Chapter 1: Subjective Figures of the Crisis ... - Negri in English

Keep in mind that this differential racial pattern of imprisonment
is not isolated to the United States. In Europe and elsewhere, if
one considers immigrant detention centers and refugee camps as
arms of the carceral apparatus, those with darker skin are
disproportionately in captivity.
The securitized is thus not a homogeneous figure. In fact,
the infinite degrees of incarceration are key to the functioning of
securitized subjectivity. There are always others lower than you,
under greater surveillance and control, even if only by the
smallest degree.
During the same years of the prison expansion, there has
also been a militarization of US society. What is most remarkable
is not the growth in the number of soldiers in the United States
but rather their social stature. Not too long ago, in the last years
of the Vietnam War, it was rumored that protesters spit on
returning soldiers and called them baby killers. This was
probably a myth propagated to discredit the protesters, but it is
indicative of the fact that soldiers and their social function were
held then in low esteem. It is remarkable that only a few decades
later military' personnel have become (once again) objects of
national reverence. Military' personnel in uniform are given
priority boarding on commercial airlines, and it is not uncommon
for strangers to stop and thank them for their service. In the
United States, rising esteem for the military' in uniform
corresponds to the growing militarization of the society as a
whole. All of this despite repeated revelations of the illegality and
immorality of the military's own incarceration systems, from
Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, whose systematic practices border
on if not actually constitute torture.
The growth in prison populations and the rising
militarization, both of which are led by US society, are only the
most concrete, condensed manifestations of a diffuse security
regime in which we are all interned and enlisted. Why are these
trends taking place now One phenomenon that corresponds
historically with the rise of the security regime in its various
forms is the predominance of neoliberal strategies of the
capitalist economy. The increasing precarity, flexibility, and
mobility of workers required by the neoliberal economy marks a
new phase of primitive accumulation in which various strata of