by Eric C. Sapp, LSPC Staff Attorney
Prefatory Note: This an abridged version of a text written in spring of 2023, in the context of advocacy regarding carceral wages.
§1 Workers’ rights are human rights; let it be stated unequivocally that incarcerated workers are workers.
§2 The prison and industrial capitalism arose in tandem. Carceral punishment on a mass scale served as both a deterrent to radical labor activism and as a device for exploiting productive labor. At various periods of history, workhouses and prisons functioned to warehouse excess labor power and to contain disruptive elements within the proletariat or at its margins; under certain conditions, the warehouse is converted into a factory.
§3 Labor organizations claiming to further the workers movement should not exclude or disregard the formerly or currently incarcerated, persons with arrest or conviction records, or other forms of involuntary involvement with the criminal legal system. Otherwise, the union becomes a tool, unwitting perhaps, of the system of oppressive exploitation.
§4 As abolitionism preceded or accompanied organized mass labor, so the radical incarcerated worker is an historical actor prior to the labor union as a form of organization. Slave revolts preceded strikes by millennia.
§5 The point of awareness is not to stoke rivalry or to position new leadership. Rather, it is to recognize that existing asymmetries have effects that function to preserve the status quo or exacerbate its maldistribution of power. For decades, subaltern workers—immigrant agricultural or domestic laborers, incarcerated workers, food servers, etc.—have been sacrificed on the bargaining table of officially-recognized labor rights. The long-term interests of all workers, however, are served by solidarity rather than fraternal division.
§6 Solidarity is no slogan; nor is it (only) an affect. It is the concrete construction of a workable ensemble of mutually supportive actions serving shared interests in the midst of real, mitigable yet ineliminable, tensions of partially competing interests. Individuals and groups whose interests are one hundred percent aligned have no need to appeal to solidarity. Those whose interests are fundamentally antagonistic have no possibility of achieving it. In the middle is the space of movement building.
§7 The system, traditionally, has functioned by placing subaltern workers and the not-quite-subaltern laborer at odds, the former made an example with which to frighten or to flatter the latter. Elites leverage those attitudes to control and efficiently exploit labor. To see this mechanism is the first step in seeing through it, to dismantle it.
§8 Because subaltern workers have generally had nowhere else to turn for alliances, they have hitherto at best entered into asymmetric partnerships with not-so-subaltern organized labor.
§9 A proletariat that despises other workers is a living oxymoron (though not for that reason unreal), as much as is a minimum wage with exceptions creating a “subminimum” wage. An ersatz minimum wage is a front for naked exploitation.
§10 Exploitation of surplus labor is the essence of all waged or unwaged—and salaried—labor under capitalism. The bargaining position vis-à-vis employers, as a function of the credibility of the threat of withholding their labor, of workers with relatively higher levels of economic expectations depends on the position of those below them. Opposing or ignoring the interests of those “beneath” one on the economic ladder undermines one’s own position.
§11 A relatively united strategy is a prerequisite to effectively confronting state-administered oppression and state-facilitated capitalist exploitation of labor. This exploitation comes in many forms: the involuntary servitude of incarcerated workers, their assignment to so-called voluntary work programs at subminimum wage rates, and economic insecurity of supposedly free laborers. Overcoming the system’s divide-and-conquer strategy is necessary.
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