of environmental disasters and the colonial denial of possible "revolutionary futures"; limits of reformism; "infrastructures of liberation at the end of the world."; "abolition is a practice oriented toward the full realization of decolonization, postnationalism, decarceration, and environmental sustainability."
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on “the undercommons”; fugitivity; dis-order in academia and institutions; and sharing of knowledge.
AM Kanngieser on "deep listening"; “refusal as pedagogy”; and “attunement and attentiveness” in the face of “incomprehensible” and immense “loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities”.
Lisa Lowe on "the intimacies of four continents" and how British politicians and planters feared that official legal abolition of chattel slavery would endanger Caribbean plantation profits, so they devised ways to import South Asian and East Asian laborers.
Ariella Aisha Azoulay on “rehearsals with others’.
Phil Neel on p0lice departments purposely targeting the poor as a way to raise municipal funds; the "suburbanization of poverty" especially in the Great Lakes region; the rise of lucrative "logistics empires" (warehousing, online order delivery, tech industries) at the edges of major urban agglomerations in "progressive" cities like Seattle dependent on "archipelagos" of poverty; and the relationship between job loss, homelessness, gentrification, and these logistics cities.
Alison Mountz on migrant detention; "carceral archipelagoes"; and the “death of asylum”.
Pedro Neves Marques on “one planet with many worlds inside it”; “parallel futures” of Indigenous, Black, disenfranchised communities/cosmologies; and how imperial/nationalist institutions try to foreclose or prevent other possible futures by purposely obscuring or destroying histories, cosmologies, etc.
Peter Redfield on the early twentieth-century French penal colony in tropical Guiana/Guyana; the prison's invocation of racist civilization/savagery mythologies; and its effects on locals.
Iain Chambers on racism of borders; obscured and/or forgotten lives of migrants; and disrupting modernity.
Paulo Tavares on colonial architecture; nationalist myth-making; and erasure of histories of Indigenous dispossession.
Elizabeth Povinelli on "geontopower"; imperial control over "life and death"; how imperial/nationalist formalization of private landownership and commodities relies on rigid definitions of dynamic ecosystems.
Kodwo Eshun on African cosmologies and futures; “the colonial present”; and imperialist/nationalist use of “preemptive” and “predictive” power to control the official storytelling/narrative of history and to destroy alternatives.
Tim Edensor on urban "ghosts" and “industrial ruins”; searching for the “gaps” and “silences” in the official narratives of nations/institutions, to pay attention to the histories, voices, lives obscured in formal accounts.
Megan Ybarra on place-making; "site fights"; solidarity and defiance of migrant detention; and geography of abolition/incarceration.
Sophie Sapp Moore on resistance, marronage, and "forms of counterplantation life"; "plantation worlds" which continue to live in contemporary industrial resource extraction and dispossession.
Deborah Cowen on “infrastructures of empire and resistance”; imperial/nationalist control of place/space; spaces of criminality and "making a life at the edge" of the law; “fugitive infrastructures”.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey on indentured labor; the role of plants, food, and botany in enslaved and fugitive communities; the nineteenth-century British Empire's labor in the South Pacific and Caribbean; the twentieth-century United States mistreatment of the South Pacific; and the role of tropical islands as "laboratories" and isolated open-air prisons for Britain and the US.
Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo on “remaining open to the gifts of the nonhuman” ecosystems; hinterlands and peripheries of empires; attentiveness to hidden landscapes/histories; defying surveillance; and building a world of mutually-flourishing companions.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on reciprocity; Indigenous pedagogy; abolitionism in Canada; camaraderie; solidarity; and “life-affirming” environmental relationships.
Anand Yang on "forgotten histories of Indian convicts in colonial Southeast Asia" and how the British Empire deported South Asian political prisoners to the region to simultaneously separate activists from their communities while forcing them into labor.
Sylvia Wynter on the “plot”; resisting the plantation; "plantation archipelagos"; and the “revolutionary demand for happiness”.
Pelin Tan on “exiled foods”; food sovereignty; building affirmative care networks in the face of detention, forced migration, and exile; connections between military rule, surveillance, industrial monocrop agriculture, and resource extraction; the “entanglement of solidarity” and ethics of feeding each other.
Avery Gordon on haunting; spectrality; the “death sentence” of being deemed “social waste” and being considered someone “without future”; "refusing" to participate; "escaping hell" and “living apart” by striking, squatting, resisting; cultivating "the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Black Atlantic"; alternative, utopian, subjugated worldviews; despite attempts to destroy these futures, manifesting these better worlds, imagining them as "already here, alive, present."
Jasbir Puar on disability; debilitation; how the control of fences, borders, movement, and time management constitute conditions of de facto imprisonment; institutional control of illness/health as a weapon to "debilitate" people; how debt and chronic illness doom us to a “slow death”.
Kanwal Hameed and Katie Natanel on "liberation pedagogy"; sharing of knowledge, education, subversion of colonial legacy in universities; "anticolonial feminisms"; and “spaces of solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release”.
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yourtongzhihazel · 18 days
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The reserve army of labor is one of the strongest tools for the maintenance of bourgeois control over the proletariat. The process is simple. Keep a large supply of unemployed or underemployed workers who become desperate for work. These desperate workers are willing to accept any wage in order to, y'know, not get social murdered via. hunger or exposure. Thus, workers who are currently employed are under "threat" by the unemployed. The bourgeoisie can then turn to the employed worker and say: "see these hungry, homeless people? if you don't take a pay cut, I'll hire them for your cut pay and then fire you". The employed, under threat of becoming a member of the reserve army of labor and all that entails, is then forced to comply.
The expansion of the reserve army of labor was actually used as a defense of keeping the institution of slavery. The argument went as so: the freeing of slaves would expand the reserve army of labor, making employed workers' task of keeping their wages higher tougher. Can you, dear reader, spot why this argument is weak and undialectical? If you answered "but wait, isn't slavery the lowest of the low in terms of the reserve army since they are compelled to work with no wages?", you are correct! Counter to what these "socialists" thought, emancipation represented the raising of the floor, not the lowering of the ceiling.
As we know intimately well, slavery still exists in the usa. Prison labor is the cheapest of all labor in the land. A majority of made in the usa products are made via or was partially made by prison labor. These prisoners also constitute the reserve army of labor. This goes hand-in-hand with the criminalization of POC and homelessness. You can be compelled to work for little to no wages by simply being thrown in prison. So the abolishment of prison labor, just like the abolishment of chattel slavery, is one of utmost important for striking a deep blow against the use of the reserve army of labor.
SN: AZ38
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chrisdornerfanclub · 6 months
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Convict slavery, or the practice of forcing people who’ve been convicted of a crime to conditions of slavery, is an ancient practice. But we see a major transition in the era of capitalism when large modern prisons for longterm confinement are first being constructed. They have the effect of containment of what society considers to be unruly social problems and transforms them into large concentrations of captive laborers able to do a variety of hard manual labor tasks in slave conditions on command, for minimal if any compensation.
The United States formally abolished racial chattel slavery in 1865 and Brazil would be the last nation to abolish slavery in the Americas in 1888. But exceptions were made in practically every nation that formally abolished slavery, including explicitly in the United States 13th Amendment which states “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” for the practice of convict slavery.
Convict slavery is much older and differs from chattel slavery in that it is usually a temporary status that ends after the sentence enacted against you expires. You are then released and allowed to have a civilian life and your status as a convict slave is not transferred across generations. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that in the United States the mass imprisonment and transformation of whole populations into convict slaves after the formal end of chattel slavery was used as a weapon against Black communities to destroy their growing self-determination, autonomous development of community institutions and independent (and thus competitive) wealth, political power in relation to southern and northern whites, and escalating labor militancy. Whites of all classes united in a reactionary class collaborationist pact and opposed Black independence after the end of chattel slavery, which resulted in the premature ending of Reconstruction. This is because Black independence represented a real and imagined competition and increased presence in business, politics, the labor market, and public life which was seen as a direct threat to the rule of white supremacy. There were even instances of solidarity between Black and white workers, which could not be tolerated in a racial capitalism because if it spread and grew the whole order could collapse. So segregation, ghettoization, Black codes, the transformation of slave catchers into police, sharecropping, debt peonage, convict leasing, re-enslavement, political disenfranchisement, intimidation, the mass production of antiblack racial propaganda, and mass violence like pogroms and lynchings were tactics white settlers used to crush this growing Black independence and to return large numbers of the Black community to conditions of slavery by another name.
What is unique about convict slavery under capitalism is not only its racial component in the settler colonies, former chattel slaver nations, and imperialist empires, but also the fact that it massively expands the mass of the class of convict slaves and concentrates and contains them in longterm state and private facilities as both punishment and as a forced labor center where production for a variety of private contracts or public works can occur and captive laborers can be trained and commanded at will without even minimal compensation or even the ability to transfer those skills to a relevant field of work after the completion of their sentence, such as the case with firefighting in the United States.
Capitalism also advances new techniques of state punishment and confinement that extends beyond the prison such as parole monitoring, home arrest and conditional release. Bourgeois law has an increasing panoptic effect on society, where new advances in technologies, methods and avenues of investigation, professionalization and militarization of police, and the growth of home security markets, has allowed the state to have a greater ability to monitor wider areas of a city with fewer resources, though this does not always produce precise or accurate conclusions as later advances in technology can reveal earlier convictions were based on flimsy or false evidence and a person who never committed a crime was nonetheless convicted and imprisoned for it. Bourgeois law is constantly expanding and refining the definition of criminality and thus expanding and refining the category of criminal. The bourgeois state produces the conditions for crime through wage slavery, poverty and emiseration in the same motion it produces criminalization and thus the movement of special bodies of state enforcers towards whole populations to monitor for constantly expanding lists of transgressive behaviors and the transformation of alleged transgressors into prisoners and convict slaves.
Capitalism also puts a price tag on freedom as bail and bond or fines and lawyers fees for even mild offenses can be prohibitive to working and poor people. This means there’s a double standard in law enforcement, where the poor are punished by laws they had no role in creating and do not benefit their safety or wellbeing, and the rich evade even the most severe of consequences for violations of law their class wrote in their benefit and to enforce their rule. There are transgressive behaviors in every class, but the bourgeoisie mostly avoids responsibility for their crimes as individuals and always as a class. The police are the shock troops of capital, the frontline soldiers enforcing the rule of private property, patriarchy and racial and ethnic supremacy. They are not neutral enforcers of neutral laws subject to individual bias and corruption as the liberals believe, but a reactionary strikeforce that is dedicated to maintaining the class, gender and sexuality, racial and ethnic hierarchy, and of maintaining a false public peace so the city is safe for production. The capitalist ruling class having a monopoly on the production and interpretation of legal code in addition to the enforcement and judicial officers serving in the direct interests of bourgeois law means justice is inherently unequal under capitalism. Bourgeois law is an expression of the political, economic, cultural, military, technological, surveillance and judicial dominance the bourgeoisie has over the working class, the lumpenproletariat, the colonized, the formerly enslaved, the destitute and foreign migrant, the disabled, and the militarily occupied.
Another unique trait of convict slavery in the era of capitalism, is the post-release deproletarianization of certain prisoners. Businesses and government agencies can discriminate against you for employment because of your prior arrests and convictions including felony status. You cannot receive certain government aid due to a felony status. This can massively restrict your opportunities and ability to support yourself or others, trapping you in a seemingly permanent lumpenproletarian class status. The arrest, the conviction, the imprisonment, the convict slavery, and then the release are all part of the same process of lumpenproletarianization where people who were once workers or believed themselves to be temporarily a member of the reserve army of labor become stripped of their ability to support themselves from most clearmarket employment, forcing them into criminalized blackmarket labor and thus a cycle of potential or real surveillance and imprisonment. The state draws upon the class of workers, the oppressed and the reserve army of labor for a transformation of some of them into convict slaves. Mass criminalization creates a specific reserve army of labor of former convict slaves who because of the loss of their job during imprisonment, restrictions on their ability to access gainful employment or receive government support, and widespread discrimination against those arrested or convicted for a crime, have high recidivism rates particularly in the United States. This means former convict slaves can be reliably depended on by the state for utilization for industrialized mass production of commodities in the future.
It should be clear that the supposedly great bourgeois revolutions which allegedly brought forth enlightenment, science, democracy and equality has only suppressed these ideals under the boot of capitalist production. Capitalism propagandizes itself as an advancement over the prior barbarisms of feudalism and slavery, but in actuality it has continued these traditions through a constant perpetuation of grotesque tragedies that put the great tyrants of the past to shame. The communist revolution is not only a revolution against capitalism, but against the whole of class society, especially against its feudal and slaver remnants. Only revolutionary socialism through a global dictatorship of the proletariat has the power to finally hammer the nail into the coffin of class rule, creating the conditions for its own abolition as a class as it liquidates and abolishes the petite and big bourgeoisie.
The Haitian Revolution’s self-abolition of slavery, the only slave revolt in history to successfully transform into a mass revolutionary movement that overthrew the rule of the slavers and their foreign supporters and established a republic, should be a major inspiration to modern revolutionaries. As long as slavery exists anywhere in the world in any form, the international task of the revolutionary masses first began in true earnest by the success of the Haitian Revolution to permanently end all conditions of slavery and involuntary servitude, remains incomplete. It must be the communists backed by the collective strength of the working class who advance this unfinished revolution towards its completion.
The United States, which has directly imprisoned the most number of its civilians compared to any other nation and indirectly imprisons many millions more through parole, home arrest and conditional release, accelerated already existing trends of prison building, mass criminalization and imprisonment in capitalist countries in direct response to various crises in United States class society. When the class, gender and sexuality, racial and ethnic contradictions of a society bursts open into unruly, transgressive, violent and/or antisocial behavior, the police are called to isolate and segregate the alleged transgressor from normative society. The police, particularly in the United States example, are a special body of armed men who can freely abuse or murder members of the public with minimal if any consequence, in the name of maintaining bourgeois order and peace. The United States thus has a unique position in the global struggle against slavery and capitalism.
The United States Civil War, the formal abolition of chattel slavery through the 13th Amendment, and the resulting period of military occupation during Reconstruction was a significant strike in the struggle against global slavery. But the revolutionary promise of Reconstruction was never completed in the United States as it was sabotaged by an alliance of northern and southern whites in the Compromise of 1877. This formally withdrew Union troops from conquered Southern states and ended the military enforcement and protection of Black former slaves. The United States had an opportunity and mandate to radically transform the relationships between capital and labor, white and Black, and ultimately the ruling class decided to actively sabotage this possibility. The revolutionary potential of Reconstruction will need to be revisited and expanded upon by future revolutionaries in order to address these lasting, unresolved contradictions and their present manifestations.
Convict slavery, the remnants of the practice of racial chattel slavery, and other forms of slavery must be globally abolished. Slavery has no place within a just, free and equal world. Its continuation as a practice into the 21st century is deeply shameful and speaks volumes as to the bourgeois interest in maintaining a world of slavery, domestically and internationally. It must be the aim of all socialists to not only liberate the working class but also the slaves, the peasants, the lumpenproletariat and the permanently unemployed. Through the collective strength of the global masses, slavery and feudalism can be fully abolished. Capitalism must be defeated so the liberation of the toiling and oppressed masses can be achieved.
This is why I support prison and police abolition. The communist solution to the question of crime must address the material causes of certain transgressive acts that are criminalized, what harm to others did it actually inflict, and if certain consequences enforced by the state or the community actually result in individual changed behavior or reduced instances of that particular transgression. Imprisonment, punitive sentences, abuse and torture by other inmates or prison guards including the use of solitary confinement, greater networking opportunities with large criminal networks or increased access to guns and drugs due to proximity with other prisoners, and increased police harassment of the community including arrests has not been shown to reduce crime within the larger community or by the individuals who’ve been imprisoned. These methods often trap people into lifelong struggles with the law instead of anything remotely resembling reformation, as the advocates for police and prison expansionism argue mass criminalization and imprisonment provides the convicted.
Prisons and the police first emerged under early capitalism, colonization and chattel slavery, then massively expanded with industrialization and then continued to expand in the modern age to address the ever present internal contradictions of a class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality stratified society. Prisons and police under capitalism exist as a form of repression of the working and oppressed masses. There are some who argue that socialism will have a continued need for police and prisons to address reactionary, counter-revolutionary, and antisocial behavior that threatens the rule of proletarian democracy. But even if this is true, socialism will by necessity massively reduce the number of prisoners and prisons and dramatically restrict the powers of police. We should not treat the masses the same way we do our enemies, especially not with antiquated, cruel and ineffective measures, and even the way we treat our enemies should be open to critique and the possibility of change. Yes, fascists and counter-revolutionaries will need to be suppressed with force if necessary, but prisons and police are capitalist practices that will need to be abolished in the global struggle against slavery, feudalism, capitalism and the constant threat of fascist decay.
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