by David Maldonado, Ph.D., AOUON Oakland
Capital, money, wages, profit, and time. These interrelated terms comprise key aspects of the prison-industrial complex and explain the grotesque, exponential rise of what we call a “prison nation” or carceral state. However, each of these concepts is very distinct, and they should not be lumped together to explain its rise. First and foremost, prisons are an expression of class warfare. Class warfare is never neutral. Just like capital, class warfare uses difference (racialized, gendered, abled, etc.) to maximize its destructive force. We already know this based on the history of this country: global capital got its start from genocide, the theft of native land, and from kidnapped and enslaved African people. Periodt. Before this, race and capital were in their infancy; only afterward did they together become the earth- and life-threatening monster we know today.
Let’s start by explaining terms.
Capital, according to Marx, is basically value in motion. Value comes from a relationship between the big capitalist and the worker. The worker functionally sells their labor to the capitalist for a certain amount of time. The capitalist must never give a “fair” wage that matches the actual time the laborer spends or the system collapses—there would be no profit. In other words, we work eight hours, but no bell goes off when our labor meets the capitalist’s break-even point and when the capitalist starts to keep the rest. Capital is slick. It is a slick ass way of stealing time, life, and labor.
Money is just the representation of capital and a means of exchange. You can’t build a house with money (it is made of paper). Money represents trust in the state––don’t feel so safe now, does it.
Profit is when the circuit of stealing time hits a temporary end point, called exchange. The capitalist takes his extra (or surplus value part) and starts again, thus the “in motion” part. It is worth mentioning that capital increasingly favors speculative capital in the form of rents and speculation. Also, many sell or improve intellectual property. Then, there is a new dynamic some are calling techno feudalism. This form of capital sells virtual cloud rent to all comers, buyers, and sellers and also relies on our free labor to improve its algorithms. That argument is beyond the scope of this work but worth looking into (Varoufakis, Y., 2024).
What prisons are not primarily about; Prisons are not about profit. Although private prisons are on the rise vis-à-vis detention centers, almost 90 percent of prisons are public. This means that the taxes taken from our wages (again, which already represent theft by the capitalist) are what fund prisons. This form of taxes is often called a social wage. So, we pay a portion of our wages, which again, is partially stolen time, so the state can use it to lock us up. The rise of mass incarceration happened as the state began gifting tax dollars to the super wealthy, spending huge amounts toward “law and order” and prison building.
However, even prior to this, there were all kinds of problems with time and labor. Technological advances started throwing many people out of the labor market long ago: think of the auto industry, mining industry, and numerous other industrial fields. Instead of having our taxes go toward housing, federal jobs, education, unemployment or various other social programs which a social wage would fund, the power elite and the state told us our time was no longer needed for this new automated job market. This new labor surplus represented an opportunity for a new form of totalizing time theft, the immobility of the prison: The taxes spent on law and order can be used to imprison one portion of the surplus working class to hire a new portion in the prison industry—corrections officers, judges, police officers, Aramark truck drivers, prison building construction companies, and to fund Bob Barker’s extremely overpriced Canteen garbage (IYKYK). It even opens the academy to “carceral experts” and enables countless nonprofits. This is an uncomfortable contradiction. If you have incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people leading these, the contradictions greatly decrease.
Anyone who has “done time” knows that time stalls for us. While we are stuck, a new class of workers is having their time stolen, albeit at a slightly higher rate. The Capitalist and his handmaiden, the State, are feasting while we starve. Further, the State promised all kinds of growth and development to mainly rural towns in exchange for hosting prisons. These communities had already been overwhelmingly ravaged by capital’s failures, and not surprisingly, these promises greatly underdelivered.
On class, race, and labor:
According to prisonpolicy.org (the best folks for stats), around 90 percent of people in prison had very low incomes prior to their incarceration. The average annual salary for this group is below $37,000. Perhaps surprising to some, 1/3 of the people in prison are white. They make up a far higher proportion of the U.S. population, but poor whites are also getting destroyed by this system. It is legalized theft, and it is coming for all of us, just more slowly for some.
Make no mistake, it is class warfare. Concerning labor, formerly incarcerated people are unemployed at rates higher than any other population, at numbers higher than during the Great Depression (Prisonpolicy.org). Our labor is needed to cook for, clean, and maintain the prison, and to fight fires as climate change devastates our landscape. But we ain’t worthy of a wage. Our time isn’t even good enough to steal from at a percentage. They want all of it! Prop 6 anyone?
Black Panther Party co-founder Dr. Huey P. Newton understood, perhaps best, the changes that were coming. Huey does not get enough credit for anticipating the rise of neoliberal policies. His work on Intercommunalism and On Technology should be revisited by all, especially activists and academics (Huey P. Newton Reader, Hillard). His concept of “survival pending revolution” explains the work prison abolition needs to do: He saw how racial capitalism (all capitalism) was developing automated technologies that would make industrial workers redundant, especially workers of color. Much like Trump is doing, the State waged war on poor and working-class communities while giving huge tax breaks to corporations. In the early 80s, the State began severely cutting social programs and focusing on permanent domestic warfare—key features of neoliberal punishment. Further, the State deregulated worker protections, attacked unions, and allowed companies to leave the country in search of cheaper labor and production, without tax penalty. Not only did this devastate American workers, but it saddled the public with a bill for unusable infrastructure that became public debt.
Huey and the Black Panther Party understood that survival programs included critical revolutionary elements. They understood that when people have their needs met, they are open to political education. By working together on alternative infrastructure, people begin to see revolutionary possibilities. While the breakfast program is well known, I like to focus on some of the lesser known projects. One project gives us an example of how we can move now. The Party was seeing Black elders having their government checks stolen in an unfortunate dynamic in Oakland neighborhoods. The Party decided to hire youngsters from different hoods to accompany elders when they needed to run errands, especially on the 1st and 15th of every month: check days. This brilliant organizing tactic satisfied multiple needs. Younger Black folks, both then and now, suffer some of the worst job prospects. By hiring them the Party could have been hiring the same people who may be so desperate as to take advantage of their fellow elders. Elders not only now had safe transportation, but also the ability to pass intergenerational knowledge to the younger generation, critical in building consciousness.
It is hard to mention this without thinking about what we saw in Oakland’s Chinatown several years ago after a rash of elder robberies. The largely Antiblack outcry was, of course, to call for more Oakland police and sentencing enhancements. My Comrade Connie Wun and other API activists instead got together with Black activists and began to do what the Panthers did, walking with elders.
Police are never the solution, periodt. And—this is very important—neither are sentence enhancements. A quick history of “hate” crimes shows that seemingly ‘liberal’ sounding enhancements are rarely used to protect vulnerable populations. Just recall that after the January 6th storming of the Capital, people were calling for new enhancements. This fundamentally and completely misunderstands where police are and what they do. If you think police are out profiling white and middle-class populations, you will have to read a whole other paper that I don’t have time to write. Sentence enhancements just give police more tools and technologies to do what they are already doing, where they are doing it. Enhancements are a huge factor in the buildup of the carceral state. So-called gang and antiviolence enhancements just allow for police to label, deem unworthy, and send away poor and people of color for longer periods of time. Even gun enhancements do not serve their supposed purpose. Here, you are welcome to disagree with me. But look at who commits mass shootings: they tend to be legal gun owners who are also part of the white population that will not be racially profiled. From what I have seen with my own eyes, all enhancements do is widen the net in places like East and West Oakland, East L.A., Compton, South Side Chicago, and more. Places that were, of course, hit hard by Redlining, Blockbusting, underfunded schools, deindustrialization, cutting of social programs, the war on crime, and oh yeah, mass incarceration. These are also places where the state systematically murdered and incarcerated Black Panthers.
As a new round of technology driven by artificial intelligence kicks into high gear, expect more devastation and prepare for state sponsored corporate theft and looting that can certainly be expected. Many more will feel this next round.
It’s time for us to decide what our labor should go toward. Can we imagine a world without a wage? Who decided the value of our time? What can we build instead? The next time someone talks about profit and prisons maybe think about the ways that time expands and complicates that analysis.
All power to the people, David A Maldonado, PhD., AOUON, Oakland Chapter
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