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The Prison–Capitalism Nexus: An Interview with Jackie Wang

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, M. Buna interviews poet and radical scholar Jackie Wang, author of the essay collection Carceral Capitalism, recently published by Semiotext(e). The book examines policing and the prison system in the US, detailing how they are tightly integrated with capitalism as we know it today. In the interview, Wang notes how capitalism’s “logics of differentiation” produce populations that are marked for dispossession and incarceration. Here’s an excerpt:

This book, in part, comes out of my engagement with the literature on financialization and the debt economy. The idea to assemble this collection of essays into a book came to me when I read Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man. From Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire to Costas Lapavitsas’s Profiting Without Producing, post-Marxists have analyzed the changing nature of value and work within the context of globalization. What I felt was missing from these analyses (of late capitalism, financialization, and neoliberalism) was an analysis of racializing processes — an examination of how logics of differentiation mediate capitalist accumulation. The United States has a very particular history of racism. The various techniques of socially managing nonwhite populations that have been deployed in the United States are inextricably linked to slavery, expropriation of native lands, immigration policy, and so forth. What I feel that some of these post-Marxist analyses get wrong is the assumption that the dynamics of late capitalism tend to homogenize subjects, rather than producing difference as a way to enable extraction. Capitalism has no fixed morality — it can absorb anti-racist, even anti-capitalist, critique. But even though capitalism is somewhat indifferent to our identities so long as they can be commodified, late capitalism produces difference, insofar as the most extreme methods of dispossession and extraction first require the subject to be rendered lootable (devalued on the level of subjectivity).

Image of Jackie Wang via LA Review of Books.