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

surplus populations are created. If left to their own devices, the
unemployed and underemployed poor can constitute dangerous
classes from the perspective of the forces of order.
All the forms of our internment and enlistment in the
security regime, in fact, fulfill the role that Marx credits to the
"bloody legislation" in precapitalist England directed at the
property'less and vagrant classes. In addition to coercing the
formerly rural populations to accept sedentary' jobs in urban
centers, the legislation also created the discipline by which the
future proletarians would accept wage labor as if it were their
own wish and destiny. So, too, our participation in security
society operates as a land of training or dressage of our desires
and hopes but also and most importantly our fears. Prison
functions in part as a warehouse for surplus population but also
as a frightening lesson to the "free" population.
Furthermore, the current economic and financial crisis
adds a whole series of other fears. And in many cases one of the
greatest fears is that of being out of work and thus not being able
to survive. You have to be good worker, loyal to your employer,
and not go out on strike, or you'll find yourself out of work and
unable to pay your debts.
Fear is the primary' motivation for the securitized to accept
not only its double role, watcher and watched, in the surveillance
regime but also the fact that so many others are even further
deprived of their freedom. The securitized lives in fear of a
combination of punishments and external threats. Fear of the
ruling powers and their police is a factor but more important and
effective is fear of dangerous others and unknown threats—a
generalized social fear. In some ways those who are in prison
have less to fear; rather, even though the threats they face from
the carceral machine, the guards, and other inmates, are severe,
they are more limited and knowable. Fear in the security regime
is an empty signifier in which all kinds of terrifying phantoms can
appear.
Thomas Jefferson, in one of his least glorious and least
courageous moments, was driven by fear to justify not only the
compromise to allow slaver}' in the new state of Missouri but also
the continuation of slaver}' in the United States. "We have the
wolf by the ear," he writes, "and we can neither hold him, nor