Michel Foucault, working in Paris in the 1970s, identified something Gramsci had named but not fully anatomized. Power, he argued, had undergone a transformation. Classical sovereign power — the power of the king — was the right to take life or let live. Modern power is something different. It doesn't primarily kill; it domesticates. A wolf is not hunted into a dog — it is bred into one, generation by generation, its development bent toward tameness until the docility looks like its own nature. Neoteny is the mechanism: the domesticated animal keeps its juvenile traits for life, the dependence and the pliancy that the wild adult would have outgrown, because those are the traits that serve the keeper. This is what biopower does to a population. It does not take your life; it administers it. It manages, regulates, optimizes — bends the body's development toward usefulness until the usefulness feels like character. The prison, the hospital, the school, the factory: not just places where bodies are controlled but where the definition of normal and deviant, productive and useless, is manufactured and maintained.
Antonio Negri built the answer to Foucault's unfinished question over decades. Arrested in Italy in 1979 on charges widely understood to be political, he wrote The Savage Anomaly from prison. He was elected to Parliament from his cell, and used parliamentary immunity to escape to France in 1983. From exile through the 1990s, he and Michael Hardt would write Empire. He died in Paris in December 2023, at ninety.
What Negri and Hardt built across Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth: if biopower is power operating through life, then biopolitical production is what capitalism now primarily depends on. Not the extraction of value from raw materials or repetitive factory labor, but from life itself — from language, from affect, from care, from knowledge, from the accumulated capacity of human beings to cooperate, communicate, and create. The call center worker selling warmth. The nurse managing pain and fear. The teacher producing the capacity to learn. The neighborhood whose longtime residents make it desirable enough for developers to gentrify. None of this produces a material good you can hold. All of it produces value that capital captures.
At the far end of domestication is the thing that does not breed its host but rewrites it. A fungus infects an ant, and the ant climbs — not where the ant was going, but where the fungus needs to fruit; it locks its jaws onto a leaf at the right height and dies there so the fungus can grow out of its head. The ant does the climbing. The ant feels, presumably, like it is doing what ants do. That is biopolitical production at its limit: not the body coerced, but the body's own striving turned to another's harvest, the worker selling warmth and calling it a career, the neighborhood making itself lovely for the developer who will price it out. The capacity is yours. The fruiting is someone else's.
And what is the substrate of all this production?
Biopolitics is the name for the contest. Not the apparatus, not the effect — the fight between them.
Deleuze and Guattari describe something like this in A Thousand Plateaus: the inscription of strata, layer on layer, each layer a record of the pressures that produced it. The refrain — a bird's territorial song — as inscription, as the daily renegotiation of where things stand. Not evolution. Evolutionary.
Think of a forest. Every creature in it is attending to and adjusting to the patterns of every other creature. Coyotes noting where the cougars have been. Wolves reading the wind for elk. Birds renegotiating territories through song, every morning, without pause. Ants laying pheromone trails that aggregate into roads. Bears pressing the same routes for generations until the trail becomes the landscape.
No one designed the trail system. The trail system is biopolitics: the accumulated inscription of every creature tracking and being tracked, moving and being moved. It is how the forest knows itself.
Gramsci writing in the prison cell was doing biopolitics. Freire teaching adults to read the word as the reading of the world was doing biopolitics. Picking up this book is doing biopolitics.
And this is what Gramsci did from his prison cell — built a map of the structures that felt like nature, named the mechanism of consent, traced the seal of hegemony so that anyone who read the notebooks could see it operating in their own experience.
She was arrested. She lectured from prison. She held, even held. By the time she was forty she had spent roughly a third of her adult life in jail. In 1913 she published The Accumulation of Capital, and the party and the Marxist establishment attacked it — because it was an argument they didn't want to hear, and because she was right.
Her argument: capitalism can't sustain itself from its own interior. She had read the terrain and seen its seams.
The prison in the United States: by the 1990s, a necropolitical space constructed on domestic soil. In 1971 there were 200,000 people in American prisons and jails. By 2008 there were 2.3 million, disproportionately Black and Latino, in conditions of violence, disease, and permanent civic death. The decisions that produced this were distributed across prosecutors, legislators, police departments, judges — no single person decided. The outcome was decided. Embedded in ten thousand individual decisions that all went the same way.
Angela Davis has been building in exactly that direction longer than most people have been thinking about it.
Her argument is structural: the prison is not a response to crime. It is an institution for managing the people capitalism has made surplus — the outside made permanent, administered, funded. Davis was making this argument decades before Mbembe named it necropolitics. The Black radical tradition had already arrived where the European theoretical tradition was still heading. Mbembe was reading Davis. The lineage was already there: the wizard before the wizard's name. In 1971 there were roughly 200,000 people in U.S. state and federal prisons; by 2008 there were 2.3 million — the highest rate in the world, produced by traceable decisions: mandatory minimum laws applied with documented racial disparity, the defunding of public mental health care that moved people from hospitals to jails, the destruction of public housing that produced homelessness and then criminalized the homeless. Each decision followed the same logic — instead of addressing the material conditions producing surplus people, enclose them. The prison is cheaper than housing, cheaper than mental health care, cheaper than economic opportunity, if you don't count the people inside it as costs.
Davis's political conclusion is also Wynter's and Crenshaw's, stated in material terms: abolition is not the demand to close prisons overnight. It is the demand to build the world that doesn't need them. Housing stability. Community mental health infrastructure. Economic democracy. Restorative justice processes that address harm without severing community bonds. There is a name for this: abolition geography — trace the chain of disinvestment decisions that produces incarcerable surplus people, and change the investment decisions at every link. Change the geographic organization of resources, and the prison becomes structurally unnecessary.
Then it collapsed. The Italian Socialist Party leadership, afraid of where it was going, refused to extend the action nationally. The industrialists waited. Within two years, Benito Mussolini was in power. Within four, a young Sardinian journalist and Communist Party leader named Antonio Gramsci was arrested.
He was thirty-five years old. Mussolini's prosecutor told the court: we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.
What happened instead is that the brain, supplied with books and exercise notebooks under prison censorship, produced nearly three thousand pages of analysis over the next six years — before his health failed and the writing stopped. He died in 1937, six days after his conditional release, his body destroyed by eleven years of confinement. He was forty-six.
That's the war of position in its honest form. Not the position you hold — the position you build and then have to leave, and the question of what it does in the hands of the people who passed through it. Gramsci built his position in prison notebooks smuggled out in sections. He never saw what they did. The councils were gone. The terrain had reasserted itself. He built it anyway, in the form available to him, which was sentences. The seeds scatter. You don't always get to see what they become.
There is a sentence in the Prison Notebooks that has stayed with readers for ninety years: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Gramsci died in 1937 with the notebooks smuggled out. The councils were long gone. Fascism was everywhere. He had been in prison for eleven years and would not live to see what the notebooks would do — how they would circulate through the hands of builders doing war-of-position work without quite having the language for it, giving that work a name — the war of position — precise enough to build on.
In the summer of 1918, Rosa Luxemburg was in the women's prison at Breslau, Germany, serving a sentence for opposing the war. The Russian Revolution had happened the previous year — the soviets taking power in October, the Bolsheviks consolidating control, the first workers' state in history declared.
Her letters from Breslau are some of the most extraordinary documents of the period. She wrote about the white anemones pushing through the prison courtyard in April. The colors of starlings in the afternoon light. The birds she had named, that she fed through the bars of her window. She was paying ferocious attention to the world from a room she could not leave.
And between the letters, in a manuscript she knew would not be published while the people it criticized held power, she was writing The Russian Revolution.
It praised the revolution. It praised the Bolsheviks' courage, their decisive action at a moment when other socialist parties had failed. It said the October Revolution was one of the most significant events in history. And in the same pages, written with the same clarity, it described exactly how the revolution would fail.
Luxemburg understood this. The soviets worked because the workers had skin in the game — their lives, their neighborhoods, their actual conditions. When the party substituted itself, it removed the people with skin in the game and replaced them with people executing directives. The intelligence drained out. Coercion filled the gap.
Luxemburg understood this in 1904. Her 1918 essay understood it again — not as theory now, but as observation of a revolution she could see was already dying. She wrote it in prison, unable to intervene, knowing it wouldn't be published in her lifetime.
Luxemburg in her prison cell in 1918, feeding birds she had named, writing the analysis that has outlasted the people who imprisoned her — she was doing the war of position. Not stopping the Bolsheviks from eating the soviets. Making sure the next generation understood why it had happened. Building something durable enough to survive her death, the suppression of her manuscript, and the thirty-five years of Soviet history that proved her right.
It wasn't buried. We're still reading it. And in reading it, we're in the tradition.
A book that argues against vanguardism — against the party that knows better than the people — is still a person standing up to explain the thing. Luxemburg in her cell was also doing something the party structure couldn't do: making the thinking available, rather than the direction. I am an open source developer by training — which is to say, I come from a tradition that understood this before I had the political vocabulary for it. The GPL, the Linux kernel, the open protocols of the web: all of them are Luxemburg's argument applied to code. Not a party controlling the fork. The commons governing itself through contribution. This is source, not instructions. Whether it's received that way is bigger than me. I can't control what you build with it, and that's the point. The tradition Luxemburg was pointing at has never needed a party. It has needed people who understood the architecture well enough to recognize it when they saw it, and to build it when the conditions allowed. That's what this is for.
The next chapter is who has been building.
Abdullah Öcalan spent thirty years building the Kurdish liberation movement — organizing, fighting, surviving, watching comrades die — and arrived at a conclusion that no amount of reading alone could have produced: the state was not the solution. He had been trying to build one. He understood, from inside that effort, what it cost and what it couldn't deliver. When Turkish forces captured him in 1999 and imprisoned him on Imrali Island, they gave him something unintentional: time to think without the pressure of the immediate.
In prison he read widely — feminist theory, the Black radical tradition, the history of Kurdish women's organizing that had been running parallel to the armed struggle and often ahead of it. He found Bookchin, whose Social Ecology named the architecture he had been moving toward: not a Kurdish nation-state but a confederacy of self-governing communes, ecological reconstruction and democratic self-governance understood as the same project, hierarchy itself as the root of both ecological crisis and political domination. Bookchin crystallized something Öcalan had already earned through decades of practice. The theory met the practitioner, and what emerged was neither — it was democratic confederalism, a political philosophy built from the Kurdish experience outward, refusing both the nation-state form and the vanguard party that had defined the left's organizational imagination for a century.
Öcalan dropped the demand for a Kurdish nation-state. He replaced it with the demand for democratic autonomy — self-governance through communal institutions, not a state apparatus.
Freire called this conscientization: the process by which people come to perceive the contradictions of their situation — and to take action against the oppressive elements of that reality. The perception and the action were not separate in his method. The shift from "this is natural" to "this was made" was already the beginning of the action. Divination at the scale of a literacy class: name what is hidden, and the room changes. The naming is the counter-spell.
The 1964 military coup imprisoned Freire and sent him into exile. The generals understood his work clearly: teaching people to read was not the threat. Teaching them that their situation was historical rather than natural was. The coup's reaction was the best confirmation his method ever received.
By the late 1930s the Nazis had placed Klee in the Entartete Kunst exhibition — degenerate art — alongside dozens of artists whose work the regime intended to erase from public memory. The angel had become a kind of mascot for the wrong side of an argument the regime was winning. Benjamin took the print with him when he fled.
By 1940 Benjamin was in flight. The Nazis had taken Paris. He had spent thirteen years working on a book about the Paris shopping arcades — Das Passagen-Werk — a book made of fragments, quotations, the debris of the nineteenth century, and it was never finished. The manuscript in his suitcase when he crossed the Pyrenees on foot in September was something smaller and sharper: On the Concept of History. Eighteen theses. He gave a copy to Hannah Arendt before he left, in case he did not make it.
Everyone in this book did what they did for the birds and the food and the music and the laughter and the friendships. For the particular quality of a summer evening when the work is done and the people you love are around you and the thing you built is humming. For the chance to look back at the people who did this before you — Rosa Luxemburg naming birds through prison bars, Paulo Freire's sugarcane worker writing his name, the employee telling the regulars about the meditation circle — and feel that you showed them respect. Not by winning. By continuing.