Suchergebnisse

This article challenges the tendency to conceptualize contemporary debt bondage as an individualized relationship between employer and victim. It highlights the systemic relations of inequality that underpin debt bondage in advanced capitalist countries, focusing on temporary migrant workers in the United States. It advances two interlocking arguments. First, that debt bondage in the US market is rooted in processes of 'neoliberalization' that have left dispossessed populations few alternatives but to sell themselves into coercive labor markets. Second, that debt operates as a class-based form of power that disciplines all sectors of the labor market, albeit in variegated forms and degrees. Far from an archaic or non-capitalist social relation, debt bondage must be understood as a profitable strategy of labor discipline anchored in state regulatory frameworks that have bolstered the power of employers and facilitated predatory and privatized forms of credit and lending as solutions to poverty and unemployment.

This article assesses prison labor regimes' role in anchoring and reinforcing market discipline during three eras of U.S. capitalism: the industrializing North, the post‐emancipation South, and neoliberalism. Synthesizing evidence from revisionist historian and political economy literatures, this article analyzes the ways in which, in addition to being a feature of particular social and economic orders, prison labor has also been deeply imbricated in the very production of those orders, particularly their racialized and class‐based social relations. It argues that although critical political economy has generally failed to incorporate prisons and prison labor into theorizations of contemporary capitalism, these have been and are increasingly vital to the functioning and reproduction of capital in the U.S. context. As such, prison labor regimes should be understood as part of a range of state strategies to aggressively impose the forms of labor and social discipline central to specific regimes of governance and accumulation.

This article documents the resurgence of US prison work programmes under neoliberalism, investigating the dynamics through which state and private corporations have erected factories inside public prisons, moving manufacturing jobs behind bars. It contends that the corporate use of inmate labour has not resulted from an autonomous capital's quest for profit, but rather that it is a strategy that has developed through and cannot be abstracted from the US state as it has restructured in order to author processes of globalisation, and as it has adopted the neoliberal domestic policy of mass incarceration.