>>I should have said that I first came up with the "you can't beat free
labor" formulation after talking with Christian when I was first
getting to know him - it was probably around 1999. I said I was
skeptical of the line about how prison privatization and the use of
inmate labor were driving the incarceration boom - that it was all
about profit and not social control, an extremely vulgar Marxist
interpretation popular with some anti-prison activists. Christian
agreed, recounted all the evidence he'd found of the failure of
prison labor to make a buck (as I recall he said it's often
subsidized in fact). So I said, you can't beat free labor, right?,
and he agreed. It was an early bonding moment.<<
apparently according to the Trot comedian Mark Steel, one of the late Tony Cliff's favourite jokes concerned a Central Asian despot who was visiting a factory in Birmingham to finalise an order for leg-irons, shackles etc.
As he was taking a tour of the factory floor, the hooter went and the factory workers all streamed out of the gate for their lunch break. Naturally, the dictator went berserk
"all your slaves are getting away!" he shouted to the factory owner
"oh no no, what an almost amusing confusion, that really isn't how we do things over here", the factory owner replied.
The tour went on, as the merits of the various production lines were demonstrated, but the customer was obviously uneasy about what he had seen. An hour later, as they walked back to the office, the lunchtime hooter blew again and all the factory workers returned.
"and this happens every day?" the customer marvelled
"oh yes - that's how we handle the lunch break".
"now then", said the factory owner, "shall we say a gross of whips, 500 leg irons and a container of cattle prods?"
"fuck that", replied the sheik. "get me a dozen of those hooters".
best dd
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