Chain Gang All Stars

Chain-Gang All-Stars uses satire and dystopian elements to ridicule the brutality inherent in the profitable privatized prison industry and to warn that its cycle will continue if left unaddressed. Capitalism is an economic system that relies on private ownership of resources—even those necessary to survive, such as food, shelter, and medicine. Additionally, capitalism’s Christian roots have imposed a moral element on wealth, suggesting that those have more deserve it and those who have less are morally inferior. As a result, capitalist systems often criminalize poverty, punishing homelessness and crimes of desperation so that those without resources become an underclass vulnerable to incarceration and dehumanization.

In the novel, the CAPE program takes this tendency to its hyperbolic logical extreme, making incarcerated people literally battle each other to the death to offset the costs of long-term incarceration, lethal injections, legal appeals, and the like for corporations that own prisons. Making this spectacle for the consumption of the masses also generates huge profits through live audience tickets, TV streaming subscriptions, celebrity events, memorabilia, and more. By setting up this exaggerated world, the novel makes the point that, despite paying lip service to the idea, the real world’s prisons care little about rehabilitation: Since privatized prisons benefit financially from incarcerating people, the incentive is to over-police and increase the number of inmates—a trend that also increases violence since incarceration comes with high risks of exposure to multiple types of violence including psychological and physical abuse, torture, sexual assault, suicide, the death penalty, and more.

Other connections between capitalism and violence abound. In the real world, manufacturers of military-grade weapons and armor market their products to US police departments. Here, the profit motive leads to the usage on civilians of dangerous weapons like potentially lethal tasers and tear gas, which is prohibited by international law for usage in wars. In the novel, this connection is made literal through the story of the Influencer device. Although its accidental creator attempted to shut down the experiment that made it and then destroy the lab where she was working, her boss saw the profit potential inherent in this torture implement. Rather than consider the moral implications of inflicting unbearable pain on human beings, the lab supervisor only saw its potential as a product.

Another connection between violence and capitalism is the currency of CAPE fighters called Blood Points, which emphasizes the point that Links earn access to weaponry and other equipment by spilling opponents’ blood. As Young observes, “I used one of my murder points to have a brand I never heard of clean my clothes for me each week. Death becomes laundry. Death becomes food. Death the currency of everything if you let it. And they let it” (199). Blood Points, which are far less valuable than regular money, are a kind of scrip—a substitute for legal tender with a real-world history of being used by corporations to control and often defraud recipients. Ironically, although many Links are being punished for murder, killing Links in CAPE battles is eventually rewarded with High Freedom; the novel’s capitalist system thrives on sanctioned violence.

Thurwar subverts some of this by sharing her Blood Points with others on her Chain, whom she loves like family. Buying them better weapons and food gives them a better chance of making it to High Freedom and joining Thurwar’s efforts to end the CAPE program, abolish the death penalty, and overturn the prison system. This approach positions A-Hamm to realize that the real enemies are not their CAPE opponents but capitalism and the prison industrial complex and that the only way to fight them is as a team.