The prison is now as large as the planet, and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners.
The authorities do their systematic best to keep fellow prisoners misinformed about what is happening in the world. The aim is not to activate them, but to keep them in a state of passive uncertainty, to remind them remorselessly that there is nothing in life but risk, and that the Earth is an unsafe place.
This is done with carefully selected information, with misinformation, commentaries, rumors, fictions. The prison population is tricked into believing that the prioriy for each one of them is to make arrangements for their own personal protection and to acquire somehow their own particular exemption from the common fate. Mankind is presented as a coward; only winners are brave.
by John Berger
Capital has succeeded in converting people into "living" fixed capital, into organic dead labor.
The dogmas defining criminality and the logics of imprisonment have changed. It's here that the thinking of Zygmunt Bauman is illuminating. He points out that the corporate market forces now running the world are exterritorial, that's to say "free from territorial constraints". They are perpetually remote, anonymous and thus never have to take account of the territorial, physical consequences of their actions. He quotes Hans Tietmeyer, former President of the German Federal Bank: "Today's stake is to create conditions favorable to the confidence of investors." The single supreme priority.
by Andy Merrifield
Speculative financial transactions add up, each day, to $1.3 trillion, 50 times more than the sum of all the commercial exchanges.
Submissive goverments, bothe of the left and right, eagerly obery the dictates of their financial masters. Their police and security forces and spy agencies are the herders who keep the prison population in line.
