Post by preterite on Oct 19, 2012 18:03:19 GMT -5
Kamau Marcharia talks about the scandal of prisons-for-profit and the traffic in human souls at privately owned prisons, and even in the horrific situation he demonstrates, whereby human freedom is sacrificed for the $74 billion profits of Wackenhut Corporation and the Correctional Services Corporation and their congressional lobbyists, we can see economies parallel to the supposedly monolithic capitalism of our supposedly seamless market economy: when these private corporations force prisoners into unfree labor, they are engaging in slavery, which is a non-market form of economic activity. There are other forms of non-market forms of economic activity that are alternatives to the market: there are the gift economies practiced by community organizers, there are the self-appropriating values of independent economic actors -- it's not all the market. And these alternative economies have value: we need not cede all to Wackenhut and its lobbyists. But I worry that by rhetorically figuring everything as being dominated by the market, we're implicitly suggesting that it's in fact acceptable for prisons to be privately owned, that many aspects of our civic life can be outsourced. Can we understand the economic activity of forced-labor slavery's existence in the United States today to practice rhetorics that refuse to cede civic life to the market, and to see value (that's a word in which there are too many concepts and ideologies overlapping one another) in alternative forms of economic activity? As Keith Gilyard says, we can't just theorize our way toward it: we have to do it.