I don’t mean: How are they similar, or how can they be reduced to the same thing? I mean: What are their common interests, common struggles, common insights, and common strategies? And how does the sharing of something in common promise to renew a sense of the world, not just as a marketplace or security zone, but as a common ground for the possibility of a meaningful life?
Since July 8, prisoners at Pelican Bay and other California prisons have been on hunger strike to protest conditions of social deprivation and arbitrary punishment, including indefinite detention in the SHU (or Security Housing Unit, a euphemism for solitary confinement). You can read their five core demands here.
Meanwhile, across the US, workers at MacDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and other fast food chains have been holding one-day strikes during peak business hours to protest their economic exploitation and to increase pressure for a living wage of $15/hour.
Both are struggling, in different ways, against a life reduced to the bare minimum required for survival.
And what else do we have to lose, Amy? I mean, we’re already dying slowly in our day-to-day lives, so why not speak up and stand up and let the nation know that we’re suffering?
Wise is not the only fast food worker to describe their situation as a matter of life and death.
Shenita Simon, 25, says: "We're barely surviving, if surviving at all." Simon is a shift supervisor at a KFC in Brooklyn; she supports three kids on $8/hr.
Christopher Drumgold, 32, says: “On what I’m earning right now you have to choose between paying your rent and eating the next day.” He makes $7.40/hr at a McDonald’s in Detroit, with a family of two kids to support.
These are the voices of the working poor who have joined together to refuse the bare minimum and to struggle for what Judith Butler might call “a livable life”: a life with dignity and meaning, a life that is more than a constant struggle (and failure) to survive.
What does the struggle of fast food workers share in common with the struggle of prisoners on hunger strike at Pelican Bay?
They, too, are engaged in a struggle against the bare minimum, and against the normalization of “survival” as a form of life.
While the working poor struggle to make ends meet on the outside, with never enough time for themselves or their families, the incarcerated poor struggle to make it through the day locked in an 8 x 10 box with nothing to do, sometimes for years or even decades.
Both are struggling in resistance to a form of neoliberal violence that squeezes as much as possible out of people at the bottom and in the middle to generate profit for those at the very top. Luxury and excess for the top 1%; the bare minimum for the rest of us.
But a meaningful life does not thrive on the bare minimum (nor on outrageous excess, for that matter). Rather, a meaningful life for the individual presupposes a world shared in common with others, a world of multiple encounters, relationships, and collaborations.
When @OccupyWallSt tweets, “We don’t want jobs, we want work,” they are expressing this desire for a common world in which creative, meaningful work is possible for everyone, regardless of their class or carceral status.
Representatives of the fast food industry claim that their business model does not exploit workers. Rather, they provide entry-level employment for young and unskilled workers who could just as well be replaced by machines.
Likewise, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitiation (CDCR) claims that they do not isolate prisoners:
There is no “solitary confinement” in California prisons and the Security Housing Unit (SHU) is not “solitary confinement.”
The SHU is specifically designed to house offenders whose conduct endangers the safety of others or the security of the prison.
SHU inmates get time out of their cells every day. SHU inmates have visitation; some have cell mates. SHU inmates have access to educational programs, religious services, reading materials, a law library, cable TV and radio.
For a refutation of these and other claims, see the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity blog. But there is one sense in which the CDCR is correct: There is no “solitary confinement” in California prisons – but only because the practice of extreme isolation has been redefined, redeployed, and normalized as “administrative segregation,” “restricted housing,” and the management of “security threat groups” in units that are specifically designed to provide the bare minimum that the law will allow.
Keramet Reiter has shown how the victories of prisoner litigation in the 1970s and ‘80s were used by prison architects and policy-makers as guidelines for new supermax prisons that are virtually litigation-proof because they have taken the minimum legal thresholds for prison conditions as a template for the “new normal.” “The Hole” has been replaced by a brightly-lit, windowless box built for containment, control, and bare survival.
Mutope Duguma calls the Pelican Bay SHU, where he is currently on hunger strike, a space of “civil death” and “socio-cultural, economic, and political deprivation.” Many other prisoners in isolation compare their experience to a living death.
This pattern of deprivation is not limited to the SHU. In a philosophy seminar with Drew Leder at Maryland State Penitentiary, inmate John Woodland, Jr. describes his maximum security cell as a space defined by the bare minimum:
It’s just enough room to live in. No more. Nothing for relaxation. Nothing for feeling comfortable. Just enough room to live in. (The New Abolitionists, 208).
Woodland compares the space of the prison cell to the space he grew up in, the space of the working and non-working poor:
One thing I noticed when I first came to the penitentiary is that the penitentiary design is similar to the high-rise projects in West Baltimore or East Baltimore or wherever. In prison it’s the tiers; in the projects it’s the floors… Because wherever you go, east or west, you see African Americans and low-income people packed in on top of one another, with no real space. When you walk down the streets of most inner cities, you feel indifference to everything: “This isn’t really part of me. I’m just existing here. This is not something I should care about or protect or build up. This is something I gotta deal with until I get out.” I guess that’s the same way we look at prison. (208-9)
No real space and no real time for anything more than bare survival. This is what fast food workers share with prisoners at Pelican Bay and across the US.
But they also share something more: a common desire for a better life, and a common commitment to join with other people in struggle.
What do you share in common with hunger strikers and fast food workers?
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