>I don't question that the US is extremely repressive for the groups
>you mention.
>One could easily argue that an African-American (or any other person)
>sentenced to life for the third strike of a drug arrest or other non-crime
>would prefer Cuba or North Korea. However, the same person might find
>him/her self in jail in those countries if he/she had some interest in
>political speech of any kind.
>
>The question raised might the comparative freedom or lack of freedom in
>these societies. Simply to raise the number of the prision population do
>not address the actual oppression in Cuba and North Korea which is
>significant and ought not to be underestimated. Yoshie argues that
>repression in communist countries needs to be balanced by Foucault's idea
>of the panopticon or the internalization of social norms which prohibts
>certain actions or belief not through law but through the construction of
>the self through various disciplines, such as schools, hospitals etc. I
>certainly accept this as a description of western "individualism" but this
>repression is of a different kind than the limitation of thought that
>happens to everyone in Cuba and North Korea
>
>When I went East Berlin in the 80's I went to a very spare bookstore which
>directed out attention to the collected writings of the Bulgarian communist
>leader (I didn't buy it). I think that if it is correct, and it is, to
>weigh the US racist incareration rates as a limition on freedom, than
>certainly the overt loss of free speech freedoms needs to be taken into
>account.
A high rate of incarceration does not simply signify the loss of civil liberties for prisoners; it is also a loss of political liberties, including freedom of speech. Machiavelli writes in _The Prince_: "One has to remark that men ought either be well treated or crushed." The ruling class & governing elite of the USA do not treat the working class well (even by capitalist standards), so they must crush them, especially the population made surplus by capital's counter-offensive (= neoliberalism). Christian Parenti explains the war on crime as a two-phase political response to the crisis of capitalism:
***** Beginning in the late sixties US capitalism hit a dual social and economic crisis, and it was in response to this crisis that the criminal justice buildup of today began. After a surge of expansion in the late sixties the growth of criminal justice plateaued in the late seventies, only to resume in earnest during the early and mid eighties with Reagan's war on drugs. Since then we've been on a steady path toward ever more state repression and surveillance.
Initially this buildup was in response to racial upheaval and political rebellion. The second part was/is more a response to the vicious economic restructuring of the Reagan era. This restructuring was itself a right-wing strategy for addressing the economic crisis which first appeared in the mid and late sixties. To restore sagging business profits, the welfare of working people had to be sacrificed. Thus the second phase of the criminal justice crackdown has become, intentionally or otherwise, a way to manage rising inequality and surplus populations. Throughout this process of economic restructuring the poor have suffered, particularly poor people of color. Thus it is poor people of color who make up the bulk of American prisoners. (Parenti, _Lockdown America_ xii) *****
The first phase is obviously repression of political freedom, in response to militant blacks, anti-war activists, etc., and has been recognized as such (besides it was practiced in tandem with COINTELPRO, etc.). The second phase, however, should be also counted as political repression: not the repression of actual political activists, but a kind of *preventive detention* of those who might *potentially* become political activists.
***** The other segment of the surplus population -- "social dynamite" -- are those who pose an actual or potential political challenge. They are that population which threatens to explode: the impoverished low wage working-class and unemployed youth who have fallen below the statistical radar, but whose spirits are not broken and whose expectations for a decent life and social inclusion are dangerously alive and well [in contrast to those whom Steven Spritzer calls "social junk" -- those whose spirits and minds are shattered, for instance the deinstitutionalized mentally ill]. They are the class that suffers from "relative deprivation." Their poverty is made all the more unjust because it is experienced in contrast to the spectacle of opulence and the myths of social mobility and opportunity. This is the class from which the Black Panthers and the Young Lords arose in the sixties and from which sprang the gangs of the 1980s. In the 1930s this same class provided the brawn fro the Communist Party-organized Unemployed Councils that forcibly stopped evictions in New York's Lower East Side.
Thus social dynamite is a threat to the class and racial hierarchies upon which the private enterprise system depends. This group cannot simply be swept aside. Controlling them requires both a defensive policy of containment and aggressive policy of direct attack and active destabilization. They are contained and crushed, confined to the ghetto, demoralized and pilloried in warehouse public schools, demonized by a lurid media, sent to prison, and at times dispatched by lethal injection or police bullets. This is the class -- or more accurately the caste, because they are increasingly people of color -- which must be constantly undermined, divided, intimidated, attacked, discredited, and ultimately kept in check with what Fanon called the "language of naked force." (Parenti, _Lockdown America_ 46) *****
Capital has realized (learning the lesson of the late 60s) that it is too late to repress people *after* they develop political consciousness and begin to exercise their political freedoms, including freedom of speech, in a fashion threatening to the conditions of accumulation. It is far better to lock up the poor *before* they become political activists. The war on drugs and crime has killed political speech by locking up potential subjects of political speech. Needless to say, the war on drug and crime has also limited political speech of those who remain outside prisons. It has helped to manufacture the consent of the governed to the dialectical twins of the police state & neoliberalism.
Yoshie