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

always there. Desertion and disobedience are reliable weapons
against voluntary servitude.
Sometimes flight takes unusual forms. The Marranos in
fifteenth-century Spain, for instance, were forced to convert to
Christianity but continued to practice Judaism in secret. They led
a double life: obeying when the forces of power were watching
and subverting that power in hidden spaces. They conducted a
kind of secret flight while staying still.
Part of our fight has to be not only against the ubiquitous
tentacles of the security system, but also against the very real and
concrete walls of the prison and the military' barracks. Angela
Davis, for instance, rightly calls for the abolition of the prison.
Given the racial composition of prisons in the United States (and
immigration detention centers everywhere), the struggle against
the prison today is the core of a new abolitionism, putting an end
to some of the most extreme structures of racial segregation and
subordination. Today's prisons clearly have none of the noble
functions of reeducation or social reintegration that
nineteenth-century reformers imagined. On the contrary', prison
is a machine that creates and re-creates antisocial subjectivities,
perpetuates fear, and poisons social relations.
The struggle against the military' and militarization is
equally important. The warnings of an illustrious catalog of US
presidents that military' establishments undermine public
freedom and democracy have gone almost entirely unheeded:
from Thomas Jefferson's and James Madison's polemics against
standing armies to Dwight D. Eisenhower's somber premonition
of the disasters resulting from the collusion of an immense
military' establishment and powerful weapons industries. For a
nation that so venerates its founding fathers and past presidents,
the United States is remarkably deaf to their pleadings on this
subject. Like prisons, militaries degrade subjectivities and poison
social relations. Not only are returning soldiers damaged by war
and hierarchy, but they spread their diseased subjectivities
among the families they return to and ever}'one with whom they
interact. Feminists have long analyzed the power, fragility, and
pathologies of the forms of masculinity propagated and
reproduced by militarism.
Projects for the abolition of the prison and the military' are