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Abolition

The notion of prison industrial complex is incomplete – cap and race are intertwined

Loïc Wacquant ’7, sociologist at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley (“The Place of the Prison in the New Government of Poverty,” http://www.europeanrights.eu/public/commenti/excerptwacquant.pdf, lpc)
The refrain of the rise of a “prison-industrial complex” that would have succeeded (or supplemented) the “military-industrial complex” of the Cold War era, with defense industry giants retooling from supplying arms to the Pentagon to providing surveillance and punishment for the poor, the fear of the “red enemy” of the exterior being replaced by dread for the “black enemy” of the interior, and private operators acting in cahoots with corrections officials and politicians to constitute a shadowy “subgovernment” pushing for limitless carceral expansion aimed at exploiting the booming captive workforce, is a leitmotiv of the oppositional discourse on prison in the United States. 13 Anchored in a conspiratorial vision of history, this thesis suffers from four major lacunae that undercut its analytical import and ruin its practical pertinence. First, it reduces the twofold, conjoint and interactive, transformation of the social and penal components of the bureaucratic field to the sole “industrialization” of incarceration. But the changing scale of confinement in America is only one element of a broader redefinition of the perimeter and modalities of state action with regard to the “problem populations” residing in the nether regions of social and urban space. It is tightly connected to, and cannot be explained in isolation from the the epochal transition from “welfare” to “workfare.”14 By contrast, it is very dubious whether it can be tied to the “globalization” of the overly large and vague “isms” of capitalism and racism—the two favorite culprits in this activist tale of government evil—neither of which provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for America’s unprecedented and unrivaled carceral experiment. Second, the imagery of the “prison-industrial complex” accords the role of driving force to the pecuniary interest of firms selling correctional services and wares or allegedly tapping the vast reserves of labor held under lock. It maintains that the profit motive is crucial to the onset of mass incarceration when, in reality, the latter pertains first and foremost to a political logic and project, namely, the construction of a post-Keynesian, “liberal-paternalistic” state suited to institute desocialized wage labor and propagate the renewed ethic of work and “individual responsibility” that buttress it. Profiteering from corrections is not a primary cause but an incidental and secondary consequence of the hypertrophic development of the penal apparatus. Indeed, the fact that private concerns are reaping benefits from the expansion of a government function is neither new nor specific to imprisonment: the delivery of every major public good in the United States, from education and housing to safety and health care, grants a vast role to commercial or third-sector parties—relative to medical provision for instance, punishment remains distinctively public. Nor is privatization necessary: banning imprisonment for profit did not prevent California from becoming a leader in the drive to mass incarceration.

Perm - prisons are apparatuses of control for the lower class

Loïc Wacquant ’7, sociologist at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley (“The Place of the Prison in the New Government of Poverty,” http://www.europeanrights.eu/public/commenti/excerptwacquant.pdf, lpc)
Prison and the deskilled labor market. In the first place, the penal system contributes directly to regulating the lower segments of the labor market — and it does so in a manner more coercive and consequential than labor legislation, social insurance schemes, and other administrative rules, many of which do not cover insecure work. Its effect on this front is threefold. First, the stupendous prevalence and escalation of penal sanctions helps to discipline the reticent fractions of the working class by raising the cost of strategies of resistance to desocialized wage labor via “exit” into the informal economy. Faced with aggressive policing, severe courts, and the likelihood of brutally long prison sentences for drug offenses and recidivism, many shrink from getting or staying involved in the illegal commerce of the street and submit instead to the dictate of insecure employment. For some of those coming out of “the pen,” the tight mesh of postcorrectional supervision increases pressure to opt for the “straight” life anchored in work, when available. 2 On both counts, the criminal justice system acts in concordance with workfare to push its clientele onto the peripheral segments of the job market. Second, the carceral apparatus helps to “fluidify” the low-wage sector and artificially depresses the unemployment rate by forcibly subtracting millions of unskilled men from the labor force. It is estimated that penal confinement shaved two full percentage points off of the U.S. jobless rate during the 1990s. Indeed, according to Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, when the differential between the incarceration level of the two areas is taken into account, the United States posted an unemployment rate higher than the average for the European Union during eighteen of the twenty years between 1974 and 1994, contrary to the view propagated by the adulators of neoliberalism and critics of “Eurosclerosis.” 3 While it is true that not all inmates would be in the labor force if free, that two-percentage point gap does not include the Keynesian stimulus provided by booming public expenditures and employment in corrections: the number of jail and prison jobs at the local, state, and federal level more than doubled over the past two decades, jumping from under 300,000 in 1982 to over 716,000 in 1999, when monthly payroll exceeded $2,1 billion. 4 Penal growth has also boosted employment in the private sector of carceral goods and services, a sector with a high rate of precarious jobs and turnover, and which goes rising along with the privatization of punishment (since the source of the “competitiveness” of correctional firms is the exceedingly low wages and meager benefits they give their staff.

Borders

Nationalism informs economic discrimination

Maria Torres ’99, director and professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago (“In the land of mirrors: Cuban exile politics in the United States,” University of Michigan Press, pp. 29-31)
The cold war further institutionalized the state’s role in the movement of people in the twentieth century. This resulted in part from a hypersensitivity to national security concerns that made émigrés from socialist countries potential spies, and vice versa. Yet émigrés also had symbolic value in the competition between these two antagonistic political and economic systems. For instance, the U.S. Congress authorized and funded the executive branch to set up special programs to relocate refugees from East European countries to the United States. Within socialist countries the control of population movement was essential for maintaining internal order. Therefore, policies regulating the movement of people had not only economic but also political functions.13 Even those immigrant flows perceived to be primarily economic may acquire political significance. Today, for instance, the debate in the United States about immigration from Mexico has acquired a political significance in the electoral arena. The Cuban revolution of 1959 restructured class and power relations on the island. Policies were instituted that greatly redistributed wealth and other societal benefits. The revolution was deeply rooted in the struggle to define a nation and institute a just social program; it also had ramifications for U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean. The Cuban revolution had a major impact on the post–World War II standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. The dynamics set in motion by an internal revolution were played out in the world arena. For the United States the nationalist revolution was perceived as a threat to its national security, as an island that had clearly been in the U.S. sphere was now quickly moving into the communist orbit. Soon, the Soviet Union had established a beachhead ninety miles from the U.S. coast. In Cuba the “defense of the revolution” against outside threats became a rallying point. National security was the cornerstone of the philosophy of the emerging government. In much the same way as with U.S. policy, internal policies in Cuba fueled the formation of the Cuban exile. Cuban officials have generally dealt harshly with internal opposition; their policies at times encouraged dissidents to emigrate, while at other times they punished those who wanted to leave. Once abroad, with rare exception, exiles were cast as enemies of the revolution. The fact that people fleeing communism acquired a positive symbolic value for the United States furthered the process of demonizing those who were leaving Cuba. This naturally affected the movement of people off the island and, consequently, the politics of émigré communities. In this context the relationship to host and home countries acquired a political significance for Cubans not normally ascribed to other immigrant communities. On the one hand, it emerged from a revolution that challenged U.S. hegemony. Thus, harboring refugees from revolutionary Cuba was of strategic value in the war against communism. Yet across the Florida Straits, leaving the island was equated with abandoning the Cuban nation, with treason. The relationship of the émigré community to the host state and home state, then, is defined at least in part by the national security interests of both states. Therefore, these must be taken into consideration in analyzing the unfolding of exile politics as well as understanding the development of the community. Some scholars have periodized Cuban immigration into various waves, taking into consideration Cuban and U.S. policies that determined the way people could leave and enter.14

Islamophobia

Racism predates capitalism - capital imperialism emerged out of it. Dismantling islamophobia is key to breaking down capitalism

Isaac Steiner ’12, staff writer at Solidarity (12/23, “Islamophobia and the Empire,” http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3042)
Vilification of Islam and of Muslims is not a wholly new phenomenon. The mythology of Islam and Muslim countries as exotic “others” with stark cultural contrasts to the “West” actually pre-dates the foundation of the United States—most dramatically acted upon with the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. While there is little real connection between this history and recent events, comments like George Bush’s September 2001 remark that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile” cemented it as a powerful metaphor for popular understanding of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More recently, the growth of U.S. empire has always required a populist justification for nearly non-stop wars. Territorial expansion into the lands of Native Americans created a script of the civilizing mission of “Christian values” and capitalism versus savage, backwards enemies. In the twentieth century, petroleum's rising importance for energy and manufacturing led to the oil-rich countries stretching from North Africa to Central Asia became a centrally important region of political and economic concern. But until relatively recently, Communism filled the role of imperialism's main bogeyman. In fact, when Soviet-allied, nationalist populism dominated politics in many Muslim countries, the CIA funded fundamentalist Islamic organizations—and red scares were the primary means of tainting any domestic opposition to imperialism. As recently as the Reagan years, Islamist fundamentalists in Afghanistan (the precursors to the Taliban) were praised as allies in the war against communism. At the same time, the crises of late capitalism—social, economic, and ideological—led to a worldwide resurgence of fundamentalism. In the United States, this took the form of twin fundamentalisms: evangelical Christianity's spread and ideological neoliberalism, or “market fundamentalism”. Meanwhile, different varieties of fundamentalist Islam became more prominent following the derailment of the Iranian revolution and the establishment of an Islamic Republic in that country. (Gilbert Achcar explored this idea in his book, The Clash of Barbarisms.) By the end of the Cold War and disappearance of communism as a credible threat, conservative theorists like Samuel Huntington began speaking of a "clash of civilizations" —which provided the perfect foil to frame the terrorist attacks of September 11, ripped from their historical context of U.S. intervention in the Muslim world. Ironically, after it had been unleashed, we see that this bigotry can have its own momentum. Now, Barack Obama—the commander-in-chief who has continued the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—is himself a target of the Islamophobic atmosphere that the wars set in motion! Muslims in the United States To understand the current Islamophobic climate, we should recognize that Islam is not just “over there”. The presence of Muslims in the United States goes back hundreds of years. As Jen Phillips observes in Mother Jones magazine: Before the World Trade Center was even designed (with Islamic architectural elements, incidentally), the ground was indeed sacrosanct: The bones of some 20,000 African slaves are buried 25 feet below Lower Manhattan. As at least 10 percent of West African slaves in America were Muslims, it's not out of bounds to extrapolate that ground zero itself was built on the bones of at least a few Muslim slaves... Connected to this history, there have long existed currents of Black Nationalism and African-American conversions to Islam which recognize this Muslim heritage, most visibly the Nation of Islam.

Queerness

The perm solves – queer Marxism can explain the function of capitalism

Alan Sears ‘5, Ph.D from Warwick in Sociology, professor of sexuality and theory at Ryerson (Jan, “Queer Anti-Capitalism: What’s Left of Gay and Lesbian Liberation?” Science & Society, Vol. 69, No. 1, Marxist-Feminist Thought Today, Guliford Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40404230, lpc)
Perhaps the greatest single contribution of marxist-feminist theory has been the development of a rich conception of social reproduction that ties together paid and unpaid labor, state and civil society, home and workplace in a single process defined by fundamental relations of inequality (class, gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality) (see Ferguson, 1999). This totalistic analysis of social reproduction is a crucial tool for the development of an emancipatory sexual politics, helping us to understand the ways that regimes of sexual regulation mobilize or suppress forms of sexuality at particular historical moments in the context of changing relations of production and reproduction. A queer marxist feminism builds on this conception of social reproduction by relating it to the "indigenous" politics of sexual emancipation developed in the lesbian and gay liberation movement. I believe a queer marxist feminism can contribute to a revival of some of the most emancipatory aspects of lesbian and gay liberation by explaining how the limits and contradictions in the gains we have made since 1969 are tied to the specific dynamics of racialized, gendered and sexualized capitalist reproduction. This is not a departure from marxist feminism, but an expansion of it in light of the politics of queer liberation.

Race

Race and capitalism can’t be separated – racism is used as a tool to justify economic oppression

Axiom Amnesia ’11 (11/5, “Understanding the Historical Context of Racism and Capitalism,” http://axiomamnesia.com/2011/11/05/understanding-historical-context-racism-capitalism/, lpc)
The white racial frame is the dominant worldview of whites today. It was adopted by white elites during the beginning of European global conquest, such as when Europeans encountered “Indians” in what was to become the Americas and when white elites enslaved Africans in the United States. The white racial frame continues to be used to rationalize and justify racial oppression today. The white racial frame rationalizes racial oppression through racist stereotypes, such as African Americans and other people of color being inherently lazier, unintelligent, uncivilized, criminal, evil, and generally inferior. At the same time, white Americans are viewed as intelligent, holy, virtuous, good, hardworking and generally superior (Feagin 2010). Racism/White Supremacy/Racial Oppression has always been central and fundamental to the global system of capitalism. The white racial frame started with, and thus justified, the genocide of Native Americans — in order to steal the land of North America — and enslavement of Africans, all in the interest of generating wealth for white capitalist elites. The genocide of Indians and enslavement of African Americans is foundational to the present system of capitalism we have today. Theft of land inhabited by people of color and exploitation of their labor was, and continues to be, fundamental to the global system of capitalism. White supremacist capitalism has thrived by “sucking the blood” of people of color in the United States and throughout the world — all in the interest of generating wealth for white capitalist elites. The exploitation of labor and land of people of color in the United States and throughout the world is central to the interest of generating wealth for white capitalist elites, and is the reason people of color are disproportionately poor. People of color are not disproportionately poor because they are inferior, like bourgeois ideology and the white racial frame says. On the contrary, they are disproportionately poor because they are the primary victims in the system of global capitalism. The primary predators or victimizers in the global system of capitalism throughout its history and today are white elites.

Analysis of racial structures is a pre-requisite to an anti-cap revolution

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor ’11, editor of the International Socialist Review and a doctoral student in African American Studies at Northwestern University (“Race, class and Marxism,” SocialistWorker.org, http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism)
Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependent on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment by revolutionary organizations in the here and now to the fight against racism, working-class unity will never be achieved and the revolutionary potential of the working class will never be realized. Yet despite all the evidence of this commitment to fighting racism over many decades, Marxism has been maligned as, at best, "blind" to combating racism and, at worst, "incapable" of it. For example, in an article published last summer, popular commentator and self-described "anti-racist" Tim Wise summarized the critique of "left activists" that he later defines as Marxists. He writes: [L]eft activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a framework of extreme class reductionism, which holds that the "real" issue is class, not race, that "the only color that matters is green," and that issues like racism are mere "identity politics," which should take a backseat to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class and affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by presuming that low-income folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial, privileges white perspectivism and dismisses the lived reality of people of color. Even more, as we'll see, it ignores perhaps the most important political lesson regarding the interplay of race and class: namely, that the biggest reason why there is so little working-class consciousness and unity in the Untied States (and thus, why class-based programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in the rest of the industrialized world), is precisely because of racism and the way that white racism has been deliberately inculcated among white working folks. Only by confronting that directly (rather than sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do) can we ever hope to build cross-racial, class based coalitions. In other words, for the policies favored by the class reductionist to work--be they social democrats or Marxists--or even to come into being, racism and white supremacy must be challenged directly.