Activity

[...] power is not a thing but rather a relationship based on actually existing activities. Thus, the renovation of surplus state capacity, the putting into motion of its potential power, is grounded in contradictory political economic conditions—conditions that are at once enabling and constrainin…

The relative surplus population comes into focus in these numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliberate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas, combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight…

It seems contradictory that large, powerful landholding capitalists, accustomed to activating the state’s capacity in enormous profit-enhancement projects, such as water development, would relinquish acres to the state. What was in it for them? First, they sell land—often the worst—that would otherw…

In less than a decade, the amount of state debt for the prison construction project expanded from $763 million to $4.9 billion dollars, a proportional increase of from 3.8 percent to 16.6 percent of the state’s total debt for all purposes (SPWB 1985, 1993). During the same period, state debt servic…

How did California go about “the largest prison building program in the history of the world” (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991: i)? We have already seen that California’s political economy changed significantly in the 1970s, due both to changes in the location of industrial investment—capital movement—an…