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The deepening division of California into richer and poorer is a function of what Richard Walker (among others) identifies as three “central contradictions” (Walker 1995): (1) the changing mix of jobs and industrial and residential location; (2) Anglos’ fear of their demotion to minority status, coupled with capital’s differential exploitation of labor market segments defined by race, gender, locality, sector, and citizenship; and (3) the state’s failure to put idled capacities back to work through infrastructural, educational, employment, and other projects. As the multi- generational abandonment of California’s children to poverty shows, wealth does not circulate the way it used to. “Some power resources appear to be increasing within the system, while others appear to be declining” (Mike Davis 1986: 181). [...]
[...] The severe drought of 1976–77, preceded by several dry years, raised the specter of a permanent water shortage. Farmers responded to the crisis in different ways. Some took part in federal programs that pay farmers who agree to idle lands on which they would otherwise have grown federally designated “surplus crops” (Howitt and Moore 1994; Gottlieb 1988). Other growers used land as collateral to borrow money so that they could invest in the latest irrigation technologies or drill deep wells to supplement aqueduct-provided Sierra snowmelt with fossil water from ancient aquifers. Investor-farmers included both those who planned to keep growing the same commodity, such as cotton, and those wishing to change crops (Reisner 1986; CDF-CEI 1978). And finally, some farmers got out of the business altogether, discouraged by the prospect of expensive water.
background for why irrigated land was taken out of production: "drought, debt, and development". just interesting
The removal of irrigated lands from production far exceeded the rate of land use for suburbanization. Some 76 percent of the irrigated land in California is in the Great Central Valley. The surge in the gross population in the valley over ten years added 1.1 million people to the area. The average California household in that area is 2.8 people (CDF-CEI 1989). If all new households represented new houses built on suburbanized farmland, at the average of three houses per acre (Sokolow and Spezia 1994), residential development over ten years would absorb about 122,000 acres, or about 16 percent of the idled acres in the Great Central Valley. Thus we can see that the idling of land, and the coming of suburbanization, did not produce a transfer of land uses, but rather stiff competition between places trying to attract developers’ capital to absorb the surplus land.
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—and to “natural” disasters. Those changes, and responses to them, provided the foundation upon which new rounds of capital movement and new natural disasters were played out. These shifts produced surpluses of finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity, not all of which were politically, economically, socially, or regionally absorbed. The new California prison system of the 1980s and 1990s was constructed deliberately—but not conspiratorially—of surpluses that were not put back to work in other ways. Make no mistake: prison building was and is not the inevitable outcome of these surpluses. It did, however, put certain state capacities into motion, make use of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets.
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 service (annual expenditure for principal plus interest) increased from 1 percent to 2.8 percent of per capita income (California State Controller 1996: 161).
this is crazy
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 otherwise be idle and more often at an inflated price (CCPOA n.d. [1996]; BRC 1990). Second, the state improves the land, and those improvements, coupled with the promise of employment, in the short run increase nearby land values. These two goals were summarized by a former head staffer of the JLCPCO concerning a dispute between the CDC and a site where the owners had surreptitiously extended the state-owned infrastructural improvements—at state cost—onto an adjacent parcel they intended to develop into a shopping mall: “They have all this land, and they are trying to bring up the values so they can develop it. That’s how they hope to save their town.”
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 of these numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between presumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduc- tion when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized, drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape, robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living” (Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added). The correspondence between regions suffering deep economic restructuring, high rates of unemployment and underemployment among men (cf. S. L. Myers 1992), and intensive surveillance of youth by the state’s criminal justice apparatus present the relative surplus population as the problem for which prison became the state’s solution (see also Males 1999).
the profit-motivated part is so interesting. you could write a whole essay on that alone. what are they supposed to be motivated by??? isn't profit the one encouraged/allowed motivation???
[...] 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 constraining. The successful political promotion of fear of crime as the key problem, and the ideological legitimacy of the U.S. state as the institution responsible for defense at all levels, allowed California to act (cf. R. W. Gilmore 2002a). The state could build prisons, but not just anywhere. The state could borrow money, but not always openly. The state could round up per- sons who correspond demographically to those squeezed out of restructured labor markets, but not at the same rate everywhere. After twenty years, $5 billion in capital outlays, and the accumulation of 161,394 prisoners (as of April 2004),26 the CDC has become the state’s largest department, with a budget exceeding 8 percent of the annual general fund—roughly equal to general fund appropriations for postsecondary education.
What has happened to each component, each surplus in this story? Have their crises been resolved? Finance capitalists achieved what they were after by issuing $5 billion in bonds for new prison construction, with more issues in the wings; while they did not make any more money than if they had raised the funds by precisely the same means to build schools or parks or anything else, state capacity to issue debt was circumscribed by defensible categories as (and through which) the role of government changed. Landowners concentrated in the agricultural counties have divested themselves of surplus acreage and brought in the state as local employer and local government subsidizer. Labor remained divided, by race, region, and income— while “taxpayers,” who themselves are mostly working people, used polling booth power inconsistently—sometimes but not always against “stranded communities” (Jacqueline Jones 1992) of under- and unemployed people of color and white people who have the highest risk of spending time in prison. Voter vagaries suggest that even politician- and media-fueled fear embodies contradictions, especially as prison and felony expansion touch more and more households that once might have believed themselves immune. Did the new power blocs achieve total, unques- tioned legitimacy? The answer is embedded in the kinds of practices this operationalization of state capacity have produced. The JLCPCO was disbanded in November 2003. Yet there is no end in sight for the elaborate, expensive, and constantly multiplied apparatuses of coercion and control developed in harmony with, and sometimes by the makers of, the weapons of destruction produced for hot and cold warfare throughout the twenti- eth century (cf. Bartov 1996; Guérin 1994).3
Four families gained control of the Tulare Lake Basin productive landscape by the end of World War I (Preston 1981; Weber 1994; Mitchell 1996). The Boswell, Salyer, Hansen, and Guiberson clans achieved the transformation “from family farm to agribusiness” (Pisani 1984) by mixing private capital with social and political power. State intervention was crucial to guar- antee the basin’s geography of accumulation. Indeed, under federal, state, and railroad land ownership schemes and public and private irrigation projects, the geography into which they introduced cotton had already been extensively reworked by rural wage laborers into a region increasingly characterized by extensive holdings (Preston 1981; Mitchell 1996). The Jeffersonian ideal of white family farmers tending small, general-production farms, struggled against, but lost out to, the parallel development of large capitalist farms producing commodity crops (Preston 1981; Daniel 1981; Pisani 1984).
maybe useful pano side character bg context