"Thus, as growth in the 'real' economy remains low, in our perverted debt economy, falsely categorizing borrowers as delinquent has become a financial opportunity in itself."
"All of this to say that a vast number of humans - whether they are laborers or soldiers - may become superfluous, though they my still be needed (for now at least) as users and consumers."
"This antagonistic relationship to production also redefines how the People's War is waged: rather than seizing the means of production, Jackson emphasized the destruction of the protective and productive forces."
"Law itself is a construction designed specifically to manage 'poor, desperate people like me.'"
"Will these credit instruments and the 'discipline of the free market' reduce our lives to the acquisition of 'marketable skills' and make it impossible to explore, wander, create, invent, learn (as opposed to 'acquiring skills'), relax, form non-instrumentalized social bonds, loaf, and daydream? Without a revolution or a social movement to overturn or counter the direction of the debt economy and techno-capitalism, we might be catapulted into a future where our lives are disciplined and determined by our dependency on credit."
"But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists. In order to turn peasants, small craftsmen, and others into workers who have nothing to sell but their labor power, these people must first be alienated from their means of subsistence."
"1) Capitalism is inherently expansionary, as it seeks to realize an ever-increasing amount of surplus value; 2) There is no reason why surplus value need be realized within the formal capitalist sphere when realization can be secured through violence, state force, colonization, militarism, war, the use of international credit to promote the interests of the hegemonies, the expropriation of indigenous land, predatory tariffs and taxes, hyper-exploitation, and the pilfering of the public purse."
"Harvey agrees with Luxemburg's claim that capitalism has a dual character: one sphere is governed by freedom of contract and the rule of law while the other is dominated by political violence and looting carried out by hegemonic capitalist nations. The looting component of the accumulation process is often carried out through the international credit system, which Harvey notes is the linchpin of late capitalism."
"To accept risk scores as an index of personal competency is to embrace a liberal politics of personal agency, where those who work hard to maintain good credit get what they deserve."
"The idea that people have a moral obligation to make good on their promise to pay their debts is partly tied to the idea that freedom means personally bearing the risks of your actions and decisions."
"A generation - financiers, abolitionists, actuaries, jurists, preachers, legislators, corporate executives, philosophers, social scientists - developed a vision of freedom that linked the liberal ideal of self-ownership to the personal assumption of 'risk.'" - Freaks of Fortune, Jonathan Levy
"the credit system is legitimized by the moral framework that shapes our understanding of debt - whereby the creditor is framed as benevolent while the struggling debtors are viewed as lazy or irresponsible for defaulting on their loans. However, as lending practices become more predatory, this moral framework is at risk of unraveling."
"The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis - not reckless public spending. The situation has led to the development of socially deleterious methods of revenue extraction that target vulnerable populations, particularly poor black Americans."
"However, I want to emphasize that the state is no ordinary borrower; it is a borrower endowed with the legal power to loot the public to pay back its creditors."
"... a municipality's financial standing (or its credit-worthiness) is partly tied to its ability to remain solvent by using the police power and court system to extract revenue from citizens."
"The kapitalistate framework also posits that two primary functions of the state in a capitalist society are to facilitate the accumulation process and to legitimize capitalism."
"Foucault asserts that biopolitical forms of power target the 'aleatory,' unpredictable, and potentially destabilizing elements of a population for the sake of keeping the whole population in balance."
"Foucault puts it bluntly when he says, 'In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable... Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.'" - Society Must be Defended
"It's as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: 'Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.' That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day - the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state."
"For Gilmore, the problem 'is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds.'"
"The media construction of urban ghettos and prisons as 'alternate universes' marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of 'void' zones that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. Whatever happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an 'injustice' does not register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms."
"Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize."
"Surviving gendered violence does not make the survivor incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence... That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts."
"I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing - and the unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit - as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer perfomativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the 'Care of the Self'- style 'politics' of choice."
"Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies onto which they project hostile feelings, allowing them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence."
"The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as 'criminals.'"
"When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that require passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point."
"But what if - instead of reacting to these charges with counterarguments that persuasively demonstrate that the abolitionist position is the only sensible position - we instead strategically use these charges themselves as points of departure to show how the prison itself is a problem for thought that can only be unthought using a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the Present?"
"When we act in accordance with the prophetic dream, the dream comes to directly constitute reality."
"Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution."
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