because sometimes it's just not that subtle.
this is an article on a depressingly elegant example of how the radical analysis that links the prison-industrial complex and the international corporate traffic in labor looks when it's made really easy to see:
housing for imported workers in a converted prison ship.
as the article says,
Particularly eerie to me in this picture is the spatial intermixing of incarceration and migrant labor, and how architecturally speaking the surplus of global capital's industrial bodies are rounded up at sea inside the old remains of an overcrowded penal system, once oceanic jails now filled with a new kind of transient inmate, a new kind of quasi-prison labor force.
Is it the prison industrial-complex and the floating populations of globalization's labor excess passing the baton in some sort of spatial relay? -- the recycling of old prison architecture for the expansion of labor marketplace exploitation?
do we really not know the answer?
and doesn't this look rather familiar?
i mean, ships as prison sites for politically restless populations intended to be used in fucked up ways by governments and industries? and simply as legal vacuums. francisco goldman's more-interesting-than-great novel the ordinary seaman comes to mind. as does australia, in general and in particular:
In New South Wales, hulks were also used as juvenile correctional centres. Vernon (1867-1892) and Sobraon (1892-1911) - the latter officially a "nautical school ship" - were anchored in Sydney Harbour. The commander of the two ships, Frederick Neitenstein (1850-1921), introduced a system of "discipline, surveillance, physical drill and a system of grading and marks. He aimed at creating a 'moral earthquake' in each new boy. Every new admission was placed in the lowest grade and, through hard work and obedience, gradually won a restricted number of privileges."
housing for imported workers in a converted prison ship.
as the article says,
Particularly eerie to me in this picture is the spatial intermixing of incarceration and migrant labor, and how architecturally speaking the surplus of global capital's industrial bodies are rounded up at sea inside the old remains of an overcrowded penal system, once oceanic jails now filled with a new kind of transient inmate, a new kind of quasi-prison labor force.
Is it the prison industrial-complex and the floating populations of globalization's labor excess passing the baton in some sort of spatial relay? -- the recycling of old prison architecture for the expansion of labor marketplace exploitation?
do we really not know the answer?
and doesn't this look rather familiar?
i mean, ships as prison sites for politically restless populations intended to be used in fucked up ways by governments and industries? and simply as legal vacuums. francisco goldman's more-interesting-than-great novel the ordinary seaman comes to mind. as does australia, in general and in particular:
In New South Wales, hulks were also used as juvenile correctional centres. Vernon (1867-1892) and Sobraon (1892-1911) - the latter officially a "nautical school ship" - were anchored in Sydney Harbour. The commander of the two ships, Frederick Neitenstein (1850-1921), introduced a system of "discipline, surveillance, physical drill and a system of grading and marks. He aimed at creating a 'moral earthquake' in each new boy. Every new admission was placed in the lowest grade and, through hard work and obedience, gradually won a restricted number of privileges."