Demand the Impossible - Bill Ayers - Part 2 of 4

2020 Reading Challenge - Day 185

July 4, 2020

Book 53 - Demand the Impossible: A Radical Manifesto
Bill Ayers (2016)
 Part 2 - page 43-88
Reading Time - 60 minutes

In this section of the book, Ayers looks at Abolition (Prisons) and Economics (Labour). I have to say... some of this just blew my mind...

Some states for the chapter on Abolition: American prisoners account for 21% of the world's prisoners. A quarter of Americans work in the business of "guard labour" (some form of keeping their fellow Americans in line). It costs $148,767/year (2011) to keep a juvenile in detention. It costs $12,926 (2011) to find the average school child.

Some shocking numbers, but here's an even more shocking tidbit:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. (Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1865), Section 1.

I highlighted that one little phrase with italics... because it is a loophole so big you can drive an entire prison system through it. Flip it around and... slavery and involuntary servitude is OK as a punishment for a convicted criminal. So... yes... slavery was technically abolished in 1865 but... if you believe it's dead and gone... well... it's clearly not. The prison system just became the new slave plantation. It's the same work, done by the same workers, just with a new label. Trade in slaves for forced labour. A rose by any other name... It's kind of a hard nugget to swallow... that racism is not just bigotry but the institutional expression of white supremacy. Add in the bit from the first chapter and you have the US, land of the free and home of the brave, as a war-making, punishing state. Brave warriors? Free prisoners?

Ayers would argue that getting rid of mass incarceration is part of the road of abolition. Getting rid of slavery wasn't enough, if it just got morphed into a prison system that disproportionately affects African Americans and people of colour. There must be alternatives to caging people. Asking the "What if..." question shifts the point and changes the frame. What if... prison was the last resort? Instead of the first resort?

And let's not even talk about the prison-industrial complex... privately-run prisons supported by the federal government. And... finally, Ayers argues that schools for the poor are simply the prep schools for the prisoners of tomorrow...

We then move on to Chapter 3 - Shoulders to the Wheel, which looks at the Economic Complex. Some stats are in order. Sweden has 67% of its workers in trade unions... the US? Only 11%. Americans work 30% more hours than the Dutch. The top 400 richest Americans have the same net worth as the poorest 150 million Americans. That's 400:150,000,000.

Ayers argues that there is no such thing as the Free Market. Gross disparities in wealth distort and destroy democracy and... under capitalism... everything is monetized. Everything is an "industry" or a "market" and individuals are not "citizens" but "consumers". Labour is simply a commodity and one of the easiest ways to cut the cost of production.

Ayers also takes a look at the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, both of whom admired capitalism (really, they did) but who also condemned its exploitation whereby it reduces people to the level of objects. When everything becomes an object - people, animals, trees, rocks, the Earth itself... then everything has been robbed of its own intrinsic value. And money cannot and should not be the sole determining factor in deciding the value of something.