MIM and RAIL attend Critical Resistance East conference in NYC MIM and RAIL gave a presentation at the "Critical Resistance East: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex" conference held in New York City on March 9th to the 11th. Four thousand people attended the conference and more than 100 presentations were given over two days. MIM and RAIL have unity with many of the conference organizers and participants, who for the most part agree that the Amerikan criminal injustice system is corrupt and must be overthrown, or at the very least radically changed. What the conference lacked was a unified agenda for accomplishing this goal. While we unite with the organizers call to oppose the criminal injustice system, we also have a worked out position of how the criminal injustice system serves the interests of imperialism, perpetuates national oppression, and we know we aim to eventually replace this system with proletarian justice. While we work for reforms under imperialism that would improve the lives of the oppressed, and we support struggles that oppose the continued and further repression of oppressed nationals, we do this within the context of building for a revolution to defeat imperialism entire. Attica is all of "us?" The conference opened with a film commemorating the Attica struggle called "Attica Is All of Us." This was a good film and speakers including a former Attica inmate, activists and an attorney followed. However, MIM disagrees with the sentiment stressed by some speakers that the prison system oppresses "us all" equally. This might get applause from a mostly white crowd, but it is not true. Yes, there is a certain moral bankruptcy inherent in the Amerikan injustice system -- why do petty drug users do hard time while smoking executives and others white-collar criminals responsible for the thousands of deaths go scot-free? And some white youth may be affected by spill-over from Amerika's war on oppressed nation youth. But we cannot deny the fact that Amerika incarcerates people from oppressed communities disproportionately. Amerika embarked on the incarceration craze in part as a response to the Black and Latino revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s. The warehousing of a million Black and Latino men helps to prevent a repeat of those revolutionary movements. As documented in MIM Theory 11, the construction of new prisons in mostly white rural areas does bring jobs and profits to the white middle class and bourgeoisie.(1) Of course, MIM organizes people from all sectors of society, including whites, to oppose the oppressive Amerikan prison system should. But we do not do so in an opportunist manner, glossing over the principal contradiction inside Amerikan society: That between oppressor and oppressed nations. We struggle against the criminal injustice system in the context of our struggle against Amerikan imperialism. Bourgeois injustice and proletarian justice About 30 to 40 people attended MIM and RAIL's presentation on Saturday, titled ITAL Bourgeois Criminal Injustice and Proletarian Justice END. We covered topics such as why we oppose the criminal injustice system; what bourgeois injustice is; what proletarian justice means; and how China dealt with prisoners and class enemies after the revolution. We followed the theoretical presentation with examples of prison-related work MIM and RAIL do now to build public opinion against imperialism and to build for revolution. Some examples included the Under Lock and Key section of MIM Notes, our Serve the People Free Books for Prisoners Program, and our on-going battle against censorship in prisons. One participant raised an interesting criticism of MIM's proposal to use prisons under socialism as a tool of class control by the proletariat. S/he argued that our advocacy of thought reform is the same as the repression of prisoners based on political beliefs that we criticized in our presentation. The answer to this question gets to the difference between anarchism and communism as well as to the core of the difference between proletarian and bourgeois justice. The first distinction between proletarian and bourgeois justice is one of the goals. The structures of all class societies are used to perpetuate the rule of that class, be it the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. In bourgeois society, the global minority uses the police, military and the prisons to keep the Third World majority from taking what is truly theirs. The purpose of proletarian justice is to keep the former oppressors from restoring their illegitimate oppressive system. The second distinction is one of methods. The predominant method of solving problems in a socialist society is one of resolving contradictions amongst the people: namely with nonviolent political struggle. MIM has addressed these differences in detail elsewhere.(2) Hey good-looking? MIM and RAIL set up a literature table on Saturday and Sunday. Many people we talked to were particularly excited about MIM's Under Lock and Key Radio program and we sold and gave out many CDs to people involved in or who know someone involved in radio.(3) We hope that this effort will help to fulfill our goal of expanding radio play of the Under Lock and Key program. While tabling, RAIL talked to one critic of MIM's line on the white-working class (see point 3 in the What is MIM box on page 2 of MIM Notes). He claimed that whites have false consciousness under capitalism and that's why they don't fight with oppressed people. But as Sakai details in ITAL The Mythology of the White Proletariat END, the white "working class" in the u.$. is not revolutionary because does not have an immediate material interest in revolution. On the contrary, the labor-aristocracy's petit- bourgeois mode of life is made possible by imperialism. This critic tried to dismiss the RAIL comrade's argument by saying that people don't challenge h because s/he is good looking and therefore has not received genuine criticism! It's true that Amerikans will often tone down their political debate for the sake of getting into each others' pants -- a symptom of petit-bourgeois individualism. But that has nothing to do with the truth or untruth of MIM's arguments. Activists serious about getting to the bottom of how oppression works and how to do away with it cannot use ad hominem attacks like "You just say that because you are cute/ugly/rich/poor etc." The truth is the truth no matter who says it. Notes: 1. MIM Theory 11, esp. 15 to 32. 2. "Platform on so- called free speech under the dictatorship of the proletariat," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/freespeech.html 3. MIM & RAIL Radio Project, http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/ma/radio.html.