Cramped Space: Finding Rebellious Potential in Fixed Capital During the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971

Abstract

Abstract:In this essay, I argue that social movements should appropriate fixed capital in moments of rebellion, utilizing it to halt capitalist production. Through this process, struggles over, for, and through fixed capital enable the prefiguring of new modes of (re)production, raising the fundamental political question of who governs the infrastructures at hand. I turn to the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 as an example of dispossessed people utilizing fixed capital to interrupt the continuation of an exploitative prison system. Finally, I offer an assessment of how explicit engagement with fixed capital and other material objects or built environments clarifies the ways that antagonistic compositional power might irreversibly damage the logics of capture within and against which rebellious potential emerges.